The Casanova Killer – Life of Serial Killer John Paul Knowles –9.Sandy Fawkes

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Sandy Fawkes
Hard-drinking, British journalist Sandy Fawkes noticed Knowles immediately. Impressed by his rugged good looks and stylish attire, she let him buy her a drink when he approached.

Knowles told her that he was a businessman from New Mexico, visiting Atlanta to oversee a court case involving a restaurant chain his father owned. He added that he identified with the central character in Jonathan Livingston Seagull. She got the impression that he had a "desperate anxiety to be liked."

Fawkes initially resisted his advances, joking at one point, "You could easily be another Boston Strangler for all I know."

They both burst out laughing. Then, eyes glittering with excitement, Knowles said, "But the Boston Strangler is dead."

At the end of the night, they ended up in Sandy's hotel room. After using Carswell Carr's shaving kit to remove his Zapata mustache, Knowles followed her into bed. Although they kissed and made out, he was unable to achieve an erection. He apologized, but Fawkes reassured him. He'd had too much to drink, she said. Before turning out the light and cuddling beside him, she joked, "So you're not really another Boston Strangler after all. What a disappointment."

The journalist assumed they would go their separate ways in the morning, but Knowles blocked all of Sandy's efforts to leave him. He drove her to a scheduled interview instead of letting her take a cab. She made plans to fly to her next assignment in West Palm Beach, Florida that afternoon, while he was supposedly attending court on his father's behalf. To her surprise he approached her as she was leaving the hotel, saying that the matter had been settled out of court.

Fawkes was due to fly to Florida at 6:20, so he proposed that they spend her remaining time in Atlanta together. While they had drinks at a revolving bar called the Polaris, Knowles told her his name was Daryl Golden. Gazing out the window at some men working on a giant crane, he became pensive.

"Would you write a book about me? You see, I haven't got long to live."

Her jaw dropped. "You what?"

She assumed that he was about to admit to being terminally ill, but instead, "Golden" explained, "I am going to be killed. Soon. It might be in two days or two months. I don't know when. But within a year I will be dead. I am going to be killed by someone."[23]

While Sandy Fawkes struggled to digest this incredible announcement, Knowles went on to say that he would be killed for something he had done in the past. He couldn't tell her what it was, but he had made some audio tapes that explained everything and left them with his Miami attorney. They would be revealed after his death, and he promised that they make world headlines.

Half-convinced he was joking, she commented lightly that perhaps he had a morbid obsession with death and should see a psychiatrist. Knowles smiled back and said that he'd actually seen one once.

"He told me I had the perfect criminal mind."

Fawkes didn't know what to think, but she was intrigued enough to postpone her flight. The journalist in her wondered if he was a hit man on the run or something else that could one day translate into the scoop of a lifetime. She claimed in her book, Killing Time, that there were times when she detected something odd about him and was genuinely afraid, but it was apparently never enough to make her actively flee him.

They ended up driving to Florida together. During the ride, he told her that he wanted to get married one day but didn't think he ever would. He told her that he'd been engaged to a San Francisco divorcee but that she had gone back to her husband. Another engagement, this one to a girl in Macon, Georgia, failed when she married someone else. Now he was going to die soon, so it didn't matter.

Fawkes tried repeatedly to get him to tell her what he'd done, but he refused. Once she caught him tearing a story from the local newspaper about the Carr murders and asked him about it, but he dismissed her questions by claiming that he had friends who lived where the events took place.

Fawkes took it all in, not sure what to make of any of it. She had mixed feelings about Golden. On one hand, his strange proclamations and possessive behavior were disconcerting. But on the other, she found him easy to talk to, even sympathetic.

She had been raised in an orphanage until the age of four and a half and suffered institutional indignities like being forced to wear different colored underwear to let everyone know she was a bed wetter. Her foster parents had been alarmed when she learned to read more quickly than their own kids and forbade her to touch any books in the home except the Bible. When she told "Golden" all of this, he seemed to understand.

In what has to be a supreme example of irony, Knowles drove Fawkes to a scheduled interview with William J. Saxbe, the United States Attorney General. Her editor wanted her to ask Saxbe about the slew of early parolees who were being released before completion of their sentences, a situation that was arousing considerable public indignation. Knowles must have loved it.

They finally parted ways nearly a week later. Knowles wanted to stay with her longer. She had introduced him to highly placed journalist friends who made him feel important by proxy. However, she was insistent and managed to evade him each time he called her room or hung out in the bar of whatever hotel she was staying at. At last he seemed to give up.

Paul John Knowles was out of her sight, but once Sandy Fawkes found out who he was and what he had done, he would never be out of her life.