The Casanova Killer – Life of Serial Killer John Paul Knowles –15.Conclusion

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Conclusion
As a serial killer, Paul John Knowles is difficult to categorize. He had no real victim profile: men, women, children, and seniors all died during his four months in action. He sexually assaulted some of his victims but left others untouched. Although he claimed that he killed the Anderson girls to prevent them from identifying him to their parents and the police, Knowles left Beverly Mabee, Barbara Tucker, and Barbara's six-year-old son unharmed. Perhaps he himself had no idea what type of victim he would kill next, or how.

In several respects, Knowles matches the classic profile of a thrill killer. For him, outsmarting the police was a form of amusement, and he loved the media attention that followed his capture. He kept detailed records of his killings, or "successes", as he called them, by tearing out newspaper pages and reliving everything in his audiotaped diaries. Although he doesn't appear to have enjoyed killing in the classic sense, murder was his ticket into the spotlight, giving him the fame that he craved.

Author Harold Schechter dismissed him as a "nihilistic lowlife who degenerated from a petty criminal into a homicidal drifter, randomly killing anyone unlucky enough to get in his way." Sandy Fawkes, herself a longtime inmate of dehumanizing public institutions, commented, "Paul John Knowles was as much a victim as any of the eighteen people he killed.... May his poor, demented soul rest in peace." Knowles himself would probably have preferred Sheldon Yavitz's assessment of him as "the most heinous killer in history."

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Bibliography
Douglas, John E., and Mark Olshaker. Journey into Darkness: Follow the FBI's Premier Investigative Profiler as He Penetrates the Minds and Motives of the Most Terrifying Serial Killers. New York: Scribner, 1997.

Fawkes, Sandy. Killing Time. New York: Taplinger Pub., 1979.

Schechter, Harold. The Serial Killer Files: The Who, What, Where, How, and Why of the World's Most Terrifying Murderers. New York: Ballantine Books, 2004.

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