On May 17, 1999, Saad Kawaf walked out of his garage in the gated Deerwood community in Jacksonville, Florida, carrying the weekly cash deposit for his store. He was headed to the bank. He did not make it to his car.
Two people attacked him moments after he left the house. They had prepared for the gated neighborhood by carrying fake business cards identifying them as real estate agents. In a community like Deerwood, a real estate agent is not a stranger.
Kawaf’s wife, Samar, was inside the house when she heard screaming. She ran to the garage and saw her husband struggling with a man at close range. A knife was involved. She also saw a second person, a woman, standing in the garage watching.
Samar went at them. In the fight that followed, she bit the woman’s arm hard enough to leave a mark. That bite would matter 21 years later.
The attackers demanded money. They knew there was a specific amount of cash in the house that morning. Samar gave them approximately $53,000. They taped her mouth and wrists and left her on the floor.
She freed herself and called police. Her husband died at the hospital. She had seen both attackers’ faces clearly, with nothing covering them. For the next 21 years, that eyewitness memory produced nothing.
The case should have closed quickly. There was a living eyewitness, a gated entrance, blood at the scene that did not belong to the victim, and fingernail scrapings taken from Kawaf’s hands at the hospital. But the description of a middle-aged white man and woman was not a lead. It was a category.
The key question was not what the attackers looked like. It was who knew about the money. That was a short list. The Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office was on it.
In the late 1990s, Kawaf’s store had been under investigation. There was suspicion the store was selling pseudoephedrine illegally, and federal interest in unreported cash transactions. None of that was ever shown to be why he was killed. But the investigation generated a file, and in that file was a detail no one outside law enforcement had reason to know: the route, the bag, the bank, the one morning a week.
The detective assigned to watch the house was William Robert Baer Jr. He had been a Jacksonville police officer since 1975. On the morning of May 17, 1999, when Samar Kawaf ran into her garage and saw a man standing over her husband with a knife, the man she was looking at was him.
Both attackers had bled in that house. By 2003, the lab had turned that material into two complete DNA profiles. They were run against CODIS, the national DNA database, and nothing came back. They were run again as the database grew. Still nothing.
CODIS is not a database of all Americans. It is a database of people the system has already booked. The reason the DNA came back empty was not that the killers were careful. It was that neither of them had ever been arrested. One of them had spent his entire adult life on the other side of the booking desk.
William Baer did not quit after the murder. He went back to work and kept the badge for three more years. He retired in 2002 with 27 years of service. He spent the next 18 years in the same city where Samar Kawaf still lived.
In 2009, Cliff Backman was shot and killed at a job site in Jacksonville. His case has never been solved. His son, Ryan, started a nonprofit called Project Cold Case in 2015, a public database of unsolved homicides and a support structure for the families attached to them.
Project Cold Case took on the Kawaf family. At the point where the science changed, they arranged for genetic genealogists to look at the case. In 2018, the cold case unit at the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office pulled the Kawaf samples back out and sent them to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement for forensic genetic genealogy.
CODIS asks if an exact person is in the system. Genetic genealogy asks if anyone related to the person is in a consumer ancestry database. It does not give a suspect. It gives a family. A genealogist builds the tree downward until only a few living people could possibly be the person who bled at the scene.
The results came back in 2020. The male profile from under Saad Kawaf’s fingernails belonged to a man who had carried a Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office badge for 27 years. The female profile belonged to his wife, Melissa Jo Schaefer.
By 2020, Baer was 64 years old, long retired, working as a private investigator. On July 1, 2020, cold case detectives brought him in and put a camera on him. He was not nervous. He opened the interview himself, telling the detectives to skip the formalities and tell him what was going on.
They told him they had the evidence to convict him. He did not deny it. He did not explain. He said, “Obviously you have got something to put me in jail for, so just put me in jail.”
Melissa Schaefer was arrested in Jefferson City, Missouri. She was 50 years old. She had been 29 in that garage. She talked.
The state of Florida stopped needing William Baer to say anything at all. On July 2, 2020, the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office announced the arrests. One of the people they had arrested used to work there.
In December 2020, Melissa Schaefer pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, kidnapping, armed robbery, armed burglary with assault, and aggravated battery. Part of the agreement was that she would testify truthfully in any prosecution that followed.
Nine months later, on September 28, 2021, William Baer pleaded guilty to first-degree murder, kidnapping with a weapon, armed robbery, and aggravated battery with a deadly weapon. He did it to take the death penalty off the table. He was sentenced to life in Florida State Prison.
The prosecutor said he was a disgrace to his name, to his family, and ultimately to the badge. In March 2022, Melissa Schaefer was sentenced to 30 years.
The case is closed. Both people who came to that house that morning are in Florida State Prison.
But the case has a wider cost. William Baer had a long career and was involved in many important investigations. Every case he touched between 1975 and 2002 now has a question attached to it. If the detective who built the case against you is later proven to be a murderer, that fact belongs to your defense.
Most of those people are guilty. But almost every one is not a standard anyone wants applied to their own conviction.
The reason the DNA sat unmatched for 17 years is that the system had no reason to suspect one of its own. The reason nobody worked the short list of people who knew about the money is the same reason. Every protection that failed Saad Kawaf failed in the same direction, toward the assumption that the man with the badge is not the one you are looking for.
It took a technology nobody had invented yet to go around that assumption instead of through it.
The cold case unit inside that same sheriff’s office pulled a 19-year-old box off a shelf in 2018. They sent it out to be worked again with a method that was new to American police work. They got back a name that was the worst possible name for them professionally and personally. They went and arrested him anyway, and then stood at a podium and said it out loud in front of cameras.
Both things are true. The institution produced the man who did it, and the institution produced the people who finally caught him.
Saad Kawaf was 39. He owned a store. He drove his own money to the bank himself once a week because he did not want to hand that job to anyone else. Samar Kawaf fought two armed people in her own garage, bit one of them hard enough to leave a piece of them behind, freed her own hands, and called for help.
Everything that was eventually used to identify the people who did this exists because the two of them fought back in the last minutes they had. It took 21 years for anyone to be able to tell her what she had done.