Early on the morning of November 16, 1974, Florida Highway Patrol Trooper Charles Eugene Campbell, thirty-five, spotted a stolen car near Perry, Florida, and pulled it over. The driver, a redheaded man of twenty-eight, got to the trooper's gun first. He took Campbell hostage in his own patrol car, used its siren to pull over a passing motorist, James Meyer, twenty-nine, and moved both men into Meyer's car. Across the state line, in Pulaski County, Georgia, he walked them into the woods, handcuffed them to a tree and shot them with the trooper's revolver. The man was Paul John Knowles. Investigators have since tied him to about eighteen deaths in the four months since he had broken out of a Florida jail.
Knowles was born in Orlando, Florida, in April 1946; accounts give the day as the 17th or the 25th, to Thomas Jefferson Knowles and Bonnie Strickland. He passed through foster homes and was sent more than once to the Florida School for Boys at Marianna, and he spent most of the years after that in juvenile institutions and prisons, mostly for theft and burglary; in 1965 he kidnapped a police officer and was sentenced to five years. He was paroled and returned to prison more than once. In 1974, while he was in prison in Raiford, he began corresponding with Angela Covic, a divorcee in San Francisco, who hired a lawyer to help win his parole and agreed to marry him. He was released in May and flew to California, and within days she broke it off, saying later that he gave off an aura of fear that terrified her. He claimed to have killed three people on the streets of San Francisco that night; no such killings have ever been matched to him.
Back in Jacksonville, where his parents lived, he was arrested on July 26 for assaulting a bartender in Jacksonville Beach, picked the lock of a temporary holding cell and escaped. That night he broke into the Jacksonville Beach home of Alice Curtis, sixty-five, a retired schoolteacher, gagged her while he ransacked the house for money and valuables, and drove off in her car. She choked to death on the gag.
The next week was the worst of it. On August 1 he picked up Ima Jean Sanders, thirteen, who had run away from Beaumont, Texas, to be with her mother in Warner Robins, Georgia; he raped and strangled her. In his confession tapes he called her "Alma," and it was not until December 21, 2011, that the Georgia Bureau of Investigation identified her; her skeletal remains had been found in April 1976. He also claimed that on the same day, outside Jacksonville, he took two sisters, Lillian and Mylette Anderson, eleven and seven, and strangled them. The girls have never been found, and investigators have said they believe that confession was false. On August 2 he met Marjorie Howie, forty-nine, in Atlantic Beach, Florida, and strangled her with a nylon stocking in her apartment; her television set was gone. On August 23 he forced his way into the home of Kathie Sue Pierce, twenty-four, in Musella, Georgia, and strangled her with a telephone cord in the bathroom. Her three-year-old son was in the house. He was not hurt.
Then Knowles went north and west, living on stolen cars and credit cards; he eventually used stolen cards in some twenty-five states and covered around twenty thousand miles. On September 3, at Scott's Inn, a roadside bar near Lima, Ohio, he drank with William Bates, thirty-two, an account executive for Ohio Power Company, and the two left together. Bates's strangled body was found in the woods in October; police had already found Alice Curtis's car abandoned near the bar and Bates's car gone. On September 18, driving it, Knowles bound and shot Emmett and Lois Johnson, sixty-two and fifty-nine, who were camping near Ely, Nevada. Charlynn Hicks, forty-two, whose motorcycle had broken down near Seguin, Texas, was reported missing by her family on September 22 and found raped and strangled beside the road near a rest stop outside Seguin on September 25. Ann Dawson, a beautician from Birmingham, Alabama, met him on September 23 and traveled with him for several days before he killed her on September 29. Her body has never been found.
On October 16 he entered the home of Karen Wine and her sixteen-year-old daughter, Dawn, in Marlborough, Connecticut, bound and raped them, and strangled them with a nylon stocking. Karen's older daughter, Cheryl, found them. The only thing missing from the house was a tape recorder. Two or three days later, accounts differ between October 18 and 19, he forced his way into the home of Doris Hovey, fifty-three (some records spell the name Hosey), in Woodford, Virginia, took down her husband's rifle and shot her, then wiped his prints and laid the gun beside her. Investigators could find no reason for it. Not long afterward, driving Bates's car with two hitchhikers he had picked up in Key West, he was stopped by a policeman who let him go with a warning; shaken, he dropped the hitchhikers in Miami unharmed.
In Miami he contacted a lawyer, Sheldon Yavitz, and recorded tapes describing his crimes, to be released after he was dead. On November 6, in a bar in Macon, Georgia, he met Carswell Carr, forty-five, who invited him home to Milledgeville for the night. Knowles stabbed Carr to death in his bedroom and strangled his fifteen-year-old daughter, Amanda, called Mandy, and tried to violate her body. "Seeing a child killed like that is just awful," said Roy Harris, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent who went to the house. Two hitchhikers seen near Macon on November 2, Edward Hilliard and Debbie Griffin, are also widely attributed to him; Hilliard's body was found in nearby woods, and Griffin was never found.
On November 8, in the bar of an Atlanta hotel, he met Sandy Fawkes, a forty-five-year-old British journalist on assignment in the United States. He called himself Daryl Golden. She was taken with his looks, a "cross between Robert Redford and Ryan O'Neal," she said, and they spent the next few days together before parting on November 10. The next day he offered to drive an acquaintance of hers, Susan MacKenzie, to the hairdresser, pulled off the road and demanded sex at gunpoint. She got away and went to the police; when officers tried to stop him, he waved a sawed-off shotgun and escaped. In West Palm Beach he posed as a tax agent to get into the home of Beverly Mabee, who had cerebral palsy, tied her to her bed, and took her sister, Barbara Abel, and their car. He drove Abel to Fort Pierce and let her go. The next morning Trooper Campbell recognized the car.
After the killings in Pulaski County, Knowles kept Meyer's car until he crashed through a police roadblock and ran into the woods, where he was caught on November 17. On December 18, 1974, Sheriff Earl Lee and GBI Special Agent Ronnie Angel were driving him along Interstate 20 toward Henry County, where he said he had thrown away Trooper Campbell's gun. He was handcuffed in the back seat. He slipped a handcuff and grabbed the sheriff's revolver; the GBI's account says the gun went off through the holster in the struggle. "Ronnie pulled his five-shot revolver and shot and killed Knowles, shot him three times in the chest," Harris said. The car went off the road. Knowles was twenty-eight and was never tried for any of the killings.
He had claimed thirty-five. About eighteen have been tied to him, and some counts run to twenty. Several of the people he named, or described, have never been found. Fawkes wrote a book about her days with him, Killing Time, later republished as Natural Born Killer. She had been with him, she wrote, exactly a week before she learned who he was.