Dead body found tied to tree in 1974 identified as girl, 15, as murder is ‘linked to serial killer’

The skeletal remains of a teenage girl discovered tied to a Florida mangrove with wire in 1974 have been identified as another victim of renowned cop serial killer Gerard Schaefer.

Susan Poole, a 15-year-old high school dropout, was reported missing by her family shortly before Christmas in 1972.

Skeletal remains were discovered bound to a tree with wire two years later, but they remained unidentified for 48 years.

Police believe they are Poole’s now, according to genetic ancestry research, and that she was another of Schaefer’s victims.

After being convicted of the murders of two young children, Schaefer died in jail in 1995.

Prosecutors regarded him as one of the most ruthless serial killers they had ever encountered, suspecting him in the deaths of up to 26 young girls.

‘[He was] the most sexually deviant person I had ever seen. He made Ted Bundy look like a Boy Scout,’ Robert Stone, who prosecuted Schaefer, once said.

At the time of her disappearance, Poole had been living between the family’s home in a trailer park near Fort Lauderdale and with a friend in a nearby apartment, Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Detective William Springer said.

‘Nobody knew where she went,’ he said, noting that her clothes and pocketbook were left at the friend’s apartment.

Sheriff’s deputies were dispatched to a distant spot in Palm Beach County in June 1974, where human remains had been discovered.

‘She was tethered to a tree in the mangroves,’ Springer added. ‘She was skeletal remains, with nothing left of her except bones,’ says the narrator.

Detectives back then didn’t have the DNA capabilities that we have now, so the case rapidly went cold, he added.

Officers even released a computer composite of Poole from today’s perspective in the hopes that she might still be alive.

Investigators submitted DNA to a national missing people database in 2015, but no matches were found.