Paul Rowles holds one murder conviction. A second death was tied to him by DNA after he was already dying in prison, and a third was attributed to him by a sheriff's office two years after he was dead, on circumstantial evidence and a note in his own cell calendar. The entry is worth reading for what each of those three levels of proof is worth.
He was born in 1948. Linda Fida, twenty, was raped and killed in Miami in March 1972. He confessed, and was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1976. He was paroled in 1985, moved to Pinellas County and then to Gainesville, and worked delivering pizza and for a construction firm. In 1994 he was sentenced to nineteen years for the kidnap and rape of a teenager from Clearwater who escaped.
Elizabeth Foster, twenty-one, a Santa Fe College student, was raped and killed in Gainesville in March 1992 and her body left in woodland off Williston Road. The case was cold for two decades until advanced DNA testing linked him to it in 2012. He was interviewed, became extremely hostile, and died of cancer in prison on February 12, 2013 before any charge could be brought.
Tiffany Sessions, twenty, a University of Florida economics student, went out for a walk on Williston Road on February 9, 1989 and never came back. She left no trace: not her Walkman, not her gold watch. Her father, a property developer, enlisted Dan Marino and other public figures to keep the case visible for twenty-five years. Rowles lived in the area at the time. After his death investigators took his belongings and found a 2002 calendar on which he had written "2/9/89 #2": the date she disappeared, beside a number two. In February 2014 the Alachua County sheriff named him as the man responsible, while stating plainly that there is no DNA connecting him to Sessions. Searches of the woodland in 2014 and later found nothing. Her remains have never been found.
One conviction, one forensic link that was never charged, one attribution resting on a number written in a prison calendar.