The Casanova Killer – Life of Serial Killer John Paul Knowles – Introduction

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Introduction

November 7, 1974

As she entered her home in Milledgeville, Georgia, all Ellen Carr probably had on her mind was going to bed. She was a registered nurse who worked a night shift, and although the small family welcomed the money, the job was a demanding one.

Inside, the house was unnaturally quiet. She found that odd. Her husband, forty-five-year-old businessman Carswell Carr and fifteen-year-old daughter Amanda usually greeted her when she came home from the hospital.

That wasn't the only sign that something was seriously amiss. As an investigator later put it, “The (place) looked as if it had been attacked by an animal.” Mirrors were smashed. Slashed furniture lay everywhere, some of it in pieces. Books from the bookshelves littered the floor.

Had they been robbed? Where were Carswell and Mandy? Heart pounding, Mrs. Carr ran from room to room, calling out. Minutes later, she was back outside, screaming hysterically. Neighbors called the police to what was obviously the scene of gruesome double homicide.

Carswell Carr's nude corpse was lying face down on the couple's bed, hands bound behind his back and twenty-seven stab wounds, inflicted by scissors, all over his body. The medical examiner later determined that he had died of a heart attack, likely brought on by the torture. Down the hall, Amanda was also face down in her room, one nylon stocking tied tightly around her neck and the other shoved down her throat. To compound the horror, she appeared to have been raped after death.

When Mrs. Carr regained her senses, she went through the house with the police and identified several things that were missing: Carswell's briefcase, shaving kit, credit cards, identification, and most of his clothing.[1]

While detectives searched for more clues, the murderer, wearing his victim's clothes, was in an Atlanta bar, flirting with a lady reporter. He told her his name was Daryl Golden, but his real name was Paul John Knowles, and he was destined to be remembered as one of most vicious and unpredictable serial killers of his generation.

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Whenever and wherever a story appears about the murder spree of Paul John Knowles, it is accompanied by one news photo in particular. It shows a brooding, handsome man with tousled hair and a cigarette dangling casually from his mouth. He bears a striking resemblance to the actor Robert Redford, whose rugged good looks has always sent women flocking to the theaters whenever one of his movies debuted.

“(Knowles') easy charm and an indefinable air of danger made him catnip to women and eventually earned him his homicidal nickname, the ‘Casanova Killer’,” crime historian Harold Schechter wrote in The Serial Killer Files.[2]

The label was rather misleading. Paul John Knowles was not cut from the same cloth as Ted Bundy, a charismatic but sadistic lady killer who preyed exclusively on women. A criminal lowlife who degenerated into a serial slaughterer, Knowles wasn’t choosy when it came to victims. Men, women, children of all ages – he murdered them all. He was a one-man crime wave who killed at least eighteen people, with some sources putting the final body count at thirty-five.

Knowles became the stuff of American nightmares in July 1974, when he escaped from a Jacksonville, Florida jail after being arrested for fighting. That same night, he broke into the home of a retired schoolteacher named Alice Curtis, tied her up, and ransacked the place for money. The sixty-five-year-old woman choked to death on her gag, but Knowles saw that as no reason to leave town. He drove around Jacksonville in the dead woman’s car until the police connected him with the crime and a manhunt began.

So did a lot of killing.

By the time he was captured in November 1974, Paul John Knowles had left a string of bodies throughout the southern U.S. In addition to Carswell and Amanda Carr, his victims included two sisters aged eleven and seven, a housewife who was strangled with a phone cord while her toddler looked on, and a Florida State trooper who he handcuffed to a tree and shot execution-style.

After his capture, Knowles basked in his newfound celebrity, giving several media interviews and describing himself as “the most successful member of my family.” He chuckled that the only thing he would regret about being executed was that he would be unable to keep watching the police make fools of themselves.

The rape and murder spree of Paul John Knowles has not been remembered to the same extent as the crimes of Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, or Jeffrey Dahmer. The female journalist who met (and slept with) Knowles in Atlanta wrote a book about her short-lived relationship with him, and in 2005, New Dominion Pictures produced a docudrama titled Dangerous Pursuit, but otherwise he is a footnote in the history of American serial murders.

Until now. This book examines the life of Paul John Knowles in detail: his turbulent childhood, the broken engagement that turned him from petty criminal to rampaging killer and the four-month rape and murder marathon that may have claimed up to thirty-five victims.[3]

Traces of his rampage continue to surface. In December 2011, police investigators in Georgia identified the remains of Ima Jean Sanders, a thirteen-year-old girl who went missing in 1974 and was likely a Knowles victim. Although he has been dead for forty-one years, Paul John Knowles continues to make headlines.