In the late spring of 1964, the desert air of Tucson, Arizona, carried a sense of unease that would soon permeate the community. A fifteen-year-old girl named Alleen Rowe, a promising student at Palo Verde High School with dreams of becoming an oceanographer, found her life tragically cut short. On the evening of May 31, she was lured from her home by people she considered friends.
Little did she know, this invitation was a pretense for a brutal act that would leave a lasting scar on the city.
Alleen was taken to a desolate area in the desert, a place that tragically contrasted with her love for walking and collecting stones under the hot sun. It was there that she was attacked, her life extinguished in a horrifying act of violence. Reports indicate she was raped, strangled, and beaten with rocks. For a long time, her disappearance was treated as a runaway case by the police, a theory her distraught mother never accepted. The grim reality of her fate would not come to light until much later, after her killer began to boast of his crime.
The central figure in this senseless act was Charles Schmid, a charismatic but deeply disturbed young man who became known as 'The Pied Piper of Tucson.' Schmid had a chilling desire to know what it felt like to kill someone. He was not alone in the commission of this crime; he was aided by his girlfriend, Mary French, and a friend, John Saunders. French was the one who coaxed Alleen out of her house that night, while Saunders was also present during the murder. After the crime, French and Saunders helped Schmid bury Alleen's body in a shallow grave in the desert.
The truth began to unravel when another of Schmid's friends, Richard Bruns, went to the police. Fearing for his own girlfriend's safety after Schmid confessed to other murders, Bruns provided the information that led to the arrests of Schmid, French, and Saunders. Both French and Saunders quickly confessed to their involvement in Alleen Rowe's murder. Schmid was eventually tried and found guilty, not only for Alleen's death but for the murders of two other teenage girls as well. He was initially sentenced to death, a sentence that was later commuted. Years later, Schmid's own life would end violently in prison at the hands of fellow inmates.
