Serial Killer Investigations (14 page)

In short, Schaefer feels utterly relaxed and at ease with his intended victims, cool and systematic. It can be seen why Ressler regarded him as the perfect example of the organised serial killer.

Perhaps the most basic characteristic of the serial killer is one that he shares with most other criminals: a tendency to an irrational self-pity that can produce an explosion of violence.

In that sense, Paul John Knowles may be regarded not merely as the archetypal serial killer but as the archetypal criminal.

Knowles, who was born in 1946, from the age of 19 had spent an average of six months of every year in jail, mostly for car thefts and burglaries. In Florida’s Raiford Penitentiary in 1972, he began to study astrology, and initiated a correspondence with a divorcee named Angela Covic, whom he had contacted through the personals ads in an astrology magazine. Angela flew down to Florida, was impressed by the gaunt good looks of the tall redheaded convict, and agreed to marry him. She hired a lawyer to work on his parole, and he was released on 14 May 1972. Knowles hastened to San Francisco to claim his bride, but by then she had second thoughts; a psychic had warned her that she was mixed up with a very dangerous man. Knowles stayed at her mother’s apartment, but after four days Angela told him she had decided to return to her first husband, and gave him his airline ticket back to Florida. Knowles exploded with rage and self-pity; he later claimed that he went out onto the streets of San Francisco and killed three people. This was never verified, but it is consistent with the behaviour of the disorganised serial killer.

Back in his hometown of Jacksonville, Florida, on 26 July 1974, Knowles got into a bar fight and was locked up for the night. He escaped, broke into the home of a 65-year-old teacher, Alice Curtis, and stole her money and her car. But he rammed a gag too far down her throat and she suffocated. A few days later, as he parked the stolen car, he noticed two children looking at him as if they recognised him—their mother was, in fact, a friend of his family. He forced them into the car and drove away. The bodies of seven-year-old Mylette Anderson and her 11-year-old sister, Lillian, were later found in a swamp.

What followed was a completely unmotivated murder rampage, as if Knowles had simply decided to kill as many people as he could before he was caught. The following day, 2 August 1974, in Atlantic Beach, Florida, he broke into the home of Marjorie Howie, 49, and strangled her with a stocking; he also stole her television set. A few days later he strangled and raped a teenage runaway who hitched a lift with him. On 23 August he strangled Kathie Pierce in Musella, Georgia, while her three-year-old son looked on; Knowles left the child unharmed. On 3 September, near Lima, Ohio, he had several drinks with an accounts executive named William Bates, and later strangled him, driving off in the dead man’s white Chevrolet Impala. After driving to California, Seattle, and Utah (using Bates’s credit cards) he forced his way into a trailer in Ely, Nevada, on 18 September 1974, and shot to death an elderly couple, Emmett and Lois Johnson. On 21 September, he strangled and raped 42-year-old Charlynn Hicks, who had stopped to admire the view beside the road near Sequin, Texas. On 23 September, in Birmingham, Alabama, he met an attractive woman named Ann Dawson, who owned a beauty shop, and they travelled around together for the next six days, living on her money; she was murdered on 29 September 1974.

For the next 16 days, he drove around without apparently committing any further murders; but on 16 October he rang the doorbell of a house in Marlborough, Connecticut; 16-year-old Dawn White, who was expecting a friend, answered it. Knowles forced her up to the bedroom and raped her; when her mother, Karen, returned home, he raped her too, and then strangled them both with silk stockings. He left with a tape recorder and Dawn’s collection of rock records.

Two days later, he knocked on the door of 53-year-old Doris Hovey in Woodford, Virginia, and told her he needed a gun and would not harm her; she gave him a rifle belonging to her husband, and he shot her through the head and left, leaving the rifle beside her body.

In Key West, Florida, he picked up two hitchhikers, intending to kill them, but was stopped by a policeman for pulling up on a curb; when the policeman asked to see his documents, he expected to be arrested; but the officer failed to check that Knowles was the owner of the car, and let him drive away.

On 2 November, Knowles picked up two hitchhikers, Edward Milliard and Debbie Griffin; Milliard’s body was later discovered in woods near Macon, Georgia; Griffin’s body was never found.

On 6 November 1974, in a gay bar in Macon, he met a man named Carswell Carr and went home with him. Later that evening, Carr’s 15-year-old daughter Mandy heard shouting and went downstairs, to find Knowles standing over the body of her father, who was tied up. It emerged later that Carr had died of a heart attack; Knowles had been torturing him by stabbing him all over with a pair of scissors. He then raped Mandy—or attempted it (no sperm was found in her)—and strangled her with a stocking. The bodies were found when Carr’s wife, a night nurse, returned home.

The next day, in a Holiday Inn in downtown Atlanta, Knowles saw an attractive redhead in the bar—a British journalist named Sandy Fawkes; she went for a meal with him and they ended up in her bedroom. But he proved impotent, in spite of all her efforts to arouse him. He had introduced himself to her as Daryl Golden, son of a New Mexico restaurant owner, and the two of them got on well enough for her to accept his offer to drive her to Miami. On the way there, he hinted that he was on the run for some serious crime—or crimes—and told her that he had a premonition that he was going to be killed some time soon. He also told her that he had tape-recorded his confession, and left it with his lawyer, Sheldon Yavitz, in Miami. In another motel, he finally succeeded in entering her, after first practising cunnilingus and masturbating himself into a state of excitement. But even so, he failed to achieve orgasm—she concluded that he was incapable of it.

Long before they separated—after six days together—she was anxious to get rid of him. She had sensed the underlying violence, self-pity and lack of discipline. He pressed hard for another night together; she firmly refused, insisting that it would only make the parting sadder. He waited outside her Miami motel half the night, while she deliberately stayed away; finally, he gave up and left.

The following day, she was asked to go to the police station, and there for the first time realised what kind of a man she had been sleeping with. On the morning after their separation, ‘Daryl Golden’ had driven to the house of some journalists to whom he had been introduced four days earlier, and offered to drive Susan Mackenzie to the hairdresser. Instead, he took the wrong turn, and told her that he wanted to have sex with her, and would not hurt her if she complied. When he stopped the car and pointed a gun at her, she succeeded in jumping out and waved frantically at a passing car. Knowles drove off. Later, alerted to the attempted rape, a squad car tried to stop Knowles, but he pointed a shotgun at the policeman and drove off.

Knowles knew that he had to get rid of the stolen car. In West Palm Beach, he forced his way into a house, and took a woman named Barbara Tucker hostage, driving off in her Volkswagen, leaving her sister (in a wheelchair) and a six-year-old child unharmed. He held Barbara Tucker captive in a motel in Fort Pierce for a night and day, and then finally left her tied up and drove off in her car.

The next day, Patrolman Charles F. Campbell flagged down the Volkswagen—now sporting altered license plates—and found himself looking down the barrel of a shotgun. He was taken captive and driven off, handcuffed, in his own patrol car. But the brakes were poor, and, using the police siren, Knowles forced another car—that of businessman John Meyer—off the road, and then drove off in Meyer’s car, with Meyer and the patrolman in the back seat. In Pulaski County, Georgia, Knowles took them into a wood, handcuffed them to a tree, and shot each man in the back of the head.

Soon after, Knowles saw a police roadblock ahead, and drove on through it, losing control of the car and crashing into a tree. He scrambled from the wreck and ran into the woods. A vast manhunt was now launched, involving 200 police personnel, tracker dogs, and helicopters. Knowles was in the end arrested by a courageous civilian, who saw him from a house, and he gave himself up quietly.

The day after his appearance in court, as he was being transferred to a maximum-security prison, Knowles unpicked his handcuffs and made a grab for the sheriff’s gun; FBI agent Ron Angel shot him dead. Knowles had been responsible for at least 18, possibly as many as 24 murders.

Sandy Fawkes had seen Knowles in court, and was overwhelmed by a sense of his ‘evil power’. But she had no doubt that on that day he now had what he had always craved: he was famous at last.

And enjoying his notoriety. The newspapers were filled with pictures of his appearance at Midgeville and accounts of his behaviour. The streets had been lined with people. Sightseers had hung over the sides of balconies to catch a glimpse of him, manacled and in leg irons, dressed in a brilliant orange jumpsuit. He loved it: the local co-eds four-deep on the sidewalks, the courtroom packed with reporters, friends, and Mandy Carr’s relatives and school chums. It was an event and he was the centre of it, and he smiled at everyone. No wonder he had laughed like a hyena at his capture; he was having his hour of glory, not in the hereafter as he had predicted, but in the here and now. The daily stories of the women in his life had turned him into a Casanova killer, a folk villain, Dillinger and Jesse James rolled into one. He was already being referred to as the most heinous killer in history.

He was quoted in a local newspaper as saying that he was ‘the only successful member of his family’. At last Knowles had achieved the aim of most serial killers: ‘to become known, to get myself a name’.

Chapter Seven

Despite their local notoriety, Knowles and Schaefer remained relatively unknown to the public at large. It was the Houston killer Dean Corll who first made the American public—and then the world—aware of the rise of a new kind of mass murderer. And although the case cannot compare in psychological interest with many others in this book, it must be discussed as a kind of gruesome historical landmark. Corll was the first serial killer to create the feeling that human depravity had reached a new depth.

Shortly after 8 a.m. on 8 August 1973, the telephone operator in the Pasadena Police Department received a call from someone with a boyish voice and a broad Texas accent. ‘Y’all better come on here now. Ah jes’ killed a man.’ He gave the address as 2020 Lamar Drive.

Within a minute, two squad cars were on their way. Lamar Drive was in a middle-class suburb of Pasadena—a south-eastern suburb of Houston—and 2020 Lamar was a small frame bungalow with an overgrown lawn. Three teenagers were sitting on the stoop by the front door: two boys and a girl. The girl, who was small and shapely, was dressed in clothes that looked even more tattered than the usual teenage outfit. All three were red-eyed, as if they had been crying. A skinny, pimply youth with an incipient blonde moustache identified himself as the one who had made the phone call. He pointed at the front door: ‘He’s in there.’

Lying against the wall in the corridor was the naked body of a well-built man, his face caked with blood that had flowed from a bullet wound.

There were more bullet holes in his back and shoulder. The bullet in the head had failed to penetrate fully, and the end was sticking out of his skull. He was very obviously dead.

The three teenagers had identified themselves as Elmer Wayne Henley, 17, Timothy Kerley, 16, and Rhonda Williams, 15. Henley, the youth who had made the call, also acknowledged that he had shot his friend, whose name was Dean Arnold Corll. The teenagers were driven off to the Pasadena police headquarters. Meanwhile, an ambulance was summoned to take the corpse to the morgue, and detectives began to search the house.

It was obvious that Corll had moved in recently—the place was only half furnished. The bedroom outside which the corpse was lying contained a single bed and a small table. It smelt strongly of spray paint—the type used in ‘paint-sniffing’ (similar to glue or other solvent sniffing). The oddest thing about the room was the transparent plastic sheeting that covered the entire carpet. And lying beside the bed was an eight-foot length of plywood with handcuffs attached to two of its corners, and nylon ropes to the other two. A long hunting knife in its scabbard lay nearby. A black box proved to contain a 17-inch dildo and a jar of Vaseline. It did not require the powers of a Sherlock Holmes to deduce that these objects were connected with some bizarre sexual ritual in which the victims were unwilling.

The new Ford van parked in the drive produced the same impression. There were navy-blue curtains that could be drawn to seal off the whole of the rear portion, a piece of carpeting on the floor, and rings and hooks attached to the walls. There was also a considerable length of nylon rope. In a large box—covered with a piece of carpet—there were strands of human hair. Another similar box in a shed had air holes drilled in its sides.

Back at the police station, Elmer Wayne Henley, nervous and chainsmoking, was explaining how he came to shoot his friend Dean Corll.

He had met Corll, he said, when he had lived in a run-down area of Houston known as the Heights. Corll, who was 16 years his senior, had recently moved into a house that had belonged to his father; it was in Pasadena. On the previous night, he and Timothy Kerley had gone to a glue-sniffing party at Corll’s house. But in the early hours of the morning, the two boys had made some excuse to go out and collect Rhonda Williams, who had just decided to run away from home. Rhonda had been in a state of tension and misery ever since her boyfriend had vanished a year earlier.

Corll had been furious when the boys arrived back at the house with Rhonda. ‘You weren’t supposed to bring a girl,’ he yelled, ‘You spoilt everything.’ But after a while he seemed to control himself and regain his good humour, and the four of them settled down to paint-sniffing in the living room. Paint was sprayed into a paper bag, which was then passed around so that they could all breathe in the fumes. Within an hour, they were all stretched out unconscious on the floor.