Bowles was born in 1962 in Clifton Forge, Virginia, into severe violence, he described a childhood of beatings by stepfathers, and left home at thirteen. He had convictions for rape and assault and had served time.
Between March and November 1994 he killed six men: John Hardy Roberts, fifty-nine, in Daytona Beach; David Jarman, thirty-eight; Milton Bradley, seventy-two; Alverson Carter Jr., forty-seven; Albert Morris, thirty-eight; and Walter Hinton, forty-seven, in Jacksonville. All were gay men who had taken him home. He beat or strangled them and robbed the houses, and in several cases pushed an object, a rag, a towel, in one case a dildo, down the victim's throat. The press called him the I-95 Killer.
He was placed on the FBI's ten most wanted list and arrested on November 22, 1994 in Jacksonville, days after the last killing.
He was sentenced to death in Florida on September 6, 1996 for the Hinton murder, resentenced to death on September 7, 1999 after that was vacated, and received life sentences in the other cases. His appeals included a claim of intellectual disability, which the courts rejected. Governor Ron DeSantis signed the death warrant in June 2019, and the execution was carried out at Florida State Prison on August 22, 2019, delayed some hours while the Supreme Court weighed a final appeal and completed at 10.58 at night. He was fifty-seven, and the ninety-ninth person Florida had executed since 1976. The Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops had written to the governor asking him to stop it, citing Bowles's childhood of abuse, homelessness and child prostitution, and arguing that life imprisonment would keep the public just as safe.
That the victims were all gay men, at a time when killings of gay men were not readily connected as a series, is a documented feature of the case and of the delay in linking it.