Angry mother confronts son’s killer in court
HILLSBOROUGH COUNTY, Fla. (WFLA) – Pam Williams has waited for nearly 14 years to look her son’s killer in the eye and tell him about the life he took away.
Wednesday morning she passionately delivered the words she rehearsed over and over.
“Schweikert, I want you to take a look at this picture. You take a good look at this picture,” Williams said as she tightly held a photo of her son, Jason Galehouse.
Galehouse was murdered in 2003. On Wednesday Scott Schweikert admitted to killing Jason Galehouse and Michael Wachholtz. Both men were 26 at the time of their deaths.
“You took my only life away from me. I don’t even have a grave, a body or a tombstone. I have the city dump with my son ground up like hamburger meat in the dirt,” Williams said as she angrily confronted Schweikert in court.
Schweikert admitted to the murder and agreed to testify against Steven Lorenzo who also participated in the crime. The plea agreement took months to work out and includes more than 300 pages of specific details about the murders of Galehouse and Wachholtz.
Schweikert claimed he and Lorenzo hunted their victims at gay nightclubs in Tampa with the fantasy of making them into permanent sex slaves.
Schweikert said Lorenzo would give the young men GHB and then take them back to his home in Seminole Heights where he would tie them up, torture them, rape them and then kill them.
Schweikert admitted he participated in the case of Galehouse, he said, they used an electric saw to cut up the body, placing parts into trash bags and then depositing the bags in various dumpsters around town.
Schweikert’s attorney is veteran Byron Hileman who has participated in more than 200 first degree murder cases. Hileman said the plea agreement that spared Schweikert from the death penalty was the best deal his client could have expected.
“It was a very painful hearing today. I don’t know that I’ve ever experienced in 40 years one more painful to sit through,” Hileman said.
Over the course of his career, Hileman has listened to gruesome testimony in many cases but he said this was one of the worst.
“All of the facts taken together make it one of the most horrible cases I’ve ever dealt with,” the attorney said.
Schweikert and Lorenzo were already serving time on federal drug convictions related to the murder.
Lorenzo has not yet been indicted on murder charges in state court.