

The Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office is now looking to speak to three friends of Susan and anyone who might know about her whereabouts when she went missing. “Everything kind of fits.”Īt the news conference on Thursday, Detective Springer said that Susan’s family “was happy to know what happened.” was to pick up young girls hitchhiking,” Detective Springer said.

Schaefer was out on bail at the time Susan went missing, Detective Springer said. Schaefer, a former police officer, lived near Susan and had been arrested and charged with kidnapping two girls and tying them up in the mangroves. “Her clothing was pretty well deteriorated by then,” he said.Īround the time of Susan’s disappearance, Mr. When Susan’s bones were found in the mangroves of Palm Beach County, Detective Springer said, there was “totally nothing left of her except the bones.” After ten years on the run and an arrest last year, they have now pleaded guilty.

Mystery on happy bones serial#
She might have been the victim of a serial killer. Genetic Evidence: Through a process known as genetic genealogy, authorities in Florida were able to identify bones found in 1974 as the remains of a girl who had gone missing two years before.Genetic genealogy has been a key tool for identifying more than 40 murder and rape suspects in cases that are years old, including the infamous Golden State Killer in California. Schaefer died in 1995, when he was killed in prison while serving a life sentence, according to the authorities.Īt a news conference on Thursday, Detective William Springer of the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office said that Susan’s bones were identified using a process known as genetic genealogy, which involves comparing genetic evidence with ancestry records. The authorities believe Gerard Schaefer, a serial killer who was convicted in 1973 of the mutilation murder of two Broward County girls and is suspected of other killings, is the “best suspect” in Susan’s murder. Last week, the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office announced that the bones had been identified as the remains of Susan Poole, a 15-year-old girl who disappeared in Broward County just before Christmas 1972. How they ended up there was a mystery for decades, and attempts to identify the victim went cold. In the mangroves off a Florida highway in 1974, the authorities found human bones that appeared to have been the remains of a body that had been tied to a tree with wire.
