Charles Howard Schmid, Jr., was a little pipsqueak of a guy, standing just about 5'3" tall.

To compensate, he bragged non-stop and wore freaky makeup and oversized cowboy boots, which he stuffed with socks, rags, and crushed tin cans to add inches.

When all that failed to pump up his ego, he killed girls.

In the early 1960s, Schmid, the adopted son of a nursing home owner, was a fixture on a sleazy strip in Tucson, Arizona, known as the Speedway. He was a sight to see.

Concealing Schmid's naturally handsome face was a bizarre mask of his own design - dark tan pancake makeup, white lipstick, and hair dyed jet-black. He topped it off with a beauty mark on his cheek made of putty and axle grease.

He told wild tales of sexual conquests. "I can manifest my neurotical emotions, emancipate an epicureal instinct, and elaborate on my heterosexual tendencies," was one of his frequent rants.

Although out of high school for years, Schmid had never bothered to get a job. He lived on handouts from his parents, who paid the rent on his cottage and covered living expenses.

Despite his creepiness, ladies loved Smitty, as he was known. His power over women would later prompt newsman Don Moser, who wrote a book on the case, to give him the sobriquet the "Pied Piper of Tucson." He was never without a fawning female. In the spring of 1964, that female was Mary French, a dumpy 17-year-old.

On May 31, during a beer binge with his gal and another buddy, John Saunders, Smitty blurted out: "I want to kill a girl."

French was eager to help him lure the victim, Alleen Rowe, 15, a high-school sophomore. That night, French persuaded the girl to sneak out of the house after her mother, a night nurse, left for work. French said they were going to a party.

Instead, Schmid, Saunders and French drove Rowe into the desert, where the men raped her, and then cracked her skull with a rock. She had been wearing curlers in her hair when she slipped out of her room. French dug a hole and buried the curlers, while the men buried her corpse.

Soon after the disappearance, detectives quizzed Schmid, who said he knew Rowe and had planned to take her to a party that night, but insisted she was gone when he arrived. French backed him up.

As time passed, Saunders joined the Navy, and Schmid got a new buddy, Richie Bruns, an oddball straight out of reform school. Schmid told his new friend all about the killing.

Schmid also found a new squeeze, Gretchen Fritz, 16, the naughty daughter of a wealthy Tucson heart doctor. Blond and slender, Fritz was a troublemaker in her private school, where she scared her teachers. Wild parties, drinking, and stealing were among her favorite pastimes.

The relationship soon soured, but Schmid kept seeing the loud, headstrong girl. He had blabbed to Fritz about Rowe, and he was worried that if they split, she'd tell.

On August 16, 1965, Fritz told her parents she was taking her 13-year-old sister, Wendy, to an Elvis Presley movie. They never returned.

It seemed as if the girls, like Rowe, had just vanished, and may have run away, until Schmid's big mouth gave police a break.

As he had with the earlier killing, Schmid blabbed to Bruns about murdering the Fritz sisters. This time he asked Bruns for help burying the bodies, which he had left rotting in the desert.

Bruns kept the secret, until he became infatuated with a girl, and started having nightmares that she was next on Schmid's list. By October 1965, his anxiety reached fever pitch; he spewed out the story and led police to the graves. He also told of Schmid's boasts about the Rowe murder.

Police rounded up French and Saunders, who confessed about the Rowe killing and agreed to testify against their former friend. French was sentenced to five years, and Saunders got life.

At his trial for the Fritz murders, which started on February 15, 1966, Schmid appeared to be average, clean-cut even. Gone were the mole, the makeup and the bizarre attire. The wholesome veneer, however, did little to sway the jury. After two hours they found him guilty and worthy of the death penalty.

A significant weakness in the Rowe case was the absence of a body. Saunders and French had led police to the spot in the desert where they had buried Rowe, but, while they could find the curlers, they could not find her grave.

Even with lack of a body, and the services of the brilliant F. Lee Bailey, the defense team could do no better than a murder two plea. Schmid was sentenced to 50 years to life.

Within a month, Schmid asked for a new trial, offering to produce Rowe's body. That would be proof, he said, that she was not killed by a blow to the head, as Saunders testified. He knew the exact location because, without knowledge of his pals, Schmid had reburied the girl.

The autopsy confirmed Saunders' story, and there was no retrial.

After 1971, when Arizona abolished the death penalty, it looked as if Schmid was destined to spend decades behind bars. But in 1975, two inmates cut his sentence short by beating and stabbing him to death.

His bizarre life inspired a story - "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" - by Joyce Carol Oates. It was later adapted into a film, "Smooth Talk," starring Laura Dern as a young girl whose "trashy daydreams" leave her vulnerable to a dangerous stranger.