SPRINGFIELD — Even as a child, Lisa Ziegert’s killer was mesmerized by violent sexual themes, he wrote in a confession letter obtained by The Republican.

“I’ve never really been or even felt normal. From a very young age I was fascinated by abduction & bondage. I could never keep it too far from my mind for long. On that fateful day, I let myself do something terrible,” Gary E. Schara wrote in neat, unfaltering penmanship to his girlfriend on Sept. 14, 2017.

He wrote the letter as state and local police were closing in, 25 years after the savage kidnapping, rape and murder of Ziegert, a young teacher’s aide, on April 15, 1992.

Schara, now 50, pleaded guilty to first-degree murder in Hampden Superior Court on Sept. 25. He was sentenced to life in prison.

Dee Ziegert, Lisa’s mother, said prosecutors read Schara’s confessional to her directly before his plea hearing that morning.

“My first reaction to the letter? I thought: That is absolutely frightening. Just frightening. And it’s amazing it didn’t happen again,” Dee Ziegert said. “But I’m glad he wrote it. Because it’s him saying ‘I did it,' and him writing it. And him signing it."

Lisa Ziegert was 24 when she was snatched from her part-time job at Brittany’s Card and Gift Shoppe in Agawam, a storefront in a bustling part of town. Her partially clothed body was found four days later, on Easter Sunday, in a wooded area. She had eight stab wounds to her neck and leg.

Multiple law enforcement agencies pursued Ziegert’s killer for more than two decades. Schara was arrested and charged in September 2017 after state and local police took a fresh run at a short list of 11 suspects who had refused to volunteer DNA samples over the years, Hampden District Attorney Anthony D. Gulluni said.

Schara’s apartment in West Springfield was the second on a list of prospective “door-knocks” for state troopers working the case.

They didn’t have to knock on any more.

Massachusetts State Trooper Noah Pack left his card with Schara’s roommate at a multi-family home on Lathrop Street on Sept. 13, 2017. Schara was at his longtime girlfriend’s home in Granville, court records show. After he learned of the visit from Pack, Schara drafted three hand-written documents: a confession; a last will and testament; and a brief letter of apology to the Ziegert family.

The Republican obtained all three through a public records request with the Agawam Police Department.

An excerpt from a letter Gary Schara wrote to his girlfriend in the days before his September 2017 arrest for the 1992 killing of Lisa Ziegert.

Schara’s girlfriend discovered the letters at her home on Sept. 14, 2017 and immediately turned them over to state police. The Republican is withholding that woman’s identity to protect her privacy.

The confession was the longest.

“I’ve been dreading the day I’d need to write this letter for almost as long as I can remember ... First off, I love you. I hope you never doubt that ... Now the hard part. You are going to find out some awful things about me today. They will tell you I abducted, (redacted) and murdered a young woman approximately 25 years ago. It is true. All of it,” Schara’s letter reads.

“I had no intention of killing her when I grabbed her, but events spun out of my control, and in the eyes of the law, it is all the same. I have never regretted anything so much,” the two-page letter continues. “I was young and headstrong and foolish, emphasis on the last part.”

Schara spent the subsequent two decades sliding back into a wholly unremarkable life, by all accounts. He worked several jobs in the restaurant business and later in customer service at a rental car agency at Bradley International Airport. His friends have described him as “docile” and the “nicest guy in the world.”

A 1987 graduate of Longmeadow High School, Schara married young. He and his wife, Joyce, had a son, but the partnership didn’t last.

His wife moved to the West Coast not long after they were married, and took their son, according to police records. In 1993, Joyce McDonald Schara told an attorney in Seattle she believed her estranged husband had something to do with the Ziegert murder. Police questioned him then — and again in 2002 and 2008 — as they continued to dig into the case.

In 2017, investigators set out to obtain court-ordered DNA profiles from remaining suspects who hadn’t been genetically ruled out. It was then that Schara buckled.

“I always knew it would one day catch up with me & now it has,” the confession reads. “I received a text from (my roommate) last night that the State Police were at the house w/ some important papers for me. That will be a warrant to take DNA & that will send me away for life. I’m still trying to decide, even as I write this note, if I have the courage for that, or if I will take the cowards way out. Either way, I apologize again, so much.”

Schara ended up in the emergency room at a hospital in Connecticut after he tried to kill himself, according to court records. On the dashboard of the black Honda Civic Schara drove to the medical center in Stafford Springs, investigators found yet another hand-written letter.

“To whomever finds my body, I apologize for any psychological trauma incurred. Call Mass State Police. Thank you. GES," read the note, with flourishing initials. He was charged with Ziegert’s murder in the following days.

In his confession, Schara said his attack on Ziegert was an anomaly.

“I also never did anything of the like again. I hated what happened. I despised myself. I thought of turning myself in hundreds of times over the years, but I truly am a coward,” he wrote. “Today it will end. I will take my own life, or face the music as it were.”

Investigators confirmed Schara never had any significant brushes with the law, before or after Ziegert’s murder. His DNA profile was — for years — cycled through the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System (CODIS), compared every week with 14 million other samples. There were never any other hits, according to Hampden Assistant District Attorney Elizabeth Dunphy-Farris.

To this day, investigators have not been specific about what Schara’s estranged wife said regarding her suspicions about Schara’s involvement in the crime. Joyce McDonald Schara died in 2014.

Aside from his admitted preoccupation with abduction and bondage, Schara’s confession offers no clues as to how he targeted Ziegert — perhaps the most frustrating question that remains in the case.

“We will just never know. I don’t know why he chose her. Did she remind him of someone? Was he angry about something else and just walked into the store? All the girls Lisa went places with said they never even remembered seeing him before,” Dee Ziegert said.

Despite Schara’s contention that he had no intention of killing Ziegert, the crime scenes told a different story.

Schara, powerfully built at over six feet tall, apparently dragged Ziegert out a back door of the card shop, where investigators later found “kick or scuff marks” at the bottom. There were flecks of blood throughout the gift shop, on balloons and Easter cards, Gulluni said.

Ziegert’s ravaged, 5-foot-2 frame was found a few miles away from the store, discarded in a clearing in the woods well beyond where passing motorists could spot her. A man on a walk in the woods found her body, police said.

Her wounds and the crime scene suggested a protracted, violent frenzy, Gulluni said.

And, she fought. Ziegert’s hands were covered in deep defensive wounds, according to a medical examiner’s report.

In his confessional, Schara addresses none of the cruelty of the attack, but is instead crisp in his directive to close the chapter.

“I have no real useful advice to offer you except, no matter which course I choose, let me go. If I turned myself in, I will have confessed and accepted that I will live out my days in prison. Move on. Don’t go looking for a lawyer to get me out. I’m definitely not worth the time, the effort, or the money,” Schara wrote to his former girlfriend.

Schara also penned a last will and testament, leaving 30 percent each of his unnamed assets to his mother, his brother and his girlfriend — with the remaining 10 percent earmarked for his roommate in West Springfield.

“All of this should be done after debts are all settled obviously,” he wrote.

The letter he wrote to the Ziegert family — who kept Lisa Ziegert’s memory alive and in the public eye for nearly three decades as investigators sought her killer — was the shortest letter of all. It ran four sentences, ending with: “I hope knowing who & knowing I am gone will bring you some closure & peace. I am so truly sorry."

It was signed with the same flourish: “GES.”

Dee Ziegert said that after the plea was over, and Schara was sentenced to life, she felt enormous relief — but also oddly let down.

“It’s like, OK, so what do I do now? I can’t fight anymore for justice for Lisa. Because now we have that. But for so long, it consumed a lot of our lives and mine in particular because I was the face of our fight,” she said. “But now, we are thinking we’ll finally go on a trip somewhere. Because we won’t worry anymore that we’ll get some important phone call and have to turn around and come back.”