Devil Tree
A tree located in my town. Two different accounts of the story, and the Wikipedia biography on Garard John Schaefer. Pretty interesting. We're going there tonight.
In Port St. Lucie there’s a big oak in a county park on canal C-24 that has an evil reputation. It is the Devil’s Tree, an old oak tree located in Oak Hammock Park, a place frequented mostly by local fishermen who use the boat launching facilities. I went to Port St. Lucie in search of this wicked oak but only found a few local people that had ever heard of it. Unlike other centuries old legends about ghostly oaks, I was surprised to learn that this legend is not really that old. The story begins on January 8, 1971, long before Hammock Park was built, when a serial killer sexually molested and mutilated two teenage girls and then hung them from the oak tree. The psycho-killer then buried his two victims in a shallow grave beneath the oak. Allegedly, the crazed killer returned on several occasions to have his way with the decomposing bodies.
In January 1977, almost on the fourth anniversary of the heinous crime, two men found the girls’ skeletons along with two deteriorating ropes tied with a hangman’s noose. Ever since then, there have been reports of hooded satanic worshippers dancing around the tree, and some say that you can still hear the screams of the girls. One allegation has it that before Oak Hammock Park was built, there were several attempts to cut down the oak, but it seems that chain saws refused to work when near the tree. When they tried to cut it down with a two-man cross-cut saw, all the teeth fell out of the saw blade. Needless to say the tree is still standing in a small open area down a nature trail that cuts through a hammock.
Witnesses claim that the women’s rest room at Oak Hammock Park is haunted by the dead girls. It is said that strange screams come out of the rest room and doors slam shut. There are supposed to be cold spots in certain areas of the park. What is really strange is that I found no first hand accounts to any of these claims. It was always a case of somebody hearing it from someone else. But that’s what keeps legends alive.
There were so many reports about devil worshipping going on around the Devil’s Tree that in 1992, a priest performed an exorcism and placed a cross at the base of the oak. A few years ago there were some instances where the sheriff department responded to some kind of satanic activity going on in the park. There’s always a little credibility in these legends.
Serial Killer was the Real Devil at the Tree
In Port St. Lucie, FL, there is a little town-owned park that people go to, to fish, or put their boats into the C-24 Canal. In 1973, before the park or any houses were built in the area, the serial killer Gerard John Schaefer. According to a news article: This homicidal Broward County, Florida, ex-policeman, though convicted in 1973 of only two mutilation murders, is believed to be responsible for at least thirty more killings. A sadistic sex-beast by nature, Schaefer would lure young women off the roads with the help of his badge to rape, torture, mutilate and murder. He enjoyed tying his victims to trees and leaving them there while he went to work as a police officer.
Schaefer was fond of killing two girls at the same time and did this on numerous occasions. According to one news article: At some point, Schaefer tired of killing victims singly. “Doing doubles,” he later wrote, “is far more difficult than doing singles, but on the other hand it also puts one in a position to have twice as much fun. There can be some lively discussions about which of the victims will get to be killed first. When you have a pair of teenaged bimbolinas bound hand and foot and ready for a session with the skinning knife, neither one of the little devils wants to be the one to go first. And they don’t mind telling you quickly why their best friend should be the one to die.”
Schaefer bound, gagged, raped, hanged, then buried 19 year olds Collette Goodenough, and Barbara Ann Wilcox at the Devil’s Tree. Over the next five days after killing the girls, Schaefer returned to the scene, and committed necrophilia with the bodies. Both bodies were missing since January 8th, 1973, and they weren't discovered until two fishermen came across a tree with two ropes tied around a low branch, and bones protruding from the ground in 1977.
Ever since, people have reported hearing screaming coming from the woods, and hooded figures who chase overly curious thrill-seekers, then vanish in an instant. In 1993, two boys were chased through the woods by these hooded figures, who disappeared by the time the boys reached the main road. Later that same year, an exorcism was conducted, and a cross was erected by the local diocese. In 1994 the cross was knocked over.
When the city built the park, they decided to include nature trails, and they also made plans to cut down the tree to prevent local Satanists from holding ceremonies near the tree. When the men came to cut down the tree with their chainsaws, their chainsaws malfunctioned. When they brought in the manual 2-man saw, the teeth chipped off of the saw. When they tried an axe, the axe head came off of the handle.
There are orbs and ectoplasm pictures that have been taken in the parking lot, but people can hardly ever take pictures near the tree because their cameras malfunction. I get creeped out when I go there, and I refuse to set foot in the woods. I have heard of people feeling cold spots along the trails during the hottest days in July. There are a lot of stories behind the Devil Tree at Oak Hammock Park, but the one I included is the true background story of the Devil Tree.
In 1995, Gerard John Schaefer was stabbed to death in prison.
If you're ever in the area, the park is located at 1982 S.W. Villanova Rd., Port St. Lucie. -A.C.Y.
Early life
Born in 1946, Gerard John Schaefer was raised in Wisconsin until 1960, when he and his family moved to Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Schaefer did not get on well with his father, who he believed favored his sister. In his teens, Schaefer became obsessed with women's panties and also became a peeping tom, spying on a neighbor girl named Leigh Hainline. He would later admit to killing animals in his youth and also cross dressing, although at other times he claimed the latter was solely to avoid the draft into the Vietnam War (which he did).
After graduating high school in 1966, Schaefer studied at college, during which time he got married. In 1969 he became a teacher, but was soon fired for "totally inappropriate behavior", according to the principal. After being turned down from the priesthood, Schaefer turned to law enforcement as a career, graduating as a patrolman at the end of 1971, at the age of 25.
Arrest
On July 21, 1972, Schaefer, while on patrol, picked up two teenage girls who were hitch-hiking. He abducted them, took them to some remote woods and tied them to trees where he threatened to kill them or sell them into prostitution. However, when he got a call on his police radio, Deputy Sheriff Schaefer had to go, leaving the girls tied up. He vowed that he would return.
The two girls, who were aged eighteen and seventeen, managed to escape their bonds and went to the nearest police station, which was actually their kidnapper's own station.
When Schaefer returned to the woods and found his victims gone, he called his station and claimed that he had done "something foolish," explaining that he had pretended to kidnap and threaten to kill two hitch hikers in order to scare them into avoiding such an irresponsible method of travel. Schaefer's boss did not believe him and he ordered Schaefer to the station where he stripped him of his badge and charged him with false imprisonment and assault.
After posting bail, Schaefer was released. Two months later, on September 27, 1972, Schaefer abducted, tortured and murdered Susan Place, aged seventeen, and Georgia Jessup, sixteen, and buried them on Hutchinson Island.
In December that year, Schaefer appeared in court in relation to the abduction of the two girls who had escaped his clutches back in July. Due to a plea bargain, he was able to plead guilty to just one charge of aggravated assault, for which he received a sentence of one year.
Murder Conviction
In April 1973, over six months since they vanished, the decomposing, butchered remains of Susan Place and Georgia Jessup were found. The girls had been tied to a tree at some point and had vanished whilst hitch hiking, and these similarities to Schaefer's treatment of the girls who had managed to get away lead police to obtain a search warrant for the home he and his wife shared with Schaefer's (now divorced) mother.
In Schaefer's bedroom, police found lurid stories he had written that were full of descriptions of the torture, rape and murder of women, who the misogynistic Schaefer routinely referred to as "whores" and "sluts." More damningly, the authorities found personal possessions such as jewelry, diaries - and in one case, teeth - from at least eight young women and girls who had gone missing in recent years. Some of the jewelry was from Leigh Hainline, who had lived next door to Schaefer when they were teenagers; Hainline had vanished in 1969 after telling her husband she was leaving him for a friend from childhood. Also among the items was a purse identified as belonging to Susan Place. Place's mother later identified Schaefer as being the man she last saw with her daughter and Jessup.
Schaefer was charged with only two murders, those of Place and Jessup. In October 1973, Schaefer was found guilty and given two life sentences. Authorities soon stated that he was linked to around thirty missing women and girls.
Place and Jessup were probably not even Schaefer's final victims; two 14-year-old girls vanished while hitch hiking just a few weeks after Place and Jessup were killed. Their bodies were later recovered, and jewelry belonging to one of the girls later found in Schaefer's home.
Imprisonment and Death
Schaefer appealed against his conviction, claiming at one point that he had been framed. All his appeals were rejected. Schaefer later began filing frivolous lawsuits, trying to sue one true crime writer for daring to describe him as being overweight and separately trying to sue authors Colin Wilson and Michael Newton and former FBI agent Robert Ressler for describing him (Schaefer) as a serial killer. All of Schaefer's lawsuits were thrown out of court.
On December 3, 1995, Gerard Schaefer was found stabbed to death in his cell. He had been killed by a fellow inmate named Vincent Rivera. In 1999 Rivera was convicted of killing Schaefer and had fifty three years added onto the life-plus-20 years he was already serving for double-murder.
Rivera did not confess to the crime or give a motive. Schaefer's sister claimed that his murder was some sort of cover up related to his attempts to verify the confession to the killing of Adam Walsh that Ottis Toole had made (and subsequently retracted.) Others suggested it was due to Schaefer owing some prisoners money, or rumours that he was a 'snitch' who had been informing on other inmates. Sondra London (see below) claimed Rivera killed Schaefer in an argument over a cup of coffee.
It is equally likely that Schaefer was killed as a result of him simply not being very popular in prison; he had been attacked on at least one other occasion and his cell set on fire twice. Schaefer was not only a sex offender and ex-police officer but was rumoured to have been an informant as well.
At the time of Schaefer's death, a Fort Lauderdale homicide detective had been proposing to file charges against Schaefer for three unsolved murders to ensure he never got out of prison.
Killer Fiction
In high school, Schaefer had dated Sondra London, who later became a true crime writer. She got in touch with Schaefer following his conviction and in 1989 she published Killer Fiction, short stories and drawings found in Schaefer's house after his arrest. A follow-up, Beyond Killer Fiction, was later released. Following his death, London released another edition of Killer Fiction, containing the stories and rambling articles by Schaefer that were in the previous two books, together with Schaefer's letters to her where he boasted of killing thirty four women and girls and how he was admired by fellow inmate Ted Bundy. At the same time Schaefer had been writing these boastful claims, he was unsuccessfully appealing his conviction and trying to sue anyone who dared to call him a serial killer.
The short stories Schaefer wrote all featured the savage torture and murder of women, and though labeled fiction, they clearly mirrored Schaefer's own fantasies and his suspected crimes. They were often written from the killer's perspective, the killer often a rogue cop - just like Schaefer. It has been said that many tales were fictional representations of Schaefer's own crimes.
In his writings, Schaefer claimed to have started murdering women as early as 1965, when he was 19.
Two schoolgirls, nine-year-old Peggy Rahn and eight-year-old Wendy Stevenson, vanished in late 1970 after being seen in the company of a man fitting Schaefer's description. Schaefer denied being involved when he was publicly accused of the crime but in a letter to London in 1989 he boasted of killing and cannibalizing the two children.
London and Schaefer had briefly been engaged in 1991, but London broke it off and got engaged (to another serial killer from Florida, Danny Rolling). Schaefer didn't take the rejection well, and began sending her death threats. He tried, unsuccessfully, to sue her three times for stealing his work.
In his death threats to London, Schaefer had claimed to have links to the Dixie Mafia and the Ku Klux Klan who would do his bidding on the outside. Nothing was further from the truth; Schaefer was despised by fellow inmates and had been attacked several times before he was murdered.
In Port St. Lucie there’s a big oak in a county park on canal C-24 that has an evil reputation. It is the Devil’s Tree, an old oak tree located in Oak Hammock Park, a place frequented mostly by local fishermen who use the boat launching facilities. I went to Port St. Lucie in search of this wicked oak but only found a few local people that had ever heard of it. Unlike other centuries old legends about ghostly oaks, I was surprised to learn that this legend is not really that old. The story begins on January 8, 1971, long before Hammock Park was built, when a serial killer sexually molested and mutilated two teenage girls and then hung them from the oak tree. The psycho-killer then buried his two victims in a shallow grave beneath the oak. Allegedly, the crazed killer returned on several occasions to have his way with the decomposing bodies.
In January 1977, almost on the fourth anniversary of the heinous crime, two men found the girls’ skeletons along with two deteriorating ropes tied with a hangman’s noose. Ever since then, there have been reports of hooded satanic worshippers dancing around the tree, and some say that you can still hear the screams of the girls. One allegation has it that before Oak Hammock Park was built, there were several attempts to cut down the oak, but it seems that chain saws refused to work when near the tree. When they tried to cut it down with a two-man cross-cut saw, all the teeth fell out of the saw blade. Needless to say the tree is still standing in a small open area down a nature trail that cuts through a hammock.
Witnesses claim that the women’s rest room at Oak Hammock Park is haunted by the dead girls. It is said that strange screams come out of the rest room and doors slam shut. There are supposed to be cold spots in certain areas of the park. What is really strange is that I found no first hand accounts to any of these claims. It was always a case of somebody hearing it from someone else. But that’s what keeps legends alive.
There were so many reports about devil worshipping going on around the Devil’s Tree that in 1992, a priest performed an exorcism and placed a cross at the base of the oak. A few years ago there were some instances where the sheriff department responded to some kind of satanic activity going on in the park. There’s always a little credibility in these legends.
Serial Killer was the Real Devil at the Tree
In Port St. Lucie, FL, there is a little town-owned park that people go to, to fish, or put their boats into the C-24 Canal. In 1973, before the park or any houses were built in the area, the serial killer Gerard John Schaefer. According to a news article: This homicidal Broward County, Florida, ex-policeman, though convicted in 1973 of only two mutilation murders, is believed to be responsible for at least thirty more killings. A sadistic sex-beast by nature, Schaefer would lure young women off the roads with the help of his badge to rape, torture, mutilate and murder. He enjoyed tying his victims to trees and leaving them there while he went to work as a police officer.
Schaefer was fond of killing two girls at the same time and did this on numerous occasions. According to one news article: At some point, Schaefer tired of killing victims singly. “Doing doubles,” he later wrote, “is far more difficult than doing singles, but on the other hand it also puts one in a position to have twice as much fun. There can be some lively discussions about which of the victims will get to be killed first. When you have a pair of teenaged bimbolinas bound hand and foot and ready for a session with the skinning knife, neither one of the little devils wants to be the one to go first. And they don’t mind telling you quickly why their best friend should be the one to die.”
Schaefer bound, gagged, raped, hanged, then buried 19 year olds Collette Goodenough, and Barbara Ann Wilcox at the Devil’s Tree. Over the next five days after killing the girls, Schaefer returned to the scene, and committed necrophilia with the bodies. Both bodies were missing since January 8th, 1973, and they weren't discovered until two fishermen came across a tree with two ropes tied around a low branch, and bones protruding from the ground in 1977.
Ever since, people have reported hearing screaming coming from the woods, and hooded figures who chase overly curious thrill-seekers, then vanish in an instant. In 1993, two boys were chased through the woods by these hooded figures, who disappeared by the time the boys reached the main road. Later that same year, an exorcism was conducted, and a cross was erected by the local diocese. In 1994 the cross was knocked over.
When the city built the park, they decided to include nature trails, and they also made plans to cut down the tree to prevent local Satanists from holding ceremonies near the tree. When the men came to cut down the tree with their chainsaws, their chainsaws malfunctioned. When they brought in the manual 2-man saw, the teeth chipped off of the saw. When they tried an axe, the axe head came off of the handle.
There are orbs and ectoplasm pictures that have been taken in the parking lot, but people can hardly ever take pictures near the tree because their cameras malfunction. I get creeped out when I go there, and I refuse to set foot in the woods. I have heard of people feeling cold spots along the trails during the hottest days in July. There are a lot of stories behind the Devil Tree at Oak Hammock Park, but the one I included is the true background story of the Devil Tree.
In 1995, Gerard John Schaefer was stabbed to death in prison.
If you're ever in the area, the park is located at 1982 S.W. Villanova Rd., Port St. Lucie. -A.C.Y.
Early life
Born in 1946, Gerard John Schaefer was raised in Wisconsin until 1960, when he and his family moved to Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Schaefer did not get on well with his father, who he believed favored his sister. In his teens, Schaefer became obsessed with women's panties and also became a peeping tom, spying on a neighbor girl named Leigh Hainline. He would later admit to killing animals in his youth and also cross dressing, although at other times he claimed the latter was solely to avoid the draft into the Vietnam War (which he did).
After graduating high school in 1966, Schaefer studied at college, during which time he got married. In 1969 he became a teacher, but was soon fired for "totally inappropriate behavior", according to the principal. After being turned down from the priesthood, Schaefer turned to law enforcement as a career, graduating as a patrolman at the end of 1971, at the age of 25.
Arrest
On July 21, 1972, Schaefer, while on patrol, picked up two teenage girls who were hitch-hiking. He abducted them, took them to some remote woods and tied them to trees where he threatened to kill them or sell them into prostitution. However, when he got a call on his police radio, Deputy Sheriff Schaefer had to go, leaving the girls tied up. He vowed that he would return.
The two girls, who were aged eighteen and seventeen, managed to escape their bonds and went to the nearest police station, which was actually their kidnapper's own station.
When Schaefer returned to the woods and found his victims gone, he called his station and claimed that he had done "something foolish," explaining that he had pretended to kidnap and threaten to kill two hitch hikers in order to scare them into avoiding such an irresponsible method of travel. Schaefer's boss did not believe him and he ordered Schaefer to the station where he stripped him of his badge and charged him with false imprisonment and assault.
After posting bail, Schaefer was released. Two months later, on September 27, 1972, Schaefer abducted, tortured and murdered Susan Place, aged seventeen, and Georgia Jessup, sixteen, and buried them on Hutchinson Island.
In December that year, Schaefer appeared in court in relation to the abduction of the two girls who had escaped his clutches back in July. Due to a plea bargain, he was able to plead guilty to just one charge of aggravated assault, for which he received a sentence of one year.
Murder Conviction
In April 1973, over six months since they vanished, the decomposing, butchered remains of Susan Place and Georgia Jessup were found. The girls had been tied to a tree at some point and had vanished whilst hitch hiking, and these similarities to Schaefer's treatment of the girls who had managed to get away lead police to obtain a search warrant for the home he and his wife shared with Schaefer's (now divorced) mother.
In Schaefer's bedroom, police found lurid stories he had written that were full of descriptions of the torture, rape and murder of women, who the misogynistic Schaefer routinely referred to as "whores" and "sluts." More damningly, the authorities found personal possessions such as jewelry, diaries - and in one case, teeth - from at least eight young women and girls who had gone missing in recent years. Some of the jewelry was from Leigh Hainline, who had lived next door to Schaefer when they were teenagers; Hainline had vanished in 1969 after telling her husband she was leaving him for a friend from childhood. Also among the items was a purse identified as belonging to Susan Place. Place's mother later identified Schaefer as being the man she last saw with her daughter and Jessup.
Schaefer was charged with only two murders, those of Place and Jessup. In October 1973, Schaefer was found guilty and given two life sentences. Authorities soon stated that he was linked to around thirty missing women and girls.
Place and Jessup were probably not even Schaefer's final victims; two 14-year-old girls vanished while hitch hiking just a few weeks after Place and Jessup were killed. Their bodies were later recovered, and jewelry belonging to one of the girls later found in Schaefer's home.
Imprisonment and Death
Schaefer appealed against his conviction, claiming at one point that he had been framed. All his appeals were rejected. Schaefer later began filing frivolous lawsuits, trying to sue one true crime writer for daring to describe him as being overweight and separately trying to sue authors Colin Wilson and Michael Newton and former FBI agent Robert Ressler for describing him (Schaefer) as a serial killer. All of Schaefer's lawsuits were thrown out of court.
On December 3, 1995, Gerard Schaefer was found stabbed to death in his cell. He had been killed by a fellow inmate named Vincent Rivera. In 1999 Rivera was convicted of killing Schaefer and had fifty three years added onto the life-plus-20 years he was already serving for double-murder.
Rivera did not confess to the crime or give a motive. Schaefer's sister claimed that his murder was some sort of cover up related to his attempts to verify the confession to the killing of Adam Walsh that Ottis Toole had made (and subsequently retracted.) Others suggested it was due to Schaefer owing some prisoners money, or rumours that he was a 'snitch' who had been informing on other inmates. Sondra London (see below) claimed Rivera killed Schaefer in an argument over a cup of coffee.
It is equally likely that Schaefer was killed as a result of him simply not being very popular in prison; he had been attacked on at least one other occasion and his cell set on fire twice. Schaefer was not only a sex offender and ex-police officer but was rumoured to have been an informant as well.
At the time of Schaefer's death, a Fort Lauderdale homicide detective had been proposing to file charges against Schaefer for three unsolved murders to ensure he never got out of prison.
Killer Fiction
In high school, Schaefer had dated Sondra London, who later became a true crime writer. She got in touch with Schaefer following his conviction and in 1989 she published Killer Fiction, short stories and drawings found in Schaefer's house after his arrest. A follow-up, Beyond Killer Fiction, was later released. Following his death, London released another edition of Killer Fiction, containing the stories and rambling articles by Schaefer that were in the previous two books, together with Schaefer's letters to her where he boasted of killing thirty four women and girls and how he was admired by fellow inmate Ted Bundy. At the same time Schaefer had been writing these boastful claims, he was unsuccessfully appealing his conviction and trying to sue anyone who dared to call him a serial killer.
The short stories Schaefer wrote all featured the savage torture and murder of women, and though labeled fiction, they clearly mirrored Schaefer's own fantasies and his suspected crimes. They were often written from the killer's perspective, the killer often a rogue cop - just like Schaefer. It has been said that many tales were fictional representations of Schaefer's own crimes.
In his writings, Schaefer claimed to have started murdering women as early as 1965, when he was 19.
Two schoolgirls, nine-year-old Peggy Rahn and eight-year-old Wendy Stevenson, vanished in late 1970 after being seen in the company of a man fitting Schaefer's description. Schaefer denied being involved when he was publicly accused of the crime but in a letter to London in 1989 he boasted of killing and cannibalizing the two children.
London and Schaefer had briefly been engaged in 1991, but London broke it off and got engaged (to another serial killer from Florida, Danny Rolling). Schaefer didn't take the rejection well, and began sending her death threats. He tried, unsuccessfully, to sue her three times for stealing his work.
In his death threats to London, Schaefer had claimed to have links to the Dixie Mafia and the Ku Klux Klan who would do his bidding on the outside. Nothing was further from the truth; Schaefer was despised by fellow inmates and had been attacked several times before he was murdered.