In persons with an abnormally strong sex-drive, fantasy can easily build up into what I have sometimes called “superheated sex,” in an analogy with superheated steam. In Schaefer’s case this led him to killing livestock, beheading them with a machete before having sex with the carcasses. The desire to kill things became so strong that he even experienced the urge to shoot at cows, and thought about joining the army because he liked the idea of killing human beings. But by the time he was old enough for the draft, in 1968, he had changed his mind. He later claimed that he had obtained deferment by wearing women’s underwear.
There followed unsuccessful attempts to become a priest, then a schoolteacher. He lost the latter job at Plantation High School after a few weeks because of “persistent efforts to impose his moral and political views on the students.” The same thing happened when he became a student teacher at Stranahan High School, revealing the same obsessive need to exercise authority.
His first murder seems to have occurred in September 1969. The victim was Leigh Hainline Bonadies, a schoolmate of Sondra, whom Schaefer had lusted after when he was her neighbor and tennis partner. In August 1969 she married, but it was not a success, and after two weeks she walked out, leaving a note saying that she was going to Miami. According to Schaefer, she asked him for a lift to the airport, but never arrived at his house. But she vanished, and when Schaefer was arrested in 1973, some of her jewelry was found in his bedroom. He never admitted to killing her.
Two months later, on December 18, 1969, Carmen Hallock, a twenty-two-year-old cocktail waitress, told her sister–in-law that she intended to meet a schoolteacher who had offered her undercover work for the government, with “lots of money.” This was the last time she was ever seen alive.
On December 29, 1970, nine-year-old Peggy Rahn and eight-year-old Wendy Stevenson vanished from Pompano Beach. A clerk identified photographs of the two girls and said he had seen them with a six-foot-tall man in his twenties who was buying them ice cream. Neither girl was ever found, and Schaefer later claimed—perhaps jokingly—that he had killed them and eaten their flesh cooked with onions and peppers, having been reading about the 1930s child killer Albert Fish, who claimed to have eaten an eight-year-old girl.
Another twenty-two-year-old cocktail waitress, Belinda Hutchens, was last seen on January 5, 1972, driving off in a blue sedan before she vanished. Her drug-addict husband later identified the car as the one belonging to Schaefer.
There is no exact record of Schaefer’s murders, but when his mother’s house was searched in April 1973, items found included a purse owned by Susan Place; three pieces of jewelry belonging to Leigh Bonadies; two teeth and a shamrock pin belonging to Carmen Hallock;newsclippings on the Bonadies and Hallock cases; an address book belonging to Belinda Hutchens; a passport, diary, and book of poetry owned by nineteen-year-old Collette Goodenough, last seen in January 1973; the driver’s license of nineteen-year-old Barbara Wilcox, who vanished with Goodenough; a piece of jewelry owned by Mary Briscolina, missing with a female friend since October 1972; an envelope addressed to “Jerry Shepherd”; eleven guns and thirteen knives; photos of unknown women and of Schaefer dressed in women’s underwear; and more than a hundred pages of writings and sketches, detailing the torture and murder of “whores.”
Schaefer’s writings in Killer Fiction detail many other murders that sound oddly authentic—in that they do not seem to have been written merely to gloat—including one of a woman whose body was dumped in a water-filled quarry in an automobile.
It is apropos to Schaefer that Ressler has a passage describing the organized serial killer:
. . . let me point out the attributes of the organized offender that are present so far in the narrative. The abductor personalized the victims by talking with them, used his own vehicle, and conned the women into his car by means of his verbal skills. He brought his own threatening weapon to the scene and took it away with him, had a rape kit, and was plainly planning to complete sexual acts with the women prior to torture and murder. After the murder, he was going to hide and dispose of the bodies. He displayed mobility and adaptive behavior during the crime when he left the women tied up and went to pay attention to some other aspect of his life, telling them that he would return and finish them off later.
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 organized 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 nineteen 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 divorcée 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 May 14, 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 on to the streets of San Francisco and killed three people. This was never verified, but it is consistent with the behavior of the disorganized serial killer.
Back in his hometown of Jacksonville, Florida, on July 26, 1974, Knowles got into a bar fight and was locked up for the night. He escaped, broke into the home of a sixty-five-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 recognized 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 eleven-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, August 2, 1974, in Atlantic Beach, Florida, he broke into the home of Marjorie Howie, forty-nine, 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 August 23, he strangled Kathie Pierce in Musella, Georgia, while her three-year-old son looked on; Knowles left the child unharmed. On September 3, 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 September 18, 1974, and shot to death an elderly couple, Emmett and Lois Johnson. On September 21, he strangled and raped forty-two-year-old Charlynn Hicks, who had stopped to admire the view beside the road near Sequin, Texas. On September 23, in Birmingham, Alabama, he met an attractive woman named Ann Dawson, who owned a beauty shop, and they traveled around together for the next six days, living on her money; she was murdered on September 29, 1974.
For the next sixteen days, he drove around without apparently committing any further murders; but on October 16 he rang the doorbell of a house in Marlborough, Connecticut; sixteen-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.
With cigarette dangling from his mouth and his long hair disheveled, Paul John Knowles appears to be the archetypal criminal. In 1974, the Florida parolee was charged and convicted of six slayings in several states. (Associated Press)
Two days later, he knocked on the door of fifty-three-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 November 2, 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 November 6, 1974, in a gay bar in Macon, he met a man named Carswell Carr and went home with him. Later that evening, Carr’s fifteen-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 practicing 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 realized 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 killing the two men, Knowles spotted 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 two hundred 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 eighteen, possibly as many as twenty-four 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 behavior. 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 coeds 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 center 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.”
7
The Worst Mass Murderer Yet
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 August 8, 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 southeastern 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 Wa
yne Henley, seventeen, Timothy Kerley, sixteen, and Rhonda Williams, fifteen. 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 seventeen-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 airholes drilled in its sides.