Florida Executes Gary Ray Bowles, the I-95 Killer
Bowles, 57, was put to death at Florida State Prison for the 1994 Jacksonville Beach murder of Walter Hinton, the last of six men the AP says he killed that year.
Published
Florida executed Gary Ray Bowles by lethal injection at Florida State Prison in Starke on August 22, 2019. He was 57. The sentence he died under was for the November 1994 murder of Walter Hinton, the man the Associated Press described as the sixth and last of the men Bowles killed in an eight-month run along the Interstate 95 corridor that earned him the press name "I-95 killer."
The court record of that last killing is short and terrible. Hinton had let Bowles move into his mobile home. One night, after the two men had smoked marijuana and drunk beer, Hinton went to bed. Bowles went outside, picked up a concrete block, carried it in and set it on a table. After thinking for a few minutes, he took it into Hinton's room and dropped it on his head, fracturing his face from cheek to jaw. Hinton was still conscious on the floor when Bowles began to strangle him. Bowles then stuffed toilet paper down his throat and pushed a rag into his mouth, and Hinton smothered to death.
Bowles pleaded guilty to first-degree murder, and a jury recommended death. The Florida Supreme Court upheld the conviction but threw out the sentence, ruling that the trial court should not have let the jury hear that Hinton was gay and that Bowles hated homosexuals. A second jury also recommended death, the judge imposed it again, and the state's high court affirmed it. In 2010 a federal appeals court rejected his habeas petition.
According to the AP, the killings began in Daytona Beach in March 1994 with the murder of John Hardy Roberts. It was not hard for police there to name a suspect: Bowles left a probation document at the scene and was caught on an ATM camera trying to draw money from Roberts' account. Catching him proved harder, and by the time he was arrested five more men had died in Rockville, Maryland; Savannah, Georgia; Atlanta; Nassau County, Florida; and finally Jacksonville Beach. In Savannah the dead man was Milton Bradley, a 72-year-old veteran of World War II. In each case, the AP reported, Bowles forced something into the victim's throat: towels, rags, toilet paper, dirt or leaves.
He had been violent long before 1994. He grew up in West Virginia. His mother remarried several times, and according to court records his first two stepfathers were abusive. At 13 he fought back against the second, smashing a rock into his head and nearly killing him, and then he left home. In 1982 he was convicted of beating and raping his girlfriend in Tampa and sentenced to eight years in prison.
The men who had worked the cases had their own view of him. Thomas Youngman, the Daytona Beach detective assigned to the Roberts murder, thought Bowles had probably come to enjoy it. After the third, fourth, fifth and sixth, the detective wondered, "When do you stop?" Investigators said that if Bowles had not been caught, he would have gone on killing.
Sources
- Gary Ray Bowles v. Secretary for the Department of Corrections, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit (via FindLaw)
- Florida executes man who preyed on gay men during 8-month killing spree, CBS News (Associated Press)