SCHAFER, PAUL [viz also Cults]: Guardian online - Fiona Ortiz - Hunting Hitler TV - The Colony: Chile’s Dark Past Uncovered 2013 -
A former Nazi who founded a secretive German colony in South America where opponents of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship were tortured has been arrested after more than a decade on the run.
Detectives in Argentina captured Paul Schäfer, an 84-year-old German, on Thursday on the outskirts of the capital, Buenos Aires. Schäfer has been wanted in Chile in connection with child abuse charges since 1996, when he disappeared. Last year a Chilean court convicted him in his absence of child abuse, together with 26 other cult members.
Smiling and handcuffed, he refused to comment as police officers took him to a cell in a wheelchair.
Schäfer, one of South America’s most enigmatic fugitives, was the leader of a notorious German cult in southern Chile known as Colonia Dignidad.
A former corporal and medic in the German army during the Second World war, he moved to Chile in the early 1960s. He established a self-sufficient colony in the mountains near the city of Parral, 218 miles south of Santiago. Surrounded by barbed wire and electric fences, and largely populated by Germans, the cult remained cut off from the rest of Chile. Guardian online article 12th March 2005, ‘Fugitive Nazi Cult Leader Arrested’
Villa Baviera, Chile – A religious cult of German immigrants has broken decades of isolation from a world shocked by sex-abuse scandals in the group, the flight of its secretive leader and reports it once helped Chile’s military government torture political prisoners.
In exclusive interviews, members of the 280-person sect ended decades of public silence to tell Reuters they had emerged from a long nightmare to the painful realization their God-like guru – a fugitive facing child-sex charges – had broken apart their families and fostered physical abuse.
The sect came here in the 1960s following Paul Schaefer, a charismatic World War II German army nurse, who cult members thought was God on Earth and who preached an unnamed religion that said harsh discipline would draw them closer to the supreme being.
‘Everyone saw him as a celestial being and no one dared doubt him. People were blind here. It was a huge shock to discover the truth,’ said Michael Mueller, a 47-year-old member of the community’s newly elected reform committee. Fiona Ortiz, Reuters article 8th November 2004, ‘Secret Cult Breaks 43-Year Spell’
A secretive German community that according to a declassified CIA file operated as a cult and could have provided refuge for Nazi war criminals. Hunting Hitler s2e8: Nazi Colony, History 2017
Built with a military perspective. ibid.
Deep in the foothills of this mountain range set in this beautiful landscape of low forested hills and fast flowing rivers is a small community of Germans who have lived here for the last fifty years. But this is not Germany or even Europe and these mountains are not the Alps but the Andes in central Chile … Colonia Dignidad, the Dignity Colony. But behind this idyllic facade hides a place where unspeakable things have happened. The Colony: Chile’s Dark Past Uncovered, Faris Kermani, Al Jazeera 2013
‘A paedophiles’ paradise.’ ibid.
Its residents have revealed horrifying stories of child abuse and forced labour, torture and killings. ibid.
By 1962 [Paul] Schafer and his group had established themselves as a charity in central Chile. They set up a farm, a bakery and even a state-subsidised hospital that offered free treatment to the local population, all with the blessing of the Chilean authorities. Schafer had his own very particular vision of how his community should be organised. ibid.
Schafer was creating a community that obeyed and followed his every command and where everyone looked up to the Permanent Uncle as a god. All this control allowed Schafer a free run to do as he wished, not only with the adults but also with the children … ibid.
Schafer reinforced this power through an elaborate system of mutual betrayal. ibid.
Frightened that he would have face criminal charges Paul Schafer fled just as he had done nearly forty years earlier. Schafer’s inner circle continued to assert its hold over the colony, but with investigators on their heels, they had to make changes to cover their tracks. ibid.
SCARVER, CHRISTOPHER: True Crime Recaps 2022 -
We all know Jeffrey Dahmer as the infamous Milwaukee Cannibal but what do we know about the man who took out one of America’s most depraved killers? True Crime Recaps: Who Killed Jeffrey Dahmer? Youtube 9.01, 2022
Christopher Scarver, otherwise known as the man who killed Jeffrey Dahmer. In 1994 Chris and Jeff were each only about three years into life sentences. ibid.
SCHARA, GARY: True Crime Recaps 2021 -
Lisa Ziegert: She was working a shift as a cashier at a gift shop in a busy strip mall when she mysteriously vanished in April 1982 … Her case went cold until a breakthrough in DNA technology helped lead police to her killer 25 years later. True Crime Recaps: Two Cold Cases Solved by DNA, Youtube 33.40, 2021
She had been left in a heavily wooded area near an almost hidden service road off Route 75 … She tried to fight off the brutal attack. ibid.
In 1993 one of those tipsters named her ex-husband, Gary Schara … He was obsessed with details of the murder and its aftermath. ibid.
SCHEANETTE, DALE DEVON: American Murder TV -
Christmas Eve 1996: Outside the Pear Tree apartments in Arlington, Texas, Skyla Prescott is looking for her sister Wendy. American Murder, CI 2017
22-year-old Wendy Prescott is dead, murdered in her own apartment. ibid.
26-year-old Christine Vu was found murdered in her apartment three months earlier under almost identical circumstances. ibid.
The media dubs the murderer the Bathtub Killer and the case soon gets national coverage. ibid.
SCHIRMER, ARTHUR: True Crime with Aphrodite Jones TV - Mail online -
A shocking suicide at a church. A minister with some sinister secrets. He was violating every commandment he could. It’s a case of murder, blind faith and betrayal. True Crime with Aphrodite Jones s4e1: Sins of the Father, ID 2013
All the blood in the garage is Betty’s. It looks like a homicide. ibid.
[He] may have murdered his first wife. ibid.
Although she had suffered a fractured skull as well as injuries to her face, body, arms and legs, the coroner made no determination as to whether her death was an accident or a homicide, and the case was closed.
Authorities reopened the investigation after Schirmer was charged in Monroe County with using a crowbar to kill his second wife, Betty, in 2008, and staging a car accident in an effort to conceal the crime.
Schirmer was convicted of first-degree murder in that case and is serving life without parole.
He faces a maximum of 40 years in Jewel Schirmer’s death and will be sentenced at a later date. Mail online article 1st July 2014, ‘Pastor jailed for murdering second wife in staged accident shocks family and pleads no contest to the charge that he killed his first wife then pretended she fell down the stairs’