Fred Schoemehl... Now retired in northern California, he is a former Orange County newspaper reporter and editor, university instructor, and editor of a western history publication. In 1967, his family relocated to Laguna Beach where he graduated from Laguna Beach High School in 1970. Starting his newspaper career at the Laguna New-Post, he soon was recruited by the Orange Coast Daily Pilot, a much larger publication that published a Laguna Beach edition throughout the 1970s and 1980s. After leaving the Pilot, he drifted through a decade of personal turmoil before re-entering UC Irvine, where received a undergraduate degree and a Ph D in U. S. history. In summer 2019, he began researching “Lost Souls,” a book on the lives of three gay men who were brutally murdered in coastal Orange County in the late 1970s. Two of these horrific deaths occurred in Laguna Beach, the third in Corona del Mar.

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About the book Lost Souls...

Indeed, Fred is on a mission to document with his book "Lost Souls" the lives of three gay men — two in Laguna Beach — in the late 1970s. As you might have read recently, one of these cases, the 1978 killing of Brent Tobey, was resolved only two weeks ago when Walter Dalie, a former south county man with an extensive criminal background, pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of voluntary manslaughter. Thus ended the legal aspect of a 42-year-old cold case that had been winding its way in and out of the Orange County legal system for nearly a decade. My interest, however, is not in telling the Dalie story. I want to tell Brent Tobey’s story, and the stories of the two other homicide victims — Alfred Willard, killed at his Laguna Beach home in 1977, and Rueben Martinez, murdered at his Corona del Mar home in 1978 by two young men whom he’d met near the Little Shrimp. Regrettably, the news coverage of the day essentially ignored these victims’ lives and family backgrounds. All that most readers learned was that Brent Tobey as a building designer, that Al Willard was a retired U. S. Coast Guard officer, and that Rueben Martinez sold real estate. Put another way, the coverage was skewed toward the police investigations, arrests in the Willard and Martinez cases, and lurid testimony in the trials that ensued. I know some of this first-hand since I was one of the reporters who covered portions of the trials of the two men ultimately convicted of murdering Rueben Martinez. I want to discover the lives of the three murdered men, the "Lost Souls", and share the real and true stories surrounding their lives and murders.