On the night of December 10, 1973, a young man picked up two underage girls who were hitchhiking near Titusville, Florida, and drove them out into the woods. When he attacked them, they fought so hard that he pulled a gun to shoot them. The pistol misfired, and the girls ran. At the police station they described the man and his car, and they had something better: his name, which they had seen on a book lying in the car. The next day Brevard County deputies stopped Bernard Eugene Giles near Titusville and took a .22 pistol out of his car. He was charged with assault and attempted rape. Ballistics soon showed that the gun had killed Nancy Gerry, eighteen, whose body had been found in a palmetto thicket that same day, December 10, with a bullet in her head.
Giles was twenty. He was born in Titusville on April 9, 1953, one of four children of a law-abiding family, and his friends spoke well of him. He showed some talent for art at Titusville High School, then stopped going and left at sixteen. He trained as an electrician. In 1972 he married a seventeen-year-old, and their daughter was born in July 1973. Two months later the killings began.
Nancy Gerry disappeared on September 26. Sharon Mary Wimer, fourteen, vanished on November 5 and was found strangled, wearing only a St. Christopher's medal on a chain, her shirt and sweater nearby. Krista Jean Melton, reported missing on November 14, was found fully clothed and shot in the head on January 31, 1974; her age is given both as fourteen and as fifteen. Carolyn Jan Bennett, seventeen, disappeared on November 15, and her skeleton, with a bullet wound to the skull, was found on Christmas Day. Paula Darlene Hamric, twenty-two, disappeared on November 17 and was found eight days later, naked, strangled, her hands tied. Most of them had been hitchhiking. The bodies were left in orange groves and woods across Brevard County, some of them raped.
After his arrest investigators looked at him for the disappearances of more than eleven girls reported missing since August 1973. By January most of those girls had been found alive, and he was no longer suspected in their cases.
He insisted he was innocent. His lawyers asked for psychiatric examinations, and in the spring of 1974 two independent examiners found no mental illness or abnormality; he was declared sane and his trial set for April 29. The Brevard County State Attorney's office said it would seek the death penalty. Shortly before the trial he took a bargain instead. He confessed to killing Paula Hamric, then pleaded guilty to the other murders and to a series of attacks and attempted murders that had not ended in death. He told the court he had been drawn to violence since he was six, playing games in which he pretended to kill the other child, and that he had enjoyed pretending to strangle a friend who played a witch; acquaintances from those years confirmed it. He said he had first tried to attack girls in 1969, after leaving school. On August 13, 1974, he was given several life sentences.
He was sent to Florida State Prison. In October 1979 he and two other inmates escaped, using homemade smoke grenades to distract the guard dogs and officers and locksmith's tools to open a gap through several rows of wire. Acting on a tip that he meant to take his daughter from his former wife, police staked out her house. He was found five miles from the prison twenty-six hours after the escape, convicted of escape and given fifteen more years.
He has since been moved among Florida prisons and is listed at Tomoka Correctional Institution. In 2019 Piers Morgan interviewed him in prison for the ITV series Confessions of a Serial Killer.