I appreciate you thoughts, I appreciate your analysis and suggestions. Schaefer victims had little in common. They varied in age, he had no preference to hair color, or skin tone. He preferred runaways, and would use his patrol car to often abduct his victims under the disguise of arresting them for hitchhiking. Not always:
A better case exists for Schaefer's involvement in the murders of 9-year-old Peggy Rahn and 8-year-old Wendy Stevenson, in Pompano Beach. Both vanished from the beach on December 29, 1970. A day later, a clerk at a nearby convenience store reported a man buying ice cream for two young girls on the previous afternoon. The clerk identified photos of Peggy and Wendy, describing their companion as a white man in his 20s, six feet tall, around 200 pounds. The girls remain missing and Schaefer was never charged, though prosecutors publicly accused him of the crime in 1973. Schaefer denied the slayings publicly, but later confessed in a letter dated April 19, 1989. "I am annoyed by all this murder talk," he wrote. "Peggy & Wendy just happened along at a time when I was curious about [1930s cannibal Albert] Fish's craving for the flesh of young girls....I assure you these girls were not molested sexually. I found both of them very satisfactory, particularly with sautéed onions and peppers."
http://www.crimelibrary.com/serial_killers/predators/gerard_schaefer/6.html
21-year-old Nancy Leichner and 20-year-old Pamela Nater, are Pinellas County residents who vanished on a 1966 picnic in the Ocala National Forest. The case remains unsolved and both women are still missing. The forest has been searched, and searched, using many methods and not a trace, anywhere, after they were saw walking into the forest with Schaefer. He left the park alone.
Of the victims located to date, Susan Place and Georgia Jessup were found on Hutchinson Island in St. Lucie County, (1973) They were buried under a the tree he had hung them from.
Less than four weeks after Place and Jessup vanished, on October 23, 14-year-olds Mary Alice Briscolina and Elsie Lina Farmer were added to the missing list. Farmer's family reported her missing on October 24, while Briscolina's waited another week, assuming she had run away from home. Farmer's skeletal remains were found on January 17, 1973 (eight days after Schaefer went to jail), at a construction site near Plantation High School. Briscolina was found on February 15, 200 yards away. (Both girls were identified by dental records.) Following the April search of Doris Schaefer's home, Farmer's relatives identified a piece of jewelry taken from the murdered girl.
Leigh Hainline Bonadies. Bonadies was last seen on September 8, 1969 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Gerard John Schaefer was
named as the prime suspect in Bonadies' disappearance when authorities found her gold locket in
Schaefer's possession at the time of his arrest in the 1970's. Schaefer was never charged in
connection with Bonadies' case. Bonadies' remains were found in the subdivision of Boca Del Mar
which was under construction at the time in Boca Raton, FL in January 1978. She was positively
identified in 2004.
19-year-old Iowa residents Collette Goodenough and
Barbara Ann Wilcox left Biloxi, Mississippi, hitchhiking to Florida. No trace of either girl was seen
until April, when searchers found evidence of their fate in Schaefers stash. Among the items retrieved
were Barbaras drivers license, along with Collettes passport, diary and a book of poems. Skeletal
remains of both victims were found at Port Saint Lucie in January 1977, but no cause of death could
be found and no charges were ever filed.
I believe the total is 7 found. Seven of the 80-100 plus that he bragged of torturing and killing. There is no accurate count of Scahefer victims. He traveled overseas and often bragged he had left victims there also. He lied as often as he spoke the truth. LE experts, as well as many other types of experts who have studied his case agree on few things, they do all agree he was pure evil. A sadistic monster who had no conscious. He took joy in the families he left behind, waiting and wondering. It gave him pleasure in knowing we were trapped in a hell of his making.
We take comfort in knowing, Deb is on the other side now. Nobody gets to hurt her again. He had no set burial ground for his victims. He had no specific area. There were items taken from victims in his mothers home, that still have not been identified as to who they belonged to.
So we wait, and we pray....maybe the next group of people who examine this monster will find a pattern, will be able to give us a clue. Maybe someone doing construction will happen upon her, or maybe someone already has and she is in one of the many graves marked unknown that Florida refuses to exhume.
To ease my mind, I do what I do. I try to find those long missing, give names to those not identified. it brings to me a sense of peace, and I pray if my sister has been found....there is someone out there doing the same for her.
