Sandy Fawkes: The Reporter and The Serial Killer

Sandy Fawkes landed in Atlanta on the night of November 7, 1974. She’d spent the day in Washington on a fruitless quest to interview former Vice President Spiro Agnew, part of a one-month tryout with an American weekly newspaper that paid her extraordinarily well, including travel and hotel—far more than her usual employer, the Daily Express, could afford thanks to the country’s current economic crisis.

Sandy had no plans for the evening. As was her habit when landing in a new city, she checked in with the local paper—here, the Atlanta Constitution—to see if one of their reporters might show her around. No one was available. The next option: the hotel bar. Sandy was nervous at the prospect of drinking alone in the South. Atlanta wasn’t London, where the pubs in Soho were so familiar to her they functioned as a second home.

As she wrote a few years later, “years of pulling in pubs and clubs had taught her that, despite being a bit broad in the beam and not exactly a raving beauty, she had a magnetism that drew men as if to a pile of iron filings.” Sandy was single, in her mid-forties. She could travel, pursue flings with younger men—early to mid-twenties was the ideal range—drink heavily without hangover, and keep primary focus on her work.

The year before she had published her most personal piece yet, a stirring account of the heartless murder of seven-year-old Maria Colwell by her abusive stepfather. Sandy’s anger propelled the story from editorial indifference to front-page news. Her outrage caused her to open up about her own troubled childhood, eliciting much praise and sympathy.

This proved to be an aberrant reaction, as she would later discover.

Sandy wasn’t alone at the Holiday Inn bar long. A young man she’d eyed earlier with some disdain for wearing a flowery tie to match his shirt walked towards her. “Would you like to dance?” he asked.

“Well, no, thank you.” She’d been thrown by his advance, but seeing the rejection cross his face, she blurted out: “I have only just arrived in town and haven’t had a drink all day….I have to go to work. I am a journalist, you see.”

“Will you be gone long? Will you come back? Are you staying here?”

Sandy wasn’t gone long. The Atlanta Constitution office proved disappointing. She came back, and the redheaded six-footer with “a classically handsome face topped by hair the color of scotch and water” that complimented her own flaming red hair, was still in the bar when she returned. This time, she accepted his invitation to dance. He told her he was on his way to Miami.

“That’s funny,” said Sandy, “I’m going to West Palm Beach tomorrow.”

“You should let me drive you there,” said the man. “It only takes a day and you could see something of the country.”

Sandy mulled over his suggestion. How else would she see America as it was, not the America constrained by tight deadlines and formal interviews? Plus, he seemed to be an experienced traveler. Earlier, the young man rattled off a list of cities and states visited: New Orleans. Houston. Dallas. Kentucky. St. Louis. Alabama.

She decided to accept, on one condition. “I’m not going to bed with you. Oh, I know you haven’t asked, but it sure ain’t difficult to read your thoughts!” Besides, Sandy continued, “I don’t know anything about you, you could easily be another Boston Strangler for all I know!”

Both burst out laughing. Within hours, Sandy would take the younger man to bed, though the experience would prove underwhelming. “So you’re not really another Boston Strangler after all,” she said, after. “What a disappointment.”

Days later, Sandy would learn how wrong she was, and what danger she’d been in the entire time.

***

There are two ways to tell the story of Sandy Fawkes. The first is how it’s always been told, as a joke, as dark comedy, making her out into a villain, a vixen, a barfly, an object of derision and then, later, pity. Sometimes Sandy told it that way herself, to friends, strangers, and in books like Killing Time, first published in 1977 and reissued several times, most recently in 2004, from which most of the quoted portions in this piece are drawn.

The other way—the way I want, I need, to tell it—is as a story of trauma. Of tragedies never fully recovered from, of terrible decisions leading to other terrible decisions, of alcohol as self-medication, and of some degree of contentment achieved after the largest possible toll. A sensational story, yes, but underneath the sensation was something more complicated, and thus, more interesting.

Sandy Fawkes was entirely self-made, including her name. Shortly after her birth on June 30, 1929, one or both of her parents—she never learned their identities—abandoned her in the Grand Union Canal. The infant, eventually named Sandra Boyce-Carmichelle, moved from foster family to foster family, her peripatetic childhood marked by various forms of abuse and few conduits for justice. Sandy’s teenage years coincided with World War II, the Blitz, the whole “keep calm” ethos. The thing to do was to tamp it down, to transcend the trauma, to channel the rage so deep as to hardly feel it at all.

She had an aptitude for painting and went to the Camberwell School of Art. Not long afterwards she met and married Willy Fawkes, a clarinetist who later became the Daily Mail‘s cartoonist, in 1949. They had four children, three daughters and a son. He still lives, as do two of the girls, but the third died in infancy, attributed to what we would now call Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. The loss of a child is devastating on its face; the grief may ebb and flow but never disappear. For Sandy, it pulsated with a nightmarish rhythm, underpinning everything she did thereafter. Her marriage to Willy, unsurprisingly, did not survive.

She’d already developed a taste for the drink back at art school, thanks to her mentor, John Minton, who introduced her to his favorite Soho pubs (Minton would not live past 40, dying of suicide.) Barstools would beckon Sandy for the rest of her adult life, and alcohol offered its temporary soothing balm of obliteration of her pain. But it could never make the sorrow disappear entirely. Sobriety didn’t stick, though the longest spell lasted about three years.

But Sandy prided herself on working through whatever ailed her, physically or mentally. Hangovers could be shrugged off. Grief could be buried. She found success as a fashion editor for the British Vanity Fair, and when she grew restless with greater ambition, joined the Daily Mail and the Daily Express, where she moved into feature journalism. She was a lone woman among throngs of men, and felt it was necessary to outdrink, outlast, and outwit them.

As Fleet Street reporter Janet Street-Porter, wrote in 2006: “Sandy wore black pleated skirts, white silk blouses, black sparkly tight sweaters, black stockings and high-heeled shoes. She oozed glamour, even in the smoky atmosphere of the back rooms of the bars where we seemed to spend hours every day.” Street-Porter saw Sandy as a role model, until she realized she could no longer keep up with hours-long jaunts to the pub, even if there was the chance of meeting John Hurt or Francis Bacon or any other of Sandy’s celebrity friends. She was fun to be with, until she wasn’t.

And that was before what happened in America in November 1974.

***

Sandy wondered why she had agreed to the man’s offer of a ride to West Palm Beach. He was attractive and young, yes. But the sex, when he was able to sustain an erection, wasn’t all that great. His conversation revolved around recurring visions of a shortened life (“I haven’t got long to live…I am going to be killed. Soon. It might be in two days or in two months. I don’t know when, but within a year I shall be dead. I am going to be killed by someone.”) and of audio tapes secreted away in his lawyer’s vault. Was any of it true, or was the man, who had finally given his name as Lester Daryl Golden, putting her on? And why on earth was he determined that she write a book about him?

Meanwhile, people kept dying with alarming speed. 65-year-old Alice Curtis, choked to death in her own home in Jacksonville, Florida. Mylette and Lillian Anderson, sisters aged just seven and eleven whose bodies were never found. A teenage girl whose name wasn’t known for decades. Marjorie Howie, 49, strangled with her nylon stocking, television set pilfered from her apartment. Women and girls, all dead between August 1 and 2, 1974.

The spree didn’t stop with those victims. Kathie Sue Pierce, strangled in her Musella, Georgia home on August 23 in front of her 3-year-old son, who escaped harm. William Bates, picked up at a roadside pub in Lima, Ohio on September 3, his nude body not discovered for another month. By that time Emmett and Lois Johnson were found shot to death at an Ely, Nevada campsite on September 18; Charlynn Hicks, raped and strangled in Seguin, Texas; and Ann Dawson, a beautician missing from Birmingham, Alabama as of September 23.

Worse was still to come in October and November. Karen Wine and her 16-year-old daughter, Dawn, both raped in their Marlborough, Connecticut home on October 16, both strangled with a nylon stocking. Doris Hosey, 53, shot to death two days later in Woodford, Virginia. Edward Hilliard and Debbie Griffin, choosing the wrong car to hitchhike with on November 2, with him ending up murdered, and her body never recovered. Carswell Carr, befriended by his killer over drinks in Milledgeville, Georgia, only to be stabbed to death on November 6, after which his 15-year-old daughter, Mandy, died by strangulation.

Sandy knew none of this. Not until she spied the front page of the local paper that Daryl (a name she much preferred to Lester) purchased on November 9, the day they finally left Atlanta. A page devoted entirely to the recent spate of murders. But she wanted to get to Florida. She’d drunk too much the night before. She didn’t much care about Daryl’s assertion that he had friends in Macon, about 70 miles from Milledgeville.

And she certainly didn’t recall saying to him in bed the night before that she didn’t think he was a “maxi-murderer at all, more your mini-murderer.” That fleeting look of irritation? No, this was a joke best left alone.

***

Once in West Palm Beach on November 10, Sandy did find Daryl useful. He drove her to the local office of the paper she was trying out with. He drove her to the house of Florida attorney general William Saxbe so she could conduct an interview, and waited in the car until she was finished. But the next day, after a heart-stopping near-loss of materials, as well as a more pressing looming deadline, Sandy knew it was over. The sex hadn’t been worth much to begin with, but now there was little point keeping on.

“I hate saying [the words] but I’m going back to London on Saturday and I have a lot of work to do and people to see before I go.”

But before they parted, she had to know: would Daryl tell her what was on the tapes?

He would not.

“In that case I have to concentrate on my own business…but it’s been a marvellous week, Daryl, wonderful, truly like a holiday. However, life must take over again.”

Couldn’t they spend just one more night together, asked Daryl.

“No, darling. No.” Sandy was firm: “Goodbyes are horrible but they’re better over and done with.” She kissed him on the mouth one last time, and felt “free to come and go and please herself again.” She spent that evening at a bar with some other American journalists, who teased her about ditching a clearly heartbroken Daryl.

The next day, Sandy received an urgent message from West Palm Beach police detective sergeant Gabbard. When she arrived at the station, she thought perhaps Daryl had had an accident. When Gabbard asked if she knew of a Susan MacKenzie, Sandy said she did, vaguely. She was the wife of one of the journalists she’d gone out drinking with the prior night.

“Your friend attempted to rape her this morning.”

Sandy, stunned, blurted out a response she would regret for the rest of her life: “Good God…and he wasn’t even a good poke!” After a beat of silence, she asked Gabbard to fill her in.

“Mrs. MacKenzie says that when he was driving her to the hairdresser’s this morning when he pulled the car off the road and asked her to make love to him. When she refused he pulled a gun on her.” Susan managed to get out of the car, despite Daryl grabbing her by the hair, and called police from a nearby pay phone. Despite being spotted by a squad car, Daryl had escaped, though police now knew the make and model of his car.

By the time he was arrested on November 21, after a shootout involving multiple officers from several law enforcement agencies, helicopters, and dogs, Daryl had killed two more people: Florida Highway Patrol Trooper Charles Campbell, who’d failed in his own attempt at an arrest and ended up a hostage; and James Meyer, kidnapped so that the man could swap a police car for a less obtrusive one. By the time the killer and the abducted duo reached a remote, wooded area in Pulaski, Georgia, the hostages’ fate was clear: both were handcuffed to a tree and shot to death.

Over the next few days, Sandy learned the gruesome truth about her week-long lover: his real name was Paul John Knowles, and he was suspected in the deaths of at least 20 people. “Exactly a week ago I had been in his arms,” wrote Sandy. “How could I have made such a mistake? Then, like hot metal flooding my veins, came the memory of that first morning, the sense of evil in the room that had thrust me headlong to the door. Good God, I had known.”

***

Sandy Fawkes’ account of her time with Paul John Knowles graced the front page of the November 19, 1974 edition of the Atlanta Constitution, two days before his arrest in Henry County, Georgia. “He was tall, fair, handsome, with the immaculate manner of comfortably rich Americans,” she began. But Sandy didn’t have that quite right, either.

Knowles was well-acquainted with Florida’s foster homes and reformatories, given up by his father after a juvenile conviction for petty crime. He married, young and briefly. He was in and out of prison from the age of nineteen, and while at Florida State Prison at the beginning of 1974, began corresponding with Angela Covic, a San Francisco divorcee he called his “Yiddisher Angel.” Covic very nearly married Knowles upon his release, but called off the wedding when a psychic she consulted warned of a “very dangerous man” entering her life. Knowles went back to Jacksonville, soon arrested again after a bar fight. He escaped from prison on July 26, 1974. His murder spree began days later.

Sandy stayed in Georgia. She was a witness who could verify Knowles’ whereabouts from November 7 through November 10. She also wanted to understand the dissonance between the man she thought she knew and the cold-blooded killer she never encountered, but far too many did, with catastrophic results. The tapes turned out to be real, in the custody of Knowles’ lawyer, Sheldon Yavitz. He’d been instructed to release them after Knowles’ death, but went ahead anyway, and was subsequently jailed on contempt of court charges for doing so. (Yavitz would later serve additional prison time and self-publish a book about the colorful life he led defending mobsters and drug dealers.) Sandy saw Knowles just once in court. Then she would never see him again.

Less than a month after his arrest, awaiting trial for so many murders, Knowles himself was dead. He’d tried to escape again while handcuffed to the backseat of a car driven by Henry County Sheriff Earl Lee with Georgia Bureau of Investigation Agent Ronnie Angel alongside. They all drove along I-20 in search of the handgun that killed Charles Campbell. Knowles went for Lee’s handgun, freed it from the holster as Lee tried to keep control of the car, and Angel fired three shots into Knowles. The spree killer died instantly.

By then, Sandy was home in London. Everyone wanted to know the real story. She felt, she wrote, “like her own ghost.” It would take her another two and a half years to sort out her version of the real story. Killing Time was published in 1977 in the UK, and two years later in the US. Reviews were mixed at best, vituperative at worst. They didn’t care for the writing style, indebted to Sandy’s Fleet Street conditioning and trying too hard to be brave. They faulted her for sleeping with such an evil man, and for sleeping with younger men outside of marriage, period. They wondered what kind of mother she was to her children.

Killing Time was supposed to exorcise her ghost. But it more likely exacerbated its presence for as long as she lived. 

***

Sandy Fawkes died in 2005, at the age of 76. Her funeral, according to her daughter, Kate, a documentary filmmaker currently at work on a memoir about her mother, was “packed to the rafters with friends—standing room only! She’d have been thrilled.” Photographs of some of those friends demonstrate how much she meant to them, just as much as what she meant to her family. Yes, there had been, as Kate told me, “a tipping point from glamorous, successful hard-drinking sassy woman to a lonelier figure drinking on her own [that] was difficult to spot until it was too late really,” but Fawkes had spent the last fifteen years of her life in a state of bliss over her grandchildren.

Yet the obituaries of Fawkes more reflect the harshness of Fleet Street than sympathy for a woman wrecked by grief, and by choices forged from emotional impulses that, if we are honest, we all feel, and might inform our own equally terrible choices. The most-cited one, an unsigned Telegraph piece, reads more like score-settling than an objective account of Sandy’s life. I drew upon it for facts, and tried to edit out the temperament.

After Killing Time, Sandy continued to work, albeit with less regularity. Fleet Street gave her the cold shoulder. She ghost-wrote Nothing But, the memoir of Christine Keeler, the woman at the center of the infamous Profumo Affair of the early Sixties, later adapted as the 1989 film Scandal. She had a small but memorable part in the film Love Is the Devil.

It would be easy to be smug and say we wouldn’t rush into a short relationship with a serial killer. But people tumble into relationships with violent men all the time, with little idea of their true nature until it’s far, far too late. For the women, children, and men who did not survive John Knowles’ murderous rampage, and for the family members who grappled with the aftermath of their deaths, it is little comfort. Knowing that, and seeing it through the lens of her own traumas, almost certainly made Sandy more defiant in her narrative.

Fawkes ended the original edition of Killing Time with sympathy for Knowles, saying he “was as much a victim as any of the 18 people he killed” and wishing that “his poor, demented soul rest in peace.” Two and a half decades later, Fawkes felt differently. As she wrote in the afterword to the 2004 edition of Killing Time (republished as Natural Born Killer: In Love and On the Road With a Serial Killer):

“In a way it was a good thing that he died, killed on a road as many of his victims were. Had Knowles spent years rotting on Death Row I would have written to him, still desperate to understand why. I was younger then. Now I am not sure that I am as keen to find some streak in him deserving of sympathy, some explanation going even a little way towards exculpating him or making others share the blame. He and I had the bond of being outsiders as children but then so was the teenage girl he raped and strangled for amusement some time that August [in 1974].”

At that time, the girl remained unidentified. Seven years later, in 2011, police matched the DNA to 13-year-old Ima Jean Sanders, who had gone missing from her mother and stepfather’s home in Warner Robins, GA that August. Sanders’ mother, Betty Wisecup, told the Beaumont Enterprise in January 2012, when Ima Jean’s identification was made public, “You just don’t take someone out for sport and rape them and strangle them.”

***

Kate Fawkes, who was eighteen when her mother encountered Knowles, and fielded Sandy’s lone phone call while under police interrogation, continues to reflect upon the reaction to Killing Time and to Sandy herself. “The 70s sexual revolution, [Sandy] discovered, hadn’t really reached much beyond the bigger cities of the world, and whilst she and her friends might hop into bed with someone without needing to be ‘betrothed’ that was still not how the rest of the world behaved. They were shocked that a mother of three could go to bed with a much younger man having only just met him. She was ahead of the curve on that one for sure.”

Killing Time was Sandy Fawkes’ story to tell. She chose to tell it in a way that favored bravado, but did not mask the horror. She needed to ask for forgiveness, not just from the reader, but from herself.