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Letter to the editor

Finally, the truth

By KAMEEL STANLEY, Times Staff Writer
Published August 12, 2007

	In 1966, Ben Dauterman became the focus of the police inquiry into the disappearance of his then girlfriend Pamela Nater.
[Handout photo]

ADVERTISEMENT Pamela Nater was a 1964 graduate of Clearwater High School. [Handout photo] Gerard J. Schaefer, is suspected in the 1966 disappearances of Pamela Anne Nater of Clearwater, then 20, and Nancy Leichner of Largo, then 21. [Handout photo]

CLEARWATER - After 41 years, the story of how Pam Nater and Ben Dauterman met is, at best, a distant memory.

"Somebody must have introduced us," Dauterman said, recalling his long-lost girlfriend over lunch last week. "Or I might have met her at a party."

And how they met might not be that significant, anyway. For them, the end was more important than the beginning.

In 1966, Pam and Ben had already planned out their future together.

They were young and in love and liked the same things.

Sometimes they would neck at Pam's house when her parents weren't around.

He was 22 and lived in Largo. She was 20 and lived in Clearwater.

They were probably going to get married - after she graduated from nursing school.

"I offered to buy her a ring," Dauterman said. "She said, 'Let's wait till we have more money.' "

After two years of dating, they went to the Ocala National Forest with another couple. The guys went for a hike. The girls stayed behind.

And vanished.

In the days that followed, Dauterman, now 62, found himself the target of one of the most brutal sheriffs in Florida history. And in the years that followed, well after the suspicion faded, Pam's disappearance shaped Dauterman's life, often in subtle ways.

It took more than four decades for Dauterman and the rest of the world to learn what happened to his missing girlfriend.

"It's a conclusion, but it's not the one I wanted," he said. "You never want to hear somebody was killed by a serial killer."

'Weren't concerned'

It was a Sunday, Oct. 2, 1966, when Pam and Ben drove north to Lake County with another couple, 21-year-old Nancy Leichner of Largo and her fiance, Craig Mackie.

Pam, a 1964 graduate of Clearwater High, loved the Beatles. Nancy, who graduated from Largo High the year before, made her own dresses and wanted to become a flight attendant.

They had never been to Alexander Springs before, and the plan was to go scuba diving. Ben was going to test out his new wet suit, a birthday gift Pam bought him with money she borrowed from his father.

But when the four arrived around noon and saw how shallow the springs were, they switched gears.

The guys left the girls to wander around the park.

The last time Ben saw Pam, between 2 and 3 p.m., she and Nancy were hanging around the picnic tables.

A short time later, Dauterman and Mackie returned. The girls were gone.

At first, the guys thought the girls had taken a walk somewhere in the park, or perhaps had run into college friends.

"We weren't concerned," Dauterman said. "We were getting pissed more than we were worried."

Dauterman and Mackie rented a canoe and searched the nature trails, but couldn't find the two young women.

About an hour later, someone called the police.

Boyfriends the focus

The disappearance of Pam Nater and Nancy Leichner became one of the state's most frustrating unsolved mysteries.

And from the outset, some say, authorities mishandled the investigation.

In those days, Lake County Sheriff Willis McCall ran the county as he pleased. McCall kept a bullwhip on the wall of his office and was notorious for mistreating black citrus grove workers and union organizers. Eventually, his brutality led to 50 state and federal investigations.

After the girls disappeared, McCall became convinced they had simply run away. McCall hated outsiders and, despite pleas from the girls' families, he refused to ask the governor's office or Florida National Guard for help.

But the families said girls who run away don't leave behind their shoes, money and keys. So when McCall's first theory unraveled, he turned his suspicion to the boyfriends. He ordered Dauterman to take a polygraph test, which he passed.

The families hired their own private investigators, search teams and psychics, but were blocked by McCall.

"It made no sense," said Joe Donahey, then a young criminal lawyer hired by Mackie's parents to defend the boys if necessary. "They (authorities) weren't looking anywhere else. That's what was frustrating."

Donahey, who later would become a Pinellas-Pasco Circuit Court judge, conducted his own investigation and quickly concluded there had to be more to the story.

"It was a joke, the way the original search went," Dauterman said.

Donahey, too, saw McCall's arrogance up close. After dressing in shabby clothes and chatting up McCall's chief deputy at a local bar, Donahey concluded that the sheriff had no evidence to back up his suspicions.

So he went to McCall and told him so.

In response, McCall took the bullwhip off the wall, snapped it three or four times and told the young lawyer to stop messing in his case.

The two friends were never charged, but the cloud of suspicion hanging over their heads took time to fade.

And even then, there were other struggles.

"I had guilt," Dauterman said. "I was the one who drove 'em up there that day."

A new beginning

After the disappearances, Dauterman lost his taste for diving - and dating.

But with no sign of Pam or Nancy for several months, friends started prodding him to open himself to romance again.

Finally, more than a year later, his boss' daughter set him up on a blind date with one of her friends.

He can't recall the girl's name, but remembers she had brown hair and a cute, petite frame. Like Pam, she liked the outdoors.

On one of their early dates, the couple went camping.

"I said, 'Man, aren't you afraid to be out in the woods with me?' " he recalled.

The girl's answer broke the ice and put him at ease.

"You're being watched so close I'm probably safer with you than anybody else in the country right now," she said.

It was sort of a new beginning for Dauterman.

Life went on. Years passed. Dauterman lost touch with Pam's family. He got married, had a daughter, got divorced. He worked as a licensed land surveyor for 20 years, then opened a charter dive boat business.

Dauterman, who is trim and fit, looks maybe a decade younger than he is, with a full head of salt-and-pepper hair and a white beard. He just retired and is married to his second wife, who's 20 years younger than him and likes to volunteer and travel.

Dauterman worries about her being by herself. Sometimes he yells when she doesn't stay in touch with him enough.

From time to time, Dauterman remembers Pam. For this story, he agreed to an interview, but declined to let the St. Petersburg Times photograph him. The focus, he said, should be on the girls, not him.

Remembering is important, he said. Once, he talked to a law enforcement officer who hauled out a huge book. Each page was filled with mug shots, and each photo was of someone who had been reported missing and was being sought.

"You still think about it," he said. "There's always hope."

Prison confession

But that hope died three weeks ago.

After 41 years, investigators determined that Gerard J. Schaefer, a suspected serial killer and former Martin County sheriff's deputy, kidnapped and killed Nater and Leichner that day at Alexander Springs.

Schaefer, who was stabbed to death in prison 12 years ago, confessed the killings to a fellow inmate while serving a life sentence for the 1973 torture and murder of two teenage girls from Fort Lauderdale.

The inmate, Charles Sizelove, kept detailed notes of the conversations and gave them to authorities in the 1980s.

But that key piece of evidence and other information never got passed on to Lake County officials until a cold case team started re-examining the case in 2004. No one knows why it didn't surface sooner.

"It's been looked at over the years off and on by different investigators," Lake County sheriff's Sgt. Ken Adams said. "This was not a one-person effort."

Adams' multicounty cold case team began by going back through old files, re-interviewing people and slowly connecting the dots.

Every so often, Dauterman would get updates.

"He seemed sincere," Dauterman said of Adams. "That helped, knowing they were looking into this thing. ... These guys stuck with it. I appreciated that."

It didn't surprise Dauterman that Pam and Nancy had been abducted and killed. But he didn't expect to hear that a serial killer did it. Having been suspected by the locals in Lake County, he always figured one of them did it.

And yet, knowing the truth hasn't made much difference.

Pam and Nancy's bodies were never found, and the parents of both girls went to their graves not knowing what happened.

These days, Dauterman considers himself lucky to have finally gotten one answer to the decades-old mystery.

Thinking about that book of missing persons, he wonders how many others never will.

"I'm glad it's over now, finally," he said. "Now there is no hope. ... But there will always be questions."

[Last modified August 11, 2007, 21:30:33]