Crime Beat

brought the whole thing, the intrusion, the loss, the anger, all back down on her. Most of all it rekindled the fear.
    Gladys started counting the days left until her retirement from her office job in two years. That would be when she would put her house up for sale and move away from South Florida. But, still, at night, she would lie awake in bed and listen. . . . She would return from outings, unlock the door, stand there and listen. . . .
    Often when home alone, she found herself asking, did I just hear a noise out there or is it my imagination? The legacy of fear that Billy Schroeder left behind will remain with her always, she says.
    Billy Schroeder could have gotten away. On one job, in North Dade, he hit the jackpot—a pile of jewelry that he converted to bags of cash and crack.
    “I ended up with $20,000 cash in my hands,” he recalls. “I said to my girlfriend, ‘Let’s get out of here. I have the money now, let’s go to a rehab center and get off this.’”
    They decided on New Jersey, even got the airline tickets. But on the way to the airport, Billy and his girlfriend went to a friend’s house to say good-bye. And they celebrated the good-bye with one more rock. Within a few hours Billy checked into a Hilton suite with a bag full of rocks. Within days the jackpot money was gone.
    Schroeder wouldn’t get another chance to get away. His habit was growing and costing him close to $1,000 a day. He was breaking into more homes each day and the risks were getting greater while he was getting sloppier. He even stopped wearing his phony FPL uniform.
    On Feb. 26, 1987, Davie Police got a call about a possible burglary in process. Officers went to the home and saw an open window, and a screen leaning against the outside wall. The screen was the giveaway. A few minutes later the cops entered the house and found a burglar hiding in a bathroom shower stall. He said his name was William Burns.
    As the Davie officers were booking the burglar into the county jail, a sheriff’s deputy booking his own prisoner looked over at Burns and recognized him as the man on the wanted fliers Detective Cloud had been circulating for almost a year.
    “You’re not William Burns,” the deputy said, and the long crime spree of Billy Schroeder was over.
    T HE COPS who wanted to speak to Schroeder had to take turns. It took two days for the elusive burglar to come out of his cocaine intoxication and figure out he was in jail, but when he did, he considered his lot—the fingerprints, the evidence, his past record—and simply said, “Let’s go. I want it behind me.”
    Schroeder sat handcuffed and shackled in the backseats of several detectives’ cars as they drove through neighborhoods of South Florida. It took him three weeks to go over the territory, pointing out the houses he remembered being in. The detectives matched Schroeder’s recollections against their own burglary reports. All told, Cloud says they cleared close to 350 burglaries. And there are perhaps dozens of others Schroeder can’t remember.
    Of the millions of dollars in property that Schroeder stole, nothing was recovered. “It’s gone forever,” Cloud says.
    Schroeder was charged with 13 burglaries. (It would take years to prosecute him if he were charged in all his burglaries.) On May 21, he tearfully pleaded guilty to the charges in a plea agreement that could leave him facing as many as 20 years in prison.
    “I want to get this behind me,” he told the judge. “I have to look to the future.”
    While waiting for that future, he has been kept in the east wing of the North Broward Detention Complex, home to all inmates undergoing drug counseling and detoxification. Schroeder takes part in the jail’s “New Life” programs, works in the laundry and volunteers to speak to visiting groups of teenagers about the dangers of drugs.
    He seems resigned to a lengthy stint in prison. And he seems genuinely repentant. Still, he can only gain by this contrition and therefore his sincerity is open to question.
    But he cries when he talks about the time more than a year ago that he smoked that first rock. And he cries when he talks about the families he stole from. He says maybe someday he will make restitution, a possibility that is, in reality, laughable.
    “I just want to do something,” he says. “I think about all the families I robbed and I know I’ve got to do something for them.”
    Like many a jail inmate, Schroeder says he has got Jesus with