Easter is typically a time of enjoyment as families gather to celebrate the holiday, but in Agawam, Massachusetts, a town of approximately 28,000 people near the Connecticut border, the 1992 holiday was one of its saddest days. On April 15, twenty-four-year-old Lisa Ziegert disappeared. Four days later, on Easter Sunday, her body was found in a wooded area. She had been sexually assaulted and stabbed to death.

The murder of Lisa Ziegert remained a cold case for over a quarter-of-a-century until a pioneering procedure led to the identification of her killer.

Lisa Ziegert

Lisa, the second of George and Dee Ziegert’s four children, graduated from Agawam High School in 1986.

The Ziegert Children:

Left To Right: Lynne, David, Lisa, Sharon

After obtaining her degree in Elementary Education from nearby Westfield State College in 1990, Lisa decided to stay home.

At Agawam, the hometown of Annie Sullivan, the teacher who worked with the blind and deaf Helen Keller, Lisa sought to be her own miracle worker. She became a teacher’s aide assisting with special needs children at the Agawam Middle School.

Lisa With Her Proud Parents

Lisa loved her job, but as everyone knows, teaching elementary school is not a high-paying profession.

To supplement her income, she also worked at Brittany’s Card & Gift Shoppe on weekdays after school, generally working from 5:00 until closing time, 9:00.

Brittany’s Card & Gift Shoppe

Lisa finished her school day at 4:30 on Wednesday, April 15, and arrived for her shift at the gift shop. Her sister Lynne stopped at 5:30 and the two chatted for approximately half-an-hour. Lisa was in her usual good spirits and nothing was out of the ordinary.

At 8:20 a customer purchased an item at the store; she, too, noticed nothing unusual. Shortly before closing time, 9:00, however, another woman entered the store and heard noises, which she described as banging sounds, coming from the back room. She called out several times, but when no one emerged or responded, she left without investigating.

No Lisa At Closing Time

When Sophia Maynard arrived to open the store at 8:45 the following morning, she was surprised to find the door unlocked and the lights on; she was even more surprised to see Lisa’s car in the parking lot on a school day.

Inside the store, Sophia found Lisa’s purse and keys behind the counter, but no sign of her friend. Sophia contacted the school and learned Lisa’s colleagues were also concerned as she had not arrived for work and had not called to explain her absence.

Knowing something was amiss, Sophia called the police.

Sophia Maynard

Lisa’s Coworker

Officers found the backroom of Brittany’s Card & Gift Shoppe in disarray. Several cards lay strewn across the floor. Scattered traces of blood on dented boxes indicated a struggle had occurred, as did two kick marks on the bottom of the door, determined to have been made by a woman’s shoe. Police believed Lisa had kicked the door while lying horizontal on the floor and struggling with an assailant.

No other physical evidence was found at the scene. A check of the store’s receipts found no money had been taken.

Kick Marks On The Door

Four days later, Easter 1992 became a day of agony in Agawam.

A man walking his dog found Lisa’s partially-clothed body on the edge of town off Route 75, in a secluded wooded area approximately three miles from the store. An autopsy determined she had been raped and had died from multiple stab wounds to her shoulders, neck, and throat. The murder weapon was never found.

An Awful Easter

The area where Lisa’s body was found was off the beaten path, unfamiliar to most passing motorists and even unbeknownst to many lifelong Agawam residents. Police believed the killer was someone with intimate knowledge of the area, such as a hunter or camper.

Tracks from a rare type of Cooper tire were found at the scene. Investigators made molds that they used to track the owner. He was cleared after it was proven he had been at the locale several days before the murder and had an alibi for the evening Lisa disappeared.

Aerial View Of Where Lisa’s Body Was Found

As Agawam mourned, investigators hunted for Lisa’s killer, certain that he was local and would be caught quickly.

Lisa Is Laid to Rest

Bolstering optimism for a quick arrest was the DNA of the killer’s semen found on Lisa. Hopes, however, faded after hundreds of potential suspects were tested without matching anyone in the Massachusetts or Connecticut databases.

A search in the national CODIS (Combined DNA Index System) database also failed to produce a match.

DNA Found

Much of the local public suspected Ed Burgatti, Jr., a family friend and high school classmate of Lisa, who lived with her sister Lynne and Lynne’s boyfriend. Many Agawam residents felt authorities were covering up his commission of the crime because his father was a member of the Police Department.

Ed was working at a restaurant on the evening of Lisa’s murder, but some felt it was possible that he still could have killed Lisa because the locale was across the street from Brittany’s Card and Gift Shoppe.  The DNA found on Lisa, however, was not his, and he was cleared of any involvement in her murder.

Ed Borgatti

Lisa’s Friend

Several male members of the Healthy Habits Fitness Center where Lisa worked out also seemed possible suspects as they had been seen eyeing her while she exercised and appeared interested in getting closer to her. All, however, were also cleared by the DNA. One man, in particular, who some members said watched Lisa and other girls in a “perverted” fashion as they exercised, was also cleared.

Several more persons of interest emerged throughout the 1990s, but all were eliminated. Tips still trickled into the new millennium but grew fewer as the first decade closed; by 2016, they were scant.

The Tips Dwindle

Undeterred investigators implemented the trailblazing technology of DNA phenotyping, a method of predicting a person’s physical appearance and biogeographic ancestry using only genetic information derived from genotyping or DNA sequencing.

Parabon Nano Labs of Reston, Virginia, applied the technology in an effort to develop a profile of Lisa’s killer. The pioneering procedure is far from perfect as it cannot account for non-genetic factors in a person’s appearance, such as hairstyle, scars, or surgeries, but it can produce a ballpark rendering of a person’s appearance.

In 2016, twenty-four years after twenty-four-year-old Lisa Ziegert’s murder, Parabon Nano Labs, using DNA phenotyping, produced the following images of Lisa’s killer. The composites depict a white male with fair complexion, some freckling, brown or black hair, and hazel or brown eyes.

The phenotyping concluded Lisa Ziegert’s killer is of mixed northern and southern European ancestry and was approximately twenty-five-years-old at the time of the 1992 murder.

Likenesses Of Lisa’s Killer

Investigators re-examined eleven people who had refused several requests for DNA samples, one of them being forty-eight-year-old Gary Schara.  They were struck by his resemblance to the phenotype composite.

                                              Gary                 Phenotype 

                                            Schara               Composite

At the time of Lisa’s murder, Schara was twenty-three-years-old, recently married and the father of a one-year-old son. He had one previous arrest, for a 1998 domestic dispute with his then-wife, Joyce.

Schara had lived in southwest Massachusetts since childhood, having grown up in Longmeadow, five miles southeast of Agawam. In 2017, he was living in West Springfield, three miles north of Agawam.

Young Schara

Schara was not at his apartment when investigators arrived with a court order compelling him to provide a DNA sample. When his roommate told him of the not-so-social call, Schara composed three letters: a confession to Lisa’s murder; a brief apology letter to the Ziegert family; and a last will and testament. He then disappeared.

Schara’s girlfriend, Noelle DesLauriers, found the letters later that day and gave them to the police. Analysis of the letters confirmed the handwriting was Schara’s.

Schara’s Letters

Schara was found the following day at the Johnson Springs Memorial Medical Center in Stafford Springs, Connecticut, after overdosing on drugs.

Another apparent suicide note was found on his car’s dashboard, but the act appeared to be half-hearted, as he drove himself to the hospital after taking an abundance of morphine.

Another Supposed Suicide Note

DNA obtained from several of Schara’s items at his home was confirmed a match to that recovered from Lisa’s body.

On September 16, 2017, Gary Schara was arrested and charged with the murder, rape, and kidnapping of Lisa Ziegert from over twenty-five years earlier.

Schara Is Charged . . .

Despite his letters, Schara initially pled not guilty to the charges. In September 2019, however, as preparations were being made for his trial, he changed his plea, admitting to the murder. In exchange, the rape and kidnapping charges were dropped.

In his confessions to the court Schara stated essentially what he had written in his suicide letters. He said he had been fascinated with abduction and bondage since childhood and claimed that he had not intended to kill Lisa but that “events spun out of [his] control.”

Gary Schara was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

. . . And Confesses

In 1993, the year after Lisa Ziegert’s murder, Joyce Schara told her attorney that she believed her husband was the culprit.

On the evening of April 15, 1992, Joyce said Gary had come home later than usual with cuts on his hands and refused to say where he had been. Over the following days, Joyce also said he seemed preoccupied with Lisa’s murder, which received extensive media coverage, and that she had found writings in his diary that led her to believe he had committed the crime.

Joyce and her son hid with relatives across the country in Seattle because she said she feared Gary. When they divorced in 1998, she took back her maiden name of McDonald.

Joyce died in 2014. Her family and attorney believe the investigators at the time did not take her claims seriously because she was an alcoholic.

Joyce McDonald

Gary Schara’s Former Wife

None of Lisa’s family or friends can recall having met Schara or hearing of him, nor can they recall Lisa’s ever mentioning him. It is unclear what sort of relationship, if any, Lisa had with Schara.

According to Joyce’s sister, Schara had given Joyce a music box after returning home on the evening of Lisa’s murder. He said he had purchased it at Brittany’s Card and Gift Shoppe. Some authorities theorize he had purchased the music box earlier while Lisa was working at the shop and that he became attracted to her.  He may have sought a relationship with her but was rejected.

By the time of Schara’s arrest in 2017, Brittany’s Card and Gift Shoppe was no longer in business. No one who worked at the store could recall the music box, but it was an item consistent with the merchandise they had sold.

Lisa’s Killer

Was Not Known By Her Family

Schara said he alone committed the murder of Lisa Ziegert and, investigators say, despite a tip reported on the evening of Lisa’s murder suggesting multiple assailants, they do not believe anyone else was involved.

At 9:15 p.m., fifteen minutes after the woman in the gift shop heard the struggle, another woman who worked nearby said she saw a full-size Bronco or Blazer type vehicle, either dark red or dark blue, driving erratically toward the area where Lisa’ body was found four days later. While stopped behind the car at an intersection, the woman said she saw a man and a woman struggling with each other in the back seat. She assumed they were merely young kids joyriding.

If the two people in the back seat were Schara and Lisa, someone else was obviously driving the car.  The vehicle and its occupants were never identified; it appears investigators no longer believe the sighting is connected to Lisa’s murder.

Justice for Lisa

But A Question Lingers

Lisa Ziegert was adored not only by her family and friends, but also by her colleagues and students.

A plaque placed beneath a dogwood tree in the courtyard of the Roberta G. Doering Middle School and a bench in the school’s plaza pay tribute to the beloved educator.

  Lisa’s Plaque

Lisa’s Bench 

Lisa also enjoyed music. While growing up in Agawam, she had played flute and saxophone in the school marching band and had also been a drum majorette.

A drum major stand dedicated to her was given to Agawam High School in her memory.

Forever Remembered

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/44066187/lisa-marie-ziegert#

SOURCES:

• CBS News
• Crime Watch Daily
• Mass Live .com
• New England Cable News
• New England Unsolved
• Springfield Republican
• Unsolved Mysteries
• Western Massachusetts Fox Channel 6
• Western Massachusetts NBC Channel 22