Bernard Eugene Giles was born in Titusville, Florida on April 9, 1953, one of four children. By 1973 he was twenty, working as an electrician, and living in a trailer park with his wife and their five-month-old daughter.
Between September and November of that year he killed five women and girls in Brevard County. He offered lifts to people hitchhiking on U.S. Highway 1, drove them to remote ground, raped them, and shot or strangled them. The bodies were left in orange groves and wooded country around Titusville.
Nancy Gerry, eighteen, went missing on September 26 and was found on December 10, fully clothed and shot in the head. Sharon Mary Wimer, fourteen, went missing on November 5 and was found strangled, wearing nothing but a St Christopher's necklace. Krista Jean Melton went missing on November 14 and was found on January 31, 1974, fully clothed and shot in the head; her age is given as both fourteen and fifteen. Carolyn Jan Bennett, seventeen, went missing on November 15, and her skeleton was found on Christmas Day, shot in the head. Paula Darlene Hamric, twenty-two, a mother who was hitchhiking to visit her husband, went missing on November 17 and was found eight days later, naked, strangled and with her hands tied.
He was caught because two girls got away from him. On the night of December 9 he picked up two fourteen-year-olds and drove them to secluded ground near Titusville. They fought him, and when he tried to shoot them the gun jammed. They escaped, went to the police, and gave a description of him and of his car. They had also seen an electrician's manual inside it with his name on the cover. Deputies stopped him near Titusville on December 11.
He was charged at first only with assault and attempted rape. A .22 pistol was recovered from the car, and ballistic testing tied it to the killing of Nancy Gerry.
He denied everything to begin with and was examined and found fit to stand trial. The State Attorney's office in Brevard County said that if he were convicted it would ask for the death penalty. Shortly before the trial he made a bargain with the prosecution instead: he confessed to the murder of Paula Hamric, and then pleaded guilty to the four other murders and to a series of non-lethal attacks and attempted murders. He was given consecutive life sentences and declared a mentally disturbed sex offender.
He also admitted holding three other women at gunpoint and letting them go unharmed.
In October 1979 he escaped from Florida State Prison with two other inmates, using improvised distractions. He was recaptured the next day and received a further fifteen years. He has been moved between Florida prisons since and is still serving his sentence.
He was interviewed in prison in 2019 for the ITV series Confessions of a Serial Killer with Piers Morgan.
Three points on the record. The date of sentence is reported both as August 1974, when contemporary Florida newspapers covered his guilty pleas, and as February 17, 1977, which is the date this roster previously carried; both may be right, since he was moved through a hospital order as well as a prison sentence. An earlier version of this entry said the confessions were the case, and that four of the five deaths would otherwise have gone undiscovered rather than merely unsolved; that is wrong, because four of the five bodies were found by other means and the ballistics on Gerry's murder preceded any confession. And a claim circulates that he later admitted four further killings, bringing the total to nine; it appears only in low-quality secondary sources, has never been charged or corroborated, and is not counted here.