Charles Howard ‘Smitty’ Schmid, Jr. was born July 8, 1942. He was an American serial killer known as the Pied Piper of Tucson.
Charles Schmid was an illegitimate child from a broken and complex family. He was adopted by the owners of Hillcrest Nursing Home, Charles and Katharine Schmid.
While he was described as good-looking, intelligent and well-mannered, he did very poorly in school. He excelled at gymnastics, led his high school to a state championship, and was an accomplished athlete. However, he quit the team in his senior year.
In his final year of high school, just before graduating, He was suspended for stealing tools from the school’s machine shop, and while he could, he never returned to school.
His parents eventually let him start living in his own quarters on his parents’ property, and was given a monthly allowance of $300. They also let him run independently with a new car and a motorcycle.
He spent most of his time hosting parties and his friends at his living quarters and Tucson’s Speedway Boulevard, picking up girls and drinking with friends, despite the fact that he tended to be a loner. His best friends were Paul Graff, who lived with him, John Saunders, and Richie Bruns.
He had numerous insecurities about his height, and so he wore cowboy boots stuffed with newspapers and flattened cans to make him appear taller. He used makeup to create an artificial image that made him look like his model, Elvis Presley.
He used lip balms, makeup and drew an artificial mole on his cheek. He also stretched his lower lip with a clothespin to make it resemble Elvis Presley’s. His easy way with the teenage community of Tucson earned him the name, ‘the pied piper of Tucson’.
All his life, Charles had been super interested in what it felt like to murder someone and on May 31, 1964, he asked his girlfriend, Mary French, and his friend John Saunders to kill 15-year-old Alleen Rowe. His girlfriend, despite knowing the initial plan, convinced Allen Rowe to come along in the guise of it being a double date.
They drove Rowe to the desert, and then the men raped her and cracked her skull with a rock. Throughout the ordeal, French was waiting in the car, listening to the radio, and when the deed was done, they buried her body in the desert.
Charles bragged to many people, including Richie Bruns, about the killing, but nobody paid him any heed because Charles had a track record of telling lies. The crime ended up being an open secret and didn’t stop the teenage community from hanging out with Charles.
Soon after, Charles wanted to kill another person, and a year later, his 17-year-old girlfriend, Gretchen Fritz, and her younger sister, Wendy, disappeared. Charles couldn’t resist bragging, so he told Richie Bruns about the bodies and also showed him where they were.
Bruns, worried that Charles would kill his own girlfriend, ran to his parents in Ohio and told them everything about the murders. Bruns also shared about the time Charles grabbed his cat, tied a heavy cord to its tail, and began to bash it bloody against the wall.
Charles was put on trial and found guilty in 1966 for the murder of Rowe, for which he got 50 years to life in prison; for the double murder of the Fritz sisters, he got the death penalty. Soon after, the Arizona supreme court abolished the death penalty, and so the sentence was commuted to life in prison.
He tried to escape and was stabbed repeatedly by his fellow inmates on March 20, 1975. He lost an eye and kidney and eventually died ten days later.
