Paul John Knowles was never tried for any killing. Between late July and mid-November 1974, police in Florida, Georgia and several other states attributed at least 18 deaths to him, according to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. He described more on tapes he recorded for his lawyer and claimed a total of 35. He was captured in Georgia on November 17, 1974, and was shot dead by a GBI agent on December 18, 1974, while being driven to recover a gun. Because he died before any trial, no court ever heard the evidence against him, and the count of his victims has stayed uncertain for half a century.
The press gave him a nickname, the "Casanova Killer." Fox News, in a 2024 report, said the press called him that; Middle Georgia broadcasters and Jacksonville stations still use it.
Knowles was born in Orlando, Florida, in 1946, according to WJXT News4Jax in 2022 and WGXA in Macon in 2016. Little has been reported about his childhood. WGXA said that before 1974 he had been jailed for minor crimes. A 13WMAZ report in about 2020 described him as a smart and charming man of 28 from Orlando who traveled the country stealing cars and credit cards.
Accounts of his earlier record vary, but they agree that in the summer of 1974 he was held in a jail cell in Jacksonville. WGXA and News4Jax said he was serving time there for stabbing a bartender. The Officer Down Memorial Page, which records the deaths of police officers, says he had been paroled in May 1974 and was returned to jail after stabbing a man.
According to media reports summarized by News4Jax in 2022, Knowles picked a lock and escaped from his Jacksonville cell. The Officer Down Memorial Page gives the date as July 26, 1974. Investigators told News4Jax that the escape began the spree, and that police documented it as starting when he returned to Jacksonville.
Alice Curtis was 65, a retired teacher in Jacksonville Beach. News4Jax described her as the first person whose death is attributed to Knowles, and WGXA called her his first victim. She died on the night of his escape, after she was bound and gagged during a robbery at her home, News4Jax reported.
Two cases from the same day show how far apart the record and Knowles's own claims can be.
Ima Jean Sanders was 13. She lived in Warner Robins, Georgia, with her mother, Betty Wisecup, and a sister who was four, the Associated Press reported in 2011. She had hitchhiked from Texas to live with her mother, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. She disappeared on August 1, 1974, the GBI said; her little sister told their mother that Ima had gotten into a van. No report of her disappearance could later be found, and she was never entered in the federal database of missing persons, the AJC said.
In April 1976 skeletal remains were found in a wooded area of Peach County, off Georgia Highway 96. Investigators could tell only that they were those of a young white female. The remains were kept at the GBI Crime Laboratory in Atlanta, where for 35 years they were labeled "unidentified victim No. 5," the AJC's Bill Torpy wrote.
On the same day, August 1, 1974, two sisters disappeared from their home in the Oceanway area on Jacksonville's Northside. Annette Anderson was 11 and Mylette Anderson was 6, according to First Coast News and Action News Jax. Their mother and an older sister had gone to care for a sick relative at about 6 p.m., leaving the girls home for a short time. Their father, Jack, a commercial fisherman, was on his way home and had been delayed by trouble with his boat. He called at about 7 p.m. and spoke to the girls; Annette told him the dog was barking at birds in the front yard. When he called again at 7:20, no one answered. Police believe the girls disappeared in that 20-minute window. When he got home, the family's small dog was shut in a back bedroom and Mylette's favorite doll was gone. There was no sign of forced entry. Neighbors had seen a white car in the driveway between 6 and 7. The girls attended Louis S. Sheffield Elementary School.
Knowles later wrote a letter claiming responsibility for the sisters. He said he had left their bodies at the end of Commonwealth Avenue in Jacksonville. Police searched the area and found nothing. Sergeant Dan Janson of the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office homicide unit told First Coast News in 2019, "I can't say that he is responsible for this." He said he believed it was a false confession, based on what was known about the case, and that Knowles was known for inflating his count for shock value. News4Jax reported that prosecutors had concluded Knowles abducted and killed the girls, and that one of his brothers said he did not believe it. The Jacksonville Sheriff's Office never closed the case. Knowles is the only person ever linked to it, First Coast News said.
Jack Anderson kept the same house and the same telephone number for the rest of his life, in case his daughters came home. He and his wife, Elizabeth, both died without learning what happened to them. Jack is buried beside a marker for the girls that has birth dates but no dates of death. In 2019, on the 45th anniversary, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the Sheriff's Office again asked for tips. Jay Howell, a former director of the center, told Action News Jax that the center had not existed until 1984, and that a 1981 study found only one in nine missing children had been entered in the national system at all.
Marjorie Howie was 49 and lived in Atlantic Beach, near Jacksonville. She was found strangled with her own stockings, News4Jax reported, and Knowles is believed to be responsible for her death. News4Jax did not report the date.
From Jacksonville, Knowles traveled widely. A 13WMAZ investigative team reported that police later linked him to crimes in Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Nevada, Texas, Virginia and Connecticut. Another 13WMAZ report said investigators confirmed that in 1974 he shot, strangled or stabbed at least 14 women and 4 men in five states, which it listed as Connecticut, Texas, Nevada, Florida and Georgia. First Coast News described a four-month spree across seven states. The deaths outside Florida and Georgia have not been described in detail by reliable outlets.
Through the late summer and fall he kept coming back to Macon, Georgia. He had a girlfriend there, 13WMAZ reported, and he did not mean to kill her; she and her children were not harmed. She later told the station she was embarrassed to have been so naive as to become involved with him. Retired Milledgeville police officer Jimmy Josey, who worked the Georgia cases, told WGXA that he could find no clear motive for any of it. He described Knowles as a martial arts expert who was "tough" and "mean."
According to investigators quoted by WGXA, it was in November 1974, in Milledgeville, Georgia, that Knowles killed Carswell Carr and his teenage daughter. Carr was 45, the AJC reported in 2011. He was stabbed with a pair of scissors in his home on the north side of town, and his daughter Mandy, 15, was strangled in the same house. Josey, who went to the scene, told 13WMAZ that the attack on Carr was the bloodiest scene he had ever worked. Roy Harris, then a GBI agent, told WGXA it was a scene he still remembered more than 40 years later.
The exact date of the Carr deaths was not reported. WGXA reported that Trooper Charles Campbell was taken hostage 11 days later.
In early November 1974, Knowles met a British journalist, Sandy Fawkes, in Atlanta. The writer Sarah Weinman, in a 2019 essay for CrimeReads, said Fawkes arrived in Atlanta on November 7 and met him that evening in the bar of a Holiday Inn, where he introduced himself as Lester Daryl Golden. Torpy of the AJC wrote in 2011 that Knowles was wearing the clothes of a man he had recently killed when they met, and that the two had a short affair.
According to Weinman, they traveled together for several days, through Georgia and into Florida, and reached West Palm Beach on November 10. Fawkes was puzzled when he told her he would soon be killed and that he had made tapes that his lawyer was holding. She ended the relationship in West Palm Beach. The next day, Weinman wrote, he drew a gun on a woman Fawkes knew, the wife of a journalist she had been drinking with; the woman escaped and called the police.
Fawkes was born in 1929, was raised in foster care, and worked as a fashion editor and feature writer for British papers including the Daily Mail and the Daily Express, Weinman wrote. She published a book about the week, Killing Time, in Britain in 1977 and in the United States in 1979; it was reissued in 2004 as Natural Born Killer: In Love and On the Road With a Serial Killer. In its first edition, Weinman said, Fawkes wrote that Knowles was as much a victim as any of the 18 people he killed. Fawkes died in 2005, at 76.
In 2024 a woman told Fox News that in November 1974, in the West Palm Beach area, Knowles took her from her home, threatened her family, held her for 18 hours and assaulted her at a motel, and that she escaped by cutting her bonds. She said she had chosen to forgive him. Of the day he died, she said, "I think that was one of the happiest days of my life."
Charles Eugene Campbell had served nine years with the Florida Highway Patrol. He joined on October 1, 1965, attended the 30th recruit class in Tallahassee in 1966, and was stationed at Venice and then at Perry, in North Florida, according to the patrol's memorial page. He was 35 and left a wife and a son, the Officer Down Memorial Page says.
On Saturday, November 16, 1974, Campbell made what the patrol calls a routine traffic stop in Perry. The driver was Knowles. He took the trooper's gun and took him hostage, Fox News reported, and used the siren of the patrol car to stop another driver, James Meyer, and take his car. 13WMAZ described Meyer as a Delaware businessman. Harris told WGXA that Knowles took both men's guns and drove them to Pulaski County, Georgia, about 70 miles from Milledgeville. There the two men were found handcuffed to a tree and shot. The Officer Down Memorial Page lists Campbell's weapon of death as a .357-caliber handgun.
Andy Hill, whose father was the sheriff of Pulaski County in 1974, told 13WMAZ that his father "always described it as the worst thing he'd ever been a part of or had to be a part of." The GBI, in its 2011 release, said Knowles had kidnapped the trooper and the other man near Perry and killed them in Pulaski County. The patrol's memorial gives Campbell's end of watch as November 16, 1974; Torpy, in the AJC, put the deaths on November 17.
Investigators told WGXA that after the Pulaski County shootings Knowles killed two hitchhikers in Macon, and that their remains were found in Crawford County. Their names have not been made public in the reporting. Other accounts give a different date and different circumstances.
The search for Knowles ended in metro Atlanta. He crashed through a police roadblock in Henry County, WGXA reported, and was captured by an armed citizen. 13WMAZ said he crashed his car at a traffic stop and fled into the woods, where a civilian held him at gunpoint until officers arrived. The GBI gives the date and place of the arrest as November 17, 1974, at a roadblock near McDonough. The AJC placed the roadblock on Interstate 75, north of Macon.
He was taken to the federal courthouse in Macon, 13WMAZ reported. An Atlanta Journal-Constitution photograph by Billy Downs, dated November 20, 1974, and now held in the Georgia State University Library's special collections, shows him being escorted by officers to jail. Reports do not say what charges were filed against him in state or federal court, or whether any reached a hearing.
While he was on the run, Knowles had recorded confessions on audiotape and mailed them to a Florida lawyer, the GBI said in 2011. News4Jax named the lawyer as Sheldon Yavitz. According to Josey, Knowles wanted a book written and a movie made, with the proceeds to be split with his mother. A federal judge learned of the tapes after his capture, 13WMAZ reported. 13WMAZ also said he left letters, notes and drawings for his attorney, his parents and the women he loved, and that he talked to a psychologist; the station's documentary includes recorded excerpts of that conversation.
After litigation over their release, the tapes were reviewed by a federal grand jury in 1975, the GBI said. They were never made public and never played in court. A 1975 letter from the then United States Attorney to the GBI summarized what Knowles had said on them. Years later, the only copies of the tapes and their transcripts were ruined when a flood damaged the federal courthouse in Macon, the GBI and the AJC reported. Investigators found the summary letter in the state archives, according to the Associated Press.
On December 18, 1974, Knowles was taken out of the Douglas County Jail to be driven to a place where he said he had left a gun, News4Jax reported. WGXA said the gun was Trooper Campbell's. The car was driven by Earl Lee, the sheriff of Douglas County, with GBI Special Agent Ronnie Angel in the front seat and Knowles handcuffed in the back, the Associated Press reported in 2011.
According to that AP account, Knowles picked the lock of his handcuffs, reached over the seat and grabbed Sheriff Lee's gun, and Angel shot and killed him. WGXA reported that he fired the sheriff's gun at Lee and Angel, that the car crashed, and that the officers were not seriously hurt. Harris, the former GBI agent, told WGXA: "Ronnie pulled his five-shot revolver and shot and killed Knowles, shot him three times in the chest." Knowles was 28. The AJC said the shooting happened near Douglasville while he was trying to escape custody; the GBI's 2011 release says only that a GBI agent shot him while he was trying to escape.
Not everyone accepted the official account. News4Jax reported that Yavitz, his lawyer, said, "I can't believe he attempted to escape." Randall Savage, who covered the case for The Macon Telegraph, told 13WMAZ that Knowles's lawyers and several other people did not believe the official version and thought he had been taken out and executed. No inquiry, inquest or official finding about the shooting has been reported. Knowles never went to trial.
Both men in the car went on with their careers. Earl Lee had become sheriff of Douglas County in 1973 and served five terms, through 1993, the Douglas County Sentinel reported; the Knowles case was one of the best-known of his tenure. He died on October 5, 1998, at 67. Angel later ran unsuccessfully for sheriff of Hall County, Georgia, the AP reported.
The identification of the girl from Peach County came 37 years after she disappeared. In January 2011 an investigator in Texas, working on another cold case, found that Ima Jean Sanders's information had never been entered in the database used to match missing persons with unidentified remains, the AP reported. Her mother, who lived in Beaumont, Texas, and her sister gave DNA samples. They were compared through the national CODIS database with the remains in the GBI laboratory, and they matched.
Investigators then looked for evidence of who had killed her. Rumors had long held that Knowles's tapes included the killing of a teenage girl near Macon. With the tapes gone, the 1975 summary letter was the key. It described Knowles picking up a hitchhiker in August 1974 whom he called "Alma," who said she was 13 or 14, and taking her to a wooded area "some distance from Macon, possibly west." It said he later went back to the place. Her jawbone was never recovered, which the GBI said was consistent with his account.
On November 20, 2011, the GBI medical examiner confirmed the identification and gave the manner of death as "homicidal means of undetermined etiology." The GBI announced on December 21, 2011, that it was "reasonably confident" Knowles had killed her in August 1974. Gary Rothwell, the special agent in charge of the GBI's Perry office, called it the "proverbial cold case" and said her family had never forgotten her. Captain Chris Rooks of the Warner Robins police said he hoped the news would bring the family closure. Josey told the AJC that Knowles had "solved this case himself."
Her mother said she had always wondered where her daughter was. Her sister, Sharron Chessher, who was four when Ima Jean disappeared, told the AP, "Now we do," and told the AJC, "We just want her home." The family was raising money to bring her remains back to Texas for burial in the family plot.
The GBI's 2011 release links Knowles to at least 18 deaths. 13WMAZ said about 20 cases have been closed. News4Jax, in 2019, said he was tied to 20 deaths in a dozen states; in 2022 it said at least 18 and possibly as many as 35. Fox News reported in 2024 that authorities said he embellished his crimes. His claim of 35 comes from the tapes, 13WMAZ reported.
Josey did not think the count was complete. "There's no telling how many people he really killed," he told 13WMAZ. "I would say there are a number of victims out there that we don't know who they are or where they are." Sergeant Janson in Jacksonville took the opposite view of at least one of the confessions. Both views fit the record, which rests largely on Knowles's own statements, a summary of tapes that no longer exist, and investigations that ended with his death.
Proven in court: nothing. He was never tried. No conviction for any killing exists.
Attributed by police or the GBI, never tried: the deaths of Alice Curtis, Marjorie Howie, Ima Jean Sanders, Carswell and Mandy Carr, Trooper Charles Campbell and James Meyer, and two hitchhikers in Macon, among at least 18 the GBI links to him.
Confessed, doubted by investigators: the disappearance of Annette and Mylette Anderson in Jacksonville. Prosecutors were reported to have concluded he took them; the Sheriff's Office sergeant who later handled the case called the confession false. The case remains open.
Claimed only: a total of 35.
Accounts differ on several details: the date of the trooper's death (November 16 in the Florida Highway Patrol record; November 17 in the AJC); where Knowles was shot (near Douglasville, AJC; off Interstate 20 in Henry County, News4Jax 2019); whose gun he grabbed (the sheriff's, AP and WGXA; an agent's, News4Jax citing the AJC); how he freed his hand (picked the lock, AP; a paperclip, Fox News); where he escaped from in July 1974 (a Jacksonville jail cell, News4Jax and WGXA; Florida State Prison, CrimeReads); the date of his capture (November 17, GBI; November 21, CrimeReads); the ages of the Anderson sisters (11 and 6 in most local reports; WGXA gave 7 and 11 and called them family friends); and the timing of the Macon hitchhikers (after the Pulaski County shootings, according to investigators quoted by WGXA, though other accounts place them earlier). The Florida Highway Patrol memorial page says an "FBI agent" shot the suspect; every other source says a GBI agent.
1946: Paul John Knowles is born in Orlando, Florida.
May 1974: paroled, according to the Officer Down Memorial Page; later returned to jail in Jacksonville after a stabbing.
July 26, 1974: picks the lock of his Jacksonville cell and escapes; Alice Curtis, 65, dies in Jacksonville Beach that night.
August 1, 1974: Ima Jean Sanders, 13, disappears from Warner Robins, Georgia; Annette and Mylette Anderson disappear from Jacksonville.
Summer and fall 1974: Marjorie Howie dies in Atlantic Beach; further deaths in other states are later linked to him.
November 1974: Carswell Carr and his daughter Mandy are killed in Milledgeville, Georgia.
November 7 to 10, 1974: travels with the journalist Sandy Fawkes from Atlanta to West Palm Beach.
November 1974: a woman in the West Palm Beach area later says he abducted her; she escaped.
November 16, 1974: takes Trooper Charles Campbell hostage at Perry, Florida, and stops James Meyer; both are found shot in Pulaski County, Georgia.
November 17, 1974: captured at a roadblock near McDonough, Georgia.
November 20, 1974: photographed being escorted to jail.
December 18, 1974: shot dead by GBI agent Ronnie Angel while being driven by Douglas County Sheriff Earl Lee.
1975: a federal grand jury reviews his tapes; the U.S. Attorney writes a letter summarizing them.
April 1976: skeletal remains are found in Peach County, Georgia.
1977: Sandy Fawkes publishes Killing Time.
Later years: the tapes and transcripts are ruined in a flood at the federal courthouse in Macon.
January 2011: DNA from Ima Jean Sanders's mother and sister is submitted for comparison.
November 20, 2011: the GBI medical examiner confirms her identification.
December 21, 2011: the GBI announces it is "reasonably confident" Knowles killed her.
August 1, 2019: on the 45th anniversary, Jacksonville police and the national center renew the appeal for the Anderson sisters.