On the night of November 16, 1994, in Jacksonville Beach, Florida, Walter Jamelle Hinton, forty-two, known as Jay, was asleep in his home when the man he had let stay there lifted a forty-pound stepping stone and brought it down on his head. In the struggle that followed the man pushed a towel down Hinton's throat. Six days later police arrested the houseguest for Hinton's murder. He was Gary Ray Bowles, thirty-two, and by then he was on the FBI's list of the Ten Most Wanted Fugitives for killing four other men. He confessed to all six.
Bowles was born on January 25, 1962, in Clifton Forge, Virginia, and grew up in Rupert, West Virginia. His father, Frank, a coal miner, died of black lung disease six months before he was born, and his mother, Frances, married several more times. His second stepfather was a violent alcoholic who beat Gary, his older brother and their mother. At thirteen Gary fought back and badly injured him, and when his mother stayed in the marriage he left home in anger. For the next few years he was homeless and earned money selling sex to men.
In 1982 he was arrested for beating and sexually assaulting his girlfriend and sentenced to six years. In 1991, out again, he was convicted of unarmed robbery for snatching an elderly woman's purse, given four years and released after two. He told police after his arrest that he had then moved to Daytona Beach, lived with a girlfriend and gone back to prostitution; she became pregnant and had an abortion when she learned how he made his money. He said he blamed gay men for the abortion, and that this was what made him a killer.
On March 15, 1994, in Daytona Beach, he beat and strangled John Hardy Roberts, fifty-nine, who had offered him a place to stay, and took his credit card, which he later used in Kingsland, Georgia, and Nashville, Tennessee. His fingerprints and probation records at the scene made him a suspect almost at once. On April 14 he killed David Alan Jarman, thirty-nine, in Wheaton, Maryland; on May 4, Milton Joseph Bradley, seventy-two, in Savannah, Georgia; on May 13, Alverson Carter Jr., forty-seven, in Atlanta; on May 18, Albert Morris, thirty-seven, in Hilliard, Florida. The pattern held each time: he sold sex to the man, beat and strangled him, and took his credit cards. Most of them lived close to Interstate 95, and the press called him the I-95 Killer.
In May 1996 he pleaded guilty to the murder of Walter Hinton and was sentenced to death. In August 1997, already on death row, he pleaded guilty to killing John Roberts. The Florida Supreme Court threw out the Hinton death sentence because the jury had been allowed to hear that Bowles hated homosexuals and that his victim was gay; at a new sentencing hearing in 1999 he was sentenced to death again.
Governor Ron DeSantis denied clemency and signed a death warrant in June 2019, setting the execution for six in the evening on August 22. On July 1 Bowles amended a claim he had first filed in 2017, that he was intellectually disabled and so could not be executed. He had scored 80 on an IQ test in 1995 and 74 in 2017, psychologists said it was likely he was disabled, and people who had known him as a boy described him as forgetful and aimless. The Florida courts refused the claim as filed too late, without a hearing, and the federal appeals court declined to let him bring it. Florida had also refused to let his court-appointed federal lawyers represent him in clemency and paid a lawyer with no death-penalty experience instead.
The U.S. Supreme Court turned down his last petitions shortly after ten that night; Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the case raised important questions. Bowles was pronounced dead by lethal injection at 10:58 p.m. at Florida State Prison near Raiford. He was fifty-seven. His last meal was three cheeseburgers, french fries and bacon. Florida did not carry out another execution until February 2023.