NBC Dateline: How was the Lisa Ziegert case cracked?

The upcoming episode of NBC’s Dateline, called “The Music Box,” went into detail about the terrible kidnapping and murder of Lisa Ziegert in 1992.

On July 9, 2022, at 9 p.m. ET, the episode aired. It was a journalistic look at the grisly murder and what happened afterward.

Through interviews with family, friends, community members, and law enforcement officials involved in the case, NBC Dateline gives investigations that are often forgotten over time an emotional touch.

Gary Schara, who was 50 years old at the time, said he had taken Lisa Ziegert and killed her in September 2017. He was charged with first-degree murder. Even though the case was over, Schara never said why he killed Lisa.

Read on to find out why it took 25 years to solve the murder case from 1992 that NBC Dateline talked about on Saturday.

Lisa Ziegert, a 24-year-old teacher’s assistant from Agawam, Massachusetts, was taken from her night job at Brittany’s Card and Gift Shoppe on April 15, 1992. The story was told on NBC’s Dateline last week. Four days later, a man walking through the woods with his dog found her body. She was only partly dressed.

Ziegert was raped and stabbed seven times in the neck, shoulders, and left leg, according to an autopsy. She fought back, but her injuries killed her in the end. After that, investigators had no leads on the killer for months and years, and the case went cold for 25 years.

In 2016, when DNA technology had made cold cases more interesting again, detectives started looking into Lisa’s murder again. In 2017, Gary Schara finally admitted that he had taken her away and killed her. A Hampden County Grand Jury charged him with first-degree murder.

Joyce McDonald Schara, who was no longer married to Gary Schara, said that he killed Lisa Ziegert in 1993. She said that he had a strange fixation on the case.

Investigators quickly dismissed the claim, though, because Schara didn’t have a criminal record and because many angry wives and girlfriends at the time blamed their cheating partners for Ziegert’s death.

Mark Pfau, a detective sergeant, took over the case in 2001 and looked into Joyce Schara’s claim. He asked Gary to talk to him, but Gary said no at first. A few months later, in 2002, Gary showed up at the Agawam police station. He didn’t seem suspicious until he was asked to give a DNA sample to clear his name, which he refused to do because he was afraid of being secretly cloned.

In 2016, authorities reopened cold cases because of new DNA technologies like digital compositing. This is when State Police Trooper Noah Pack and Detective Sergeant Mark Pfau, who had been working on Lisa’s case from the beginning, started going through the pile of case files again.

According to the NBC Dateline episode, the two police officers narrowed their search to 11 people who matched the digital composite image made from samples found on Lisa’s body. District Attorney Anthony Gulluni asked the court to let him force any suspect who didn’t want to give a DNA sample to do so.

On September 13, 2017, Noah Pack went to Gary Schara’s apartment and knocked on the door. Gary was not there, so his roommate answered the door. Schara was staying with his then-girlfriend Noelle DesLauriers at the time. The next day, when she got home from work as a nurse, she found that her boyfriend had left and left a letter for her.

Gary admitted to his crime from 25 years ago in the letter. He said that he didn’t mean to kill Ziegert, but he let himself do something terrible that day. He also said that he had been interested in bondage and kidnapping since he was very young. On the next two pages of the letter, he wrote Ziegert’s family an apology and his last will and testament. He wrote GES on the letter (Gary Edward Schara).

DesLauriers gave the police the letter and said that Gary might have killed himself. Mark Pfau figured out that Schara’s letter was a way for him to clear his mind now that he knew his DNA would match the killer’s.

Joyce Schara told Pfau that Gary had given her a music box like the ones sold at Brittany’s Card and Gift Shoppe on the night Ziegert was killed. Pfau remembered hearing this from Schara.

The police took a sample of Schara’s saliva from his toothbrush at DesLauriers’ house and used it to run DNA tests. The results were clear and linked Schara to the crime from decades ago, which was the subject of NBC’s Dateline show on Saturday.