Yeardley: Hey, Small Town Fam. It’s Yeardley. How are you guys? I hope you’re all wonderfully well. The case we have for you today comes from fan favorite Detective Lindsey. We’ve had Lindsey on the podcast several times, and she always delivers. Like our own Paul Holes, Lindsey investigated some of the most vicious, depraved offenders out there, and today’s case is no exception. In this episode, Lindsey brings us the story of a serial rapist named Donald Schneider. By the time Lindsey catches up to this predator, he’s already served time in prison for one sexual assault that happened years earlier. He was sentenced to 10 years for that crime, but he got out after he’d served slightly more than half of his sentence.

Then, if you were just looking for arrest warrants as evidence, it would seem that Schneider doesn’t commit any more sexual assaults for the next 20 years. But Lindsey finds that hard to believe. So, she starts digging through the boxes of cold cases at her agency, and she comes across a brutal kidnapping and rape case that happened a decade earlier. Thanks to the preservation of evidence, as well as advances in DNA technology, Lindsey is able to tie Donald Schneider to the crime and shed some light on what he was actually up to during the 20 plus years he seemed to all but drop off law enforcement’s radar. I won’t spoil the end for you, but you’ll hear me get choked up as we conclude the episode, when the impact of Lindsey following her hunch leads to a victim’s heartfelt gratitude. Here is “There Are Monsters.”

Hi there, I’m Yeardley.

Dan: I’m Dan.

Dave: I’m Dave.

Paul: And I’m Paul.

Yeardley: And this is Small Town Dicks.

Dan: Dave and I are identical twins-

Dave: -And retired detectives from Small Town, USA.

Paul: And I’m a veteran cold case investigator who helped catch the Golden State Killer using a revolutionary DNA tool.

Dan: Between the three of us, we’ve investigated thousands of crimes, from petty theft to sexual assault, child abuse to murder.

Dave: Each case we cover is told by the detective who investigated it, offering a rare, personal account of how they solved the crime.

Paul: Names, places, and certain details have been changed to protect the privacy of victims and their families.

Dan: And although we’re aware that some of our listeners may be familiar with these cases, we ask you to please join us in continuing to protect the true identities of those involved-

Dave: -out of respect for what they’ve been through.

[unison]: Thank you.

[Small Town Dicks theme]

Yeardley: Today on Small Town Dicks, my friends, we have the usual suspects. We have Detective Dan.

Dan: Good evening.

Yeardley: Oh, evening. You’re giving it all away.

Dan: Yeah. This is a first for us.

Yeardley: It Is.

Dan: I like it. I’m awake.

Yeardley: We have Detective Dave.

Dave: Buenas noches.

Yeardley: Buenos noches, senor. And we have the one and only Paul Holes.

Paul: Hey, hey, how’s it going?

Yeardley: [laughs] Hey, hey. And Small Town Fam, I hope you’re sitting down because it’s your lucky day. We are so pleased to welcome back to the podcast one of our superstars, certainly one of our fan favorites, Detective Lindsey.

Lindsey: Hi, guys.

Yeardley: Lindsey, it’s so great to see you again.

Lindsey: Nice to be back.

Yeardley: I may have misspoken. Are you in fact still a detective? Because I know you’re retired, but you couldn’t really stand retirement, so you went back to work. Now you work for your DA, is that so?

Lindsey: Yeah, I work for the prosecutor’s office here in my local jurisdiction.

Yeardley: Amazing and I chuckled that all these guys, so obviously the usual suspects are retired, but Paul obviously also couldn’t really stand retirement at all. He’s gone back to work now. He works for Othram as an investigator on the DNA side. And so, I want to tell our listeners that you come to us, the reason we’re recording in the evening is because you’ve already had a full day of work and now we’re making you Lindsey sit down with us and tell us some terrible story. [laughs]

Lindsey: Oh, my goodness. That’s okay.

Yeardley: We’re just really happy to see you. We’ll take any way we can get you.

Lindsey: I got to see you guys in Seattle when you were on your live tour.

Yeardley: Yes. Which was so much fun.

Lindsey: That was cool.

Yeardley: So, Lindsey, I’m going to hand it over to you. Please tell us how this case came to you.

Lindsey: Okay, so in February of 2005, I was a detective in the sex crimes unit. And my partner and I were called into the sergeant’s office one day and told, basically, drop everything you’re doing. You’re now going to be reinvestigating about 70 cases that were previously assigned to another detective who’s no longer in the unit.

Yeardley: Did you say 70 or 7?

Lindsey: 70.

Yeardley: Oh, my God.

Lindsey: Yeah. So, my partner and I basically split them up. He got half, I got the other half. And one of the cases that I got was a sexual assault that had occurred the previous year in April of 2004. And it was in a place called McKinley Park, which is a pretty well-known park on the east side of Tacoma near the Tacoma Dome for anybody that’s listening that knows Tacoma. So, reading through this case, it was pretty alarming. This victim’s name is Mary. She was 52 years old. And Mary came home one morning, covered in duct tape, like duct tape was wrapped around her head, she had bruising, she had abrasions all over her body, her clothing was cut up, completely disheveled, she had leaves and things stuck in her hair.

And when she came home, her roommate took one look at her and, was like, “What happened to you?” And Mary tells a roommate that she basically got picked up by this guy. Initially, she said that he had offered her a ride. In reality, we later learned that Mary was working as a sex worker, and the suspect picked her up under the guise of a date. And once she got in the car with him, everything seemed fine. He took her to this park, and once they got out of the car, he had a backpack with him. And they started walking into the park. And she said, as soon as they got inside the park and into the wooded area, he just completely changed. He proceeded to open up his mobile rape kit, which is basically what that backpack was.

Yeardley: Oh, my God.

Lindsey: Yeah. Mary says that the suspect opens up this backpack and proceeds to duct tape her arms behind her back, pulls out a knife and cuts her clothing off. And over the course of several hours, he sexually assaults her in various ways with multiple objects. He had a bottle of OxiClean, and he was basically spraying that on her after each sexual assault, I guess in his mind, thinking he was going to somehow eliminate his DNA. And then after a while, the suspect tried to force her to take some of his prescription medications and basically gave her a handful of these pills and told her to take the pills. Mary had the presence of mind to spit them out when he turned his head.

And then she rubbed some dirt over the top of him and scooted on top of the pills so he didn’t see that she spit them out. And the suspect, he actually tied her wrist to his wrist with, I think it was a shoelace. And then eventually, this is going to sound really bizarre, but he fell asleep, and then at some point wakes up and tells her, “You know, be lucky that I’m not Bundy and don’t work as a prostitute anymore.” And then he basically stands her up and walks her back out to the car and drops her off on the street corner, still covered in duct tape. And Mary was not going to report this to law enforcement.

So, when she got home, she was just going to deal with it herself. Her roommate was like, “Oh, hell, no. We’re calling the police. This is insane.” So, Mary reluctantly did go to the police, then ultimately was able to lead the responding officers to the crime scene and then she went to the hospital and had a sexual assault kit taken. Her injuries were very significant. The sexual assault nurse examiner told me that she normally would not take photographs of genital injuries, but because this victim, Mary– because her injuries were so significant, she actually took a Polaroid photo of her injuries. And so, Mary, as she’s being interviewed by law enforcement, she describes how the suspect was opening up to her and telling her things about himself. Such as, I just got out of prison, I go to this particular clinic for my mental health treatment. Just kind of bizarre things, but things that the responding officer, officer Beverly, was able to use.

So, based on figuring out what the name of the medication was that Mary was given, and then cross referencing that with medication that was prescribed to registered sex offenders, Officer Beverly came up with a potential suspect. His name is Donald Schneider. And Donald was a Level 3 registered sex offender, which is the most dangerous, highest likelihood of reoffending, and early investigation into the case the original detective who was assigned this, interviews Mary and actually shows her a photo montage of several individuals including a photo of Donald Schneider.

The photo of Donald Schneider that Mary was shown was an older photo. And when I get into this case later, I’m going to explain how much of a chameleon this man was. He probably had, I don’t know, 20 plus booking photos that I could find of him over time. And in every photo, he looks like a completely different person. So, Mary did not pick him out of the photo montage at that point. So, the case really went nowhere initially. And then when I got it the following year, I reached out to the crime lab and the sexual assault kit had been sent out there, but it hadn’t been tested yet. And so, I talked to the DNA supervisor, explained to him what I had, asked him to go ahead and test the sexual assault kit and also test another piece of evidence that was collected from the crime scene, which was a piece of cloth. It was like a scarf that at the crime scene, Mary was told to lay on top of it. So, those two items were submitted.

And just for our listeners, because it’s not like CSI and I know they all know this by now, but back in 2004, like, the crime lab didn’t test evidence unless the case was going to be charged or there was going to be an arrest made or it wasn’t just like, you submit all your evidence to the lab and they’ll test it. That’s not really how things worked. So, I don’t know that the kit ever would have been tested. So, a few months later, the sexual assault kit was tested. It went through completion, and I get a call from the lab letting me know that they did get a hit. And the hit matches Donald Schneider, even though our victim didn’t pick him out of the photo montage, which can create problems later at trial, especially in a case where you’ve got an adult victim.

And especially an adult victim who’s a sex worker, right? Because all Donald has to say is, “Yeah, I had consensual sex with Mary, but I’m not the one that did all those bad things to her. She’s a sex worker. She probably had sex with lots of other people.” But regardless of that, because of Donald’s criminal history and when I started looking into why he was a registered sex offender to begin with, it was very clear to me that he was really dangerous, and he was a predator. He was a serial predator and he preyed on all different kinds of victims.

I think he’s what you might call, like, a crossover predator, where they prey on not only strangers, but people that are known to them. Age ranges vary widely with their victim preference. And really, I think it comes down to opportunity for somebody like this particular offender. So, Donald, obviously, I knew where he was because he was a registered sex offender, and he had to report. And so, we knew what his registration address was. It was pretty easy to track him down. And we ended up actually just using a ruse and calling him in rather than going to his house under the guise of some kind of registration appointment. Our office was a couple floors up in the same building. And so, we just took him into custody and brought him upstairs for an interview.

Normally, when I would interview rape suspects, I would try to establish a rapport, and I would take the handcuffs off and really try to get comfortable with them in the interview room. Donald Schneider was not one of those people. We actually left at least one handcuff on him during the interview. He had this animalistic aura about him that was really frightening. Just when you hear that term, the hair on the back of your neck stands up. He was that kind of individual. And during the interview, Donald denied any kind of sexual assault. He basically said, “Well, I did meet a hooker and we had sex. We basically did everything.” If there were bindings involved or tape involved, well, she must have brought them to the scene. And I’m pretty sure she wanted it rough. I mean, it was just, like, complete minimization of everything.

So, we ended up booking him into the jail and he was ultimately charged and we went to trial because in Washington we have a two-strikes, you’re outlaw for violent sex offenses. And he already had one sex strike against him. So, he was going to trial on this one. And it was a challenge even trying to keep track of Mary during this process because as we all know, it can take years for cases to go to trial. So, I’m trying to keep track of her because she was pretty transient, not the easiest person to find and locate and get in for interviews and things like that. But we ultimately did prevail. The trial was pretty grueling.

And some of the things that really stood out to me were the fact that we had this photograph taken by the sexual assault nurse. Not to say that we wouldn’t have gotten the conviction without it, but I think it just really put an underscore, like this is not consensual. No one would ask for this type of violence to occur to them. So, Donald was convicted, he got sentenced to a second sex strike. So, he got life without the possibility of parole. And honestly, I thought that was the last time I was ever going to hear that guy’s name.

[laughter]

But that wasn’t the case.

[Break]

Yeardley: When Donald Schneider was convicted of Mary’s rape, how old was he, roughly?

Lindsey: Oh, boy, he was in his 50s.

Yeardley: Okay. And then Donald Schneider had already been convicted of a violent sexual offense prior, which is why he had to register as a sex offender.

Lindsey: Yes, that is correct.

Yeardley: How long before Mary’s rape had that happened?

Lindsey: So, in 1982, Donald was actually convicted of his first and only sex offense up until that point, and the circumstances on that one were pretty chilling. The victim in that case, her name is Jessica. We’re going to call her Jessica. Jessica was a 14-year-old girl who was walking down the street early evening in Tacoma. She’s on the sidewalk, walking down a main busy street. Jessica saw Donald drive by her and Donald honked or waved or something but Donald saw her and he did a U turn and drove around the block. As she continued to walk, she actually had a little pocket knife with her. And she pulled out her pocket knife and just thought, well, I’m going to pull it out just in case.

And she turns around and he’s coming at her at a full sprint from behind her. So, he had circled around and he just basically executed a blitz attack. He took the knife away from her. I think she was cut by the knife in the struggle. But he basically grabbed her, threw her to the ground, slammed her head into the concrete, and then dragged her off the side of the road into a grassy area and proceeded to sexually assault her. While this was going on, Jessica was screaming. And some of the neighbors heard the screams and called the police. So, Tacoma police officers arrive in the area. They get out on foot and start looking around, trying to see if they can find the source of this disturbance. And they actually come across Donald in the act of raping Jessica.

So, they shine their flashlights on him. Donald jumps up and attempts to pull his pants up. Doesn’t get his pants up very high, and then bolts and takes off running. He doesn’t get very far because his pants are around his ankles. And so, he ends up tripping and falling. And when the officers take him into custody, they tell him, “You know, you’re lucky we didn’t shoot you.” And Donald’s response was, “I wish you would have.” So, in Jessica’s case from 1982, Schneider was originally arrested for rape in the first degree. He ultimately was convicted of a lesser charge and he was sentenced to 10 years in prison, but did, I think, just maybe a little over half that?

Dan: It’s a kidnapping and a rape.

Dave: But it was a different time when it comes to sentencing.

Lindsey: Yes, it was the 80s.

Dave: They got historically lenient sentences on some pretty vicious stuff.

Lindsey: Yeah, so that was his first arrest, first conviction. So that was why he had to register. And he had some other arrests for stealing a car and some other property crimes and things like that, but no other sex offenses that I could find, which I thought was very bizarre, because if you look at that crime from 82 and then you look at this case from 2004, there’s a huge gap even after he gets out of prison. Like, what has this man been up to? What was he doing? And so, I think it was maybe 2007 when that case finally went to trial for Mary.

Then fast forward to, I think it was around 2012 somewhere in there, I was investigating some cold cases and part of my routine was to go through and dig through archives and just look for other cases that could be related and look at both solved cases and unsolved cases. So, I was digging through our records archives and I came across this 1995 case, which really disturbed me. What I read was that a nine-year-old girl, we’re going to call her Emily, she was walking to her school bus stop and a man pulled up in a car, a yellow car, and asked her for the time. And when she got closer to his car, he grabbed her and pulled her into the vehicle and then drove off with her. He pulled over and tied her up. I can’t remember if it was with tape or rope.

And then drove her about 30 miles away from her house to a wooded area. When he took her into the woods, he sexually assaulted her. And then once he completed the assault, he apologized and said, “I’m just a drunk old man and basically my brain needs help” or something weird like that. And he told her to count. I think it was to count to 100 and then walk out into the road and someone will help you. And so, he left and left her there. Emily eventually wandered out to the highway and was picked up by a good Samaritan who drove her to the hospital.

Now, just imagine being a parent in this scenario. You’re at work, you get a phone call from a detective saying, “Your child, who you think is at school, is in the hospital, and they’ve been kidnapped and raped.” I can’t even imagine.

Yeardley: No, the worst.

Lindsey: Yeah. So, I’m reading this, and I’m like, okay, this happened in 1995. I don’t see any arrest has been made, and I’m getting fired up just reading the case. And so, I check with the property room, and I find out that the sexual assault kit that was collected in Emily’s case was never submitted to the crime lab. And this would have been pre-DNA, you know, so 1995, they weren’t doing DNA testing. So, then I call and ask, “Okay, well, so it was never sent to the lab, but do you even have the kit anymore?” Because based on standard retention policies, it’s very likely that the sexual assault kit no longer exists. Well, luckily, someone in the sheriff’s office had put a hold on it. Whatever the reason was, I’m thankful because it was still there.

And I was able to then call my counterpart at the sheriff’s department and say, “Hey, Detective Tim, can you please send this to the crime lab and get it tested?” This sounds like a really, really bad situation. I don’t know if it’s related to one of my cases or not, but regardless, whoever did this needs to be in prison. So, Tim submitted Emily’s sexual assault kit to the lab, and a few months later, he calls me and says, “You are never going to believe who hit to that case, Donald Schneider.” It was a pretty surreal moment because, I mean, he was definitely not on my radar. It was a pretty generic description of the suspect, as you would probably imagine, right? The victim was nine. But Emily, she did help to create a sketch of the suspect in her case.

And it was a pretty widely publicized case back in 1995. It was on the news. They had the sketch. That was a very unusual thing to happen in her small community where she lived. She lived in a rural area out in the county. I mean, it was just an unheard-of thing to happen. So, I get this news that now Donald Schneider’s DNA matches the DNA from Emily’s rape kit from 1995. So that answers one question for me, which is what was this man up to during this huge gap in his criminal history? But knowing that he was in prison already for life, I was curious about, number one, would the prosecutor’s office be wanting to move forward and actually go forward and charge him?

And then two, what’s the likelihood that he’s going to want to talk? Well, I couldn’t go to prison to see him because I just had shoulder surgery. So, Detective Jean and Detective Tim went and made contact with him in prison and Donald would not give a statement, but they were able to get a reference sample from him of his DNA and then confirm, do all the confirmatory matching at the lab that it was in fact his DNA. And so, the prosecutor’s office ultimately charged Donald with the sexual assault of Emily. They brought him back from prison to await trial. Donald pled guilty.

So, he didn’t want to take that one to trial. I don’t know, you can’t really come up with any kind of reasonable explanation when you’re talking about a nine-year-old child.

Dave: Donald has learned from his first case, though, or his first conviction at least that one occurred in city limits, within an earshot of several homes, I’m guessing. And now Donald realizes I can’t have a bunch of people wandering around and possibly coming across what I’m doing. Take the crime scene and put it out in the middle of nowhere.

Lindsey: Yeah, absolutely.

Paul: Lindsey, you mentioned the crossover offender when we first started.

Lindsey: Yes.

Paul: And we’ve got three cases, small sample size. However, we’ve got nine-year-old Emily, 14-year-old Jessica, and then a 52-year-old Mary. Obviously, huge age range of the victims that he’s attacking. People they think about this myth that exists with serial predators. They target a specific type of victim. It’s like a cookie cutter. It’s like the Ted Bundy thing. It’s the brunette co-ed, right?

Lindsey: Right.

Paul: And that is not the case. We see this more often than not where we see offenders that will attack adults, but then also will attack prepubescent kids.

Lindsey: Yes.

Paul: That’s where it becomes really tough sometimes when you’re assessing who the victims are and trying to link cases together. Donald, with both Emily and Jessica, they’re victims of opportunity. He’s driving by and he sees these little girls in a situation that he’s thinking, I can make this happen. The other evolution to Dave’s point that I’m seeing is in addition to taking the victim to an isolated location with Mary, now in 2005, he is going to a sex worker who is voluntarily getting into his car. And I will tell you, that is an evolution that I’ve seen over and over again. Instead of this blitz attack where you have all these dynamic variables of witnesses and everything else going on, you go into a stroll area where this is just a common interaction and there isn’t the fight. This woman just negotiates a deal at your car window and then opens up the door and comes inside and you drive off. Donald did learn from his prior experiences.

Lindsey: Yeah, he was someone who evolved, I would say, over time, although I do think that he was all over the place. And it probably had to do with his drug use. But number one, it was victims of opportunity. So, Donald, he goes back to prison for his second life sentence. So, now he’s there forever. So, he’s got life without the possibility of parole for Mary’s case. And now he’s also got life without the possibility of parole for Emily’s case. And once I got the hit from the 1995 case, then it really made me decide, “Okay, I need to go back and look at Donald Schneider again and what else might he be responsible for?” And so, one of the things I did during my follow-up investigation into Mary’s case back in 2005 was I interviewed Donald’s wife.

So, Donald was married at the time of his arrest in 2005, and his wife Linda had two young children. Donald was a caretaker for her children during that marriage. So, during the interview with Linda, Linda actually reveals that she was also a victim of Donald’s as a child. So, she actually started dating him when she was about 13 and he was a grown man, I think, in his mid to late 20s. And oh boy, yeah, while they were dating, Donald would sexually assault Linda pretty violently, tie her up and do all kinds of horrific things to her. They were driving one day and Donald pointed at a girl that was walking down the street and he told her, basically his fantasy was that the two of them would abduct a girl off the street and then have their way with victim. I mean, that was his fantasy.

Paul: That was a test for Linda.

Lindsey: Yeah.

Paul: Donald is putting it out there to see how receptive Linda was to that idea.

Lindsey: Yeah.

Paul: I’m thinking of a serial killer. I went after this Phil Hughes and his prior girlfriend. He approached and said, “I’ve murdered and mutilated three women.” Phil told that to his prior girlfriend as a test. He came back, a couple days later and just said, “I was just kidding.” No, he wasn’t. He was wanting to see if the girlfriend was going to be an accomplice. And then ultimately, Phil ended up marrying a woman who did participate in helping find him victims and dispose of the bodies.

Yeardley: Oh, my God. Were Linda’s children that Donald was sort of acting as a father to, they were not his biological children.

Lindsey: No, they were not.

Yeardley: Was there a gap between Linda starting to date Donald when she was 13?

Lindsey: Yes. So, he had gone to prison.

Yeardley: And at some time in that gap, Linda had children with somebody else.

Lindsey: Correct.

Yeardley: Okay.

Lindsey: So, aside from that little tidbit that she shared, the other thing that really kind of stopped me on my tracks during my interview with Linda, Detective Jean and I were at her house, and I wish we’d had this interview on video. It’s one of those things, right? You’re wrapping up the interview. You’ve asked pretty much everything you think you can ask, anything that you can think of that’s important, and you throw out that last little. Is there anything else you can think of, that you think might be important? Right. She’s like, “Well, actually, there was this one time when Don took me and my girlfriend to this motel, and he said he was going to give her a ride home. And then I never saw her again.

Yeardley: Oh.

Lindsey: Deadpan silence. You could have heard a pin drop. And my partner and I are looking at each other, and we’re like, “What? What did you just say?” [laughs]

Paul: That’s when you bring the notepad back out, turn to a fresh new page and start writing. Right? [laughs]

Lindsey: It’s like, “Okay, all right, let me unpack my stuff and sit back down, because we need to go into this.” Linda tells me that in her early teens, she thought maybe she was, like, 13 or 14 years old, she could name the school she was at. She knew that she was in junior high school. There was a little girl that she went to school with, and they had decided they were going to go out with Donald and some other adult male and party. And so, all four of them went to a motel room where they were drinking alcohol and doing drugs. And at some point, the little friend who I’m just going to call Jane because we don’t know what her name was, Jane tells Linda that she wants to go home. And Donald volunteers and says, “I’ll drive her home.”

So, Donald leaves with Jane, and that’s the last time that Linda ever sees her. And then a couple days later, Jane’s mother calls Linda and says, “Hey, have you seen Jane?” And Linda says, “Well, Don gave her a ride home the other night.” “No, she hasn’t been home.” So, Linda could not remember this girl’s name. She could only give me a description. I actually went back to the school where she had attended a couple decades earlier and dug through their yearbooks from back in the– it would have been, I think, the late 80s, early 90s, and had her go through the yearbooks. Linda could not identify this girl. I worked with our State Missing Children’s Clearinghouse. I worked with NCMEC as well, trying to see if we could come up with a possible identification for who this child might have been.

Yeardley: So, NCMEC stands for the National. It’s the missing children’s registry, correct?

Lindsey: Yes. National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. I had worked with them in the past on other cases, and I knew that they had analysts that could do timelines and they could access NCIC and do the offline searches, and it just made sense to employ them because we knew that Donald was a child molester, basically, and I was never able to figure out who Jane was. It’s possible Jane did get home. We just don’t know. But we also know that back in that time frame when kids were listed as runaways, which she probably would have been if her parents did report her missing, those cases used to get automatically purged out of NCIC once they turned 18. So, I don’t have any idea who this girl was. So that was very frustrating. And it’s just one of those things with Donald Schneider I found that there are a lot of unanswered questions.

[Break 2]

Lindsey: So, in digging through the archives and looking for old cases, there were two cases that I came across that really jumped off the page to me as just screaming, Donald Schneider. Both of these cases are never going to be charged. They’re never going to be officially solved. So, I guess let the listeners decide what they think. But the first case is a case that occurred in 2004. And this actually happened about four months after Mary’s attack in Tacoma. It happened in the same area of town as Mary’s case.

A mother, who we’re going to call Michelle, and her 11-year-old daughter named Holly were walking down the sidewalk minding their own business on a warm spring evening, when a man jumps out from behind some bushes with a butcher knife, like a 12-inch butcher knife, and proceeds to grab Holly, the 11-year-old girl, and tries to drag her away from her mother. And this is a residential neighborhood and it is daylight. I mean, there are people around. So, mom puts up a huge fight and is able to maintain control of Holly and is able to fight off the attacker who runs to a pickup truck and drives away. Michelle calls the police, and the police come out, they get a detailed description of the suspect and his vehicle, and they actually help to create a sketch.

So Holly and her mother helped to create a sketch of the suspect in this case. And when the sketch goes out on the news, a detective from a county that’s basically two counties north of us, he sees the sketch on the news and he is the registered sex offender detective for that county. And he sees it and he goes, “Hey, that looks exactly like a guy who’s a registered sex offender up here in our county.” So, the detective who was assigned to Holly and Michelle’s case starts investigating that particular sex offender, ultimately arrests him, and they go to trial and there’s a hung jury.

. And so, the prosecutor’s office decides that they’re going to try him again. And so, as that second trial is gearing up, that is when I was assigned to Mary’s case. Okay, so if we’re all tracking like, even though this case happened after Mary’s, and it’s like a year later, I was finally assigned to Mary’s case and was looking into it. And as soon as I pulled up the booking photo of Donald Schneider, I about fell out of my chair because it was an identical– It was identical to the sketch.

Yeardley: To the sketch in Holly and Michelle’s case?

Lindsey: Yes. It was like, “Oh my goodness.” And one of the things that was very unique about the suspect in Holly and Michelle’s case is, they described him as this tall white male, not bald, but like a short buzz haircut. And they said that he had these rectangular glasses, which was unusual. And so that was what was in the sketch. When I pull up this booking photo of Donald Schneider, not only does he have the exact same haircut, he’s got the glasses, the rectangle glasses, everything. So, then I look at his vehicle history. He’s got a truck that matches the description of the truck that is described by Holly and Michelle. They described it as like a dark blue Datsun older 80s pickup truck. But they said it had, like, a wooden box in the bed of the truck.

Well, come to find out, Donald Schneider had a dark blue Datsun pickup truck. He would haul wooden pallets for money, and so he would have stacked up wooden pallets in the bed of his pickup truck. He reported that truck stolen shortly after Holly and Michelle’s case, and he never picked up the truck, and it was ultimately destroyed.

Yeardley: Without any forensic investigation into the truck.

Lindsey: No.

Dave: I’m no longer a detective, however–

[laughter]

Lindsey: That might be what you call a clue, right?

Dave Yeah. This is completely common for folks to retroactively report their car stolen because they know that that description’s going to be out there, and they have to have an explanation to say, “Well, I wasn’t driving it. It wasn’t with me because somebody else got it.”

Lindsey: Yeah. So that case, everything about it, it just screamed Donald Schneider to me. It was not too far from where his mother lived. He had the right type of truck. He looked exactly like the sketch. It was totally his MO. So, I end up letting the detective who’s assigned the case know this. We then notify the prosecutor, who’s gearing up now for this retrial of the sex offender from the other county. And ultimately, they ended up dismissing the case against the sex offender. They tried to basically do another investigation to see if they could prove Donald Schneider did it. And unfortunately, they just could never get there. There was no forensic evidence, independent of Holly and Michelle’s visual recollections, and a truck that we no longer had.

And, Donald wasn’t admitting anything, so that case was just dead in the water. So that was one of the cases that I dug up. The other case that I dug up, and it screamed Schneider to me was a 1988 case. And this occurred in Federal Way, which is a small jurisdiction between Tacoma and Seattle. Two young girls, we’re going to call them Amanda and Roberta. They’re both 14. They had gone to the mall, and as they’re on foot, walking down the road, they see a guy drive by and slows down, and then he keeps driving. Now, does this sound familiar to you at all from, like, the 1982 case?

Yeardley: Yes.

Lindsey: They continue to walk. He has circled around, and now he’s ahead of them. And so, once they get up to a hedge an unknown white male jumps out from behind this hedge with a knife, holds the knife to one of their necks and forces both of them into his vehicle. Once he gets them into the vehicle, he drives them through the Tideflats of Tacoma to, wait for it, the same park where Mary was taken.

Yeardley: McKinley Park.

Lindsey: McKinley Park. And this is a distance. This is a significant distance from Federal Way to the east side of Tacoma. The victims, the two 14-year-old girls, Amanda and Roberta, say that the passenger side door handle has been removed from his vehicle, which is something that I’ve seen in other serial rape cases as well, which is really frightening. So, they couldn’t get out. He tells them in the car that he’s not a child molester. He’s trying to minimize for himself or trying to make himself feel better as he’s driving these poor girls. Once they arrive at the park, this is a wooded, forested park. This isn’t just like, open air park where there’s a merry go round or something like that. This is woods.

He marches Amanda and Roberta into the park and sexually assaults both of them. When he’s done, he basically tells them that he is, I think, he said he’s a sick bastard and that his brain needs help and tells them to count to 100 and then walk to the Tacoma Dome and someone will help them. Amanda and Roberta walk to a nearby residence and police are called. They’re taken to the hospital. Photographs are taken of their injuries. They both have exams done. They didn’t have forensic nurses back then, but they did collect swabs. Unfortunately, this was 1988. There was no DNA testing back then. And because of retention periods and ages and things like that, all those swabs had already been destroyed by the time I found the case.

So, I was pretty frustrated because I was thinking, “Well, we’re dead in the water here.” However, because it was so egregious and because I just felt so confident that it was Schneider, I decided I was going to call, see if I could get a hold of the victims, Amanda and Roberta. So, I was able to actually track down one of the victims. Amanda, I got her phone number and when I dialed her number, she answered and I said who I was, that I was a detective with Tacoma PD and I’m investigating a case from back in 1988. Deadpan silence. And then I can hear her crying and I’m thinking, “Oh crap.” I mean, I don’t have anything good to tell her. I’m not going to be able to solve this case. Did I just completely open up this old wound for no good reason?

So, I’m really questioning my instincts at this point. And then Amanda pulls herself together, and she says, “I’m so glad you called. I’m just so happy that I wasn’t forgotten and that somebody actually cares about what happened.” This was not something that was ever talked about in her family. She never got any help after this happened, basically– I mean, this was that time period where everything just gets swept under the rug. Right? Don’t talk about it didn’t happen, pretend it didn’t happen, whatever. So, no one had ever talked to Amanda about the attack after that night.

I actually showed her photos of Schneider, knowing I was never going to be able to prove that it was him, and she could not identify him, which didn’t really surprise me, given how long it had been. But I was able to let her know at least that there were detectives out there that actually cared that we were still working on the case. And we were trying to do what we could. And I also let her know that, the person that I believe is responsible is he’s incarcerated for life. He’s not getting out. And Amanda said, “She’s always looking over her shoulder.” She said, like, “Even to this day, I’m always wondering, you know, if he’s going to come back.” And it’s just horrifying.

[Break 3]

So, in 2015, I was able to talk with Donald Schneider again. I had a couple people that I needed to go interview in the same prison where Schneider was being held. And so, Detective Brad and I took a road trip to Walla Walla, which is on the east side of Washington. And after talking to the two other inmates, we were there to talk to on other cold cases, we decided to have a little chat with Donald and pull him out and see what he had to say. And initially, he was a little flustered. And I could tell that he was not really happy to see me. Shocker. I actually asked him if he remembered me, and he was like. He looked at me for a little bit, and then he was like, “Oh, you changed your hair.” It’s like, [Yeardley laughs] “Yeah, yeah my hair is probably different from last time he saw me.”

But once I assured him that were not there to charge him with any new cases, he settled down, and he was actually somewhat pleasant to talk to. I showed him the details of the two cases that I just talked about. Amanda and Roberta and Holly and Michelle. Because I knew, like, we’re never going to be able to charge them. I just wanted to know if he would admit to his involvement and just to be able to let the victims know. So, I had the sketch with me from Holly and Michelle’s case from 2004 and gave him some of the details of the case. And he said, “I don’t remember that.” He never said, “I didn’t do that.” He just said, “I don’t remember doing that.” So, then I put the sketch in front of him.

Yeardley: This is a sketch of himself.

Lindsey: It is literally a mirror image of him. And he looks at it, and he’s like, “I guess. I mean, it kind of looks like me.” I’m like, “It doesn’t kind of look like you. That looks exactly like you. [Paul laughs] And he’s like, “No, I don’t know.” He basically said, “Look, I did so much math, my memory is terrible. I don’t remember any of this stuff that you’re talking about.” But he did say that he knew he had done a lot of bad stuff in his life, and Donald did admit he is where he needs to be. I asked him if it would be okay to come back and talk to him again sometime. Not about specific cases, but just to talk about maybe his thought process and his victim selection and that kind of stuff, and how his brain works.

Yeardley: And he said, “Yes, that he would be open to that, but it would have to be after his mom dies” because he doesn’t want his mom seeing him on the news anymore. That’s a common theme with these serial offenders, these really awful predators where they either don’t want their kids to know or their mom to know.

Lindsey: Yeah, a lot of these guys still have somebody in their life that they still have respect for, I guess or maybe they think that person still has some respect for them, I don’t know.

Yeardley: I’m curious, Lindsey, that Donald let all of his victims go with the exception of possible Jane. Sweet Jane who we don’t know what happened to her. Maybe he let her go, maybe he didn’t. But what is that about? That seems incredibly risky. Even if Donald evolves from kidnapping and assaulting girls where neighbors can hear and/or the cops can be called and intervene, and then in another assault, he takes his victim to a much more remote place, but in both cases, he lets the victim go.

Lindsey: Well, I think part of it probably has to do with victim selection. With Mary, for example, I’m guessing he didn’t think she would ever report that based on what she was engaged in, because, let’s face it, most sex workers are not going to report it. In his mind, he was most likely thinking, well, even if she did no one’s going to believe her because she’s working as a sex worker. So that is probably part of it. And then, he may be the type offender that his sole intent is to sexually assault. I mean, I know there’s some offenders that their intent is to sexually assault, and sometimes they end up killing, because they go overboard or whatever, or they realize, I got to get rid of this witness.

And then you’ve got the ones that the killing is part of their enjoyment. And, I didn’t ever learn anything about Donald that told me that the killing or torturing or hurting was part of his enjoyment. However, we don’t really know. In my opinion, we only know about a fraction of his victims.

Dave: Yeah. You think about how many cases went unreported during this stretch? Yeah.

Lindsey: If he picked up one sex worker, he probably picked up 100.

Yeardley: Sure.

Paul: Assuming he doesn’t have any homicides, I would say that homicide is not part of his fantasy. There are serial predators that are strictly sexual assault. They’re strictly serial rapists. Lindsey alluded to. Sometimes, these serial rapists will kill because they’ve learned they need to eliminate the witness, but they’re not getting the sexual gratification out of the homicide. They’re not fueling a fantasy of killing that person. Whereas you have the other opposite end of the spectrum, where now you have these serial killers, where the act of homicide is part of the fantasy. That’s something they need to do in order to get the gratification out of the crime. So, there’s a whole spectrum along those lines. And so, at least with the cases that Lindsey is aware of attributed to Donald, he falls into the serial rapist type of category.

And even with Mary, he says, “Don’t worry, I’m not a Ted Bundy.” Well, if he’s being truthful, if Donald was being truthful about stating that. What he’s saying is, “I’m not going to kill you. Killing isn’t part of what I do.” And it’s at risk to Donald’s own self-preservation to let these living witnesses, these victims loose. At this point in time, Donald is a crossover serial rapist. Jane is a mystery in terms of what did Donald do with her, if that’s a real case or not. In terms of the Donald not wanting to talk to Lindsey while mom was still alive. And Yeardley, you are right. There are multiple offenders who have taken that same stance. And I think the misperception is that these types offenders are these pure through and through, absolute psychopaths. They have no feelings for anybody, lack empathy and everything else.

And the reality is that these types offenders, their psychology is much more complicated. I would suspect that Donald truly loves his mom and he doesn’t want his mom to hear the worst of the atrocities that he’s committed. So, there’s a spectrum of what these offenders internally feel about other people that are in their lives.

Lindsey: Yeah. I would like to go back out and talk to him again. And I think it would be a really, really eye-opening conversation. And just the fact that he mentions not wanting his mom to see him on the news again told me that he has more to say. Aside from just like let’s talk about your MO and your victimology. No, no, no. He has more cases, more victims. Because why would all that other stuff be on the news?

Paul: Yeah.

Yeardley: Well, Lindsey, I just want to say as I was listening to you tell this case, I loved this about you when we first sat down with you too, is you’re like a fucking dog with a bone and your thoroughness and you’re sort of I’m going to go outside what would be considered the box of what my investigative mandate is. The fact that, well, we’re at this prison. You know what? I’m going to drop in on Schneider and see what he has to say. Cause you know, we’re already here. Or your idea to call up Amanda of the Amanda and Roberta crime and just see if she can shed any light. Even though you don’t have much to offer her in terms of resolution. But you know what Amanda got out of that that she’s like, “Thank goodness, you didn’t forget about me.” I just think it’s so meaningful and it’s one of the things I really love about you.

Lindsey: Oh, thank you. These cases are really rough but at the end of the day, it’s the right thing to do and you shouldn’t be doing this kind of work and you shouldn’t be a detective investigating violent crimes against people if you don’t give a fuck.

Yeardley: Right.

Dan: Amen.

Dave: Lindsey said it best. If you don’t care, what are you doing in the job?

Yeardley: It’s well said. Thank you so much for bringing that to us today. Lindsey, just great to see you.

Lindsey: Oh, great to see you too.

Paul: Lindsey, you and I have gotten to know each other well and I so respect how you approach the job. Great job again.

[music]

Lindsey: Thank you.

Yeardley: Small Town Dicks was created by Detectives Dan and Dave. The podcast is produced by Jessica Halstead and me, Yeardley Smith. Our senior editor is Soren Begin and our editor is Christina Bracamontes. Our associate producers are the Real Nick Smitty and Erin Gaynor. Logan Heftel is our production manager. Our books are cooked and cats wrangled by Ben Cornwell. And our social media maven is Monika Scott. It would make our day if you became a member of our Small Town Fam by following us on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube at @smalltowndicks, we love hearing from you.

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The transcripts of this podcast are thanks to SpeechDocs and they can be found on our website, smalltowndicks.com. Thank you SpeechDocs for this wonderful service. Small Town Dicks is an Audio 99 Production. Small Town Fam, thanks for listening. Nobody is better than you.

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