The Palm Beach Post from West Palm Beach, Florida • Page 76

1)24 Palm Beach Post-Times, Sunday, May 20, 1973 To Police, Belinda, Carmen, Leigh Are 'Just Missing Gary and his mother said Schaefer was very polite "excessively so," according to Mrs. Hainline. "He was kind of a pest. I found him in the bedrooms all the time. "He was always coming in and running upstairs in Gary's room, Leigh's and a girl who came to stay with us a friend of the family.

"He was kind of a high-tempered fellow He wasn't a quiet boy he talked all the time about hunting, fishing and golf A private investigator hired by the Hainline family talked to Schaefer following Leigh's disappearance. Gary Hainline also talked to Schaefer and said Schaefer told him Leigh had called him and said she was going to Cincinnati to visit relatives. She asked Schaefer for a ride to the airport. Gary said Schaefer told him, but she never called him back. The private investigator said Leigh sent a telegram to Schaefer a week before she disappeared.

Relatives of Belinda Hutchins claim one of her ed a thick file of memos and pictures over the years on all three women. Physical evidence collected from Schaefer's bedroom in his mother's F'ort Lauderdale home includes a gold locket belonging to Leigh, teeth identified as Carmen's and the names "Belinda" and "Carmen" mentioned in the writings attributed to Schaeter. After interviews with friends and relatives of the three young women last week, similarities among the trio's personalities and physical appearances began to emerge. Carmen, Leigh and Belinda, all good-looking women in their early 20s, had few" close relationships with other women, but all seemed to be exceptionally attractive to men. And high-paying job offers as undercover narcotics agents is another strong similarity.

Relatives say such offers were made to each of the three women shortly before they disappeared. Leigh's relatives are the only persons interviewed who have a firm recollection of Schaeter. Leigh's family and Schaefer's family were neighbors for several years. Leigh was a year older than Schaeter when they met in their early teens. They spent time together swimming and playing tennis, according to Leigh's mother, Caroline Hainline.

"1 never cared for the boy," said Mrs. Hainline, who is now living in Kentucky. "He did foolish things. "One time he and Gary (Leigh's brother) went fishing out on the ocean, and he (Schaefer) threw the oars away." The two boys finally drifted in with the tide, she said. Leigh's father, however, liked Schaefer, and Gary spent time hunting and fishing with him.

But Gary said Schaefer was "always hanging around my sister." Mrs. Hainline said, "You never knew where he was He was sneaky He sort of dropped by all the time." girlfriends Used to date a policeman named Schaefer and'bring him to their homes, but police are downplaying the significance of this link. Last week, Belinda's sister-in-law identified a picture of Schaefer as the policeman, and Belinda husband Bill said he is sure Schaeter is the same man. Hutchins also said Belinda got into a light blue or white Toyota or Datsun in front of her Fort Lauderdale home Jan. 4.

1972. Schaefer's blue-ajreen Datsun has been impounded by police. "I asked Belinda about this guy Schaefer the night she disappeared," Hutchins remembered, "and she told me. This guy's Although family and friends may speculate on possible links to Schaefer, Fort Lauderdale detectives trying to build a case emphasize they can only work with facts. "They're still in my missing persons file." said Sgt.

Jerry Meltzer, patting his thick brown folder. "And that's where they'll Slav until we find out more. The Cast of Characters Cases Dispensed Guilty -Murder Charges Filed Gerard John Schaeter A 27-year-old former Martin County deputy sheriff and Wilton Manors policeman who has been charged with the butcher slayings ol Susan Place and Georgia Jessrp and who investigators say they have linked to more than 20 other murders and disappearances of young women from South Florida and other parts ol the country. Nam- Kllcn Trailer and Paula Sue Wells 'Die I wo hitc hhiking teenage girls who were handcuiled. gagged and bound to trees on Hutchinson Island by Schaefer July 22, 1972 when he was a Martin County deputy.

They escaped, and Schaeler pleaded guilty to as-suulling them. He had served two and a half months ol his six-month sentence when the bodies til Georgia Jessup and Susan Place i were found on the same island nine miles .1. I rom here the assault had occurred Susan Place and Georgia Jcssup I'heir decapitated and dismembered bodies were lound April 1 near Wind Creek tin lluti hirfson Island in St Lucie Cnunlv. The two horl Lauderdale tcenaeers loll home Sept. 27, 11172 with a man their parents knew as Shepherd, and thev never returned 1'he girls parents have identihed a piciure ol Schaeler as the man thev knew as Jerrv Shepherd.

Cases Under Investigation li HILARY IIYl TON and LINDA (iORTMAKKK Poll Stall Writers FORT LAUDERDALE A gold locket, gold-tilled teeth and writings are the only threads of evidence police admit they have linking Gerard Schaeter to the mysterious disappearances of three Kurt Lauderdale women. "As far as we're concerned, all three are still just missing persons," says a Fort Lauderdale detective who has been trying to find new bits of evidence to weave into a solid case. "We don't know they're dead yet, and until we do. we just don't have anything Leigh Bonadies, 25. who vanished Sept.

8. I9; Carmen Mullock, 22, who was last seen Dec. 18. and Belinda Hutchins, 22, who disappeared Jan. 4.

1972. are grouped into one cast police are still investigating. But late Friday po lice said they had no new leads. "It Sj really hard getting into cases that are three years old," says a detective who has collect- Leigh Bonadies She Seemed 'Unhappy' To Family? Friends By HILARY HYLTON Pott Staff Wriltr FORT LAUDERDALE Caroline Hainline's firm, distinct voice quavers and falls to a hush as she says. "Yes.

I think she's dead." Mrs. Hainline's daughter Leigh, a pretty blonde, was 25 when she was last seen Sept. 8. 19. Leigh brother.

Gary Hainline. recently identified a gold locket belonging to Leigh which was found by police in the Fort Lauderdale home of GerardJohn Schaefer's mother. Other jewelry, including a swimming club pin and a Disneyland pin which Mrs. Hainline said may be her daut hter's also was found. Relatives and friends describe Leigh as "unhappy" and "mixed-up" when she disappeared over three years ago.

Charles Hainline keeps a picture of his daughter on a living room desk in his Foft Lauderdale apartment. Wearing a high-necked long-skirted dress, Leigh looks like a conservative young girl. However. Leigh was taking drugs and drinking heavily, according to her second husband and other relatives. She married twice.

Her second marriage was only three weeks old when she disappeared and. according loher brother she was not happy. Gary Hainline was home on leave from the Army when he visited his sister and her second husband. Charles Bonadies. He said the two argued constantly and Leigh told her husband she "didn't need him." Leigh met her second husband at the Manda-lay.

an apartment complex for singles. She was living with a friend described by her mother as "unstable." Leigh worked as a waitress at several Fort Lauderdale restaurants, according to her husband. Employes at the Moonraker and Wollie's restaurants remembered Leigh as quiet. Warren Foster, manager of the Moonraker, said she was "a loner." According to her mother. Leigh was "easily led" but she would always call her mother when she had a problem.

"Lujigh was unhappy." her mother said. "Basically I feel Leigh was a pretty good girl We had brought her up in the church but she was easily led." the neighborhood where Leigh, Gary and Schaeter grew up is a middle-class suburban neighborhood with neat lawns, shady trees and an occasional swimming pool. Canals weave behind the and the neighborhood children often-visit a nearby yacht club. Leigh. Gary and Schaeter swam together.

Leigh was a good swimmer and spent many hours in the family pool. The three played tennis together. Leigh continued to play tennis with Schaeter after she moved away and married. The day she disappeared, she left a note saying she would be back later to play tennis. Leigh and her second husband had a dinner date in Miami later than night with Leigh's uncle.

Paul Forward. Forward said Leigh's 'husband called him later tha night and said Leigh wasn't feeling well so they couldn't come to dinner. Mrs. Hainline said Bonadies reported Leigh missing to tha police "aboul a week later." jep mmm 1'allrllr (iwidtiwuitb and'1 Barbara Am Hih nv I euar Kaptds, Iowa teenager who wcictot' seen alive early this year in llilini. Mi," hitchhiking toward Honda.

Personal Hem belonging lu the girls were loutul a dm search of Sttuefer bedroom Vj Marv BrucoJina and Ktslc Parmer Tin- mutilated remains of these two Fort Litnterd.ile area girls were found earlier Flu war at a lonsti taction site tn Plantation The two 14-year-old girls were last reported Oct 2.1 1172 investigators have clr-cumstaiUially linked the death to Schaefer Karen r'frrrll and Marcd Malar ik West Virginia Cntversj (vermis lnund dciaj) Hated in March 1970 near Morganlnvsn Va Thev had disappeared aboul luiimnlhk carina and were Ust wen jluc lulihtiiking tujlhi'tr donnitury. Leigh HiinliseBonidU-i A 2t-year-old Fort Lauderdale waitress who was fast reported alive Sept 8, 19(9. shortly before she left i note for her husband of two weeks saving she was off to Miami but would tie back later tit play tenuis She was a next door neighbor of Schaefer in Fort Lauderdale Some ol her jewelry was found in a polled search of Schaefer's bedroom. Belinda Hutctdai i A 22 year-old "working girt" who was hit reported aljve by her husband Jan 4, 1972 when she left their Fort Lauderdale 1 i home in a car similar to achaeier's Her husband looked at evidence confiscated from Schaefer a bedroom and said he saw nothing of Belinda's But the name Belinda does appear in writings altnb-' uted to Schaefer Carmen Marie Halkick A 22-year-old cocktail waitress in Fort Lauderdale who disappeared Dec 18 10611 leaving a puppy and a bathtub filled with water Just before she disappeared she mentioned being offered a high paying job as an undercover nanotKS aem something Leigh Bonadies also had mentioned a tew months before disappearing. Two of Carmen's gold-filled teeth were found in the police search of Schaefer bedroom.

CM ft) Chief Deputy Finis Parish Cant. Wayne Scamhler Ll Patrick Duval The chief investigators ol the Blind Creek case irom the Si Lucie County Sherifl L-il Lem Brumley Jr. The 41-year-old chief investigator for State Atty. Stone office who savs in scope and bizarreness this it the biggest case 1 ve ever worked on. He has worked in law enforcement for 20 years.

Philip Shailer The state attorney for Broward County who was brought into the case by Stone Friday as a special prosecutor In the Blind Creek murder case. Lanie Norvell The St. Lucie County sheriff who has put "hundreds of man hours into the Blind Creek case. He says. "We feel like this is a verv serious rase and may involve other missing people.

Elton H. Schwari The public defender for the 19th Judicial Circuit 'and Schaefer court-appointed attorney in the Blind Creek case. Schwari, 44. argues that his client has psychiatric problems and should go to a menial hospital for treatment until he is well. Schwari has never defended a murder case.

Robert Stone The state attorney for the 19th Judicial Circuit which encompasses Martin. St. Lucie. Indian River and Okeechobee counties He says he is involved in "the biggest case of mv life. He filed the two murder charges against Schaefer Fridav in Ihe Blind Creek slavings.

The heftv 36-vear-old lawyer, who savs he wants lo run1 for attorney general somedav. has never prosecuted a murder case. The Investigators Carmen Hallock Belinda Hutchins When Last Seen, She Was Excited About a New Job 'Nothing of Hers Was on That (Evidence) Table9 where Carmen was finishing her last semester of work. And despite warnings from her sister to reject the job that Carmen said would have paid $5,000 a month, Carmen told Mrs. Bormann only four days before she disappeared that she was determined to take the position.

"She called me up and told me she'd made up her mind to talk to this person again," Mrs. Bormann said last week in a telephone interview. "I told her to please forget about it, that it sounded shaky, that it just appeared to be a high priced call girl ring. "But she was over 21, so what could I really do? And you know what her comment was to all my advice? 'What have I got to she said. Isn't that an incredible comment?" A young woman who relatives said lived two different lives her family, she was warm and kind," the friend says, "but most of her friends were Carmen graduated from Northeast High School in Fort Lauderdale in 1965 and attended junior college sporadically.

Orphaned six months before she disappeared, Carmen had no real goals in life, and she had to support herself, according to the friend. "Her mother died without a will, and Carmen disappeared before the estate was settled." Except for the friend and sister, few people seem to remember Carmen well. At the plush Round Table Restaurant, the veteran waitresses are reluctant to talk about Carmen. One waitress who reportedly saw Car- men leave work Dec. 17 with a man she was dating maintains a tight-lipped silence about the man she remembers seeing.

"I'm going to go down to that police station and ask them to take my name off their list," she told a reporter last week. "I've had too many people bothering me lately, and I don't know anything." While she and her co-workers carefully avoid talking about Carmen, the restaurant's young assistant manager instructs inquiring reporters not to ask any employes about Carmen. "Please don't talk to anybody here," the handsome young man said last week. "We're not supposed to talk." Mrs. Bormann says the "teacher" who offered Carmen a job approached her on the campus of Broward Community and may have been only an intermediate for a teacher.

"He said the job might take her out of the Fort Lauderdale area and she might have to go to Washington," her sister recalled. Her friend added that the man who offered the job told Carmen he traveled to the "islands" guess he meant the Bahamas" occasionally. But despite the $70 monthly phone bills Carmen used to run up with her sister, Mrs. Bormann says Carmen never told her more about the mysterious teacher. The evidence linking Schaefer to Carmen obviously has upset her sister, who appears to wish she'd still be uncertain about Carmen's disappearance rather than to know the truth.

"You want definite information, but yuu don't want it to be this horrendous," she savs. One day last week, Belinda's mother, a gray-haired, olive-skinned woman, sat at a metal-legged table jammed into a corner of the tiny kitchen of the family's small concrete biock apartment. She clutched a Jehovah's Witness prayer book. Her face is round, and her eyes have dark circles around them. Her body is heavy with age, years of poverty and ill health and the memory of bearing and raising 11 children.

Two of her children have grown to adulthood and died violently. And Belinda has been missing more than a year. Belinda's daughter was 10 months old when her mother disappeared. She is a pretty, curly haired little girl who kisses her daddy as he picks her up. Belinda's little girl has aunts and uncle barely older than she is.

They spill into the living room of the small apartment and play barefoot in the dark outside. Belinda's mother begins to cry as she stands at the door. "My daughter, she was a good girl, no matter what they say," she says in a soft Italian voice. On the wall of the apartment hangs a wooden cuckoo clock. Belinda last gift to her mother before she disappeared.

"She was a good girl." she says, i know she was." Bill, who hired a private investigator a year ago. continues to search lor his wife despite his growing belief she is dead and becomes distraught at the mention of recfrnt developments. "Nothing of Belinda's was on that table," he says. divorced. She continued to work, according to Bill.

He met Belinda when she was 18. He was working in a gas station and she lived nearby. When he married her, he knew she was a working girl. She quit the business, he says, after their wedding. But she went back to it later for financial reasons.

She was making at one time "between $40,000 and $60,000" a year, says her husband, a short dark-haired mechanic who wears flashy clothes. "I believe in prostitution if a woman wants to be a prostitute to make a living," Bill says, "and times are getting very hard especially for women who have children "If she has a husband and she's out working, she must really love that man. he says, "No woman would go out and make a lot of money for someone she didn't care for. "Belinda would not let anybody pimp her," Bill says. "This is the reason why her husband, I knew as little as possible because this was not Belinda's bag.

She didn't want it to be that she had pimps. "She wanted to be high class. She wanted to be a lady. She wanted to make the money that a lady would make and and it was a job," Bill says. Belinda's family is poor.

Her father, who speaks with a Spanish accent, is forced to work at menial jobs because of heart disease. Her brothers also are poor. But Belinda helped her family financially, Bill says. By LINDA (iORTMAKER Pmt Staff WnUr FORT LAUDERDALE "I guess I'm just trying to forget," says Martha Bor-mann of Hinsdale, III. She is talking about her missing sister, Carmen Hal-lock.

"1 don't get anything done any more," the 34-year-old housewife says. It was three weeks ago that she learned from Fort Lauderdale detectives that teeth from Carmen had been found. They were the first shreds of evidence that Carmen might be dead since the buxom redhead disappeared Dec. 18, Mrs. Hormann, a soft-spoken woman who has three daughters, spent three weeks in Florida in January futilely combing the area for clues to her sister's disappearance.

Carmen, 22, was reported last seen alive Dec. 18, 1969 by a friend after they lunched together at Britts department store in the Coral Kidge Shopping Center, just east of the Round Table Restaurant on North Federal Highway at Oakland I'ark Boulevard, where Carmen was a waitress. "She left me at 2:30 that day it was her day off and said she had an appointment at 5 p.m. about her new job," the Inend recalls. "Nobody ever saw her alter that." The "new job" was the position as an undercover narcotics agent Carmen had been offered three months earlier by a teacher at Broward Community College By HILARY HYLTON Pott Stall Writer FORT LAUDERDALE Police recently showed Bill Hutchins a Lfng table covered with guns, knives, pornographic literature and lurid photographs confiscated from the Fort Lauderdale home of Gerard John Schaefer's mother.

"Nothing of Belinda's was on that table," be insists. Hutchins keeps hoping Belinda is alive. "Nothing of hers was on that table," he repeats. Belinda Hutchins was reported last seen stepping into a small foreign car in front of her home Jan. 4 1972.

She left the house wearing a pink dress, white high-heeled shoes and carrying a small cluttdi purse containing her cigarettes. Belfnda was carrying no makeup. "She didn't need any." Bill says. She left expensive dresses at home and a Corvette and Cadillac parked in the driveway. Belinda was "a prostitute a working girl," Bill says, "She was proud of her profession." At the age of 14, he says, Belinda worked as a go-go girl in Baltimore She learned the ways of the world fast and discovered that if she wanted to keep her job, she would have to follow instructions, he says.

That was when she learned "the business" is profitable, he recalls. She married, was unhappy and was.