The case
Charles “Smitty” Schmid was in his early twenties and living in Tucson, Arizona, where he spent his time around local teenagers who treated him like a celebrity. He stuffed his boots to look taller, wore makeup and dyed his hair to look like Elvis, and kept a loyal circle of young followers.
On May 31, 1964, Schmid killed fifteen-year-old Alleen Rowe in the desert with help from his girlfriend, Mary French, and a friend, John Saunders, and they buried her there. On August 16, 1965, he strangled his girlfriend Gretchen Fritz, seventeen, and her thirteen-year-old sister, Wendy, and left their bodies in the desert as well. His friend Richard Bruns eventually went to police, led them to the Fritz sisters’ remains, and Schmid was arrested on November 10, 1965. Rowe’s remains were recovered after he pointed detectives to the site.
Time and Life magazines nicknamed him the Pied Piper of Tucson. Schmid was convicted and sentenced to death, but his sentence was commuted after the 1972 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Furman v. Georgia. In November 1972 he escaped from the Arizona State Prison in Florence and was recaptured days later. On March 20, 1975, two inmates stabbed him dozens of times, and he died of his injuries on March 30, 1975.
Case photographs
Where it happened
Tucson, where Schmid buried his victims in the desert