Nancy Leichner & Pamela Nater

On Sunday, October 2, 1966, Nancy Elaine Leichner, 21, of Largo, and her friend Pamela Ann Nater, 20, of Clearwater, joined a picnic outing with the Aquaholics, a skin-diving club, at the Alexander Springs Recreation Area in the Ocala National Forest near Altoona, Florida. The two women had traveled to the springs with their boyfriends. Between 2:00 and 3:00 p.m., they were last seen walking into the woods together along one of the nature trails. They left their purses, clothing, shoes, Leichner's prescription eyeglasses, and other personal belongings behind on a picnic table and never returned.

An extensive search covering roughly fifteen square miles of forest and springs turned up no sign of either woman. Early theories included accidental drowning, but according to later accounts that explanation was eventually disproven, and no trace of the pair was ever recovered from the water or the surrounding wilderness. For decades the case remained one of Central Florida's most enduring mysteries, and both women were carried as endangered missing persons by the Lake County Sheriff's Office.

The eventual break traced back to Gerard John Schaefer Jr., a Florida man who later served as a Martin County sheriff's deputy and was convicted in 1973 of the first-degree murders of teenagers Susan Place and Georgia Jessup, who had disappeared from Fort Lauderdale in September 1972. Schaefer, widely suspected in numerous other killings of women and girls, received two concurrent life sentences. While imprisoned, he reportedly admitted to fellow inmate Charles Sizelove — a former police officer serving time for fraud — that he had killed both Nater and Leichner. According to investigators, Sizelove kept detailed notes of those conversations and turned them over to authorities in the 1980s, but the information was never forwarded to Lake County officials at the time. Schaefer was never charged in the disappearances; he was stabbed to death by another inmate at Florida State Prison on December 3, 1995.

In 2004, a Lake County cold-case team began re-examining the file. Over roughly two years, investigators assembled evidence that included the Sizelove jailhouse confession notes and eyewitness accounts placing Schaefer in connection with the case. In July 2007, nearly 41 years after the women vanished, the Lake County Sheriff's Office announced it was closing the case, concluding that Schaefer had abducted and murdered Nater and Leichner at Alexander Springs that day.

Because Schaefer died before the attribution was made, the conclusion was never tested in court, and the bodies of Nancy Leichner and Pamela Nater have never been found. Family members told reporters that the announcement came too late for several relatives: Leichner's sister, Susan Leichner-Schonder, said their father died without knowing the truth, and both of Nater's parents also died before the case was closed. The case is generally described as administratively closed but only partially resolved, since no criminal charges were ever filed and the women's remains were never recovered.