http://www.charleyproject.org/cases/n/nater_pamela.html

Pamela Ann Nater


Above Images: Nater, circa 1966


Vital Statistics at Time of Disappearance

Missing Since: October 2, 1966 from Altoona, Florida
Classification: Endangered Missing
Date of Birth: May 30, 1946
Age: 20 years old
Height and Weight: 5'3 - 5'5, 120 pounds
Distinguishing Characteristics: Caucasian female. Dark brown hair, brown eyes. Nater had reddish highlights in her hair in 1966. Her nickname is Pam. Her middle name may be spelled "Anne." Her last name is sometimes given as "Mater" or "Taylor."
Clothing/Jewelry Description: A blue and white two-piece bathing suit and a blue and white pinstriped boys' Gant or Hugger short-sleeved shirt.


Details of Disappearance

Nater and her friend Nancy Leichner went on a picnic with Aquaholics, a skin-diving club, in the Alexander Springs Recreation Area of the Ocala National Forest in Altoona, Florida on October 2, 1966. They attended the picnic with Leicher's fiancee and Nater's date. The two women were last seen going into the woods together along one of the nature trails, along Alexander Spring Creek. They left their purses, clothing, shoes, and other personal belongings behind on a picnic table. A search was organized when they didn't return. An extensive search covering fifteen square miles turned up no sign of Leichner or Nater. They have never been heard from again.
It is not believed that the women drowned in the swampy area. They are both good swimmers and in any case did not plan to swim that day because the water was too cold. Their dates are not considered suspects in their disappearances.

The serial killer Gerard Schaefer was investigated in connection with their disappearances. A photograph of him is posted below this case summary. Schaefer is believed to have been responsible for the deaths of dozens of young women and is suspected in the disappearance of Carmen Hallock and Leigh Bonadies. Bonadies disappeared in 1969; her remains were found in 1978, but not identified until 2004. The family of Debora Lowe, who disappeared in 1972, believes he was involved in her case as well. Schaefer he was only convicted of two murders. He was murdered in prison in 1995. He was never charged in connection with Leichner and Nater's disappearances and authorities are unsure if he was involved.

Nater is a graduate of Clearwater High School and was employed as a nurse at the time of her disappearance. Both women resided in Pinellas County, Florida in 1966. They did not know each other very well; they had met only once prior to their disappearances. Their cases are unsolved.



Above: Schaefer


Investigating Agency
If you have any information concerning this case, please contact:
Lake County Sheriff's Office
352-343-9529



Source Information
The Doe Network
The Crime Library
Florida Department of Law Enforcement
Newspaper Archive
The St. Petersburg Times



Updated 5 times since October 12, 2004.

Last updated June 5, 2005.

Charley Project Home

Pamela Ann Nater

Lake investigators crack a 40-year-old cold case
Convicted killer, since deceased, named as likely killer of 2 missing women.

BY JESSICA GREENE
STAR-BANNER

OCALA NATIONAL FOREST - A cold case squad of Lake County investigators announced Tuesday that they have cracked the case of two young women who disappeared from Alexander Springs more than 40 years ago.

On Oct. 2, 1966, Nancy Leichner, 20, and Pamela Nater, 21, joined their boyfriends and the Aquaholics diving club for a scuba diving excursion at the park.

Reports indicate that the two women embarked on the park's nature trails separately while their boyfriends were diving. A witness later saw two girls walking along the trail with an unidentified man following close behind. Over the years, many possible suspects were identified and then dismissed. Investigators determined that the girls were most likely taken from Alexander Springs by force and killed, but the case remained unresolved.

Then, in 2004 the Lake County Sheriff's Office Cold Case Review Board decided to re-examine the circumstances surrounding the girls' disappearances.

After reviewing old files, Gerald Schaefer, a convicted murderer and former law enforcement officer, became a possible suspect. Schaefer, who is now deceased, was not a suspect in the 1966 case.

Schaefer reportedly confessed to killing both Nater and Leichner in conversations with fellow Avon Park Correctional Facility inmate Charles Sizelove, a former police officer convicted of fraud.

Schaefer was arrested in South Florida in 1973, and the belongings of nine victims were found, including a gold tooth, belonging to one of his victims, said Sgt. Ken Adams, an investigator with the Lake County Sheriff's Office criminal investigation bureau. Investigators also found bracelets and other "trophies" that were not linked to a specific victim.

Sizelove kept detailed notes of his conversations with Schaefer and handed them over to an Avon Park correctional officer. Sizelove had proven himself as a reliable "jail-house snitch" by aiding law enforcement in other cases, Adams said.

Sizelove's notes resurfaced in the re-evaluation of the case and were instrumental in leading to the resolution. Previous witnesses were also interviewed again and new witnesses were discovered, Adams said.

"In these materials are found various sources of relatively strong circumstantial evidence that I think clearly point to Gerald Schaefer as the most likely killer of these two young women," Wade C. Meyers, director for the Forensic Psychiatry Program at the University of Florida, stated in a report dated May 3, 2007.

The resolution is "bittersweet," Adams said.

"You're pleased and there's an excitement, but you haven't recovered the victims," he said.

Leichner's father and both of Nater's parents died before the case was resolved.

"It would have been nice to tell the families," Adams said.

Adams said he was, however, able to tell Nater's father that a new suspect had surfaced before he died.

Craig Mackie (Leichner's boyfriend) and Benny Dautermn (Nater's boyfriend) were former suspects. When informed that the cased had been closed, both were overwhelmed and expressed "great relief and gratitude," Adams said.

"You can only imagine 40 years of having this linger with you," he said.

Adams plans to meet with Leichner's mother and sister and the former boyfriends separately later this week to present them with details of the findings.

Jessica Greene may be reached at jessica.greene@starbanner.com or 732-7159.
http://www.ocala.com/article/20070718/NEWS...321/1001/NEWS01

With a crisp, autumn sun overhead and the transparent waters of Alexander Springs just a few yards away, Pamela Nater and Nancy Leichner set out in their bathing suits for a barefoot walk along a trail in the Ocala National Forest.

They left everything behind_purses, cars, dozens of friends and acquaintances, steaks grilling on an open fire.

That was 35 years ago. They never came back.

The case of the two women, both in their early 20s, has never been solved, joining a list of Florida disappearances that puzzle investigators and trap family and friends in the anguish that comes with not knowing.

"I still hurt," says Pamela Nater's mother, Alice, now 84 and living in Tarpon Springs, Fla. "I see young people graduating from college and I think of her. I see nurses_that's what she wanted to be_and I think of her. And after all these years, we don't know any more about it now than we did back then."

What investigators faced then, they still face today: With its canals, lakes and seashores, with pine forests that persist in spite of development, Florida can be an easy place to disappear without a trace.

"You've got the ocean, you've got the Gulf, you've got the Everglades_you've got a lot of places out there," said Fort Lauderdale police Detective Al Stone. "And they don't have alligators up North. But we do."

If not for a surveyor working last week in the pine woods of west Orange County, who knows whether the body of Rajini Mahtani, a missing 62-year-old Dillard's clerk, would have been discovered.

But some people disappear forever, leaving nothing behind but a tangle of suspicions, pointing here and there but nowhere in particular, like wisps at the end of a severed rope.

That was the case with Tiffany Sessions, a 20-year-old University of Florida student who disappeared in Gainesville in 1989. It was the case with Deborah Poe, an Orange County convenience store clerk who vanished on the job in 1990. And so far, it appears to be the case with Lillian Martin and her 10-year-old grandson, Joshua Bryant, who vanished from their Deltona home May 12.

X X X

Nearly 900,000 people are reported missing in the United States every year. All but a fraction of these cases, less than 1 percent, are resolved through investigations or by the reappearance of the missing party.

Police cannot investigate every missing-persons report. Before they start digging in earnest, investigators try to weed out the obvious with common-sense questions that can help determine whether the missing individual is a runaway or may be in serious trouble.

Is there evidence of a struggle? Are there suspicious records of phone calls, credit cards, ATM withdrawals? Was this person stable? Did he or she have any history of mental problems, drug addiction, or any reason to run and hide_debts, an argument?

"If it's a grandmother who suddenly stops calling and sending out birthday cards, you know you've got a suspicious case," said Stone, who is in the midst of an investigation that highlights the difficulties of missing-persons cases in general_and the particular challenges of tracking down people in Florida.

X X X

Like many newcomers, Colleen Wood, 53, came to the state chasing a dream. Two years ago, she quit her desk job in Akron, Ohio, to work at a marina near Fort Lauderdale and be close to her lifelong love: sailing.

She was happy and had a wide circle of friends, most of them boaters. When family and friends in Ohio stopped hearing from her in December, they assumed that she was enjoying herself at sea, perhaps on the first leg of the trip she had talked about for so long_sailing around the world, with a friend.

Then, weeks went by with no word from her. Her cell phone was turned off for nonpayment. Her son, Michael Tandarich, contacted Coast Guard officials from Akron, asking them to launch a search, fearing his mother was lost at sea.

It wasn't until April that he learned, after contacting a friend of his mother's, that she had never left on the sailing trip at all.

Fort Lauderdale police are now investigating the case.

"My gut instinct tells me there's something suspicious here," Stone said. "Police have questioned a former boyfriend and sailing enthusiast but say he is not a suspect.

"We can't have a suspect, because at this point, we don't have a crime," Stone said.

There lies the legal Catch-22 of some missing-persons cases, even the suspicious ones: It is not a crime to be missing. Without a crime, police do not have easy access to the investigative clout of subpoena and search warrants.

Tandarich fears that if anyone harmed his mother, her love of the water and her desire to be close to it may have helped her killer dispose of her body. Stone agrees that sometimes Florida's topography can make it easier for criminals to dispose of bodies, and for the missing to remain missing.

X X X

Florida is a bigger state than people realize, said former Lake County Deputy Sheriff Malcomb McCall, an investigator on the Alexander Springs case 35 years ago. "That was one problem_back in those days, at least, you could drive 15 miles in any direction from where those girls disappeared, and not find much of anything to speak of."

Hundreds of searchers combed Lake County for them. Nationwide publicity generated supposed sightings of the girls from California to the Bahamas. Jeanne Dixon, the psychic of her day, said she had a vision of the girls in a muddy place.

Two prisoners, fighting extradition from Florida for another crime, tried to confess to slaying the girls.

"But when you talked to them, they didn't know how to get to the springs, and when you asked them what the water was like, they said it was `kinda murky,' " McCall said. "After that, you didn't much need to talk to those boys any more."

X X X

Police know that publicity can be an ally in searching for missing persons. But that can be a double-edged sword. When leads come in, no matter how far-fetched, investigators are obligated to follow them up.

And eyewitness sightings of the missing person, no matter the source, are more often than not the product of good intentions and a touch of imagination.

"That was the lesson I learned with Cory Erving," said Sgt. Todd Browne, who heads the division of investigative services for Seminole County.

A year ago, Browne was working on a missing-persons case that brought national publicity to Orlando. Cory Erving, the 19-year-old son of former basketball superstar Julius Erving, was missing.

His father appeared on television to ask for help, and leads from all over the country flooded in to Browne and his team of investigators. People had seen Cory Erving in Philadelphia, in New York, all over the country.

In fact, he had died near his home when he lost control of his car, which plunged into a lake and was submerged, hidden from view.

"All those people who thought they saw him, I believe that most of them honestly thought that they did," Browne said. "Yet, obviously, they didn't. But you have to follow every lead you get, for the benefit of the person's family. That's what I would want someone to do it if was my mom. You can't afford to take a wait-and-see approach. I don't want to live with that. Nobody should."


Publication: Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service

Publication Date: 08-JUL-01

Author: McLeod, Michael