Doe ID 'Singer Island Jane Doe' Susan Poole

DNA: ID

AbJack Entertainment

Society & Culture, True Crime

4.8 • 871 Ratings

🗓️ 5 May 2025

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Episode 145 Doe ID 'Singer Island Jane Doe' Susan Poole

On June 16, 1974, a man and his two sons were searching for driftwood on Singer Island in the Burnt Bridge area of North Palm Beach, Florida when they found human remains. Investigators descended on the area and found more of the skeletonized remains along with tattered and weathered pieces of clothing. There was no ID with the body, and police would face an uphill battle identifying the remains which were thought to be those of a young woman or teenage girl between the ages of 14 and 25. It was believed that the girl had stood between 4ft11 and 5ft'2 tall, and that she weighed between 83 and 103 pounds. Police found evidence that she had been tied to a tree, leading them to believe that she was likely the victim of a homicide. With not much to go on, the case of the girl that would become known as 'Singer Island Jane Doe' went cold.

Although police didn't know who their victim was, they thought they knew who killed her; a vicious, and sadistic serial killer and predator named Gerard John Schaefer. Schaefer worked as a sheriff's deputy for the Marin County, FL sheriff's department, and he had murdered and attacked several women and young girls in the area where Singer Island Jane Doe had been found. If Schaefer did indeed kill Singer Island Jane Doe, he took his secrets to the grave after he was murdered by a fellow inmate whil in prison.

In 2022, after the Palm Beach County sheriff's office teamed up with Othram Labs to perform genealogy on the DNA from Singer Island Jane Doe, they finally learned who she was; Susan Gale Poole. She had been reported missing from her Brower County trailer park in December, 1972 when she was 15 years old. Police are confident that she's the victim of Gerard John Schaefer, and in fact, he was responsible for the murder of another girl that lived in the same trailer park as Susan. Although it will likely never be established how she crossed paths with her killer, her family is relieved to have her remains so that they could give her a proper farewell.

'Singer Island Jane Doe' has her name back now; it's Susan Poole, and this is her story.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to DNAID.
0:03.1	Brought to you by Abject Entertainment.
0:05.3	Be sure to check out some of the other great true crime podcasts from this network,
0:09.8	including The Murder in My Family, Missing Persons, Scene of the Crime, Zodiac speaking,
0:16.1	Beyond Bizarre True Crime, Citizen Detective, and Campus Killings.
0:22.0	All of these podcasts are available for you to binge on right now, wherever you listen to podcasts.
0:27.5	Subscribe where you're listening to this podcast so you don't miss an episode. The
0:40.3	The The
0:57.0	The In late morning on Sunday, June 16, 1974, a lake park man and his two teenage sons were walking around Singer Island, which is not an island but a peninsula off South Florida in North Palm Beach.
1:35.9	It features parks, recreation areas, and five miles of pristine beaches.
1:40.2	The trio was looking for driftwood and fishing lores in a dense mangrove forest in an area known as burnt bridges, west of the two-lane A1A highway bridge, when they found something quite different, and shall I say, unexpected.
1:53.2	One of the boys found a human skull lying near the edge of the Lake Worth Lagoon.
1:58.8	Palm Beach County Sheriff's officials were summoned to the scene and observed the
2:02.1	following very disturbing tableau. A human skull that included all but one tooth, which had either been
2:07.7	removed or had fallen out due to decay and been moused, lay on the ground. A lower jawbone and other
2:13.8	human bones were scattered throughout the area and were believed to have been stripped of flesh by land crabs and birds.
2:20.4	I have to explain here that looking for tiny bones in this area was comparable to the infamous needle haystack situation.
2:27.4	The area was densely overgrown, swampy, and thick.
2:31.0	The bones were scattered in a wide area.
2:33.4	As a result, only a partial skeleton was
2:35.8	eventually recovered, and it was completely devoid of flesh. But some hairs were found that
2:40.8	indicated that the person had likely been a long-haired strawberry blonde. Close examination of the
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