Return To Sender Addressee (Gerard John Schaefer is Deceased)

So where were YOU when you found out the news?!?!?  For myself it was quite the shock to get my letter to Gerard J Schaefer returned with the markings it had.  Upon receipt a call was placed to Starke Prison to learn that the fellow writer and correspondent I had became acquainted with the year before had been murdered a few months earlier in December of the last year, shanked to death and left a bloody mess on the prison floor.  Later on more was learned of this exchange.  GJ was put down by a much younger and more powerful inmate after a few words between the two regarding the smallest, most trivial of all things…..a disagreement over a water cooler (I shit you not).  

What lesson could be learned from this bloodshed, permanent cancellation of creativity for keeps????  Maybe this…..no matter how wicked, despicable and depraved any person may be in the deeds they may have done——eventually that person will age and get old.  And what of the young????  The young won’t know of or even give a shit about the elder’s wicked deeds of yesteryear.  The young will be stronger, and the young will destroy such a person.  No bullshit right there.  Anyway I digress.

For what itsthis “Rogue Cop” and “The Hangman”, this disgraced former sheriff’s deputy with multiple murder charges and convictions credited to him——his writing, it could be said, because I’m saying it, could very well change some readers’ lives.  As a reader, writer, scholar and instructor of English, Schaefer’s work ‘Killer Fiction’, for me, was absolutely the most dehumanizing work I’ve ever read.  The book and it’s contents are very difficult to wash away, not unlike how it is impossible to unsee the horrific.

This auction is for this returned letter of mine I wrote to Schaefer, both letter and stamped and post-marked envelope together.

 Notable mentions include Glenn Rogers, Harvey Glatman, and ‘The Vampire Lust of Ted Bundy’, a short story Schaefer sent to me and granted permission for its future reproduction along with a couple other short stories from ‘Killer Fiction’. Letter is dated March 4, 1996.