[3] In fall of 1986, at age 17, Schwab committed his first known sex offense involving a male 14-year old high school sophomore from Brevard County.

[4] A month later, on April 18, Cocoa resident Junny Rios-Martinez Jr. went missing, after failing to show up to a school baseball game.

Schwab had seen Rios-Martinez's picture in the March 21, 1991, edition of Florida Today and became friendly with the boy and his family, introducing himself as "Mark Dean" and an associate of Malcom Denemark from that newspaper.

Over the next month, Schwab gained the trust of the boy by exploiting his interest in surfing and scheduled future meet-ups under the guise of organizing another photoshoot for Florida Today.

In the weeks preceding the abduction, Schwab claimed to have quit his job at the newspaper and taken up work at a surfing magazine, eventually saying that he had found Rios-Martinez a sponsorship with a surf gear company, providing the parents with forged documents as proof, and spent several hours each day designing clothes and surfboards with the boy.

Schwab told his parents that he was planning to take their son to a surfing tournament in Daytona Beach on April 18, but the trip was suddenly "canceled" the day before.

The day of his disappearance, Rios-Martinez was last spotted getting into a U-Haul truck near his school's baseball field with a man matching Schwab's description.

On April 23, Schwab lead investigators to the body's location in the woods in Canaveral Groves, a rural area of Brevard County, Florida, inside a footlocker that was "nearly shut" covered in palm fronds, debris, and wrapped in rope.

Police determined that Schwab had acted alone and lured Rios-Martinez to his truck under the guise that they would be going to the surfing tournament in Daytona Beach after all.

The author identified himself as "Doug" rather than "Donald" while the letter itself was found to have been written in Schwab's handwriting and contained fingerprints matching his.

At trial, witnesses had testified that Schwab was subject to child abuse and raped by a friend of his father when he was young.

The case led to the passage of the Junny Rios-Martinez Jr., Act of 1992, which prohibited those convicted of sexual battery from receiving early release in the state of Florida.