Casanova: Paul John Knowles - Part 01

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2:04sign was an ordinary transport and drivers stopped because stopping was what decent people did. Almost nothing that would catch such a man existed yet. Someone that would exploit that trust. There was no national database and no DNA. Most drivers licenses carried no photograph. Motels took cash without a question and a sheriff in Georgia had no reason to telephone a detective in Nevada. And the assumption behind all of it was sound. People are hurt by somebody they know. And the person responsible is found by working outward from the life of the one who was harmed. It is true almost every time and in his white clearance rates in that area ran above 90%. It fails completely against a man who kills strangers and states he has never been in and keeps driving. There's no outward to work toward. The life of the person who died contains no thread that leads anywhere because he was never in it. The Florida summer of 1974 came in hot and wet. As it always does, the underheads built over the peninsula and broke by five. The asphalt steamed and the

3:09air stayed thick into the dark. On the 26th of July, a man of 28 picked a walk in a Jacksonville jail and walked out into that heat. Paul John Knowles was born in Orlando on the 25th of April 1946 to Thomas Jefferson Knowles

4:18and Bonnie Strickland. He did not stay with them. He spent his childhood in foster homes, moved through the system. There was little record keeping and nobody followed what happened to him closely during that period. A more than one occasion, he was sent to the Florida School for Boys. The name gives nothing away. It stood at Mariana in the Panhandle, open since 1900. By the years Paul Knowles went through it, the place ranked among the most notorious reform schools in the United States. The Mariana and the White House boys has affected me my whole life. And you can never sit at you, put it in the pants. These are things that just doesn't go away. On the grounds was a center block building. The boys called the White House. Boys aged six to eighteen were taken into it and beaten with a leather strap. And the survivors who came four decades later described lashings that ran to dozens of strokes. I was in Mariana, Florida when I was thirteen years old. Age of eleven.

5:22Thirty years old. Fifteen and then I turned sixteen one month out those there. We got sent to Mariana for things like skip and school. A skip school. Smoking cigarettes. Smoked. Talking back to the school teacher. That's what took me there. One man told a senate committee he had been given 31 licks at the age of 12. They described a separate room used for rape. They described boys who went into that building and were never seen again. They treated us like animals, bro. Real animals. Animals got more respect than we did. A lot of people don't want to tell a story because they came face to story. The abuse was horrible. The pain lasted my entire life. I'm actually crippled from it from the beatings that they give us. Now you got beat. Fifty licks. Twenty five thirty five forty licks. I really couldn't sit down after that beating. You couldn't even sit down for a month. I broke my muscle and the leg while I was sad. I didn't speak to my mother for three years

6:26because she sent me there. It wasn't no different. Sexual assault. Brutality. They read your letters and then you speak about me around them. Your letter got tore up. I became an alcohol at a very young age. I tried to drink everything away and didn't work. I left there and went to prison after leaving the boys. But effect your whole life. I rebuild against all the thoughts. We hope that there'll be some degree of healing. We're old men now but think about it if you was a 12 year old. You don't understand. Ford closed the place in 2011 after 111 years, the following year researchers from the University of South Florida went over the grounds and found 55 burials far more than the state had ever documented. They recovered 51 sets of remains. A legislative committee was told that more than 180 boys registered at Dozier remain

7:27unaccounted for entirely. The legislature issued a formal apology in 2017 and funded rebarials in a memorial. It took until 2024 for the state to approve a compensation program for the survivors. By which time the youngest of them was 67. Noles was there in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The worst years of the place had. Thousands of boys went through. Decades later groups of them organized under the name White House boys and spent years pressing the state to admit what happened there. What happened to them? Ford had nobody responsible for Paul Noles. So it sent him to that place more than once. And who's to tell if what happened after? Had anything to do with his time in that place? All was first incarcerated at 19. There is a version of that first arrest that prefigures something. By some accounts what he did as a teenager in Jacksonville was to be stopped by a patrolman over a traffic matter and to pull a gun on the officer and take him. 14 years later

8:29he would take a Florida state trooper at gunpoint on a highway near Perry. After that pattern said he went in and he came out and he went back in on the car theft and burglary charges of a young man with no anchor. By his late 20s he had spent most of his adult life inside a Florida institution of one kind or another. In the state of Florida had a file on him that ran to years. By his own later description he had spent so long inside that the outside had stopped being real to him in any practical sense. He had no trade, no property, no address of his own, no person waiting for him anywhere. Nothing in that file predicted what came later. The temptation with a man like this is to read the childhood backward and find the monster in it. A juvenile record and a string of property offenses describe a great many American men who came out of state care in that era. By early 1974 he was at Raeford. The Florida state prison north of Stark serving time and writing letters.

9:29Raeford in the era was the end of the line in the Florida system. It was overcrowded and violent and it ran on a parole model that has since been dismantled almost everywhere. A man serving time then could be released on the recommendation of a board that weighed his institutional conduct, a plan for where he would live and somebody on the outside willing to take responsibility for him. Nolz had no home to go to and no family who wanted him. What he needed was somebody on the outside. He found one by mail. The woman who wrote back was named Angela Kovic. She was recently divorced and worked as a cocktail waitress in San Francisco. Prison correspondence was its own institution then, within made advertising and women writing in. Some of those relationships were transactional, some weren't genuine. A great many were something in between. A man in a cell has nothing with time. He could spend a week on a letter. He can revise. He can present a version of himself assembled out

10:30of what the last letter told him she wanted. She has no way to check any of it against how he behaves at a dinner table or in traffic or when something goes wrong. She was reading a man who did not exist. He had billed him specifically for her across months and nothing else to do. Nolz was good at it and he had months to practice. Angela came to believe she was in love with him. She visited him at Rayford and on one of those visits he proposed and she accepted. She hired a lawyer for him and paid for the representation and that attorney took him to a parole hearing in May of 1974. The parole came through on a condition. He was to move to San Francisco where Angela had arranged a job for him with a billboard company. He flew to California in May of 1974 and she called it off almost immediately. The reason she gave afterward has been repeated ever since and it is the earliest description anybody has of what he was like in a room. She said he projected in

11:31a mirror that terrified her. Some accounts add that a psychic had warned her about a dangerous man in her wife. Whenever the mixture of instinct and superstition, she looked at the man she had been writing to for months in person and ended it. It's worth mentioning here that Paul Nolz was handsome. Very handsome. Out of all the serial killers I've called, he's probably the most classically attractive. He looked like he was carved from stone with a jaw that jutted out and a dignified sort of sternness. Pictures of him online with a cigarette jutting from his mouth and must up hair that looked like it was done for style points. It's an awkward thing to talk about when it's how he got his nickname, the Casanova killer. So it can't be ignored. He never turned up at the billboard company. He was in California four days and then he left. He claimed later to have killed three people on the streets of San Francisco that night. Nothing ever substantiated it. He went back to Florida and in Jacksonville he was arrested again after a bar fight in which he stabbed a

12:33bartender. The charge alone would have sent him back inside for years and he had a record that guaranteed it. On a Friday in late July, he worked the walk on his cell and walked out. A Florida county detention cell in 1974 was a modest piece of engineering and a man with a long institutional history knew exactly what one was. He'd spent years inside buildings like it, even the locks. He had been in custody a matter of weeks. He was out before the state had finished processing the paperwork. That evening he broke into a house on the east side of Jacksonville. Alice Curtis was 65 years old and she was a retired schoolteacher. She lived alone. He tied her hands, pushed a gag into her mouth and put her on the floor. Then he went through her house looking for money. A gag works by filling the mouth. It does not close off the nose so a person can usually breathe around it. Most people do. Alice Curtis wore dentures. A gag pressed over a denture plate can

13:34work it loose. An alluse plate in a mouth that is already packed with fabric has one place to go. The cause of death entered in the record is that she choked on her own dentures. The hands that could have pulled them free were tied behind her. Alice was 65 and she was faced down on her own floor with her wrist tied. Suffocation is not fast and is not quiet. The body fights the whole way down. Somewhere in the next several minutes while a man she had never met opened drawers in another room. She stopped fighting. He found her money and took her keys. He backed her car out of her own driveway and drove off. The retired schoolteacher who had lived alone in that house was on the floor behind him. That was the first one. At least the first substantiated one. It happened on the same day he picked that lock. He had been free for a matter of hours. There were 114 days left. Jacksonville and laid July. Carried a heat that does not lift after dark. The St. John's river runs through it. Wide and brown and slow. In the air off it in August,

14:38it's thick enough to feel on the skin at midnight. Alice Curtis's car lasted until he understood it would be looked for. Then he went looking for another. On the first of August, he was in the Jacksonville area. When he saw two girls he recognized. Liliana Ann Anderson was 11. Her sister, Milette Josephine Anderson was 7. They knew him or knew of him, which is why they were a danger to him with Alice Curtis's car in his possession. Both girls were taken. Their bodies went into a swamp somewhere in North Florida. They were never found. Swamp is the reason. Water mud allocators. A water table that sits at the surface. In country where a body does not need to be buried because the ground swallows it without help. The Anderson sisters were 11 and 7 years old. So far, our Casanova has targeted children in the elderly. The next day, the second of August, he was in Atlantic Beach. Marjorie Howe was 49. She lived in an apartment

15:39in Atlantic Beach. A small coastal town north of Jacksonville where the ocean runs flat and gray in the mornings and the sea oats bind the dunes. It is a place people were tired too. In August, during that time, it was full and hot and the doors stayed unlocked because nothing really happened there. It was a different version of Florida. Her door gave. She was alive when he came through it. She was a small woman and he took a nylon stocking, put it around her neck and pulled until she was gone. A stocking is the weapon of a man who brought none. He had looked around the room. Then he unplugged her television and carried it out. It was a color set, which in 1974 was still enough of a luxury to steal. He gave it to a girlfriend and making. A woman's life ended over a television and the man who took it drove it into Georgia, proud of his little present. On the first of August and Warner Robbins, Georgia, he picked up a 13-year-old girl who was hitchhiking.

16:39Her name was Ima Jean Sanders. She was a runaway from Beaumont, Texas, 600 miles west. She had crossed most of the golf coast on her own before she ever stood on that road. She had run away from home. Middle Georgia in August is heat and pine and long empty stretches of two lane between towns. In a 13-year-old standing on the shoulder of one of those roads, gone to a car with a man because it was 1974 and a normal thing to do. He killed her. Her family spent almost two years not knowing. Her skeletal remains were found in April of 1976 and then they sat in a Georgia evidence room as an unidentified female for another 35 years. On the 23rd of August, he was in Crawford County, Georgia. In the Peach Country south of Maiken, Kathy Sue Pierce was 24 years old and she was at home with her three-year-old son. Crawford County in late August is Peach Country at the tail of the season, hot and still, with the orchards

17:40picked over and the air smelling of fruit going soft on the ground. It is about as far away from a crime scene as a place can look. He forced his way in. She ran. 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 a 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.

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19:53few 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-slashipscura.com-slashipscura. For part of it, his hands still work and go up to the throat and try to get underneath, then comes the stage after that. The child was in the doorway. He was 3 years old and he was in the doorway of the bathroom while a stranger killed his mother. When it was over, noles looked at the boy, then he stepped over what he had done, left the house, and left the 3-year-old to stare at his mother, hoping that she'd wake up. Paul took nothing. There was no burglary reported. That child grew up

20:59the murder of Kathy Sue Pierce did not become a national story in 1974. It's not often a part of this that gets retold. Somewhere in Georgia, a man in his fifties has carried that room his whole life, what he saw in it. At the end of August, he went north out of Georgia and the weather changed with him. Ohio in early September is the beginning of the turn. The corn is high and going brown. The night's drop into the fifties and the light comes in at a lower angle across flat country. On the 3rd of September and Limo Ohio, a man named William Bates went into a bar. Bates was 32. He worked in advertising sales and a life in that town and a job with a title. He had no connection whatever to Florida or Georgia or to a man five weeks out of custody who was already caring at least four deaths. They drank together. Nobody has ever reconstructed more of the encounter than that. Two men at a bar in a small Ohio city, one local and one passing through. No one strangled

22:00him. He took his car. He took his clothes. Bates was found in a wooded area the following month. Strip naked. Decomposed past visual recognition. Identified through dental records. His family had spent a month believing he had walked out of his own life. It wasn't uncommon at the time. There was a Facebook, Instagram, all that social media slot. A lot of people just left their life behind and when some people went missing that was the first assumption because it wasn't uncommon. The car went west and the man driving it was wearing William Bates suits. The next three weeks are why no police department in the country had a chance. Noles drove William Bates car out of Ohio and kept going. He crossed the Mississippi and then the plains and went on into the Great Basin. Out there the country opens into sage and salt flat. The horizon runs 40 miles and the interstate is the only human thing in the frame for an hour at a time. On the 18th of September he stopped

23:00at a campsite outside the Eli Nevada. Eli is high desert country in the east of the state. In a campsite out there in September is a clearing off a two lanes strip of asphalt with sage running to the horizon in every direction. At night the temperature drops 30 degrees off the daytime and the sky goes to the kind of dark that people from the cities have never seen. There are no lights. There's nobody within 20 miles. And then Alexander Johnson and Moas Mildred Johnson were an older couple camping traveling the west as retired Americans traveled in the 1970s. They had pulled into sleep both of them were shot where they lay two reports in the dark a long way apart from anything and then nothing but the sound of a car door and an engine going back onto that highway into that inky dark. Nobody heard it. There was nobody within 20 miles to hear it. Three days later on the 21st of September he was in Texas and he saw a woman on the road

24:01near Segwin. Charlene Hicks had been riding a motorcycle and she had come off it. She was on the roadside with a damaged bike so he stopped. There was a fence between the road and the field. Texas Ranch fence. Four strands of barbed wire on cedar posts. The kind that runs 100 miles beside a farm road without a gate in it. You've seen it. He took her through it. Not over the fence. Not under it. He took her through it. Working fence carries a barb every four or five inches and is strong tight enough to turn a bowl. And a person dragged through it comes out open up along the arms and the back and the legs. Then he was standing in a Texas field in September with a woman already bleeding from 100 places and with all those open wounds and all that blood he raped her right there. He took the stocking off her leg and put it around her throat. The nearest house was not close. The road behind them was empty. She had come off a motorcycle and had needed nothing more complicated than a lift. Understand the geography of those two crimes.

25:05Nevada and Texas are 1200 miles apart. The Johnson's were shot at a desert campsite and Charlene Hicks was killed in a Texas field three days later. The only thing connecting them was a car registered to a dead man all the way back in Ohio. The highway system had its unintended consequences. And in 1974 there was no mechanism on earth that would have put those three deaths in the same file. Not a chance. Six days after Texas on the 23rd of September he was in Birmingham, Alabama. And he met a woman named Ann Dawson. She was a beautician. She was a widow. They did not have an encounter. They had a relationship. Noles and Ann Dawson traveled together for six days. She paid for things along the road. They stayed in motels together. On the 29th of September, he killed her. Afterward he said he had put her in the Mississippi river. Her body was never recovered. Six days is long enough to have conversations. Tea meals. To be bored together in a car.

26:06And at the end of it he killed her and left her somewhere that has never been found. Then he went on driving. You have to wonder if he was waiting for that first argument, that first bit of uncomfortable tension. She really didn't know the danger that she was in. That's what makes it so terrifying. The second she stopped buying him stuff, stopped sweetening up to him. The second he got bored was the moment she died. After Birmingham, the road turned north and kept going. Further than anywhere else in the four months, Marlesboro is a small town and central Connecticut, east of Hartford. In country that has stone walls in the woods, left over from farms that stopped being farms a century ago. October there is the New England October. Hard bright days and cold nights and the maples going over. It is more than a thousand miles from Jacksonville. No Florida escapee had any business in Marlesboro, which is precisely why he was safe there. Nothing in that town connected to anything he had done. Nothing he had done connected to that town. On the 16th of October he went into a house.

27:11Karen Marie Wine was at home. Her 16 year old daughter, Don Marie, was there with her. Both of them were bound in the same house at the same time. They mother in a 16 year old girl. Each of them tied, each of them able to hear what was being done to the other. For however long it went on, he raped them both. Then he strangled them both with an nylon stocking. Karen Wine's older daughter, Cheryl, came home and found what was left of her family on the floor of the house she grew up in. The only thing the family could establish as missing from the house was a tape recorder. The Connecticut state police had that and nothing else. A mother and a teenage daughter raped and murdered in their own home in a quiet town, with almost nothing taken. An investigation like that begins with the people around the family and works its way outward. There was no word to even begin. The man who did it had been in Alabama two weeks earlier. And he'd been Virginia in three days. He turned south again down through New England in the

28:13mid-Atlantic in Virginia, where the hardwoods along the blue ridge were going over into color. On the 18th of October in Woodford, Virginia, he walked into a house. Doris Hovey was 53 years old. She was at home. A rifle was hanging on the wall of her own house. He took it down, stared at it, and shot her once. He wiped the weapon down, laid it carefully beside her body, and walked out of the house without taking a single thing. He had never met her. He had no idea what her name was. He was in the state for no reason. Killed a 53-year-old woman in her living room in the middle of the day, then took 30 seconds to arrange the scene so it would look like her husband had done it. Her husband found her. For a period afterward, the investigators looked hard at the husband. A woman shot in her own home with a gun from that home with nothing stolen. That's a domestic homicide in every textbook ever written. Listener, the evidence said so. They had been arranged to say so. The man who actually did it had never met her. Had no idea who she was,

29:17was in Virginia for no reason, and was two states away within the day. Early in November, he had circled back to Georgia. On the second of November, two hitchhikers disappeared near Macon. Edward Hillard was 23. Debbie Griffin was 30. Hillard's body turned up in the woods nearby. Griffin's remains were not found until the 29th of August, 1975, in Crawford County. Nine months later, in about 30 miles away, Noles was never proved to have killed them. He is strongly suspected. The timing and geography fit perfectly. Millageville is an old town in middle Georgia. They antebellum state capital, with wide streets and big houses on them, and a hard freeze coming by late November. On the sixth and a bar there, Noles fell into a conversation with a man named Carzwell Hall Car. Car was 47. He had a wife and daughter. He was a friendly man who liked company, and he invited the stranger home to spend the night.

30:18His wife was at work. There's been a lot of speculation. Why, he'd bring a handsome man back home from the bar. Well, his wife was away, but it's not my place to speculate. Sometime in the night, Noles picked up a pair of household scissors. Scissors are short and blunt at the point. They need force behind every strike, and a man using them is close enough to feel the other man's breath. Carzwell Car was 47 and he fought. The medical examiner counted 27 separate wounds by the time it was finished. 27, in a hallway or a bedroom of an ordinary Millageville house, then Paul went to find the daughter. Amanda Beth Car was 15. Everybody called her Mandy. She was somewhere in the house while it happened. He strangled her with a pair of nylon stockings. Afterwards, he raped her body. James Josie, a Millageville officer who worked that scene, said years later that it was the bloodiest crime scene he had ever seen. He had a career behind him when he sent it. Josie also gave the clearest description anybody has offered of what they were dealing with. Noles had no

31:22compunction about killing the person. He said, it made no difference whether he strangled them or shot them or stabbed them. He was a martial arts man. He was tough and he was mean. Roy Harris, a Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent, but the other half of it, seeing a child killed like that is awful and it is something he remembered to that day. Mrs. Carr came home to it. She'd gone to work on an ordinary Wednesday and came back to a house where her husband and daughter were dead, killed by a man he had brought home out of the kindness of his heart the night before. On the second week of November, 17 people were dead across eight states and not one police department in the country knew that a single man had killed them. Nobody failed. The crimes did not resemble each other because there was nothing to resemble. He strangled with a stocking and with a telephone cord and with his hands. He shot people with a rifle. They pissed on a shotgun. He stabbed

32:22to man with scissors and suffocated a woman with a gaggy tied himself. The list goes on. Pattern analysis rests on an offender repeating himself and he did not repeat himself. He used whatever was in the room. Seven separate investigations were open in seven states in the second week of November 1974. In Connecticut, they were looking for somebody local. In Virginia, they were looking at a husband. In Ohio, a family believed a man had simply gone. In Nevada and Texas, there was nothing to look at. Two days after his most recent brutal event in a hotel bar in Atlanta, a British journalist looked up from her drink. The man standing there was tall and good-looking and in his late 20s. He told her his name was Darryl Golden. She spent the next several days with him.

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