The Palm Beach Post from West Palm Beach, Florida • Page 1

Awards WEATHER Partly cloudy with chance of afternoon thunder showers. High 87-119. Low 72-74. Details, C4 The Palm Beach Post Pyle Kennedy Pulitzer VOL. LXV, NO.

67 WEST PALM BEACH, FLORIDA MORNING, MAY 14, 1973 56 PAGES-: -PRICE TEN CENTS Pretty Lucky' To Escape Ride With Schaefer Results in Nightmare William A Clark, a Detroit News reporter, is a former Post staff writer. By WILLIAM A. CLARK Copyright 1(73, ixtrolt Ntm The man was a la officer. The two teenage travelers knew it for a fact because the day before they had seen him in uniform and had been given a "ride home" by him in his Martin County Sheriff's Department cruiser. But, in a remote, swampy area of an island off the east coast of Florida on a hot Saturday afternoon in July of 1972, the man a 26-year-old deputy sheriff named Gerard J.

Schaefer was handcuffing the girls' arms behind their backs, gagging them, binding their feet to their arms with ropes and threatening to kill them if they tried to get away. One of the imperiled girls was Nancy Ellen Trotter. She was 18 at the time and recently graduated from a suburban Detroit high school. She and a girlfriend, Paula Sue Wells of Garland, had traveled to Florida to "get a suntan." Nancy is 19 now and in the opinion of Robert Stone, state attorney for the 19th Judicial Circuit of Florida "one oftwo lucky girls in the world today." Stone believes the former deputy sheriff convicted of, and now jaied for, aggravated assault on Nancy Trotter and Pawla Sue Wells last July 22, is a suspect in a series of unsolved murders, including that of Detroit native Susan Place. In an exclusive interview with the Detroit News, Nancy Trotter told how she and her companion got into their prediment and how she swam, with her arms handcuffed1 behind her back, across a subtropical river to get out it.

For 'fancy, an attractive blonde of 5-feet-5 and 120 pounds, her daylight nightmare began with a wave of a thumb to passing motorists: "We were coming back from Jensen Beach to our apartment in Stuart. "tie came up in his patrol car and he stopped and said, 'It's illegal to "He called into the station on his radio and said he had two girls and asked if it was okay to take us home. "They said to him, so we got in the back seat of the police car and he took us to our apartment. "He was really nice, then. He told us he had hitchhiked all over the U.S.

and Europe and made it sound like he knew what it was like. Turn to NANCY, A12 Nancy Ellen Trotter tied to tree on Hutchinson Island Strange Arsenal Found In Probe of Deaths it A Vl, I 'ml -r A ruT 19th Judicial Circuit has said Schaefer is "definitely a suspect" in the disappearance and deaths of Susan Place, 17, of Oakland Park, and Georgia Jesmip, 16, of Fort Lauderdale, whose mutilated bodies were found in shallow graves on the island. Four South Florida girls in addition to the Place and Jessup girls are dead in a spree of macabre, bizarre murders believed committed by an alleged cultist necrophi-liac who had sexual intercourse with the corpses of the young women. ByJAYNE ELLISON Copyrltfit 173. Tin Palm Itach Poll Weapons, including machetes and large Japanese knives, have been confiscated by authorities investigating the murders of two teenage girls found butchered April 1 on Hutchinson Island in St.

Lucie County. The arsenal, which also included firearms, were found in a search of Gerard John Schaefer's mother's home in Fort Lauderdale and at other locations. State Atty. Robert E. Stone of the The cases of eight other missing girls also are being actively investigated, and investigators say more than 20 slayings may be related.

Stone, whose circuit includes St. Lucie, Martin, Okeechobee and Indian River counties, describes the current investigation as perhaps the "greatest crime in American history" Schaefer, 27, is in Martin County jail on an aggravated assauty charge against two other teenage girls last July. Turn to ARSENAL, A12 Staff Photo by Guy Forrall Robert Stone (Right) and Len Brumley Work on the "Biggest Case of Their Lives" Skylab Ready for Tminch Today Astronauts Pilot Jets to Cape To Watch Space Station's Launch Vf I which will launch the unmanned Skylab space station at 1 30 p.m. EDT today. Eight thousand feet away, on a separate pad stood the smaller Satum IB rocket which will lift the astronauts into orbit at 1 p.m.

Tuesday. Conrad, Kerwin and Weitz touched down on an isolated landing strip near the launch pads and were taken to crew quarters to continue a quarantine started 19 days ago. Donald K. Slayton, director of flight crew operations, said the Skylab 1 crew "is fully trained, confident and looking forward to getting the big one off tomorrow and then riding the little one on Tuesday." The astronauts spent some time at a Cape Kennedy beach and later sat down to a dinner of pork loin with dressing, vegetables and dessert. Turn to SKYLAB.

A4 CAPE KENNEDY (AP) The men of Skylab 1, poised for a 28-day adventure in space living, flew to this launch base yesterday as final preparations advanced smoothly toward today's liftoff of America's first space station. Taking off and flying in a precise Navy formation, astronauts Charles Conrad Dr. Joseph P. Kerwin and Paul J. Weitz left Ellington Air Force Base near Houston's Johnson Space Center aboard two gleaming white T38 jets and roared halfway across the country to the nation's spaceport.

The astronauts circled the Cape Kennedy area under clear, cloudless skies to make an aerial inspection of the two rockets, coiled for launch, which will start the Skylab era of America's space program. Below the astronauts, workers moved smoothly toward the final preparation of the powerful Saturn 5 rocket jpj One Dead, Three Hurt in Florida Prison Fight jr "nV hurt in a disturbance in the garment factory. The prison spokesman said the stabbings occurred shortly after 6 p.m. Two men were stabbed near their living "wing" (cellblock) and two others in the prison gymnasium. Dead at the scene was Jimmy Freeman, 23, of Miami, serving a life term on a first-degree murder conviction.

declared war on each other," about 150 miles south of here at the Sumter Correctional -Institution; A spokesman for the maximum security facility hee said he did not think there was any connection between the incidents. Two weeks ago four prison workers here were beaten and stabbed and five inmates Sumter Quiet, C2 NEW RIVER (UPI) A convicted was slabbed to death and-lhreexther-inmates received knife wounds last night in a fight at the Florida State Prison in Bradford County. The incident came less then 24 hours after authorities said "blacks and whites Martha Safe and Sound, 'Trying To Live a Private Life Inside Today JOHN DEAN, former White House counsel, tried to recruit government employes to work- as undercover spies and infiltrate protest groups at last summer's political conventions A3 Amusements B3 Bridge Column B6 Classified Ads C5-15 Comics B6 Crossword Puzzle B6 Editorials A14 Horoscope B6 Letter to the Editor A14 Obituaries C4 Poster Bl-8 Sports Dl-6 TV Column B7 Sv if t' el-t Times in response to queries concerning her whereabouts, said she had a "pleasant week" at "somebody's house, I don't have to tell you who," that she had "a perfect right to find my little hideaways," and that she came home yesterday, "because it's Mother's Day." The call was apparently made from the Mitchells' Manhattan apartment building. An observer reported seeing Mrs. Mitchell enter the building shortly before the telephone call was made.

She appeared to be in good spirits. Turn to MARTHA, A3 IONiw York Timi NEW YORK Mrs. John N. Mitchell was reportedly secreted in a mental hospital last week, but yesterday, sounding as ebullient as ever, the former attorney general's wife denied it. "Anybody who says that, why they're just as crazy as can be," she told the Times by telephone.

"I'm right here at home. I went to see some friends of mine. I'm trying to live a private life now. Martha Mitchell has a riyht to privacy now, and I'm going to demand it." Mrs. Mitchell, who telephoned the I MARTHA MITCHELL a right to privacy" Rising Sun Outlines Nose of Skylab Waiting for Launch.