On the morning of July 23rd, 1978, 17-year-old Mark Schroeder hid behind a loading dock at his grandfather’s Salt Lake City warehouse. He waited for the 76-year-old man to arrive, spoke with him for 15 to 20 minutes, then raised a .357 Magnum revolver and fired twice into the back of his head at point blank range.
When Mark returned to New York and told his mother what he had done, Francis Schroeder’s response was immediate. She exclaimed, “Thank God.” Then she rushed to her son and hugged and kissed him in celebration of the murder she had spent years orchestrating through theft conspiracies, poisoning schemes, hired assassins, and relentless psychological manipulation.
Franklin James Bradshaw had built an empire of auto parts stores and oil and gas leases worth approximately $10 million. Some estimates suggested as much as $20 million. Yet, despite accumulating one of the largest personal fortunes in Utah, he wore clothes from thrift shops, used an empty Coors beer carton as his briefcase, and drove a rusty pickup truck.
When investigators examined his body, they found a stained $10 bill tucked into his shoe. Money so precious to him that he carried it on his person at all times. A detail that encapsulates the tragic gulf between Franklin’s values and those of his daughter Francis, a Manhattan socialite who purchased $40,000 earrings from Tiffany’s and sat on the board of the New York City Ballet while surviving on the $3,000 monthly allowance her father was threatening to eliminate entirely.
Francis Bradshaw entered the world on April 6th, 1938 in Salt Lake City. She was the daughter of Franklin Bradshaw, who would build a business empire through auto parts stores and federal oil and gas leases scattered throughout the western United States, and Berenice Bradshaw, who would later spend approximately $2 million defending her daughter against murder charges.
Despite her privileged upbringing in Utah’s business elite, Francis’s childhood was marked by emotional distance and rejection. In a haunting recollection, Francis described a formative incident when she was four or five years old. A doll she had received for Christmas caught fire from sparks jumping from the fireplace. When young Francis cried over her beloved toy, her father’s response was coldly devastating. “I shouldn’t have even bothered coming home for Christmas. This is disgusting.” She later reflected with painful simplicity, “I just wanted a daddy.”
In 1958, while attending the prestigious Bryn Mawr College near Philadelphia, Francis’s troubled psychology manifested in criminal behavior. She was suspended for stealing and forging checks, with reinstatement conditional on receiving psychiatric help.
By 1958, she was living at the exclusive Barbizon Hotel for women in Manhattan, where she met Victor Gentile, a pearl merchant from a wealthy Italian family, at an upscale restaurant on Lexington Avenue. They married at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in 1959, and Francis quickly gave birth to two sons, Lorenzo, called Larry, born in February 1960, and Marco, called Mark, born in December 1960.
Her first marriage proved disastrous. Victor was abusive. He reportedly would throw the young boys out of cars on deserted New York street corners in drunken rages when they were as young as four, five, and six years old.
Following the divorce, Francis remarried in 1969 to Frederick Schroeder, a Dutch businessman, producing a daughter named Levvenia. But this second marriage was also abusive and ended in divorce.
By the mid-1970s, Francis had reinvented herself as a sophisticated Manhattan socialite living in a luxury Upper East Side apartment. She served on the board of the prestigious New York City Ballet and cultivated intimate relationships with the ballet world’s titans, choreographer George Balanchine and impresario Lincoln Kirstein. She reportedly viewed Balanchine as her true father, a psychological displacement that revealed her ongoing search for paternal validation, even as she plotted to murder her actual father.
Franklin Bradshaw had grown deeply frustrated with his daughter’s relentless financial demands and her refusal to become self-sufficient. By the mid-1970s, he had reduced her monthly stipend and warned her to find employment. In 1978, the very year he was killed, Franklin drafted a new will, threatening to cut Francis out entirely, directing his assets instead to a trust benefiting his other children and charitable causes. This legal threat pushed Francis over the edge into planning her father’s murder.
The conspiracy began in earnest during the summer of 1977 when Mark and his older brother Larry traveled from New York to Salt Lake City to work at their grandfather’s automotive parts warehouse. Francis saw this as a golden opportunity. She directly instructed both sons to steal from the business. Over the course of that summer, Mark and Larry managed to steal approximately $200,000 in cash, checks, and stock certificates from Franklin’s operations, handing a significant portion directly to their mother.
But Francis’s mind was already working toward a darker solution. She obtained amphetamines and instructed her teenage sons to slip them into their grandfather’s oatmeal, hoping the drugs would induce a fatal heart attack that would be attributed to natural causes. Mark refused to participate in this particular scheme, an act of resistance that suggests some part of him recognized the enormity of what his mother was asking.
Undeterred, Francis developed additional elaborate murder plans. Setting fire to the warehouse while Franklin was inside, or throwing an electrical appliance into the bathtub while he bathed. When direct involvement of her son seemed uncertain, Francis pivoted to hiring a professional assassin.
Through family friend Richard Barron, she arranged meetings with Miles Manning, an individual willing to commit murder for payment. Francis agreed to pay Manning $5,000 and provided photographs Mark had taken of the warehouse to help him plan the murder. Manning took the money and disappeared without carrying out the contract.
When Francis discovered the betrayal, her response was not to abandon her scheme, but to escalate. She told Mark she was planning to hire another hitman from out of state. Meanwhile, Francis asked both Mark and Barron to obtain a gun on her behalf. Ultimately, it was Mark who successfully acquired the murder weapon, a .357 Magnum revolver purchased from a friend named John Kavanaugh in Midland, Texas.
The night before the murder, Mark called his mother from Salt Lake City to say he couldn’t go through with killing his grandfather. Francis’s response to Mark’s hesitation was calculated and devastating. “If you don’t do it, don’t come home again.”
For a boy who had been psychologically abandoned by his father and stepfather, the prospect of maternal abandonment represented an existential crisis, the loss of the only emotional anchor he possessed, however toxic that anchor might be.
On the evening of July 22nd, 1978, Mark arrived in Salt Lake City and checked into a hotel. At 7 in the morning the following day, he made his way to his grandfather’s warehouse. Rather than approaching Franklin directly, Mark hid behind a loading dock, waiting for the 76-year-old man to arrive.
Franklin Bradshaw drove up at approximately 7:30 and entered the building, unaware of the danger. Mark emerged from his hiding place and approached his grandfather. When Mark entered the warehouse, he found Franklin at the sales counter, and they talked for approximately 15 to 20 minutes.
Whatever transpired during that conversation remains unknown. Perhaps Mark made one final attempt to back out. Perhaps he remained silent with his mother’s voice ringing in his ears. Perhaps he simply waited for the right moment.
When Franklin turned his back to Mark and was positioned behind the sales counter, Mark raised the .357 Magnum and fired twice at point blank range, shooting his grandfather in the back of the head.
Following his mother’s explicit instructions to make the murder appear as a robbery, Mark staged the scene. He pulled out Franklin’s pockets, took money from his grandfather’s wallet, and scattered credit cards around the body. He then took a cab back to his hotel, retrieved his belongings, and boarded a flight back to New York City.
When Mark told his mother what he had done, Francis exclaimed, “Thank God,” and rushed to embrace him in celebration. Mark had begged his mother to dispose of the murder weapon, recognizing its danger as evidence. Instead, Francis gave the gun to Richard Barron and told him to hide it, a decision that would prove catastrophically foolish.
For over two years, the murder remained unsolved. Police investigated traditional robbery homicide leads without success. But Marilyn Bradshaw Reagan, Franklin’s daughter from his second marriage and Francis’s sister, refused to accept the robbery narrative. She posted a $10,000 reward for information leading to her father’s killer.
In October 1980, Richard Barron contacted her with the murder weapon he had been harboring in his Manhattan apartment for more than two years. Fingerprint analysis proved absolutely definitive. The prints on the .357 Magnum matched both Mark Schroeder and his mother Francis.
Mark was arrested on December 6th, 1980 at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, where the 20-year-old was attending as a freshman. Francis was arrested on March 21st, 1982 at her luxury apartment at 10 Gracie Square on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. When arrested, Francis exhibited signs of severe psychological distress and attempted to jump from a window at the police precinct station on East 67th Street.
Mark’s trial took place in 1982 with defense attorney Paul Van Dam, who would later serve as Utah’s attorney general, arguing that while Mark had shot and killed his grandfather, he had done so under extreme psychological pressure from his mother. Van Dam described Mark as “the most psychologically abused kid that I had ever come across in all my years of being in the business.”
Psychiatrist Dr. Luis G. Moch from the University of Utah testified that Mark had a highly pathological relationship with his mother and was fundamentally incapable of resisting her psychological influence. On July 6th, 1982, Judge James S. Sore found Mark guilty of second-degree murder and sentenced him to 5 to 10 years in prison.
Francis’s trial began on September 10th, 1983 with prosecutors seeking the death penalty. Mark wavered about testifying against his mother until the evening before trial began. The deciding factor was his protective instinct toward his younger sister, Levvenia. Recognizing that breaking his mother’s power was the only way to shield her from the same psychological fate.
On the witness stand, Mark testified simply, “If she wanted you to do something, it was very difficult to say no. You didn’t say no to mom.” When asked why he had agreed to murder his grandfather, Mark answered, “My mother asked me to so she could inherit a great deal of money.”
Victor Gentile, Francis’s first ex-husband, testified that in spring 1978, Francis had told him she was going to put out a contract on her father’s life. Francis did not testify in her own defense, and no witnesses appeared on her behalf.
On September 27th, 1983, the jury deliberated for only three hours before finding Francis Schroeder guilty of first-degree murder. Francis Schroeder was sentenced to life in prison on September 28th, 1983.
Her mother, Berenice, spent an estimated $2 million on legal representation, approximately $8 to 9 million in today’s currency, with the vast majority funding elite Manhattan defense attorneys for Francis. While Mark received far less generous support. Mark would later express resentment. “She totally spent everything on Francis.”
Mark served approximately 13 years in the Utah State Prison before his parole in 1995. While incarcerated, he earned a building construction degree and later reflected that prison had actually saved his life, that incarceration had allowed him to become human after the psychological trauma he had endured under his mother’s control. He acknowledged his grandfather with genuine remorse. “He was a good man and he didn’t deserve what happened to him.”
When journalists asked about the case in later years, Mark declined. “I see no gain in this for me. I paid my debt. What’s the point?”
Francis transformed herself into a model inmate, earning two bachelor’s degrees in psychology from Utah State University through prison education programs financed by her mother. She was paroled in late 1996.
When Berenice Bradshaw died on February 24th, 1996 at age 92, her will named Francis as the primary beneficiary of a trust estimated at approximately $2 million, providing lifelong income of approximately 5% annually, plus a luxury condominium in Salt Lake City’s prestigious Avenues district, a safe deposit box filled with jewelry, and a full-length fur coat.
Marilyn Bradshaw Reagan challenged the will using Utah’s slayer statute, but the law prevented Francis from inheriting only from her victim, not from her mother. As one observer noted, Francis’s mother’s peaceful death finally got Francis Schroeder what the murder of her father could not, his money.
Francis died on March 30th, 2004 at age 65 in a San Diego hospice from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Comfortable to the end, supported by wealth ultimately derived from the grandfather her son had killed at her command.
Mark, reflecting on the tragedy with devastating clarity, once said, “My grandfather had to die by my hand in order for me to be human.”
Shana Alexander’s book “Nutcracker: Money, Madness, Murder” became a New York Times bestseller and Edgar Award finalist, spawning a 1987 television miniseries starring Lee Remick, who earned an Emmy nomination for portraying the woman who had weaponized maternal love into murder.