The Casanova Killer – Life of Serial Killer John Paul Knowles –1.One Night in Georgia

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One Night in Georgia

November 7, 1974

British journalist Sandy Fawkes needed a drink. Badly. So she wandered into a Holiday Inn bar in Atlanta, Georgia and started ordering.

Fawkes, a forty-five-year-old redhead, had botched an assignment for the National Enquirer in Washington, DC, which left her discouraged and desperately in need of diversion. The liquor helped. So did the sight of the handsome stranger at the other end of the bar.

"His gaunt good looks made him stand out from the crowd," she remembered years later. "He looked like a cross between Robert Redford and Ryan O'Neal."

The man, who appeared to be in his mid- to late twenties, was over six feet tall, broad-shouldered and narrow-hipped, and had rugged facial features that Fawkes found attractive. His suit and tie were conservative yet classy, providing no hint that they were actually the clothes of a murdered man.

She was still checking him out when he noticed her too. Coming over, he asked her to dance. She politely declined, saying that she had to work. Fawkes left for the local Enquirer offices to wrap things up but soon returned to the bar on impulse and found the man still there.

This time she accepted his invitation, and things started to happen. They talked for hours, went out to dinner, and finished the night in her bed. As his hands wandered over her body, she had no idea that the night before, they had snuffed out the lives of Carswell and Amanda Carr.
******
He told her his name was Daryl Golden. During the week they spent together, he slowly integrated himself into her life. However, he remained so attentive, considerate, and protective that she barely noticed the intrusion at first. He insisted on paying for everything and drove her everywhere that she needed to go in a white Chevrolet Impala that looked brand new.

With Golden's expensive wardrobe and vehicle, he looked rich to Fawkes, although she did notice some oddities. He paid for everything with credit cards but didn't have enough cash on him to buy a newspaper. Perhaps she was too smitten to care. When he volunteered to drive her to Miami where he claimed to have an appointment, she agreed at once.

By all accounts, the couple had a great time. They went clubbing, with Fawkes glowing with pride whenever her new paramour stepped onto the dance floor. "He was a spectacular dancer," she recalled, and indeed he was. Golden was such a performer than once he started moving, everyone else on the dance floor stepped aside to watch. He clearly loved it, too.

At one point he asked her if she had ever written a book and if she would consider writing one about him. Like most writers, Sandy Fawkes was used to being inundated with book ideas, but she humored him by asking why his life would make a good subject.

To her amazement, Golden replied that he did not have long to live. "Within a year, I will be dead," he stated, adding that he expected to be killed for something he had done.

While Fawkes stared at him with disbelief and growing alarm, he said that his attorney in Miami had been given some tapes for safekeeping and their contents would be revealed after his death. "It will make world headlines," he promised.

That conversation signaled the end of their time together. "After a week, I just had a feeling I wanted to get away from him," Fawkes recalled.[4]

Days later, Sandy Fawkes was approached by police detectives who had questions about her former lover. They told her who he really was; Paul John Knowles, an ex-convict suspected of committing a series of rapes and murders over the last four months. They grilled her about the liaison and even hinted that she could be charged as an accomplice.

"Police in Macon, Georgia make Rod Steiger look like a fairy," she shuddered afterward.

When the detectives showed her photos of items taken from the Carr residence, any doubt about "Golden's" guilt dissolved. She recognized several pieces of clothing that Knowles had been wearing. She was doubly shocked to learn that their original owner had been murdered the day before she met Golden. The police also informed her that the sleek white Chevrolet Impala belonged to a businessman named William Bates, whose strangled corpse had been dumped outside Lima, Ohio last September.

The kill list sickened her. Two young girls strangled and dumped in a swamp outside Jacksonville. A Texas woman raped and murdered, with her corpse being dragged through a barbed wire fence afterward. What must have been especially alarming was the murder of Ann Dawson, a beautician from Birmingham, Alabama. Knowles met her on September 23 and traveled with her until the 29th, at which point he disposed of her.

It took Sandy Fawkes a long time to recover. She was no lightweight when it came to bloodshed. In 1973, she had covered the Yom Kippur War in the Middle East. But never before had she come so close to a violent death, and she constantly wondered why Knowles had spared her.

Perhaps she indirectly answered that question three years later, when Killing Time, an account of her fling with Knowles, was published. (The book was republished in 2004 as Natural Born Killer: In Love and on the Road with a Serial Killer.) Knowing that she was a journalist, Knowles must have decided that she was his ticket to the infamy he craved so desperately.

Sandy Fawkes was lucky. At least eighteen others weren't.