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. At half past noon the next day Brevard County deputies arrested Bernard Eugene Giles near Titusville and took a .22 pistol out of his car. Florida Today described him as a twenty-year-old unemployed Titusville man, jailed over the pistol-whipping and rape attack on the two hitchhikers. "This guy apparently runs around getting his kicks beating up women," Sheriff Leigh Wilson said. Late on December 10, the same night the girls got away, the body of Nancy Gerry, eighteen, had turned up in a palmetto thicket. The county medical examiner first put her death down to natural causes, then reversed himself when a .22-caliber bullet was found lodged in her head. Ballistics matched it to the pistol from Giles's car.
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. In the paper's mid-December account, every victim but Nancy Gerry had been a hitchhiker taken to a desolate spot. 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. Accounts published in 2024 placed him at two different ones, Tomoka Correctional Institution and Okeechobee Correctional Institution. In 2019 Piers Morgan interviewed him in prison for the ITV series Confessions of a Serial Killer.
April 9, 1953: Bernard Eugene Giles is born in Titusville, Florida.
1972: he marries a seventeen-year-old.
July 1973: his daughter is born.
September 26, 1973: Nancy Gerry disappears.
November 5, 1973: Sharon Mary Wimer, fourteen, vanishes; she is later found strangled.
November 14, 1973: Krista Jean Melton is reported missing.
November 15, 1973: Carolyn Jan Bennett, seventeen, disappears.
November 17, 1973: Paula Darlene Hamric, twenty-two, disappears; she is found strangled eight days later.
December 10, 1973: two hitchhiking girls escape his attack near Titusville when his pistol misfires; late that night Nancy Gerry's body is found in a palmetto thicket.
December 1973: Brevard County deputies arrest him near Titusville and take a .22 pistol from his car.
January 31, 1974: Krista Jean Melton is found shot in the head.
August 13, 1974: having pleaded guilty, he is given several life sentences.
October 1979: he escapes from Florida State Prison with two other inmates and is found twenty-six hours later; he is given fifteen more years for the escape.
2019: Piers Morgan interviews him in prison for the ITV series Confessions of a Serial Killer.