The Casanova Killer – Life of Serial Killer John Paul Knowles –14.Aftermath

donzhtm

Aftermath
Paul John Knowles was dead, but the families of his victims continued to suffer. Jack Anderson, father of Lillian and Mylette, sued Knowles' estate for damages in excess of $2,500. He stated in his complaint that he and his wife, Elizabeth, had undergone and would continue to undergo severe mental pain and suffering.[25]

Anderson died in 1994. According to his wife, he was never able to accept that his daughters were dead, and the failure to recover their bodies added to the illusion that they were not dead. The family never moved and their phone number remained unchanged for years because as Elizabeth put it, he "thought the babies were coming home."

Interviewed in 1998, Elizabeth confirmed that the years after Lillian and Mylette's disappearance were "horrible." She admitted to having spells in which she retreated within herself and refused to come out. When her husband died, she bought "memorial" headstones for her daughters and erected them in the family cemetery plot.

"My heart says they're in heaven. They're with Daddy now," she said. ''But I'd like to have bodies so I could really say goodbye."[26]

******

In April 1976, the skeletal remains of a young woman were found in a patch of woods off Highway 96 in Peach County, Georgia. Because they would not be identified, the bones were sent to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation Crime Laboratory in Atlanta, where they remained unclaimed for 37 years.

Then, in January 2011, the mother and sister of Ima Jean Sanders, who had run away from Warner Robins in August 1974, submitted samples of their DNA to the Austin County, Texas, Sheriff's Office. They had never stopped wondering what had happened to her, and while they hoped that she had made a new life for herself elsewhere, they also needed to know if the worst had come to pass.

The Sheriff's Office sent the samples to the Office to the University of North Texas Center for Human Identification (UNTCHI), where they were in turn uploaded into the Relatives of Missing Persons index of the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS), a database containing DNA of convicted criminals, missing persons, and unidentified bodies.

A result was soon found. The genetic data from Ima Jean's mother and sister matched the DNA from the Peach County remains, which the GBI had entered into CODIS. Aware that Paul John Knowles had been at work in the area around the time Ima Jean vanished, investigators spoke with current and retired members of all agencies involved in the original investigations of Knowles' crimes. When they asked about the infamous audiotape diary that had been surrendered to Judge Owens, court officials advised that the only copies of the tapes and their transcripts had been destroyed years ago, when the federal courthouse in Macon was flooded.

A search of the GBI archives, however, yielded a letter written in 1975 by the U.S. Attorney. It summarized Knowles' taped confession of his Georgia murders. One passage read:

"Sometime in August, 1974, Knowles picked up a white, female hitchhiker named Alma who represented her age as 13 or 14 but who appeared to be in her late teens. He carried this girl to a wooded area some distance from Macon, possibly west. He raped her and then strangled her and left her body in woods between trees. Approximately two weeks later, he returned to the location and found that the body had been moved eight or ten feet away apparently by animals. The body was greatly deteriorated and barely identifiable as a human being. Knowles found her jawbone and buried it in the area."

Consistent with Knowles' claim, the jaw bone was missing from Sanders' skeleton.

Captain Chris Rooks of the Warner Robins Police Department flew to Texas to deliver the news to Ima Jean's relatives personally. When she received her daughter's ashes from the state of Georgia, the former Betty Sanders (now Wisecup) fought to control her emotions.

"After 38 years of waiting to know, you feel like the walls closed in. I carried her home from the hospital, and I get to carry her home today."