Fatal Fantasy | 1. Overkill

Renowned DNA scientist and father of three, Dr. Robert Schwartz, is found stabbed to death more than 30 times by a sword inside his Virginia home. A Satanic pentagram and other clues point to some sort of witchcraft. Binge all episodes of Fatal Fantasy ad-free today by subscribing to The Binge. Visit The Binge on Apple Podcasts and hit ‘subscribe’ or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access. From serial killer nurses to psychic scammers – The Binge is your home for true crime stories that pull you in and never let go. Join our free newsletter at Patreon.com/TheBinge. The Binge – feed your true crime obsession. Fatal Fantasy is brought to you by Sony Music Entertainment and M. Williams Phelps LLC. Find out more about The Binge and other podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts and follow us @sonypodcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 1:06Speaker 01

  Every human being fantasizes, daydreams, lies in bed at night, drifts off during the day while at work or school, perhaps envisioning a different version of reality. They might peer into the crystal ball of their future and see themselves hitting the lotto, having children, becoming a professional athlete, getting that girl or guy they've always wanted, or perhaps carrying out a diabolical murder in the most brutal ways imaginable.

• 1:44Speaker 01

  Fact is, some fantasize about unicorns dancing in fluffy pink clouds, while others imagine that person they despise dying a slow, miserable death.

• 1:58Speaker 01

  This is the story of both, with the fantasy aspect of it all gone horrifically and fatally wrong.

• 2:16Speaker 02

  You know, I can't force anybody to to believe what I have to say. I am stating truth. That's it. I don't care how it makes me look. I don't care what it does to my reputation. Dr. Schwartz deserves the truth. You know, he deserves the truth. His family deserves the truth.

• 2:41Speaker 01

  Dr. Robert Bob Schwartz hasn't shown up for work. It's the 10th of December, 2001. His coworker Terry said it was unlike him to miss a meeting and not come to work. The renowned scientist, a pioneer in DNA research, would have let someone know if he wasn't coming in. Dr. Schwartz is not answering his phone, so his boss, who happens to know one of the neighbors, calls and asks the neighbor to go over and check things out. Schwartz's driveway was under construction. To get to the house, you had to walk.

• 3:25Speaker 01

  When the neighbor arrived, he found another neighbor standing outside. He'd asked him if he'd seen Dr. Schwartz. "No," the guy said, "and he'd been there since 7:30 that morning." So the two men head down the driveway. They see Dr. Schwartz's vehicle parked in its usual spot, over by the stables where he keeps his horses. The house is made of fieldstone and cement, a cross between the Hobbit and a Revolutionary War colonial.

• 3:59Speaker 03

  It was a home that was in a very rural area. It was out away from most of the neighbors. The closest neighbor was probably about a quarter of a mile away.

• 4:15Speaker 01

  They go around to the back of the house, where there's a door into the kitchen.

• 4:22Speaker 01

  Inside now, everything has this awfully and eerily quiet vibe to it.

• 4:30Speaker 01

  The neighbor senses right away that something is off. There's a sour, steely, metallic smell, mixed with the feeling of something even more alarming:

• 4:42Speaker 01

  death.

• 4:44Speaker 01

  He takes one step into the kitchen, and there is Dr. Schwartz.

• 4:51Speaker 03

  And upon his entry, he found a very gruesome and disturbing scene. Dr. Schwartz was located in the kitchen, face down on the kitchen floor, in a pool of blood, and had numerous wounds that were visible.

• 5:10Speaker 01

  Now, Dr. Schwartz's neighbor is no forensic expert, but even to him, it's clear this wasn't some kind of robbery. There's no forced entry. Whoever had murdered Dr. Robert Schwartz walked into the house without resistance, as if someone invited them in.

• 5:32Speaker 01

  Investigators from the Loudoun County, Virginia Sheriff's Office secure the crime scene and begin taking stock of the gruesome attack. Blood is everywhere: on the floor, walls, countertops, smeared along the wooden floor. As a working true crime journalist for over 25 years, I have written about and studied hundreds of crime scenes, and I can tell you that the brutality of this murder went beyond a crime of passion.

• 6:07Speaker 01

  Schwartz had one arm sticking out, his eyes wide open like a doll, a large pool of blood around his head and torso. And there are even droplets of cooked blood inside a frying pan on the stove.

• 6:25Speaker 01

  Here's one of the investigators involved early on, Detective Greg Locke.

• 6:32Speaker 03

  Dr. Schwartz suffered over 30 stab wounds. Some of the stab wounds penetrated through his body and actually into the hardwood floor, indicating that he had been stabbed numerous times after he had fallen to the floor.

• 6:48Speaker 01

  In total, Schwartz was stabbed 31 times. Thirty-one times. Delving into this case years ago, interviewing over 50 people for a book I was working on, I had so many questions about the crime scene alone. Clearly, Dr. Schwartz's murder was fueled by an enormous amount of rage. And yet, looking deeper into it, I began to wonder if something far more sinister was going on here.

• 7:27Speaker 01

  And then, combing through crime scene photographs, I come to an obvious, premeditated, carefully executed incision on the back of Schwartz's neck. A large X carved deliberately and clearly visible by what appears to be the tip of a large blade. Crime scene investigators on scene flip Dr. Schwartz over and find a series of wounds on his chest and stomach. Wounds in the shape of what appears to be a five-pointed star. A satanic pentagram? In all my years of true crime reporting,

• 8:12Speaker 01

  I have never seen anything as barbaric and bizarre as the murder of Robert Schwartz. Digging deeper over the years, this story became something I would have never suspected, something hard to fathom, taking me into a world of live-action role-playing, dark and twisted fantasies, mythical worlds some believed were real, and even the creepy, sadistic, underground world of vampires.

• 8:41Speaker 04

  She was frantic. You need to tell me what exactly happened when the police showed up? She goes, "They said he was under arrest for the murder of somebody."

• 8:52Speaker 05

  I told you guys something horrible was gonna happen. And something horrible was coming. And nobody wanted to listen. I told you something was coming. But all you guys told me was it was all in my head.

• 9:09Speaker 05

  And look what happened.

• 9:16Speaker 01

  My name is M. William Phelps. I'm an investigative journalist and the New York Times bestselling author of dozens of true crime books. From Sony Music Entertainment and M. William Phelps, LLC, you are listening to Fatal Fantasy. This is episode one, Overkill.

• 9:58Speaker 00

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• 10:28Speaker 06

  Welcome to the 60th Hunger Games.

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  Witness the beginning of the revolution.

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  Hey Mitch, you've been trying to take down these games from the start.

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  Film for IMAX.

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  Make them remember you.

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  The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, November 20th, rated PG-13.

• 10:53Speaker 01

  Just to the northwest of Washington DC, Loudoun County is not a place investigators were accustomed to getting called out to a homicide scene.

• 11:05Speaker 01

  In a county of nearly 400,000 people, there had been only five homicides that year, leading up to December 10th. Loudoun County Sheriff's Office Detective Greg Locke had yet to be involved in a murder investigation. That is, before he took the call to head out to Dr. Schwartz's house. His boss had warned him that this homicide was unlike any other the Loudoun County Sheriff's Office had seen in as long as anyone could recall.

• 11:43Speaker 03

  I was actually in leadership class for the Sheriff's Office and I received a notification to respond to the scene of the homicide.

• 11:54Speaker 01

  As I stood on the street facing Dr. Schwartz's property, an eerie sense of how his killer, or killers, descended upon his house washed over me. The property is set far back away from the road. At night, with the lights on in the house, it would be easy to watch anyone inside without them knowing.

• 12:22Speaker 01

  Heather Greenfield is a local Associated Press reporter who covered the case extensively.

• 12:30Speaker 01

  I reached out to her back when I began writing my book about the case to get a better lay of the land.

• 12:39Speaker 08

  This is one of the most affluent communities in the country, the most affluent counties. And so people, people live, it's just these beautiful rolling hills and farms. And people that have succeeded in Washington, whether it's in politics, or IT, or in his case, science, they buy their, their dream house out in the, um...

• 13:04Speaker 08

  outskirts of Leesburg, and that's indeed what he had done.

• 13:08Speaker 01

  Dr. Schwartz and his wife Joan had settled in Leesburg in the early 80s and raised their three children there.

• 13:15Speaker 08

  And I think that people were just shocked that something like this could happen. It's it's just one of the safest suburbs, fantastic schools, beautiful scenery, and it was just shocking.

• 13:30Speaker 01

  And he wasn't just a scientist. He was famous.

• 13:35Speaker 08

  Well, Dr. Schwartz was a renowned scientist specializing in biometrics and DNA research. And for the 15 years before his death at age 57, he had been one of the leading members of a team that was working on DNA sequencing.

• 13:53Speaker 01

  Detective Greg Locke is tall and thin, sports brown hair, a thin mustache to match, and presents the overall look of a television detective, smooth and laid back. On that day, December 10, 2001, when the Loudoun County Sheriff's Office arrived on scene, Locke had been on the job for only a few months.

• 14:19Speaker 03

  I was primarily assigned to robbery homicide, but worked all types of crimes, including sexual assaults, child cases. The only thing in particular, really, that stood out in my mind inside the house were the indentations in the floor of the kitchen where the body was found.

• 14:44Speaker 01

  Schwartz's killer had stabbed him through his torso entirely, lodging the blade into the floor, leaving gouge marks in the wood. That's volcanic rage, and it speaks to the personality of Schwartz's killer.

• 15:03Speaker 03

  I guess at that point was just the question mark of why. We were still at that point trying to determine why this had happened to a prominent scientist who appeared not to have any disagreements or problems with any friends, neighbors, colleagues. So we were still trying to very much put the puzzle together.

• 15:24Speaker 01

  Victimology becomes the number one focus. If you think of the victim as the bullseye on a target, those closest to him are the first ring around the bullseye, and you need to speak with them first. Family is obviously number one, but that would go along with making the death notification. So Locke reached out to Dr. Schwartz's employer and those he worked with.

• 15:53Speaker 03

  He was well-liked by his coworkers. In fact, that was one of the things that they said, you know, he was always on time, always punctual.

• 16:02Speaker 01

  Schwartz had worked on early DNA sequencing that could actually help solve his own murder. Back in 1978, Schwartz co-authored a white paper with Margaret Dayoff, science which had set the stage for identifying individuals by their DNA. So if Schwartz's killer had left his or her DNA at the scene with no obvious witnesses to the murder, this research he had done to prove individuality would help law enforcement prove who had killed him by narrowing down a potential suspect pool to one person.

• 16:45Speaker 01

  When I was standing along the road leading down into the Schwartz residence, it occurred to me that the road itself then, a dead end, for anyone driving down it, they either lived there, had been invited there, or might have gotten lost and wound up on the road inadvertently. It's not one of those roads you just pass by or stumble upon. Detective Vincent D. Benedetto had been with the Loudoun County Sheriff's Office for 15 years when the Schwartz investigation began.

• 17:21Speaker 01

  D. Benedetto's expertise is documents following the paper trail of murders and financial crimes. And almost immediately, as he begins thinking about the crime scene, D. Benedetto's thoughts go toward motive.

• 17:37Speaker 09

  Certainly was quite gruesome, probably the most gruesome crime scenes I've looked at from Loudoun County. And it seemed pretty obvious he was stabbed many, many times after he had died. Rage is not usually a motiveless crime.

• 17:55Speaker 01

  Then something comes up. The pathologist confirms by late into the night of the 10th that Dr. Schwartz had actually been murdered on Saturday, December 8th, probably in the evening. So Schwartz had been dead for two days before his body was discovered. And the pathologist reveals something else. The weapon, they are now almost certain was not a knife, but a sharp, slightly curved object, definitely similar, but with a much longer blade. This changes the game for investigators.

• 18:39Speaker 01

  Now they need to look back and focus on two days before Schwartz's body was found, which can often complicate matters. Effectively, your killer is now two days ahead of you.

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• 20:07Speaker 11

  He was a good guy, yeah. He was a lot, he was, he could be a quirky, there could be quirky aspects of him sometimes, but he was basically well-loved and very likeable.

• 20:19Speaker 01

  At 57 years old, Dr. Robert Schwartz was one of the most respected scientists in his field. He had founded the Virginia Biotechnology Association and been at the Center for Innovative Technology, CIT, since the company started in 1986. A handsome guy, in a Leslie Nielsen sort of way, with a bit of middle-aged weight around his belly, Schwartz's coworkers, family, and friends told me the guy was serious about life and work, but also had a soft, humorous side to him as well. In other words, the polar opposite of a man you'd think was hated enough by someone to

• 21:03Speaker 01

  want to stab him 31 times inside his own home. Terry Woodsworth retired today. First met Dr. Schwartz in 1986.

• 21:16Speaker 11

  He didn't talk about himself a lot. He really didn't. He was focused on what was going on and all that business kind of guy and stuff, but he also had a sense of humor and I began to sense that as we'd have meals and stuff together.

• 21:30Speaker 01

  Schwartz was the oldest of seven siblings. A sister later lamented Schwartz was a, quote, "remarkable older brother who always had a gentle touch." Working alongside him for over a decade, Terry got to know Dr. Schwartz on a more personal level. During that time, Schwartz's wife Joan had become ill with lung cancer. It changed him. Before Joan got sick, he was more outgoing and social, but as she became sicker and he had to face the fact that he'd soon be a widower, he retreated more into himself and became quieter.

• 22:14Speaker 11

  I knew that that was just a real tragic time when he, when she was ill and he was trying to take care of her and then basically woke up one morning and she was gone. You know, that was, that was tough.

• 22:28Speaker 01

  Joan Schwartz's death crushed the guy. Their kids were in their late teens and early twenties at the time, and raising them now fell squarely on his shoulders. Even when Joan was alive, the family had its share of rocky times. But once she was gone, Clara, the youngest, took it the hardest.

• 22:49Speaker 12

  Her mother had been bipolar, as I understand it, and quite erratic at times, and she was close to her mother.

• 22:58Speaker 01

  That's Dr. Katherine Ramsland, a forensic psychologist, who has written about this case. She's talking about Clara Schwartz, who actually found her mother's body.

• 23:12Speaker 12

  And then mother dies when she's in, I guess, 10th grade, and she's bereft. And her older brother and sister go off to college, leaving her isolated in the stone house with her father, who is very different from her and has expectations of her that she doesn't want to live up to.

• 23:35Speaker 01

  Dr. Schwartz, a single father, struggled with how to deal with Clara and get her through high school. They lived together then, on the farm, where there was plenty to do, and he expected her, as most parents would, to step up.

• 23:54Speaker 12

  He still cares about her. I mean, he always was concerned. She wasn't taking care of the horses, and that was a responsibility that would show that she could do things, but she wasn't doing it.

• 24:06Speaker 01

  Dr. Schwartz's coworker Terry says as Dr. Schwartz's kids grew older, he opened up about how proud he was of Jesse, the oldest, Michelle, the middle child, and even the youngest Clara.

• 24:20Speaker 11

  I knew about Jesse going to NC State. He was very proud of him, Michelle at JMU. He was very proud of her work because she was interested in some similar things as he was. Clara, I think he talked about that it was really hard when Joan died. It was hard on him. I mean, gosh, he's ending up being a single dad. He adored his kids and would light up when talking about them.

• 24:44Speaker 01

  It always seemed to go back to Joan's death and Schwartz having to raise them alone. He strove to get the best out of them all. And being an overachiever himself, expected it.

• 24:59Speaker 11

  I think he was respected by people because he didn't know where he stood. He was not going to suffer fools gladly.

• 25:08Speaker 01

  In all of the investigations I have been involved in, you have to consider the victim's chosen career path, especially when someone has high visibility within what is a high-profile company. We saw this recently with the healthcare CEO murdered on the streets of New York. So a question came up. Was Dr. Schwartz targeted? After all, he knew big players within the scientific world. Hundreds of millions of dollars were at stake. Had he been involved in research or something else that could have gotten him killed?

• 25:49Speaker 11

  Bob was at the second level down from the head of CIT. So he was one level down from that by the time he was killed. He was at the point where he was interacting with university relationships and overseeing that technology growth and development for the whole state.

• 26:07Speaker 01

  Detective Locke was not ruling any possibility out.

• 26:11Speaker 03

  There was some information that was coming out through the media that this might have been some bigger conspiracy. We had to focus on the evidence we were presented and work with that evidence to determine what had happened.

• 26:25Speaker 01

  Locke's next point of evidence gathering was the grim task of attending the autopsy and seeing what unusual details of the crime the post-mortem revealed.

• 26:36Speaker 03

  It was very obvious Dr. Schwartz endured a very vicious attack. He had multiple wounds on his hands and arms, as well as over 40 lacerations, incisions to his body.

• 26:53Speaker 01

  So Schwartz fought with his attacker, which meant there was going to be DNA.

• 27:04Speaker 01

  With over 700 autopsies under her belt, Dr. Carolyn Revercombe noticed immediately after she started her cursory inspection of Schwartz's body that he had suffered two stab wounds to his neck that went entirely through one side of his body and out the other side. She counted 27 stab wounds to his torso, along with several additional stab wounds, some superficial, some penetrating the skin and intramour, others all the way through his body. Just as they had thought back at the crime scene, many of those stab wounds going all the way through Schwartz's body were inflicted when he was not moving and did not have blood

• 27:48Speaker 01

  pressure, Revercombe confirmed. This was significant. Schwartz's killer repeatedly stabbed the guy when they didn't have to. So Schwartz was on the floor, face down, not moving, his killer standing over him, jabbing the weapon into him over and over in a sordid murderous frenzy. Overkill.

• 28:12Speaker 01

  The pathologist then saw a possible pattern. There were three particular wounds in a group on Schwartz's upper left back, very close in space, that appeared to be in the shape of a three-leaf clover. The suggestion was that these three wounds had a ritualistic sensibility about them, or were inflicted for a purpose other than to cause pain and death. Then one other point Reverend Cole made was the weapon. She believed Schwartz was murdered with some sort of long, thin sword, more pirate-like than Conan the Barbarian.

• 28:52Speaker 01

  It occurred to me that Schwartz's killer had entered into some sort of blackout rage, meaning there seemed to be a disassociation with the crime on some level. I have investigated several of these murders, and the psychological framing is always the same. The killer's intent jumps from murder to complete annihilation, or, interesting here, punishment. Luck was certain the wounds inflicted post-mortem were personal. Still, the working theory was that a dark, fantastical individual or group,

• 29:33Speaker 01

  perhaps practicing witchcraft or Satanism, was involved.

• 29:52Speaker 01

  One major fact investigators confirmed is that Schwartz had been interrupted.

• 29:58Speaker 03

  It appeared from the forensic investigation that Dr. Schwartz was in the process of cooking dinner when someone came to the house. There were no signs of forced entry, as if he possibly either knew someone who he allowed into the home, or they gained entry without force.

• 30:16Speaker 01

  Now they have a general timeline. Evening, somewhere near 7:00 or 8:00 PM on Saturday, December 8.

• 30:26Speaker 03

  Some of the investigators are detailed to other assignments that may consist of locating surveillance cameras, talking to any other business or homeowners that might be in the area to try to obtain information of whether someone saw something recently in proximity to the incident. In this particular case, being in such a rural area, there were no other homes close by, there were no cameras, and there really was not a significant number of homes for us to go to to talk to people.

• 31:03Speaker 01

  Detective Dee Benedetto is back at home base, digging through finances and the paper trail to see if any patterns or information jump out. Was Schwartz in financial trouble? Did he somehow get himself involved in a bit of shady business that could have led to his murder? Could he himself be part of a satanic group nobody knew about? If there is one thing I have learned about murder investigations of this nature, include every possibility until you can exclude it. So Dee Benedetto began combing through Dr. Schwartz's credit card receipts and bank statements over the previous week to see if

• 31:48Speaker 01

  that information might tell a story.

• 31:51Speaker 03

  It was going to Ruby Tuesday, a place where I'd eaten many times, and I went to get the credit card receipt from what I guess would have been his last meal. It just gave me kind of a chilled feeling to hold this and realize that, you know, here he was, normal guy, doing normal things, having a meal out, and he did not know that in a few hours he would be dead.

• 32:13Speaker 01

  For Greg Locke, after leaving the autopsy, like any old-school police investigator, he next focused on the most obvious: Dr. Schwartz's friends, family, colleagues, and neighbors.

• 32:31Speaker 03

  I contacted the supervisor on the scene and asked if they wanted me to go ahead and start canvassing the neighborhood. And in that particular area, the residences were very far apart. So, the two closest houses, which were approximately an eighth and a quarter of a mile away, is where I started my canvassing.

• 32:53Speaker 01

  The chances that anyone in the neighborhood had seen anything were slim. With the house being secluded, set so far back into the woods.

• 33:03Speaker 03

  So, the first house that I stopped at, there were two individuals home, a husband and wife, and they stated that on Saturday night, that a male knocked on their door, and they answered the door and were speaking with him, and basically indicated that he and some of his friends had gotten stuck in the mud right up the road, and wanted to know if he could use their phone.

• 33:29Speaker 01

  Being good neighbors and decent people, the couple invited the young guy in.

• 33:34Speaker 03

  During the conversation, he stated that he was really not that familiar with the area. Did they know of a wrecker service that could come tow them out? They did have a wrecker service in mind, and actually made the call for him, and had the wrecker service respond to pull the car out of the mud.

• 33:54Speaker 01

  And did they describe who these people were?

• 33:57Speaker 03

  They said that there was three people there. There were two males and a female, and that one of the individuals did most of the speaking, and they were not familiar with the area.

• 34:09Speaker 01

  Anyone who murdered Schwartz would not have visited a neighbor and called the tow truck to pull them out of being stuck in the mud. But perhaps these people had seen something. Perhaps they were witnesses and didn't even know it.

• 34:24Speaker 03

  When I spoke to the neighbors near Dr. Schwartz's house, they really didn't detect anything out of the ordinary. And speaking to this individual, he seemed very polite and cordial toward them.

• 34:38Speaker 03

  And gave them no reason to be suspicious of any improper activity.

• 34:44Speaker 01

  Could these young strangers have possibly seen someone at the Schwartz residence? What investigators do know is that a man was violently killed in his own home as he was cooking a meal for himself on a rainy Saturday night. That he probably let the killer into his house and had little idea of the horrible fury that would imminently come down upon him. That the crime scene was offering precious few clues as to who the killer was. And that around the same time, as this vicious deed occurred, three young adults were stuck in their stationary vehicle just down the road,

• 35:26Speaker 01

  waiting for a tow truck to drag them out of their muddy confinement. As I thought about all of this, something Keith "Happy Face" Killer Jespersen once told me years before rang in my ears. There are no coincidences in murder. Only

• 35:47Speaker 01

  connections.

• 35:54Speaker 01

  Next time on Fatal Fantasy. Investigators deliver the death notification to Dr. Schwartz's family, and the search for the three youngsters stuck in the mud produces a major lead.

• 36:08Speaker 09

  She seemed to take a pause for a second. And then she didn't look up, she didn't gasp, she didn't... All she said in a quiet voice was, "How."

• 36:19Speaker 01

  Before the first big break in the case comes in.

• 36:22Speaker 03

  So it certainly appeared from the images that were obtained from the ATM that we now had persons of interest.

• 36:30Speaker 01

  And a shocking piece of evidence is discovered. Do you recall where you guys found it?

• 36:36Speaker 03

  It was wrapped up in a cloth in a closet.

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• 37:28Speaker 01

  Fatal Fantasy is a production by Sony Music Entertainment and M. William Phelps, LLC. Written and executive produced by me. From Sony Music Entertainment, the executive producers are Jonathan Hirsch and Catherine St. Louis. And our production manager is Samantha Allison. Jeremy Adair is my senior producer and script consultant. And Matt Russell, my sound engineer. I use Epidemic Sound for music and SFX.

• 38:14Speaker 00

  Get this: When you're with Xfinity, you're already a member. No sign up, no cost. Score epic experiences from our family at NBC Universal. Plus movie tickets, discounts on streaming, mobile, and more. Check the Xfinity app every Thursday for exclusive perks and experiences, only with Xfinity. Now that's the way to start a weekend. Let the magic begin. Restrictions apply. Visit Xfinity.com/membership to learn more.