Serial killer cop reportedly murdered teenage girl who went missing nearly 50 years ago

The remains of a 15-year-old girl who went missing nearly 50 years ago have finally been identified, and her death could be connected to a serial killer cop, according to authorities, as reported by New York Post.

A cold case

Susan Poole, 15, was reported missing by her family in 1972, who lived in a trailer park near Fort Lauderdale. It wasn’t until 1974 that her remains were found tied up to a tree in the mangroves at a remote area known as 'Burnt Bridges' in Palm Beach County. However, authorities could not identify the remains and thus the case turned cold.

In December 2021, Texas-based forensics lab, Othram, reached out to the sheriff's office and said they might be able to assist in solving cold cases. In March 2022, the company provided the names of the victim’s mother and siblings. Palm Beach County Sheriff's Detective William Springer said Poole’s mother, still alive and in her 90s, provided a DNA sample and it was a match for the remains.

Springer said in a press conference on Thursday 2 June:

The family was happy to know what happened. You know it’s been a long time waiting to see what happened to their sister.

Authorities believe that Poole may have been murdered by Gerard Schaefer, a police officer and serial killer who was found guilty of mutilating and decapitating two girls, aged 16 and 17, in 1973. Springer said that Schaffer had been a police officer in Wilton Manors, a suburb south of Fort Lauderdale where Poole lived with her family, at the time she disappeared.

The same M.O.

Springer highlights the pattern, as reported by West Palm Beach News and Weather:

If you look him up, he lived in Broward County in the area where Susan Poole lived. He got arrested for kidnapping two girls, taking them out on A1A and tying them up in the mangroves. He was convicted for killing several girls that were also tied up in the mangroves.

According to CBS News, the tree where Schaefer apparently tortured and killed his victims is known in south Florida as the 'Devil Tree'.

Schaefer was fatally stabbed in prison in 1995 while serving a life sentence. As per the authorities, he was implicated in up to 30 deaths. Robert Stone, who prosecuted Schaefer, once described him as:

The most sexually deviant person I had ever seen. He made Ted Bundy look like a Boy Scout.

But the evidence is all circumstantial. Springer said, as reported by Law & Crime:

His M.O. was to pick up young girls hitchhiking. And back then, from her other friends, they told me she did hitchhike. Everything kind of fits that way, but I don’t have any physical evidence to link him to it.

Authorities would like to speak to Poole's friends to 'help us find the missing piece and give her family closure.'

Read more:

⋙ Love Island contestant's mother is wanted by police after going missing with 8-year-old girl

⋙ Netflix's Conversation With a Killer: John Wayne Gacy, the clown who murdered 33 people

⋙ Burned remains of murdered girl ‘Little Miss Nobody’ found 62 years later in Arizona desert