On February 6, 2014, Alachua County Sheriff Sadie Darnell stood at a news conference in Gainesville and said it was "highly probable" that Paul Rowles was the man responsible for the disappearance and likely murder of Tiffany Sessions, the University of Florida student who had walked out of her apartment twenty-five years earlier and never been seen again. Rowles could not answer the charge. He had died in prison a year before, and the evidence the sheriff's office laid out was a timeline, his job, his absence from work, and a line of numbers in his own hand. Sessions's remains have never been found, and the sheriff said the office was still looking for the last piece of conclusive connection.
Rowles was born on April 28, 1948. His first known victim was his neighbor Linda Fida, twenty, at the Robin Hood Apartments on Northwest Second Avenue in North Miami. He stalked her, waited for her husband to leave, broke in, raped and tortured her, and killed her by stabbing her in the breast, on March 29, 1972. He admitted that it was a fantasy he had long held. He confessed, and Judge Leonard Rivkind sentenced him to life imprisonment in 1976 with a warning that he should never be released. His wife, also named Linda, defended him loudly after his arrest. A 1994 account told to a later victim described the Fida killing as a strangling; the court record and the other accounts describe a stabbing.
He walked out of prison on parole on December 17, 1985. He lived first in Pinellas County and in April 1988 moved to Gainesville, where he delivered pizza and worked for a construction-related company whose job site lay along Williston Road.
Tiffany Louise Sessions was born on October 29, 1968, in Miami and was a business student at the University of Florida. Between four and five in the afternoon of February 9, 1989, she told her roommate she was going out alone for a power walk and left her apartment on Southwest 35th Place in a white sweatshirt with "Aspen" printed at the collar, red sweatpants and tennis shoes, wearing a two-tone Rolex watch she almost never took off and carrying a black Sony Walkman. She left her wallet, identification and keys behind. Five hours later her roommate called her mother. The police did not treat it as a crime at first, because there was no scene and no sign of a struggle. Neighbors said a woman of her description had been talking to people in a car; no one could say whether she got in. The FBI called the search that followed the largest in Florida's history. Her parents, Patrick and Hilary Sessions, kept it going for decades, and her mother later wrote a book, Where's My Tiffany? An earlier suspect, Michael Knickerbocker, reportedly told other inmates he had killed her, but he had not been living in Gainesville at the time. Rowles had. He was working near the route she walked, and he did not turn up for work the day she vanished.
Three years later, on March 15, 1992, Elizabeth Foster, twenty-one, a student at Santa Fe Community College, was reported missing in Gainesville. Her body was found eleven days later in woods off Williston Road, about a mile from where Sessions had disappeared. The case went cold.
By then Rowles was in prison again. In 1994 he climbed through a window of a Clearwater apartment, forced a fifteen-year-old girl out at knifepoint, bound her with duct tape and drove her to his apartment in Jacksonville, where he sexually assaulted her. When he let her go into another room for a drink she unlocked the front door with one hand, shoved aside the tire he had used to bar it with the other, and ran to a neighbor. She thought it took ten to fifteen seconds. He was sentenced on July 13, 1994; one account gives nineteen years, another says the sentences for his sexual crimes totaled sixty-nine.
In February 2012 a cold-case unit matched DNA from the Foster scene to Rowles (a 2014 television report dates the match to 2013). Detective Kevin Allen of the Alachua County Sheriff's Office interviewed him, and in January 2013 investigators found an address book in which Rowles had kept information on the people he had killed. It listed Linda Fida as the first. It may also hold a cryptic reference to Foster. And it carried the entry "#2 2/9/89 #2", which investigators read as the date Tiffany Sessions disappeared and as a mark that she was his second victim. Rowles died of cancer in prison a month later, on February 12, 2013, without ever admitting either killing. He was never charged with Foster's murder.
After the 2014 announcement, crews searched the woods near where Foster's body had been found, the area to which Rowles was also thought to have taken the Clearwater girl in 1994, for two weeks. They found nothing. The Clearwater survivor learned only from the front page of the newspaper that there were other suspected victims. "I know for sure I wouldn't have made it out if I hadn't escaped," she said.