The Casanova Killer – Life of Serial Killer John Paul Knowles –2.The Year of Fear

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The Year of Fear

The 1970s were marked by exuberance, creativity, and breakthroughs. People disco-danced to infectious Bee Gees beats, kept pet rocks, and watched beautiful lady cops take down bad guys on Charlie's Angels. On May 14, 1973 NASA launched Skylab, the first American space station, taking mankind one step closer to living and working in space. Five years later, on July 25, 1978 another scientific landmark took place when Louise Brown, the first "test tube baby," was born.

Like every era before and after it, the 1970s also had its dark side. There were two assassination attempts on President Gerald Ford in 1975. In November, 1979 Islamic militants stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and took over 60 American diplomats and citizens hostage for 444 days, a debacle known as the Iranian Hostage Crisis. There was also a frightening increase in the number of serial killers. According to a homicide database at Radford University, 450 of these mass murderers were at work during the 1970s, compared to 156 the decade before.[5]
There has been a lot of speculation over why serial killer activity spiked so sharply during the 1970s. Some experts propose that murderers who grew up and warped their psyches during the drug-polluted, cult-ridden 1960s were old enough to act on their impulses the following decade. Others suggest that the pool of available victims grew exponentially after the free-wheeling Sixties. More young people (especially women) lived on their own, hitchhiked, had sex with strangers, and indulged in other pursuits that put them at risk.

If there were a "banner year" for serial killers in the United States, it would be 1974. It later became known as the "Year of Fear" because the best of the worst either got their start or made further inroads in their respective reigns of terror.

In January, John Wayne Gacy killed his second victim, a teenaged boy, and stashed the corpse in his closet prior to burial. When blood leaked from the victim's nose and mouth and stained his carpet, Gacy "plugged" future kills using cloth rags or the victim's own underwear.

On January 15, Dennis Rader, alias BTK (Bind-Torture-Kill), kicked off his decades-long murder spree by annihilating four members of the Otero family in Wichita, Kansas. He capped the morning of mass slaughter by hanging 11-year-old Josephine Otero from a pipe in the basement and masturbating while she died.

Ted Bundy, who would rape and murder several women across multiple states before being executed, claimed his first documented victim on January 31. He broke into the basement bedroom of 21-year-old Lynda Ann Healy, a senior at the University of Washington, battered her unconscious, and carried her away. Her decapitated and dismembered remains were not found until a year later.

Paul John Knowles also began to kill in 1974. Like Ted Bundy, a failed romance factored in his breaking point. But where Bundy was focused and goal-oriented enough to be accepted into law school and work at a suicide crisis center, Knowles didn't bother trying to fit in anywhere. All he cared about was being famous and feared, although not necessarily in that order.