Paul John Knowles was born in Orlando, Florida, on April 17, 1946, and spent most of his life from the age of ten in reform schools and prisons, on charges that were almost all theft and burglary. In 1974 he was in Raiford state prison when a San Francisco divorcee named Angela Covic, who had begun writing to him, hired a lawyer to get him paroled and agreed to marry him. He was released in May, flew to San Francisco, and she changed her mind within days after a fortune teller warned her about a dangerous man. He said later that he killed three people in San Francisco that night. No such bodies were ever found.
Back in Jacksonville in July he was arrested after a bar fight, picked the lock of his cell and walked out. What followed ran from July 26 to November 17, 1974, across at least ten states. He strangled sixty-five-year-old Alice Curtis in her Jacksonville home, then took two young sisters, Mylette and Lillian Anderson, aged eleven and seven, who were never found. He killed a woman and her daughter in Atlantic Beach, a woman in Musella, Georgia, a woman in Milledgeville, a businessman named William Bates in Lima, Ohio, whose car he took, an elderly couple camping in Nevada, a beautician in Alabama, a fifteen-year-old girl in Georgia, and others. He raped some of the women and robbed most of the victims, but the pattern was that of a man moving and killing whoever was in front of him.
He was fluent and charming and used it. In November he picked up the English journalist Sandy Fawkes in a Holiday Inn bar in Atlanta and spent six days with her; she wrote a book about it afterwards, Killing Time. He gave a lawyer in Miami, Sheldon Yavitz, a set of tape recordings describing the murders, to be released after his death.
On November 16 he was stopped by Georgia state trooper Charles Campbell, took his gun, handcuffed him in his own car, and then abducted a passing motorist, James Meyer. He handcuffed both men to a tree in the woods and shot them. He crashed through a roadblock the next day, ran into the woods, and was held at gunpoint by a civilian, Dave Clark, until police arrived.
On December 18, 1974, he was being driven by Sheriff Earl Lee and GBI agent Ronnie Angel to point out where he had thrown Campbell's revolver. He slipped a handcuff, reached for Lee's gun, and Angel shot him three times. He was twenty-eight. He had claimed thirty-five murders. About eighteen are accepted, and several of the bodies he described have never been recovered.