Rowe
Troubles from the beginning, Charles Howard Schmid, Jr. is born on July 8, 1942 to an unwed mother, put up for adoption, and adopted by the owners of the Hillcrest Nursing Home in Tucson, Arizona. The couple's only child, the parents indulge Schmid's every whim (at first, later he will get into violent arguments with his father whom his mother eventually divorces) and he soon develops into a charismatic braggart and a liar as a means of dealing with the issues he has over his birth (finding his real life mother, Schmid will have the women state she wants no part of the boy's life and shuts her door in his face) and short stature (only 5'3" tall, to make himself appear taller, he begins stuffing his cowboy boots with newspapers and crushed soda cans. Despite being a good looking, intelligent, well-mannered, athletic (Schmid will become a gifted gymnast that leads his high school team to the state championship) teenager, the youngster struggles in school (bored with classes and barely getting by, he will quit gymnastics his senior season) and never returns to Palo Verde High after being suspended for stealing tools from the machine shop there.
High School
Freed to explore the varied wilds of his personality, Schmid is gifted by his parents with a new car, motorcycle, a small house on his parents' property, and a monthly allowance of $300 (he will never hold down a regular job and his bank account is enlarged by contributions from his many girlfriends) ... unearned rewards he uses to party, pick-up girls, and transform himself into a street philosopher and Elvis wannabe. As part of his transformation, Schmid paints his face in pancake makeup he believes will make him look mean, makes his lips white with lip balm, often sports a bandage on his nose, creates a fake beauty mark mole on his left cheek made from axle grease and putty, dyes his reddish-brown hair black (all explained away as being affectations for the rock band he isn't in), and to look more like his hero Elvis, he attaches a clothespin to his mouth to stretch his lower lip and chews on a toothpick he moves about his mouth when talking. Hanging out with the kids on Tucson's Speedway Boulevard or at his party pad, Schmid's existence revolves around acquiring as many young female conquests as is possible (he has multiple girlfriends, some at the same time), drinking, playing guitar, and being the center of attraction in any room he steps into by seemingly having a tall tale to spin involving himself for any topic under the sun (the limp he has from walking in stuffed cowboy boots for instance is explained as being the result of an old injury received fighting off a Mafia loan collector). A folk hero to many of Tucson's youngsters, boredom with his life eventually sets in for Schmid, and to spice things up he decides he'd like to experience what murdering someone would feel like ... and he has a ready victim targeted, Alleen Rowe.
Transformed
Party Pad
An intelligent and good looking blonde, blue-eyed teenager, Alleen Rowe is newly arrived in Tucson after her nurse mother divorces the previous year. Getting along with her fellow students, Rowe loves to be out in the sun because it makes her feel alive, enjoys desert walks and collecting unusual looking stones, and wants to be an oceanographer after graduating from college. Unfortunately for the 15-year-old, there will be no college after she becomes friends with Schmid's current girlfriend, 17-year-old, Mary French. Uninterested at first in going to a desert "party," but hectored throughout the day, Rowe finally agrees to join French, Schmid, and Schmid's friend, John Saunders for the evening ... but only after her mother leaves for work. Mom gone, Rowe goes out the window of her bedroom barefoot, carrying her shoes with curlers in her hair, wearing only a black bathing suit beneath a yellow-checked shift. Selecting a deserted spot off Golf Links Road, Rowe is offered to Saunders, but the gay youth can neither rape her or murder her ... Schmid is quite capable of the deed though, and does both to the young teenager before getting his companions to help bury the body (along with Schmid's bloody shirt). Stories rehearsed in case the attention of the authorities is drawn their way, Tucson wakes up the next morning to a mystery ... where did Rowe vanish (Rowe's mother will report her daughter missing, but the police will at first treat the case as that of just one more teenage runaway ... ignorance and apathy that will then prompt the woman to seek assistance from Arizona's Attorney General, the FBI, local reporters, and even a psychic).
Teenagers Searching For Rowe
Found
The killing put behind him, when Saunders joins the Navy, Schmid acquires a new buddy, 15-year-old Richard Bruns, and yet another new girlfriend he spots at a downtown swimming pool ... the shapely 16-year-old rebellious daughter of a prominent local heart surgeon and board member of the Union Bank, Gretchen Fritz (a handful herself, Gretchen admires prostitutes for getting money from boys and men for something that they want for free, is excessively jealous, claims her brother-in-law is a member of organized crime, and has teachers at the private school she attends frightened by her behavior ... she falls for Schmid when he shows up on her door claiming to be a pots-and-pans salesman, confesses that he made the story up just to meet her, and is rewarded with laughs, tears, and then a cocktail and sex. The pair are soon hanging out together as a couple, with Gretchen sporting a cheap engagement ring (at least two other girls sport "promise" rings from Schmid) ... but the relationship will not last. Poison feeding poison, the pair fight constantly about Schmid's attractions to other women and when the couple will be married. Then, more ominously, about the contents of Schmid's diary in which he admits to killing a 16-year-old boy and burying him in the desert (it is unknown if this murder actually took place), Gretchen's fake pregnancy (also bologna, at roughly the same time, French shows up after an absence out of town and states she is having a Schmid puppy too), Gretchen not liking Bruns, and the murder of Rowe (which motor-mouth Schmid has of course told Fritz all about). Thinking she has the upper hand on her lover, when Schmid tries to breakup with Gretchen, she of course threatens to let the authorities know that Schmid is a killer, with rueful consequences. On the evening of August 16, 1965, Gretchen leaves her home at 7:30 in the evening in the company of her 13-year-old sister, Wendy, intent at taking in the Elvis movie, Tickle Me, at a local drive-in, the Cactus Drive-In Theater. Missing, Dr. Fritz will first contact police about his missing daughters, then hire local private investigator, William Helig to look into the matter. a hiring that pays handsomely when the detective discovers Getchen's red-and-white, two-door Pontiac Le Mans parked behind the Flamingo Hotel in downtown Tucson off Speedway Boulevard ... a car containing gravel and mud on both the front and rear seats, a disconnected speedometer, Gretchen's purse with $20 in it, ticket stubs to the movie, the car's keys, and a business card from the "C & S Uphostelry Co.," a failed business Schmid was trying to start.
Gretchen
Wendy
Suspect identified in the vanishing of the sisters (sensing he is holding information back, Helig will interview Schmid numerous times), the case is broken by Schmid's incessant babbling (over thirty local teenagers have heard the killer gloating over his murders and either don't believe Schmid's tales, fear for their own lives should they notify authorities, or simply don't care as long as their parties don't end) and his trust in his buddy, Richard Bruns. Wanting to "wow" his friend, Schmid tells Bruns about the murders, and when he isn't believed, drives his buddy out into the desert and shows him the bodies. Horrified, Bruns processes the information into a belief that his girlfriend, former Schmid girlfriend, Darlene Cook, knows too much and will be the killer's next victim ... a scenario he intends to prevent to the point where he seems to always be around Cook's home and is discovered watching Cook's home from inside a trash can. Enough is enough, when the screen door of his home is found slashed, Cook's father believes the culprit is Bruns and goes to the police (Bruns of course thinks Schmid is to blame). Arrested, to get over the fascination he has for Cook, the teenager is told by a juvenile court to leave town for three months. Arizona to Columbus, Ohio not far enough, Bruns, still worried about Cook, goes to live with his grandparents and is soon telling them everything he knows about Schmid, information they immediately pass on to the Tucson police, who gladly escort the youth back to the Arizona desert. Bodies of the Fritz girls found, Saunders and French are next scooped up over the Rowe case and confess to their part in that crime (Saunders is arrested in Connecticut and will receive life with the possibility of parole in seven years, while French is busted in Texas as an accessory to murder and gets an eight year sentence ... they are both nineteen). Recently married in Nogales, Mexico to 15-year-old Diane Lynch (the 87-pound teenager says yes to nuptials with Schmid on the couple's first date ... on advice from her mother, she will divorce her husband soon after his legal problems begin), Schmid is arrested doing yard work at his party pad on November 10, 1965. Busted, he too confesses, recants the confession, then puts together a legal team to get him off (a decision that will send his mother into bankruptcy) that includes humanoid celebrity lawyer F. Lee Bailey (a human louse that will also "defend" Dr. Sam Shepard, regarded as the inspiration of the television show, The Fugitive, wife murderer Carl A. Coppolino, U.S. Army Captain Ernest Medina for his role in the Vietnam War's My Lai Massacre, Patty Hearst, drug dealer Claude DuBoc, infomercial con artist, William McCorkle, and killer Orenthal James Simpson). Tried on February 15, 1966 for the deaths of the Fritz sisters (30 witnesses, just over two hours for the jury of eight women and four men to come to its decision) and on March 15, 1966 (postponed until May 10 of 1967, the outcome is a 50-year to life sentence) for the murder of Rowe, none of his lawyers' tricks work (they try and pin the Fritz murders on Bruns), and Schmid is found guilty and sentenced to be executed in the gas chamber at the Arizona State Prison in Florence.
Mary French In Court
On Trial At Right
Lucky for awhile, while awaiting execution, the state of Arizona temporally abolishes capitol punishment in 1971 and Schmid has his sentence commuted to 50-years in prison. But even that is too much for killer and over the years he will attempt to escape his latest sentence. Missing from his maximum security cell, he is discovered hiding in a clothing locker in the prison welding shop (after being secreted there in a hollowed out wooden gymnastics side horse), he fakes his suicide to get into a less secure part of the prison, and in 1972, finally gets beyond the walls of the penitentiary with fellow triple murderer (his wife and her parents), 32-year-old Raymond Hudgins. Getting out of their cells for a class at the prison's education and rehabilitation section, during a major rainstorm the pair slip away from class and get over the prison's 25-foot-tall walls. Schmid's freedom lasts all of two-and-a-half-days (Hudgins will also be arrested and returned to prison). Making their way south towards Tucson, the pair hold up two stores in Mesa for traveling money, hide in a local vineyard while the authorities search for them in a light plane and police helicopter, at an isolated ranch near Tempe, briefly take four people hostage, and dine on the treats of a Sonic drive-in before separating. Wearing a blonde wig over hair dyed red, limping from blisters on his feet from his desert walk, Schmid is arrested the next morning in the Tucson railroad yards of the Southern Pacific after police are called by a 28-year-old former classmate of Schmid's named Bill Lanier (after Schmid asks Lanier if it would be okay to bum a train ride).
Arrested
Jail
Out over, returned to the state prison, Schmid seems to settle down and shows an interest in poetry (and actually gets some of his stuff in front of Professor Richard Shelton of Arizona University's English Department who states the work is ... "actually quite talented."). But is all a ruse (by this time Schmid has legally had his name changed to Paul David Ashley ... to enhance his efforts at rehabilitation). Dropping out of yet another escape plan, Schmid enrages his co-conspirators, 26-year-old Jimmy L. Ferra of Apache County (in for second degree murder and assault) and 22-year-old Dennis R. Eversole of Phoenix (in for five counts of armed robbery), and on March 20, 1975, the men accost Schmid in the prison's dormitory and using three knives (two made from a putty knife and a sharpened piece of steel), slash and stab the convict forty-seven times in the face chest, and stomach (his ureter duct through which urine is passed from the kidney to the bladder for discharge is severed). Rushed to Maricopa County Hospital with an assortment of savage wounds, Schmid has emergency surgery that claims his right eye, sutures his punctured lung, and treats as best the hospital can injuries to his abdomen and intestines. All for naught, 10 days later he develops a blood infection, undergoes a tracheotomy to aid his breathing, and suffers complete kidney failure. He dies asking why his friends killed him at the age of 32.
Schmid .
But of course, the story goes on even after Schmid is gone. Although Tucson will get a black eye, the Pied Piper story in Life Magazine will be a huge hit. Author Joyce Carol Oates will use part of the tale to inspire her short story, "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been," which in turn will be made into te movie, "Smooth Talk." Sent by Playboy Magazine to do an interview, writer John Gillmore will instead get a whole book, "The Tucson Murders" out of his exclusive interviews with Schmid. Young adult writer Emily Ross will use to case in writing "Half in Love with Death. And there will be a 1971, 1994, 2005, and 2014 (abused actress Rose McGowan's directorial debut) dramas featuring aspects of the case. In 2014, the case is featured on the television show, "A Crime to Remember." The craziest item thus far though happens to Richard Bruns. Putting his thoughts down on paper to purge his memory of the killings (life turned around, he marries, has three children, three grandchildren graduates cum laude from the University of Arizona, becomes a teacher and collects antiques), Bruns' tale languishes in a box for years until it is discovered by his daughters, who eventually convince their father that the tale should be published ... as it is in 2018 under the title, "I, a Squealer" (so far, no movie is planned)!
The Book
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