Firefighters found the house burning with the doors padlocked from outside. It took thirty-three years to name the man who did it.
On August 6, 1992, firefighters in Weimar, California — a foothill community of a few hundred people in Placer County — found the home of 85-year-old Alwin Schoefer burning, with the exterior doors padlocked shut from the outside. Inside, Schoefer had been beaten, stabbed and shot, and the fire had been set deliberately.
His wallet, ID and coin purse were later recovered in a bag dumped along a road in neighbouring Nevada County. Detectives suspected robbery. Schoefer was known locally for keeping large sums of cash at home rather than using a bank. Dozens of people were interviewed. None of it produced a suspect, and the case went cold for thirty-three years.
In 2025, the Placer County Sheriff’s Office Cold Case Unit identified physical evidence collected in 1992 that could finally be DNA tested. The profile matched Joseph Victor Foster — a man who had lived within walking distance of Schoefer’s home, and who was already serving multiple life sentences for the January 1991 Weimar murders of Jacqueline Barton, 33, and Hugh Cleveland Gresham, 37, a case itself solved by DNA in 2017.
Foster was transferred into Placer County custody on March 18, 2025. He pleaded guilty to first-degree murder on March 30, 2026, and on April 30, 2026 he was sentenced to more than 75 years to life in state prison. With that conviction, he has been held responsible for four killings — all of them in and around the same small California town.
Sources
- Placer County Sheriff’s Office press release, “Cold Case Serial Killer Sentenced for Murder of 85-year-old Man,” May 6, 2026 (primary source)
- True Crime News, May 7, 2026
- Sacramento Bee (Rosalio Ahumada), May 5, 2026
- ABC10, “Man sentenced to 75 years to life in 1992 Weimar cold case murder in Placer County”
- Roseville Today, “25 Years Later: Weimar Murder Suspect Arrested”
- CBS Sacramento, January 15, 2015
Image credits are shown on-screen in the video, slide by slide. Every image is public record, Creative Commons or public domain, or clearly labelled illustrative stock. Narration is AI-synthesised and the research is AI-assisted.
Related reading
No book has been written about this case specifically. For readers interested in how decades-old homicides get reopened and solved through preserved physical evidence, this search covers the field: cold case DNA investigations on Amazon.
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