Developing an Instinct
What Ressler was learning was that once you had talked to enough killers, you began to develop an instinct about what kind of person would commit a particular crime.
In early 1978 he used it to help a colleague, homicide detective Russ Vorpagel, in Sacramento, California.
On January 23, an intruder walked into the house of newly married Teresa Wallin, twenty-two, in the Watt Avenue area of Sacramento, shot her three times, and then mutilated the body with a knife. There was no sign of rape, but there was evidence that the killer had drained some of her blood into a yoghurt cup and drank it.
In his profile of the killer, Ressler said:
White male, aged 25–27 years; thin, undernourished appearance. Residence will be extremely slovenly and unkempt and evidence of the crime will be found at the residence. History of mental illness, and will have been involved in use of drugs. Will be a loner who does not associate with either males or females, and will probably spend a great deal of time in his own home, where he lives alone. Unemployed. Possibly receives some form of disability money. If residing with anyone, it would be with his parents; however, this is unlikely. No prior military record; high school or college dropout. Probably suffering from one or more forms of paranoid psychosis.
Ressler explains:
I had plenty of reasons for making such a precise description of the probable offender. Though profiling was still in its infancy, we had reviewed enough cases of murder to know that sexual homicide—for that’s the category into which this crime fit, even if there was no evidence of a sex act committed at the scene—is usually perpetrated by males, and is usually an intraracial crime, white against white, or black against black. The greatest number of sexual killers are white males in their twenties and thirties; this simple fact allows us to eliminate whole segments of the population when first trying to determine what sort of person has perpetrated one of these heinous crimes. Since this was a white residential area, I felt even more certain that the slayer was a white male.
Now I made a guess along a great division line that we in the Behavioral Sciences Unit were beginning to formulate, the distinction between killers who displayed a certain logic in what they had done and those whose mental processes were, by ordinary standards, not apparently logical—“organized” versus “disorganized” criminals. Looking at the crime-scene photographs and the police reports, it was apparent to me that this was not a crime committed by an “organized” killer who stalked his victims, was methodical in how he went about his crimes, and took care to avoid leaving clues to his own identity. No, from the appearance of the crime scene, it was obvious to me that we were dealing with a “disorganized” killer, a person who had a full-blown and serious mental illness. To become as crazy as the man who ripped up the body of Terry Wallin is not something that happens overnight. It takes eight to ten years to develop the depth of psychosis that would surface in this apparently senseless killing. Paranoid schizophrenia is usually first manifested in the teenage years. Adding ten years to an inception-of-illness age of about fifteen would put the slayer in the mid-twenties age group. I felt that he wouldn’t be much older, for two reasons. First, most sexual killers are under the age of thirty-five. Second, if he was older than late twenties, the illness would have been so overwhelming that it would already have resulted in a string of bizarre and unsolved homicides. Nothing as wild as this had been reported anywhere nearby, and the absence of other notable homicides was a clue that this was the first killing for this man, that the killer had probably never taken a human life before. The other details of the probable killer’s appearance followed logically from my guess that he was a paranoid schizophrenic, and from my study of psychology.
For instance, I thought this person would be thin. I made this guess because I knew of the studies of Dr. Ernest Kretchmer of Germany and Dr. William Sheldon of Columbia University, both dealing with body types. Both men believed there was a high degree of correlation between body type and mental temperament. Kretchmer found that men with slight body builds (asthenics) tended toward introverted forms of schizophrenia; Sheldon’s categories were similar, and I thought that on his terms, the killer would be an ectomorph [i.e thin, intellectual type]. These body-type theories are out of favor with today’s psychologists—they’re fifty years old and more—but I find, more often than not, that they prove to be correct, at least in terms of being helpful in suggesting the probable body type of a psychopathic serial killer.
So that’s why I thought this was bound to be a thin and scrawny guy. It was all logical. Introverted schizophrenics don’t eat well, don’t think in terms of nourishment, and skip meals. They similarly disregard their appearance, not caring at all about cleanliness or neatness. No one would want to live with such a person, so the killer would have to be single. This line of reasoning also allowed me to postulate that his domicile would be a mess, and also to guess that he would not have been in the military, because he would have been too disordered for the military to have accepted him as a recruit in the first place. Similarly, he would not have been able to stay in college, though he might well have completed high school before he disintegrated. This was an introverted individual with problems dating back to his pubescent years. If he had a job at all, it would be a menial one, a janitor perhaps, or someone who picked up papers in a park; he’d be too introverted even to handle the tasks of a deliveryman. Most likely he’d be a recluse living on a disability check.
I didn’t include some other opinions in the profile, but I did believe that if this slayer had a car, it, too, would be a wreck, with fast-food wrappers in the back, rust throughout, and an appearance similar to what I expected to be found in the home. I also thought it likely that the slayer lived in the area near the victim, because he would probably be too disordered to drive somewhere, commit such a stunning crime, and get himself back home. More likely, he had walked to and from the crime scene. My guess was that he had been let out of a psychiatric-care facility in the recent past, not much more than a year earlier, and had been building up to this level of violent behavior.
Sherlock Holmes could not have explained his methods better. Using this profile, cops on the beat began questioning people in the area. Around that time, many of them had reported seeing a dirty, disheveled man in an orange jacket, who sometimes knocked on doors and made incomprehensible demands.
Four days later, thirty-eight-year-old Evelyn Miroth, the mother of three sons, was found shot and mutilated on her bed, and a boyfriend, Danny Meredith, was found shot dead in the next room. One of her sons, six-year-old Jason, had also been shot. A twenty-two-month-old baby, David Ferreira, whom the victim had been babysitting, was missing. Evelyn Miroth’s other two sons were away from home at the time. The postmortem showed that Evelyn had been sodomized.
Again, there was evidence that the killer had drunk some of his victim’s blood.
Finally, Ressler’s profile paid off. A woman named Nancy Holden thought she recognized it, and told the police about an encounter she had had with a man named Richard Chase on the day of the Wallin murder. Chase, who had been at school with her, had accosted her in a store and tried to persuade her to give him a lift. Worried by his wild appearance, she had made some excuse.
The police checked on Chase and discovered that he had a record of mental illness. When they called at his apartment to interview him, Chase tried to run away; he was finally handcuffed before he could draw a gun.
The body of David Ferreira was found—decapitated—in a box near a church.
On January 2, 1979, Richard Chase was tried on six counts of murder. It became clear from the evidence that one of his peculiarities was to dabble his fingers in the intestines of his victims—hence the nickname the “Dracula Killer.” Chase was sentenced to death, but on December 26, 1980, he committed suicide with an overdose of his antidepressants, which he had been saving up for weeks.
Ressler makes the vitally important observation that Chase’s mental problems can be traced back to his mother, who was “schizophrenic, emotionally unable to concentrate on the task of socializing her son or to care for him in a loving way.” And he goes on to note that no less than nineteen of his serial killers had inadequate mothers. The psychologist Abraham Maslow used the term “schizophrenogenic” about his own mother, explaining that it meant the kind of mother who made her kids crazy, and told me (when I was working on a book about him) that if it had not been for a maternal uncle who loved children, and who took care of Abe and his younger brother, he would not be sane, that his uncle “may have saved my life psychically.” If a person like Maslow, brought up in a protective family background, can come close to being “psychically wrecked,” it underlines how easy it is for the kind of offenders Ressler was dealing with.
Another serial killer to whom Ressler devotes several pages in Whoever Fights Monsters was Gerard Schaefer, perhaps one of sickest sex killers of the twentieth century. In his early lectures to police academies, Ressler would use Schaefer as a typical example of the organized serial killer. In fact, Schaefer fit the pattern so well that members of the audience often accused Ressler of taking the details of the organized serial killer directly from Schaefer.
Ressler was not involved in catching Schaefer; he was arrested before Ressler had developed the idea of criminal profiling. But the pages about him in Whoever Fights Monsters show the importance Ressler attaches to the case.
In 1973, there had been so many disappearances of young women in Brevard County, Florida, that the police were in the process of putting together a task force when the man responsible fell into their hands. He was Gerard John Schaefer, a twenty-nine-year-old police officer.
On July 22, 1972, Schaefer stopped his police cruiser to confront two hitchhikers, Nancy Trotter, seventeen, and Pamela Sue Wells, eighteen, in the town of Stuart in Martin County. He issued them a warning about hitching rides, but also offered to give them a ride to the beach the next day. He drove them out to the then swampy and isolated Hutchinson Island on the pretext of showing them a Spanish fort. The young women must have felt that they could hardly be in safer hands.
Once out on the island, he suddenly started to verbally abuse them, accusing them of being runaways (which they were not). He then forced them from the car at gunpoint, and handcuffed them both. All this was plainly designed to reassure them that this was a legitimate arrest, to make them feel that this was a mistake that would soon be cleared up when they reached the police station. But when he went on to gag them with old rags from the trunk of his car, they must have realized that this was no arrest.
Schaefer then forced Pamela Sue to balance on the giant roots of a cypress tree, where he tied her. Next he made Nancy stand on the roots of another cypress, some distance away, with a noose around her neck. Trapped there, the young women were forced to listen to his taunts of selling them into white slavery. His aim was obviously to terrify them—if possible, until they lost control of their bowels, which seems to have been one of the things that sexually excited him. But then he was interrupted by a call on the police radio. He left the pair only to return to find them gone. Realizing that Pamela Sue and Nancy could identify him, he went home and rang the sheriff—his boss—and told him that he had done “something foolish.” His intention, he explained, was to frighten the girls and make them realize that hitchhiking was dangerous. He described where he had left them, and in about a quarter of an hour, the sheriff found the petrified young women wandering in the woods—still handcuffed and gagged.
Schaefer was dismissed from the police force immediately, and charged with assault and imprisonment. He was released on $15,000 bail, and ordered to appear for trial in November 1972.
My own interest in Schaefer arose from the fact that he had been the first love of a friend of mine, a woman named Sandy Steward, who later became the crime writer Sondra London. After his arrest she kept in touch with him, published some of his writings under the title Killer Fiction, and persuaded me to write an introduction to them.
When Sondra met Gerard Schaefer in Florida at a high school dance in 1964, she was seventeen and he was eighteen—handsome, gentle, and well-mannered. Her parents liked him so much that they invited him to go with them on their vacation, and her grandmother told her she was lucky to meet such a nice boy. Sandy and Gerry decided that they were in love, walked hand in hand, and made love among the tombstones in the old graveyard. They had been together for a year when he confessed to her that he experienced terrifying sadistic urges towards women, and daydreamed of hanging them dressed only in their underwear. Sometimes he sobbed as he told her about these compulsions. He even talked to the school counselor about them, but she was unable to help him. Eventually, Sandy broke off their engagement because, she said, she had no desire to be his mother-confessor.
Schaefer also spied on a woman who sunbathed in her garden in a bikini. One night, when she came home late and slightly drunk, he broke into her house, and woke her up by pressing a knife to her throat and threatening her with instant death if she moved, and then made her lie on her face. He removed his trousers and masturbated on her, then urinated on her pillow. Before he left, he threatened to kill her if she told anyone.
The experience proved to be addictive. But it was not rape to which he became addicted, but the terror he could inspire in his victims. For this reason, Schaefer liked abducting two victims together, so one could watch as he killed the other. This is undoubtedly what he had in mind when he drove Nancy and Pamela Sue into the woods that day in 1972, a decision that cost him his job, but unfortunately not his liberty. For soon after being released on bond, he went back to killing.
On September 27, 1972, Schaefer introduced himself to Susan Place, eighteen, and her friend Georgia Jessup, seventeen. He went with them to Susan’s home and told her parents that they were going to the beach to “play some guitar.”
Mrs. Place thought the man—who said his name was Jerry Shepherd—looked too old for the girls (he was twenty-six). A feeling of vague unease prompted her to note down the license-plate number of his blue Datsun.
When neither girl returned home, Mrs. Place notified the police. But when they checked the license number she had noted down, it proved to belong to another make of car, whose owner was totally unlike the genial, plump-faced “Jerry Shepherd.”
A month later, on October 23, 1972, two more teenaged girls vanished—this time, they were only fourteen. Elsie Farmer and Mary Briscolina had set out to hitchhike when they too disappeared. In January 1973, their skeletons were found in undergrowth near Fort Lauderdale, and identified by dental records.
Meanwhile, in November 1972, Schaefer had been sentenced to six months for the Trotter and Wells kidnapping, and while he was in jail, his luck ran out. As Susan Place’s mother was driving through Martin County, she noticed that all car license plates began with “42.” The license number of the blue Datsun had started with a 4, which was the number of Pinellas County, near Saint Petersburg. Had she noted down the number incorrectly? Mrs. Place decided to act on the assumption that she had, and when she found that the same number, but starting with 42, belonged to a blue Datsun, she suspected that she was at last on the right track. When further research revealed that its owner, Gerard Schaefer, was in jail for kidnapping two teenage girls, she knew she was. At the county sheriff’s office, she was able to identify Schaefer as Jerry Shepherd.
A search of Schaefer’s home—where he lived with his mother—revealed various items that belonged to the missing young women, and some extremely explicit pornography, written and illustrated by Schaefer himself, describing murder, rape, and acts of necrophilia.
Schaefer was indicted and sentenced to two life terms for the murders of Susan Place and Georgia Jessup. But the items found in Schaefer’s room convinced the police that he had killed at least twenty women, and even two children of eight and nine. Evidence recovered later suggested that even this could be less than half the total. Sondra London was shaken when Schaefer came to trial in 1973, and as she began to realize that Schaefer had already committed murder when he was her lover, her fascination with the problem of serial killers increased.
Finally, in February 1989, Sondra addressed a letter to Schaefer in Florida State Prison. He replied effusively: “How could I not remember you, the great love of my life?” Soon he agreed to allow Sondra to work on a book about him.
As the correspondence continued, she asked him if he still wrote pornographic stories, like those the police had found in his home. By way of reply he forwarded her some of his more recent efforts.
A typical one, “Grand Theft,” describes how he picks up a hooker, a “girl with an ass like jello on springs,” in a burger bar. In her room she performs oral sex with “misty eyed pleasure.” Then, as they are leaving the room, he slips a garrote around her throat. Schaefer describes her last moments: “With her eyes, she asked me, ‘Why?’ ‘Because,’ I hissed, as the life went out of her.”
Most of the stories have the same, predictable plot: he picks up a young woman, they have sex, and he kills her sadistically, strangling, shooting, or disemboweling her. “She stared in wide-eyed fascination as the ropy coils of her own intestines slid out of her belly . . .”
Yet as she interviewed him in prison, Sondra was puzzled by the paradox of a man who was “well-spoken and pleasant, funny and smart.” She adds: “In the process of studying him like some kind of caged wild animal specimen, I’ve come to appreciate his many fine qualities. What is scary is the idea of the hideously deformed, shadowy monster lurking behind this nice, normal guy.”
Sondra decided to publish Schaefer’s “killer fiction” herself. “You do not have to like something to learn from it,” she pointed out. It appeared in a slim, red-paper covered book, seventy pages long, costing $18. I was offered a copy by a specialist crime bookseller in New Jersey, and recognized that this was the authentic production of a sadistic sex killer.
Soon after, I entered into correspondence with Sondra, after an introduction by British publisher Paul Woods, who published her study of men on death row, Knockin’ on Joe (a term meaning self-injury to get out of forced labor) and in due course, wrote an introduction to a new edition of Killer Fiction. I have to admit that I hesitated. It was so sick that it seemed to me to be interesting solely as an insight into the mind of a sadistic killer. I described Schaefer as suffering from a kind of “halitosis of the soul.” Finally, though, I overcame my squeamishness, because I agree with Sondra that it is not necessary to like something to learn from it.
I have never read the entire book and do not intend to. There is a dreary sameness about the stories, an obsession with trying to provoke nausea and disgust. “I pulled off her shoes thinking it wasn’t right to cornhole a woman with her panties around her knees and a bullet in her head with her shoes on.” And he describes how he dug up the body several times, in spite of decomposition, and ended by cutting off the head.
Oddly enough, Schaefer would later try to sue me because his name is mentioned in my book The Serial Killers (1990), maintaining that he was in prison only for the murder of two teenagers. When I sent the publisher’s defense attorney some photocopied pages of Schaefer’s book, in which Sondra London writes of the “serial killer who loved me,” and Schaefer quotes himself as telling fellow inmate Ted Bundy: “[I reckon] twenty-eight confirmed kills in South Florida alone, plus my collection of heads,” Schaefer’s case against me was dismissed. I suspect that he only started it to introduce some variety into his uneventful prison life.
Schaefer was murdered in his cell on December 3, 1995, stabbed by fellow inmate Vincent Rivera. But Sondra, who attended the trial, sets it on record that she does not accept this version of his death. “His body was covered with marks of state-issued boots.” She believes prison guards murdered him, and that drug-dealing lay behind it.
Since Schaefer has written hundreds of thousands of words attempting to describe his crimes and his state of mind, it ought to be possible to understand exactly why he committed them. We know that he was brought up a Roman Catholic, and that he adored his mother and hated his alcoholic father, who often beat her. Sondra once had to pull him off his father, whose head he was beating with a golf club, after he had called Schaefer’s mother a whore. Plainly, Schaefer became obsessed with this idea of “whores”; he once said that there are only two types of women: whores and virgins. He obviously hated women who enjoy sex: “. . . with her left hand she tore at her panties in an effort to strip them from her own ass. Her wanton depravity was out of control. She’d become an animal in the mindless throes of sexual lust, a regular bitch in heat.” This comment is a prelude (of course) to killing her.
But the story enables us to glimpse the puzzling complexity of Schaefer’s psychology. He knows perfectly well that the woman in question is not a whore, just as he knew that Georgia Jessup and Susan Place and his other victims were not whores. When he broke into the bedroom of the woman who lived nearby, and set out to terrorize her, he knew she was not a whore either—she had just said good-bye to her boyfriend at the front door. But he could only achieve the maximum pitch of sexual excitement by telling himself that they were whores. In a sense it made no difference what they were, for they were simply tools of his masturbatory fantasy, like illustrations in some pornographic magazine. He had conditioned himself to be excited by the idea of whores, and perpetrating violence on them, just as some men need a prostitute to dress in a schoolgirl’s gym slip, or a nurse’s uniform.
Which leaves the interesting question: What originally caused Schaefer’s obsession with “whores?” Was it, perhaps, his adoration of his mother, and his father’s assertion that she was a whore? Sondra London believes that he was sexually obsessed with his mother, and that since he was allowed into the marital bed until he was sixteen, such an obsession had plenty of time to develop. We recall that the Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe, was also obsessed by prostitutes; a friend describes how he would hang around brothels, fascinated by the sight of the women who went in and out. We have noted how Sutcliffe was deeply shocked when his mother, whom he adored, was caught by her husband having an affair with a policeman. Sutcliffe’s mother was also bullied and humiliated by her husband, another typical Right Man. Could it be that when a child sees the mother he worships ill-treated by her husband, and accused of being a whore, the result is an emotional trauma that causes him to associate love and humiliation, purity and sadism?
There is undoubtedly another element that needs to be added to the equation: what psychologists call “hypersexuality.” Most young and healthy adolescent males experience a powerful sex drive that usually results in repeated masturbation, perhaps several times a day; therefore most of them are potential rapists. Another serial killer, Danny Rolling, commented in a letter to me that the difference between the rapist and the normal male is smaller than we assume, and he refers to a study in which a hundred college men were asked if they would rape a pretty girl if they were sure they could get away with it, and all replied yes.
In some males the sex drive is so abnormally powerful that it is almost insatiable. We have seen that Albert DeSalvo, the “Boston Strangler,” needed sex up to a dozen times a day, and on more than one occasion, raped two women the same day. When the sex drive is this strong, particularly in an adolescent lacking in self-confidence, the result is inevitably masturbation accompanied by fantasies. Like Heirens, Schaefer became an underwear fetishist when he was twelve; like Harvey Glatman, he also discovered the pleasures of bondage: “I would tie myself up to a tree, struggle to get free, and I’d get sexually excited and do something to hurt myself.” And he began to fantasize about hurting women.
In persons with an abnormally strong sex-drive, fantasy can easily build up into what I have sometimes called “superheated sex,” in an analogy with superheated steam. In Schaefer’s case this led him to killing livestock, beheading them with a machete before having sex with the carcasses. The desire to kill things became so strong that he even experienced the urge to shoot at cows, and thought about joining the army because he liked the idea of killing human beings. But by the time he was old enough for the draft, in 1968, he had changed his mind. He later claimed that he had obtained deferment by wearing women’s underwear.
There followed unsuccessful attempts to become a priest, then a schoolteacher. He lost the latter job at Plantation High School after a few weeks because of “persistent efforts to impose his moral and political views on the students.” The same thing happened when he became a student teacher at Stranahan High School, revealing the same obsessive need to exercise authority.
His first murder seems to have occurred in September 1969. The victim was Leigh Hainline Bonadies, a schoolmate of Sondra, whom Schaefer had lusted after when he was her neighbor and tennis partner. In August 1969 she married, but it was not a success, and after two weeks she walked out, leaving a note saying that she was going to Miami. According to Schaefer, she asked him for a lift to the airport, but never arrived at his house. But she vanished, and when Schaefer was arrested in 1973, some of her jewelry was found in his bedroom. He never admitted to killing her.
Two months later, on December 18, 1969, Carmen Hallock, a twenty-two-year-old cocktail waitress, told her sister–in-law that she intended to meet a schoolteacher who had offered her undercover work for the government, with “lots of money.” This was the last time she was ever seen alive.
On December 29, 1970, nine-year-old Peggy Rahn and eight-year-old Wendy Stevenson vanished from Pompano Beach. A clerk identified photographs of the two girls and said he had seen them with a six-foot-tall man in his twenties who was buying them ice cream. Neither girl was ever found, and Schaefer later claimed—perhaps jokingly—that he had killed them and eaten their flesh cooked with onions and peppers, having been reading about the 1930s child killer Albert Fish, who claimed to have eaten an eight-year-old girl.
Another twenty-two-year-old cocktail waitress, Belinda Hutchens, was last seen on January 5, 1972, driving off in a blue sedan before she vanished. Her drug-addict husband later identified the car as the one belonging to Schaefer.
There is no exact record of Schaefer’s murders, but when his mother’s house was searched in April 1973, items found included a purse owned by Susan Place; three pieces of jewelry belonging to Leigh Bonadies; two teeth and a shamrock pin belonging to Carmen Hallock;newsclippings on the Bonadies and Hallock cases; an address book belonging to Belinda Hutchens; a passport, diary, and book of poetry owned by nineteen-year-old Collette Goodenough, last seen in January 1973; the driver’s license of nineteen-year-old Barbara Wilcox, who vanished with Goodenough; a piece of jewelry owned by Mary Briscolina, missing with a female friend since October 1972; an envelope addressed to “Jerry Shepherd”; eleven guns and thirteen knives; photos of unknown women and of Schaefer dressed in women’s underwear; and more than a hundred pages of writings and sketches, detailing the torture and murder of “whores.”
Schaefer’s writings in Killer Fiction detail many other murders that sound oddly authentic—in that they do not seem to have been written merely to gloat—including one of a woman whose body was dumped in a water-filled quarry in an automobile.
It is apropos to Schaefer that Ressler has a passage describing the organized serial killer:
. . . let me point out the attributes of the organized offender that are present so far in the narrative. The abductor personalized the victims by talking with them, used his own vehicle, and conned the women into his car by means of his verbal skills. He brought his own threatening weapon to the scene and took it away with him, had a rape kit, and was plainly planning to complete sexual acts with the women prior to torture and murder. After the murder, he was going to hide and dispose of the bodies. He displayed mobility and adaptive behavior during the crime when he left the women tied up and went to pay attention to some other aspect of his life, telling them that he would return and finish them off later.
In short, Schaefer feels utterly relaxed and at ease with his intended victims, cool and systematic. It can be seen why Ressler regarded him as the perfect example of the organized serial killer.
Perhaps the most basic characteristic of the serial killer is one that he shares with most other criminals: a tendency to an irrational self-pity that can produce an explosion of violence.
In that sense, Paul John Knowles may be regarded not merely as the archetypal serial killer but as the archetypal criminal.
Knowles, who was born in 1946, from the age of nineteen had spent an average of six months of every year in jail, mostly for car thefts and burglaries. In Florida’s Raiford Penitentiary in 1972, he began to study astrology, and initiated a correspondence with a divorcée named Angela Covic, whom he had contacted through the personals ads in an astrology magazine. Angela flew down to Florida, was impressed by the gaunt good looks of the tall redheaded convict, and agreed to marry him. She hired a lawyer to work on his parole, and he was released on May 14, 1972. Knowles hastened to San Francisco to claim his bride, but by then she had second thoughts; a psychic had warned her that she was mixed up with a very dangerous man. Knowles stayed at her mother’s apartment, but after four days Angela told him she had decided to return to her first husband, and gave him his airline ticket back to Florida. Knowles exploded with rage and self-pity; he later claimed that he went out on to the streets of San Francisco and killed three people. This was never verified, but it is consistent with the behavior of the disorganized serial killer.
Back in his hometown of Jacksonville, Florida, on July 26, 1974, Knowles got into a bar fight and was locked up for the night. He escaped, broke into the home of a sixty-five-year-old teacher, Alice Curtis, and stole her money and her car. But he rammed a gag too far down her throat and she suffocated. A few days later, as he parked the stolen car, he noticed two children looking at him as if they recognized him—their mother was, in fact, a friend of his family. He forced them into the car and drove away. The bodies of seven-year-old Mylette Anderson and her eleven-year-old sister, Lillian, were later found in a swamp.
What followed was a completely unmotivated murder rampage, as if Knowles had simply decided to kill as many people as he could before he was caught.
The following day, August 2, 1974, in Atlantic Beach, Florida, he broke into the home of Marjorie Howie, forty-nine, and strangled her with a stocking; he also stole her television set. A few days later he strangled and raped a teenage runaway who hitched a lift with him. On August 23, he strangled Kathie Pierce in Musella, Georgia, while her three-year-old son looked on; Knowles left the child unharmed. On September 3, near Lima, Ohio, he had several drinks with an accounts executive named William Bates, and later strangled him, driving off in the dead man’s white Chevrolet Impala. After driving to California, Seattle, and Utah (using Bates’s credit cards) he forced his way into a trailer in Ely, Nevada, on September 18, 1974, and shot to death an elderly couple, Emmett and Lois Johnson. On September 21, he strangled and raped forty-two-year-old Charlynn Hicks, who had stopped to admire the view beside the road near Sequin, Texas. On September 23, in Birmingham, Alabama, he met an attractive woman named Ann Dawson, who owned a beauty shop, and they traveled around together for the next six days, living on her money; she was murdered on September 29, 1974.
For the next sixteen days, he drove around without apparently committing any further murders; but on October 16 he rang the doorbell of a house in Marlborough, Connecticut; sixteen-year-old Dawn White, who was expecting a friend, answered it. Knowles forced her up to the bedroom and raped her; when her mother, Karen, returned home, he raped her too, and then strangled them both with silk stockings. He left with a tape recorder and Dawn’s collection of rock records.
With cigarette dangling from his mouth and his long hair disheveled, Paul John Knowles appears to be the archetypal criminal. In 1974, the Florida parolee was charged and convicted of six slayings in several states. (Associated Press)
Two days later, he knocked on the door of fifty-three-year-old Doris Hovey in Woodford, Virginia, and told her he needed a gun and would not harm her; she gave him a rifle belonging to her husband, and he shot her through the head and left, leaving the rifle beside her body.
In Key West, Florida, he picked up two hitchhikers, intending to kill them, but was stopped by a policeman for pulling up on a curb; when the policeman asked to see his documents, he expected to be arrested; but the officer failed to check that Knowles was the owner of the car, and let him drive away.
On November 2, Knowles picked up two hitchhikers, Edward Milliard and Debbie Griffin; Milliard’s body was later discovered in woods near Macon, Georgia; Griffin’s body was never found.
On November 6, 1974, in a gay bar in Macon, he met a man named Carswell Carr and went home with him. Later that evening, Carr’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Mandy, heard shouting and went downstairs, to find Knowles standing over the body of her father, who was tied up. It emerged later that Carr had died of a heart attack; Knowles had been torturing him by stabbing him all over with a pair of scissors. He then raped Mandy—or attempted it (no sperm was found in her)—and strangled her with a stocking. The bodies were found when Carr’s wife, a night nurse, returned home.
The next day, in a Holiday Inn in downtown Atlanta, Knowles saw an attractive redhead in the bar—a British journalist named Sandy Fawkes; she went for a meal with him and they ended up in her bedroom. But he proved impotent, in spite of all her efforts to arouse him. He had introduced himself to her as Daryl Golden, son of a New Mexico restaurant owner, and the two of them got on well enough for her to accept his offer to drive her to Miami. On the way there, he hinted that he was on the run for some serious crime—or crimes—and told her that he had a premonition that he was going to be killed some time soon. He also told her that he had tape-recorded his confession, and left it with his lawyer, Sheldon Yavitz, in Miami. In another motel, he finally succeeded in entering her, after first practicing cunnilingus and masturbating himself into a state of excitement. But even so, he failed to achieve orgasm—she concluded that he was incapable of it.
Long before they separated—after six days together—she was anxious to get rid of him. She had sensed the underlying violence, self-pity, and lack of discipline. He pressed hard for another night together; she firmly refused, insisting that it would only make the parting sadder. He waited outside her Miami motel half the night, while she deliberately stayed away; finally, he gave up and left.
The following day, she was asked to go to the police station, and there for the first time realized what kind of a man she had been sleeping with. On the morning after their separation, “Daryl Golden” had driven to the house of some journalists to whom he had been introduced four days earlier, and offered to drive Susan Mackenzie to the hairdresser. Instead, he took the wrong turn, and told her that he wanted to have sex with her, and would not hurt her if she complied. When he stopped the car and pointed a gun at her, she succeeded in jumping out and waved frantically at a passing car. Knowles drove off. Later, alerted to the attempted rape, a squad car tried to stop Knowles, but he pointed a shotgun at the policeman and drove off.
Knowles knew that he had to get rid of the stolen car. In West Palm Beach, he forced his way into a house, and took a woman named Barbara Tucker hostage, driving off in her Volkswagen, leaving her sister (in a wheelchair) and a six-year-old child unharmed. He held Barbara Tucker captive in a motel in Fort Pierce for a night and day, and then finally left her tied up and drove off in her car.
The next day, Patrolman Charles F. Campbell flagged down the Volkswagen—now sporting altered license plates—and found himself looking down the barrel of a shotgun. He was taken captive and driven off, handcuffed, in his own patrol car. But the brakes were poor, and, using the police siren, Knowles forced another car—that of businessman John Meyer—off the road, and then drove off in Meyer’s car, with Meyer and the patrolman in the back seat. In Pulaski County, Georgia, Knowles took them into a wood, handcuffed them to a tree, and shot each man in the back of the head.
Soon after killing the two men, Knowles spotted a police roadblock ahead, and drove on through it, losing control of the car and crashing into a tree. He scrambled from the wreck and ran into the woods. A vast manhunt was now launched, involving two hundred police personnel, tracker dogs, and helicopters. Knowles was in the end arrested by a courageous civilian, who saw him from a house, and he gave himself up quietly.
The day after his appearance in court, as he was being transferred to a maximum-security prison, Knowles unpicked his handcuffs and made a grab for the sheriff’s gun; FBI agent Ron Angel shot him dead. Knowles had been responsible for at least eighteen, possibly as many as twenty-four murders.
Sandy Fawkes had seen Knowles in court, and was overwhelmed by a sense of his “evil power.” But she had no doubt that on that day he now had what he had always craved: he was famous at last.
And enjoying his notoriety. The newspapers were filled with pictures of his appearance at Midgeville and accounts of his behavior. The streets had been lined with people. Sightseers had hung over the sides of balconies to catch a glimpse of him, manacled and in leg irons, dressed in a brilliant orange jumpsuit. He loved it: the local coeds four-deep on the sidewalks, the courtroom packed with reporters, friends, and Mandy Carr’s relatives and school chums. It was an event and he was the center of it, and he smiled at everyone. No wonder he had laughed like a hyena at his capture; he was having his hour of glory, not in the hereafter as he had predicted, but in the here and now. The daily stories of the women in his life had turned him into a Casanova killer, a folk villain, Dillinger and Jesse James rolled into one. He was already being referred to as the most heinous killer in history.
He was quoted in a local newspaper as saying that he was “the only successful member of his family.” At last Knowles had achieved the aim of most serial killers: “to become known, to get myself a name.”
