The Serial Killers

by Colin Wilson

  Back in his home town of Jacksonville, Florida, on 26 July 1974 Knowles got into a fight in a bar 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. 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 eleven-year-old sister Lillian were later found in a swamp.

  What followed was a totally 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, forty-nine, and strangled her with a stocking; he 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 Impala. After driving to California, Seattle and Utah (using Bates’s credit cards) he forced his way into a caravan 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 forty-two-year-old Mrs 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 off her money; she was murdered on 29 September. For the next sixteen days he drove around without apparently committing any further murders; but on 16 October he rang the doorbell of a house in Marlborough, Connecticut; it was answered by sixteen-year-old Dawn White, who was expecting a friend. Knowles forced her up to the bedroom and raped her; when her mother, Karen White, returned home, he raped her too, then strangled them both with silk stockings, leaving with a tape recorder and Dawn White’s collection of rock records. 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 kerb; when the policeman asked to see his documents, Knowles expected to be arrested; but the officer failed to check that he was the owner of the car, and let him drive away.

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

  On 6 November, 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 Carr – or attempted it (no sperm was found in the vagina) and strangled her with a stocking. The bodies were found when Carr’s wife, a night nurse, returned home.

  The following 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. 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 in Miami, Sheldon Yavitz. In another motel, he finally succeeded in entering her, after first practising cunnilingus and masturbating himself into a state of excitement. Even so, he failed to achieve orgasm; she concluded that he was incapable of it.

  Long before they separated – after a mere six days together – she was anxious to get rid of him. She had sensed the underlying violence, self-pity, lack of discipline. He pressed hard for another night together; she firmly refused, insisting that it would only make the parting more difficult. 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 travelling 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 turning, 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 girl named Barbara Tucker hostage, driving off in her Volkswagen, leaving her sister (in a wheelchair) and six-year-old child unharmed. He held Barbara Tucker captive in a motel in Fort Pierce for a night and day, then finally left her tied up and drove off in her car.

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

  Soon after, he saw a police roadblock ahead, and drove on through it, losing control and crashing into a tree. He ran into the woods, and a vast manhunt began, involving two hundred police, tracker dogs and helicopters. In fact, Knowles was 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 murders, possibly as many as twenty-four.

  Sandy Fawkes had seen Knowles in court, and was overwhelmed by a sense of his ‘evil power’. She had no doubt that he now had what he had always wanted: he was famous at last. ‘And enjoying his notoriety. The papers 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 Knowles, manacled and in leg irons, dressed in a brilliant orange jumpsuit. He had loved it: the local co-eds four-deep on the sidewalks, the courtroom packed with reporters, friends, Mandy’s school chums and relatives of the Carr family. It was an event, 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.’

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

  Yet the central mystery remains, the mystery with which we are confronted again and again in dealing with serial killers. Sandy Fawkes describes him as charming and intelligent. She also describes how, as they watched a group of picnickers, with a man swinging his small child around, he watched with a ‘tender smile’. ‘He seemed to be so ordinary and yet so lost, as if he knew that scene would never be his, he could not join, would always be separate.’ When she asked him if he had many friends he replied: ‘I find it difficult to get close to many people,’ and she adds: ‘The impression was one of rejection, a history of failure to relate.’ Their curious sexual relations seem to illustrate the same point – his need to masturbate before he could generate the excitement to achieve penetration.

  The odd thing that emerges from her book Killing Time is that, in many ways, Knowles was obviously a normal, decent human being, capable of playing his role as a ‘social animal’ rather better than most people. Yet the man who killed two small children because he thought they had recognised him, who shot so many other people without compunction, was – in the precise sense of the word – a wild animal rather than a human being, a creature like a tiger or a mad dog. What could cause such a transformation? Most of us can instinctively understand it, but it is difficult to capture in words. Like so many other criminals, he was trapped in a sense of being unlucky, but then, so are a vast number of human beings who never break the law. We know nothing of what made Knowles into the kind of person, although the reason obviously lies in his family background. (He told Sandy Fawkes that he disliked his father.) What we can sense is that he somehow exaggerated his problems, his ‘failure to relate’. When he went to San Francisco from prison in Florida, he was hoping to become ‘normal’. Rejection by the woman he had hoped to marry produced the response that ‘rejection’ always causes in Right Men: a kind of suicidal violence. He went on a rampage of murder, like a naughty child who tries to make his parents feel sorry for punishing him. His own high dominance also made him capable of raping and murdering women without guilt or regret: the high-dominance male can generate little personal feeling for medium- or low-dominance females – they are merely objects to be used. Sandy Fawkes was different, a female within his own dominance group with whom he could have formed a permanent relationship, but, like his bride-to-be in San Francisco, she also sensed his lack of discipline, the low bursting-point that would have made him a liability as a husband. It was after he felt that she had also rejected him that he reverted to his old habit of violence; the attempt to rape Susan Mackenzie was probably an attempt to make her ‘feel sorry’ for her rejection.

  Here once again, we feel instinctively that it was all somehow pointless, that Knowles was acting on unnecessarily pessimistic assumptions. The judge who sentenced Ted Bundy to death evidently felt the same. ‘Take care of yourself, young man. I say that to you sincerely. It’s a tragedy to this court to see such a total waste of humanity. You’re a bright young man. You’d have made a good lawyer. I’d have loved to have you practise in front of me. I bear you no animosity, believe me. You went the wrong way, partner. Take care of yourself.’ This was a recognition that, as a high-dominance male, Bundy might have been capable of considerable achievement. Bundy’s downfall was his sexual obsession, the craving to prove his ‘superiority’ by using and discarding women like cigarettes. Knowles was not primarily concerned with sex, but – like Carl Panzram – with ‘getting his own back’ on society. But as Joyce Cary’s Gulley Jimson once remarked, ‘You never get your own back – it’s always moved on.’

  In speaking of the Right Man, Van Vogt used the interesting phrase: ‘He makes the decision to be out of control.’ Our first response to this is the feeling that he has phrased it badly; surely he means ‘the decision to lose control’ or ‘to go out of control’. But Van Vogt is making an important point. Knowles’s decision was not simply to lose control. He recognises that control, discipline, constructive effort, amounts to a state of being, and he make a conscious choice of the opposite state. He decides to have a low bursting-point.

  Such a decision is not only irrational; it is self-destructive. Once they can actually see the negative consequences of their conduct, ‘mad dog’ killers like Panzram and Knowles are intelligent enough to recognise this. By that time it is too late.

  ‘Realise that most Right Men deserve some sympathy,’ says van Vogt, ‘for they are struggling with an almost unbelievable inner horror.’ At first sight, this is perhaps the strangest remark in van Vogt’s account of the Violent Man. ‘Unbelievable inner horror.’ Is he not overstating the case?

  To realise why this is not so, we need to understand that members of the ‘dominant five per cent’ need success as much as they need food and drink. It is difficult to imagine anything more frustrating than a dominant male (or female) stuck in a position that allows absolutely no expression of that dominance. A few people of this type ‘sublimate’ their dominance into creativity, and become writers or artists or musicians; they may even achieve the success they crave in this way. Many simply remain frustrated and develop ulcers. A certain percentage retreat into a kind of fantasy world in which they are anonymous geniuses or heroes, men whose greatnessis simply not recognised by their fellows. Van Vogt comments that such men are ‘idealists’, meaning that they live in their own mental world and prefer to ignore aspects of reality that conflict with it. When reality administers hard knocks, they go through a crisis of self-justification, and usually end up more certain than ever that they are right and the world is wrong. Typical of this strange, lonely fantasy was the card displayed in the cab of the Yorkshire Ripper: ‘In this truck is a man whose latent genius, if unleashed, would rock the nation, whose dynamic energy would overpower those around him. Better let him sleep.’ In fact, Peter Sutcliffe had been a shy, lonely child who had developed into a shy, lonely adult. It is also typical that Sutcliffe’s violent attacks began after he suspected that his future wife was being unfaithful to him; the superman fantasy was being undermined, and he had to do something about it before it collapsed and buried him in its ruins. Yet, as van Vogt goes on to observe: ‘If they give way to the impulse to hit or choke, they are losing the battle, and are on the way to the ultimate disaster . . . of their subjective universe of self-justification.’ He was, of course, thinking about the ‘normal’ Right Man, not the Right Man who has surrendered completely to the urge to hit or choke, and become a serial killer.

  What happens to such men? We have seen that the first stage is that they become subject to the ‘Jekyll and Hyde syndrome’, where the sane and non-violent part struggles against the ‘hunchback’. Like Bundy, they may be horrified by what they have done and swear never to do it again; but the hunchback has become stronger through being indulged, and they are soon using their talent for self-justification to excuse murder: life is cruel, the law of existence is survival of the fittest, society is rotten and deserves what it gets . . .

  As soon as we become aware of the ‘Right Man pattern’, we can see it again and again in cases of serial killers, even those who, at first sight, seem to be basically motivated by sex. In April 1980 a Colombian man was arrested in Ambato, Ecuador, when he tried to abduct an eleven-year-old Indian girl from the market place. A few days earlier, the rain-swollen river had overflowed its banks and revealed the bodies of four missing girls; ever since then, police had been looking for a multiple sex killer. The prisoner, thirty-one-year-old Pedro Alonzo Lopez, denied that he had anything to do with the murders. A pastor who posed as a fellow prisoner finally extracted a confession; soon, Lopez had told police that he had killed about three hundred and sixty girls, and was leading them to some of the burial sites.

  Lopez later told the story of his life to American journalist Ron Laytner. The seventh son of a prostitute in Tolima, Colombia – with twelve brothers and sisters – he was thrown out of the house by his mother at the age of eight for sexually fondling one of his sisters. Kindly
neighbours took him in, but the next day his mother took him to the edge of town and left him. He took a day to find his way home, laughing at his success. The next day his mother took him on a bus to another town and left him there. That night, a man found the crying child and promised to be a father to him; in fact he took him to an empty building and raped him.

  In Bogotá, where he was begging, a visiting American family sent him to a school for orphans, but a woman schoolteacher tried to seduce him when he was twelve, and he ran away after stealing money.

  At the age of eighteen, in prison for stealing a car, he was grabbed by four male prisoners and raped. He swore revenge. It took two weeks to manufacture a knife; then he lured the rapists, one by one, into a dark cell and killed three of them; the fourth stumbled on the bodies and fled, screaming, from the cell. Two years were added to his prison sentence – the murders were looked on as self-defence.

  Once out of prison, he began abducting and raping very young girls, preferably under the age of twelve. He would then kill them and bury the bodies. They were mostly Indians, and no-one paid much attention to their disappearance. The Ayacucho Indians caught him carrying off a nine-year-old girl and, after torturing him, prepared to bury him alive. An American missionary intervened and took the bound rapist in her jeep to the nearest Peruvian police outpost. The police were not interested, and sent back across the border into Colombia, where he continued to murder girls – his total was by this time around a hundred. He returned to Ecuador for, as he explained, its girls are more gentle and trusting than those of Colombia. His method was always the same – to walk around markets until he saw a girl with ‘a certain look of innocence and beauty’. He would follow the girl, if necessary for days, until her mother left her alone. Then he would approach her and tell her that he had a present for her mother. He would lead her by the hand to the outskirts of the town, then rape and kill her. He hoped one day to rape a white child, attracted by their fair hair, but tourists tended to keep an eye on their children.