Casanova: Paul John Knowles - Part 02

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2:04Perfect. If you like Sarah J. Mass, Rebecca Yarros, Amber V. Nicole, or Karrissa Broadbent, the Deluxe Special Edition comes with stenciled edges, foil stamping, illustrated end papers, full color character art, and exclusive bonus content. You won't find anywhere else. Temptus of Wrath and Vengeance by New York Times bestselling author, Melissa K. Roiches is available now wherever books are sold. I would call him as evil. When you look at him, you could say pure evil. He would seemingly just sort of blow in and blow out, leaving a trail of violence in his wake. He stabbed him, he shot him, he strangled him, he might have to hand. Whatever was convenient, that's what he used. He kept tapes of some of the S. He documented a lot of his executions. He wanted to be notorious, he wanted to be famous. He never got it. Notaradi. Everybody believes that they would know that they're smarter than others.

3:09It is the assumption behind every conversation anybody has about a case like this. Some quality would come off of him, something in the eyes, something in the way he handled a fork, some wrongness a person would register across a bar, even if they couldn't name it. The record does not support it. May has never supported it. Neighbors described the polite man on the corner. Landlady is described a quiet tenant who paid on time. Colleagues described someone handsome, but unremarkable. In November of 1974, a professional interviewer spent several days and nights with the most one at man in the American South. Her entire trade was reading people and drawing the mound. She was in a car with him in motel rooms with him, eating meals across a table from him. She thought he was a pleasant company. She was neither careless nor stupid. She was working with the only equipment anybody has, which is the belief that a person who means harm gives something away. By then, he had killed 17 people. In the foremost reason of them, we're less than a week in the ground.

5:00I'm really surprised that he, quote, has not gotten a notoriety that Ted Bundy got. Charles Manson got, because to me, he was more brutal than Ted Bundy. He was more brutal than Manson, because Manson was chicken. He had his people do to kill him for him. For the most part that I'm aware of, again, Bundy killed his victims, no killed his victims. But I don't, I think he was more vicious than Bundy was. He wanted notoriety, but he never got it to the standpoint of what Ted Bundy got. Of course, Ted Bundy kept

6:01conning him every time they get ready to execute him. He'd give him one more bit of information. They tried to pull it out as long as they could, and then they caused them to put them in old spark and took care of him. You don't kill 16, 17, 18, 29, 30, 35 people. You just don't do it. They're people that do, but the average person, they don't go around killing people. And for somebody to kill that many people, and that many different types of murders. You know, he's strangling me stabbing me, shooting him. It's something wrong. Sandy Foxx was 45, and she was a Fleet Street journalist. She had worked for the Daily sketch and the Daily Express. She was good at it. She had also started life as an abandoned infant. She was found as a baby in the Grand Union Canal, and she never learned who her parents were. And that is a thing to keep somewhere in mind, because 30 years later, she would write that

7:03hard of what she recognized in him was just another outsider. She had come to the United States hoping to land interviews by the 8th of November. She had been in the country long enough to be tired, and she was drinking alone in a hotel bar at Atlanta. The man who sat down beside her was 28 and tall and by her description afterward, strikingly good-looking. She compared him to two film actors of the period, which is a thing a person only does about a face they cannot get past. He told her his name was Darryl Golden. They left together that night. Several days on the road in America, with a stranger followed, which in 1974 was a reasonable thing for a woman of 45 to do. In a story she could dine out on afterward. They drove. They stopped where they stopped. She was on an assignment that had not come together, and he was somebody to be with while it did not. The car she was riding in had belonged to William Bates of Lime, Ohio, who had been dead for two months. His clothes were in the boot. Two things about those days matter, and both come from her own

8:06reporting afterward. The first is that he could not have sex with her. They tried repeatedly across the days that they were together, and he could not manage it. It troubled him. She came to believe, once she knew what she had been traveling with, that the failure was specific, and that the problem was consent. Everything he had done in the previous four months, he had done to people who could not stop him, presented with a woman who wanted him there. Nothing worked. The second is that he kept asking her about riding. He asked whether she intended to write a book, and he raised it more than once. He suggested there was a book in him, and that she was the person who might write it. She was a Fleet Street reporter who had come to America looking for a story, and the man beside her kept telling her he was one. She took it for vanity. Men talked to journalists like that, then and now. And the ordinary translation is that a person wants to be interesting. There are a lot of people walking around listening, with main characters syndrome. People who treat their lives

9:07like it's some sort of lore. When in reality, they're just like everyone else, not that there's anything wrong with that. She thought he was a man with an inflated idea of himself. He was auditioning a biographer. They separated on the 10th of November. She was let go unharmed, and she got on with her assignment. On the 17th, she was in front of a television when his face came onto it. The man she had spent the week with was the subject of a multi-state manhunt. He was not called Darryl Golden. He had killed a state trooper in a businessman in Georgia. The day after she had last saw him, and the papers had already given him a nickname. The dates were all recoverable, which nights, which motel rooms. What he had been doing in the days before he sat down beside her, she went to see him. He was in the Douglas County jail, in maximum security by then, and he was still granting interviews. And she was a reporter with the best access anybody had. She sat across a table from a man. She had slept beside, tried to sleep with, and asked him questions

10:09with a notebook open. By the time she got home to London, everybody wanted the real story out of her. She wrote afterward that she felt like her own ghost. It took her two and a half years to write it. Killing time came out in Britain in 1977, and in the United States two years after that. It caused her the career. Reviewers went at her for the sympathy and the closing pages, and Fleet Street gave her the cold shoulder, and the work dried up. She had survived him, and then been quietly frozen out for writing it down. She reissued the book in 2004, under a different title, with a new afterward. In it, she took the sympathy back. She acknowledged what she had felt as a bond over being outsiders, and then set it beside the plain fact that he had been no different from the people he killed. He wasn't special. He was worse. She died on Boxing Day of 2005, age 76, 31 years after Atlanta. Still being asked how she had failed to see it, her answer never

11:11changed. There had been nothing to see. Listener, a professional interviewer, a woman who read people for a living, spent several days in close quarters with him, and found pleasant company. This signal was not a faint. There was no signal at all. Well, I didn't know anything about it until the next day the bodies were found around 3-3-30. His wife had pulled a double at Whitey C. She was, I believe she was a nurse at Whitey C, and she had pulled a double, and when she got home she found the bodies and called us, and they responded, and they started investigation. And I was working day shift, and I got off at 3 o'clock, and I didn't know anything about it until the next day. The next day I went to work, and that's when the chief called me in. It said, won't you work on this, follow up on these leads, and etc. And that's when we started sending our teletypes and following up on all that. The GBI was involved. They were called immediately

12:14to come and process the crime scene. The college GBI out of Atlanta, the crime scene text, come down. Back in those days that was a vicious crime. It worked a lot of murders, but that was the bloodiest crime scene I'd ever seen. He was there so many times he bled through the mattress. I'm assuming he followed cars while from Macon. Apparently, cars will invite him home, and he followed him to the house. We never knew, there's nobody to ask. On the 11th of November, the day after he and Fox separated, he picked up a woman named Susan McKenzie. She was a quaintance of Fox. At gunpoint, he demanded sex. She got out of the car and got away, and she went straight to the police. The four months came apart at that moment. Every police department in eight states had been working these deaths separately for four

13:18months with nothing. It broke because a woman survived 20 minutes with him, walked into a station, and described his face. But your officers found him within a day and tried to stop him. He produced a sawdoth shotgun and drove off. And from that afternoon, there was a description of vehicle and an active hunt. Then he went south into Florida, which was the worst decision available to him. Florida was where he was known. He went south into Florida, and West Palm Beach. He forced his way into the home of a woman named Beverly Mabee. Beverly was invalid. She could not get out of the house and she could not run. And a man with a gun was standing in her living room. He left her there and took her sister as hostage instead. Along with their car, he drove north through the night, with a woman in the passenger seat, who had been in her own home an hour earlier. He let her out in four pierce the following evening. Alive, three women in one week, McKenzie got away from him. Beverly was left where she sat, and Beverly's sister was put out of the car alive in four pierce.

14:22Whatever governed those decisions was not mercy in any sense of the word. And it did not extend the Charles Campbell or James Meyer 24 hours later. In November 1974, the police department received a phone call from his car. She found her husband and daughter deceased. For as a injury, he was stabbed by 40-50 times. She was strangled, raped, all stuff was stolen from the house. Amanda was a girl in my class. I don't know how long I had probably known her, but growing up through middle school, high school, possibly even elementary school, the different classes. But when all that happened, I mean pretty much shocked. It wasn't unusual for somebody not to come to school one day, sick or out of town doing something else. But then to find out later, either that I can't remember for that evening, the next day at school, that she had actually been

15:23murdered. It was just disbelief. I mean again, shocks. I mean, how could something like that happen? We thought it might have been a patient from the state hospital, and because of the way the house was ran fact and the brutality, we think it might have been a crazy person from the state. They called in the GBI, because it was so extensive as far as the injuries. We had no idea who were looking for. He stole some credit cards from the cars, and then they started using those, or he started using those in other places, and then that turned out to link him into the murders here, and then they started tying him into other murders that had happened. We got a call from Florida. They had gotten involved with a chase with an individual who later turned to be called John Rooze. In the car he was driving, they found a Atlanta Journal Constitution newspaper on the back seat. On the front page was a story about the car murders in Millageville. When he

16:27walked up to the car, those pulled a shotgun on him and took him as prisoner, put him, and the businessman that he had abducted from, miles from Delaware in the patrol car, and they were right down the road in the patrol car. Those had driving and the troopers in the back seat, and I think he got the fear that he wasn't too bright. Most of us picked the bank years ago, and just never looked back. Meanwhile, the fees keep stacking up. That's where chime comes in. Chime is changing the way people bank. They're not like the traditional banks that charge you for everything and hide the good stuff behind high balances. With chime, you get fee-free banking, no overtracked fees, no monthly fees, no minimum balance fees. You also get 5% cash back on the chime card in a category you choose like gas or groceries, while you're building credit through

17:27everyday spending with no credit check. Your money can grow faster with a savings rate that's nine times the national average. And if you're ever in a pinch, spot me, let's you overdraft up to $200 fee-free. Join the millions who are already banking fee-free with America's number one choice for banking. Head to chime.com slash obscura. That's chime.com slash obscura. Sign up now. It only takes a few minutes. Chime is a fintech, not a bank, banking services and chime card provided by Chimes bank partners, qualifying direct deposits required, terms and limits apply. Go to chime.com slash disclosures for details. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. If I could wake up tomorrow and be better at one thing, they would be putting the work down. I spend my days inside case files and court transcripts and I have a bad habit of carrying all that to the dinner table. Someone will ask me about their day and I'm still somewhere in 1997, 300 miles away, thinking about a detail in

18:31a corner's report. It's not the work that bothers me. It's that I'd like to be all the way in the room I'm actually standing in. That's the one thing I'd fix. BetterHelp is a feeling defined by you. And for BetterHelp, it's a better help therapist who really gets you. It's a focus on global emotional well-being with thousands of therapists and millions of members in over 100 countries. It's progress and it's getting better at leaving the work at the desk. Sign up and get 10% off BetterHelp.com. That's better, H-E-L-P dot com. On the 16th of November near Perry in North Florida, a state trooper named Charles Eugene Campbell, bold him over. Campbell was doing traffic enforcement on a Florida highway. He walked up to a stopped car as troopers due thousands of times a week. Noles took him at gunpoint, put him in the patrol car, and kept driving with a uniformed officer as prisoner in a police radio in the dashboard. Some distance up the road, he stopped a passing

19:34vehicle. The driver was James Meyer, a businessman traveling on work. Noles took him too. He drove both men, the trooper and the businessmen, north into Georgia, into a wooded area in Polaski County, near Big Indian Creek, south of Macon. He took him out into a wooded area, handcuffed him with the troopers handcuffs around a tree and then basically executed him by shooting him in the head with the troopers gun. Both men were walked off the road into the trees and handcuffed to a pine. Together, facing each other, those two men had an hour, a uniformed state trooper who had made a routine stop in a business man on his way to an appointment, both taken at gunpoint by the same stranger, both driven north across a state line in the trooper's own patrol car. In the radio in the dash carrying traffic, about a man hunt that was looking for the man behind the wheel. They could see each other, neither could reach the other, and neither could reach the cops.

20:36Then he shot both in the head and walked back to the car. They were found still fast into it, killing a uniformed state trooper changed everything. Until that afternoon, he had been a one-and-man in a few jurisdictions. From that afternoon, he was the object of a multi-state man hunt with an unlimited budget, and I mean everything thrown at it. He was essentially a dead man walking. By the 17th of November, there was a coordinated hunt running across every state in the country, and all points bulletin was out. The stolen blue Ford Grand Torino he was driving had been identified. Roadblocks were up across North Florida, South Georgia, Southeast Alabama. The Georgia Bureau of investigation was coordinating with departments in Texas, Connecticut, Nevada, and more. The FBI put him on the most wanted list, a patrol spotted him near McDonough, in Henry County, South of Atlanta, and Henry County deputy named Charles Hancock, got behind him, and the chase began.

21:37It ended at the interstate of Highway 42, in Hudson Bridge Road, where officers had put a barricade across the carriageway. The car did not slow down. The Grand Torino went into the barricade at speed, and struck up a troll car hard enough to injure the officer inside it. A man named Jerry K, then it came off the road and noles put it into a tree. Then he was out of the wreck on foot. In November, in a county he did not know. He had a gun in his hand, and he turned and fired at the officers running toward him. Chief detective Phil Mess Howard shot him in the foot. A gun shot through the foot breaks bone and does not stop bleeding on its own. He went into the woods on it anyway. He tried to run a roadblock in Jonesburg, Georgia. He wrecked the car, got out, took off running the exchange gun fire with the deputy. He was shot in the leg. A full man had followed in Georgia. Dogs, officers from several agencies working a grid, helicopters overhead, a perimeter drawn around the ground where he had gone into the trees.

22:42That country south of Atlanta is mixed pine and hardwood bottom cut through with creeks. And in the third week of November, the leaves are down and the visibility is better than it would be in summer. He was on foot wounded in a strange county with a hole through his foot. He walked out of the perimeter anyway. Everybody looking for him was searching ground he had already left. The man who ended it was named David Clark. He was 27 years old. He worked maintenance at a hospital. And he lived near McDonald and he had spent the weekend in the mountains hunting with relatives. He was a Vietnam veteran. He came home knowing nothing about a man hunt. A man came out of the trees. Clark had a shotgun. Clark put it on the stranger and kept him where he stood. Then walked him to a nearby house and had somebody telephone the police. Subsequent to that, he was captured by a youth. He was rabbit hunting on the nose. He run up on the nose and he was bleeding. He had a shotgun.

23:42He took him into custody and notified the authorities. They got down and apprehended him. As I said, a rest is history. I was typing up his finger print cards. And we had a nurse in that to draw blood for analysis. He scared the nurse. She was scared of him. He had a... I don't know how to describe it or the strange look about him. Henry County investigators, Paul Robbins and Billy Payne came and put the handcuffs on. A doctor named Joseph Blissett examined him afterward. The photographs from that examination survive. And in them, all John Knowles is a thin young man. In his late 20s, he sat in maximum security at the Douglas County jail. And in custody, he talked. He talked to investigators and he talked to journalists. He kept graining interviews from that jail. He gave a series of tape confessions to his attorney. And on them, he described 16 murders across Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Nevada, Texas, Virginia, and Connecticut. He put his own total at 35. The figure investigators

24:49could substantiate came to 18. The fate of the confession tapes is the largest loose end in this case. They passed into the possession of his lawyer. Over the years, the cassettes degraded. As magnetic tape does. And at some point, they were reported as damaged and unplayable. Then they went missing altogether. They have never been produced and nobody has ever fully explained what became of them. 16 murders described in the man's own voice with the details only he had. On cassettes that a lawyer put in a drawer to degrade. Whatever he said about the killings nobody has confirmed

25:51went with them. Any detail about the Anderson sisters or Anne Dawson, anything that might have led a family to a body. A handwritten summary of their contents survive. That summary is the reason Imajean Sanders has her name back. On the tapes, he did not call her Imajean. He called her Alma. He killed a child and could not remember her name. And the wrong name is what went out onto the tape and into the summary. On the 21st of December 2011, 37 years later, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation announced a match. They had worked from that summary against skeletal remains found in April of 1976 and unidentified ever since. A murderer's boast written down second hand and filed turned out to be the only thing in the world that could tell a family what happened to their child. I think I documented 18 people that he killed. I think he told his lawyer that he killed 35 people. I don't know what I would venture to say that he killed more than 35 people.

26:52I think he probably killed somebody in every town he stayed in. Travel from Jacksonville to California, Maine, he killed people in Ohio, back to Georgia. I would say more, but I know he killed seven in Georgia. He killed two in Millageville, two in Hawkinsville, two in Macon, one in Halfton County. I know four in Florida, two in Alabama, two in Nevada, two in Connecticut, that I know best on credit card receipts, which right? I think 33 states and 54 cities. Well, you heard those saying the Lepers don't change their spots, kill us don't change our M.O.s. He was a con artist. He could con you out of your wallet, you watch your car. He was a smooth talker. Some people identified him as a ladies man. He was brutal. He was mean. He was vicious.

28:08He's just, thank God we don't have a whole lot of them around. Their serial killers out there. But I don't know what makes a person do what he did. Paul was moved between facilities more than once in the weeks that followed. On the 18th of December 1974, he was being transported from Millageville towards Henry County, Georgia. He had agreed to show them where he had left a weapon. Specifically, the gun he had used on Trooper Campbell and James Meyer. The car was Sheriff Earl D Lee's own vehicle, and it had three men in it. Lee was driving. Georgia Bureau of Investigation Special Agent, Ronnie Angel, was in the front passenger seat. Noles was in the back, alone, and handcuffs and iron legs. A private car has no cage in it. There is nothing between the back seat and the front, but upholstery. Somewhere on Interstate 20, near Lithia Springs, in Douglas County, Noles got a hand-free in the back of that car. There was a paper clip on him. He had been picking

29:11locks since he was a teenager, and it done it to a cell door in July. And nobody had searched him well enough to find a bent piece of wire. The first the two men in the front knew of it. He was over the seat. He got a hand on Sheriff Lee's revolver and fired a single round. It discharged while the weapon was still in the holster, and the shot went through the leather. The car was doing highway speed. In three men fighting in it, Aja Angel drew and fired three times into Noles' chest. At a range of about two feet, he was dead in the back of the car, 28 years old, 145 days after he picked a lock in Jacksonville. The day he died, he was transported in the back seat of an uncaged car, handcuffed in front. No leg arms had shoes on. Posedly had a gym clip in his mouth. He took it and unlocked his handcuffs. He reached over the seat, tempted to get early as gun, shot a hole

30:13through the seat. Aja Angel pulled his weapon and shot him in the chest, killed him. He was killed before he could be tried. Ted Bunny got his motor ride when he was tried. For the killings at the fraternity house and the tall hats out, I believe, where he killed the students. Newspapers suggested afterward that it had been an execution, arranged to spare the state of trial. Nothing was ever proved and no charge was ever brought. If you ask me, the escape in the final end went with the person. It matched up with his behavior and matched up with how this story started. Ronnie Angel spent the rest of his life declining to discuss it with anybody. Listener, cases like this are the reason American law enforcement is built as it is now. Through the 1970s, a series of offenders moved across state lines, killing strangers, and every one of them exposed the same gap. Departments could not talk to each other.

31:17No place existed to compare an unsolved homicide in one state against a similar in another, and nobody was looking at the country as a single map. The FBI opened its behavioral science unit at Quantico in 1972, and through that decade, the agents there began interviewing men in prison and building the analytical work that would later be called profiling. In 1985, the Bureau launched the violent criminal apprehension program. A detective anywhere in the United States could submit the details of an unsolved homicide and have it compared against every other submission in the country. Every element of that system exists because of these four months, and a dozen other stretches like them. None of it helped anybody in 1974. The Connecticut State Police, the Nevada Highway Patrol, and a sheriff in Crawford County, Georgia were each on a murder that made no sense. There was no number any of them could call to learn. They were on the same one. The dead were buried in the survivors went on. Paul Knowles wanted a book written about himself. He asked a journalist to

32:21write it, and she did, but he never lived to see it. He was basically known as the Casanova killer, so I guess he was a pretty much a sweet talker. You know, had it had a real good pickup line for, you know, picking up people and doing different things. Women thought he was a Casanova. That's how you got the name Casanova killer. Women thought he was handsome. I didn't.

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