It was strange that Walter hadn’t called his sister for three days, let alone that he missed her birthday. So she, worried, decided to go to her home with her husband William. As soon as they entered, a nauseating smell, almost unbreathable, slapped them in the face. A stench that became unbearable when accessing the bathroom. There, in a blanket-covered mound on the ground, they discovered the badly beaten and decomposing remains of Walter.
The investigation pointed to a suspect: the young tenant who lived with the victim, a certain Tim. But this was a false name. His real identity was Gary Bowles, a serial hunter of homosexuals, who camouflaged himself as a prostitute in the gay community until he committed six savage crimes. That hunt earned him the nickname I-95 because he committed them along Interstate 95.
Gary Ray Bowles was born on January 25, 1962 in the small American town of Clifton Forge (Virginia), although he grew up in the small town of Rupert. The first family tragedy occurred when his father died of a lung disease: he worked as a coal miner. The second occurred when his mother rebuilt his life and remarried.
As our protagonist explained years later, his second stepfather was a violent and abusive alcoholic, who beat his mother, his older brother and him, and who, in his case, even abused him well into adolescence. In fact, Gary was thirteen years old when he severely injured his assailant to prevent her from raping him again.
Shortly after this episode, the little boy left school and also the family home, while his mother decided to stay and stay with her husband. This infuriated Gary, who, penniless and on the streets, preferred to go ahead and manage to survive.
This is how the pubescent boy became a bum, a thief and a swindler, and fell into prostitution networks to get a place to sleep and some cash. For the next twenty years, his life consisted of chaperoning older gay men who were still socially closeted, and whom he met in gay-friendly areas and bars.
Gary always kept his status as a prostitute a secret. He came to have a girlfriend and even maintain a double life. But everything changed when his partner lost the baby he was expecting and discovered that he worked as a male gigolo.
The young woman decided to break up with him, but her reaction was the most violent: Gary beat her up and raped her twice. The court sentenced him to six years in prison. He was running September 1982.
As a result of these events, according to the experts who interviewed him, revenge against the homosexual community began to take shape in Gary’s mind: he blamed gays for his girlfriend’s abortion. That is why it is believed that his main homicidal motivation was homophobia.
After serving time, Gary worked as a carpenter, bricklayer, farm worker, and construction worker, though he never quite gave up his criminal misdeeds. These earned him another four years in prison for armed robbery. It was in this last stage and already on the street, when this thirty-something began one of the bloodiest homosexual hunts on the east coast of the United States in memory.
Gary chose Interstate 95, known as I-95, to travel through Florida, Georgia and Maryland in search of victims. There were eight months, between March and November 1994, of terror in the gay community of these states. No one felt safe and completely mutilated corpses kept turning up.
The killer’s modus operandi was similar in all cases: he went to bars with a gay environment and looked for slightly older men who hid their sexual orientation. Later, she entered into a sexual relationship with them for money, which she later transformed into an affective-sentimental relationship in order to enter her home.
Once inside, Gary carried out the murders in surprising and cruel ways: he would beat, shoot, or strangle his victims, as well as mutilate or desecrate their bodies. Of course, in all of them he always left the same strange signature. It was about introducing an object down his throat. That is to say, he stuffed his throat with all kinds of objects, from towels, rags or toilet paper, to leaves and dirt, and even a sex toy in the form of a dildo.
As described by Bernie de la Rionda, a former state prosecutor who handled Gary’s case, “the murders he committed, it seemed as if he took pleasure or enjoyed their brutality.” After the carnage was over, the prostitute would steal the vehicles, IDs, cash, and credit cards of the deceased. Immediately afterwards, he fled the place.
To make his identification and arrest more impossible, Gary came to use false names -Joey Pearson or Timothy Whitefield-, first names such as James, Mike or Mark, and up to five different social security numbers.
This is how the criminal deceived and killed six men: John Hardy Roberts, 59; David Jarman, 38; Milton Bradley, 72; Alverson Carter, 47; Albert Morris, 38; and Walter Hinton, 42.
Among the clues that he left at the crime scenes, it is worth noting the documentation of his parole found in the first murder, that of John Roberts, in addition to the images captured while he was trying to withdraw money from an ATM with his credit card. the victim. His handwriting also appeared in a hotel record where he rented a room under David Jarman’s credentials.
A Wal-Mart clerk stopped Gary when he tried to pay with Albert Morris’s card, but he fled before officers arrived. Of course, his description served to identify him. Armed with these clues, investigators confirmed the same patterns in all of the murders and launched a rampant search and seizure.
In fact, three days after Albert Morris was found gagged, beaten, strangled and shot in the head inside his trailer home, the FBI placed Gary Bowles on its Ten Most Wanted list. It was late May 1994.
Two months later, the television show America’s Most Wanted also aired a special on the case, warning that the suspect frequented gay bars “where he meets and befriends the customers. All known victims were cared for in such establishments.”
Given the alarm generated, Gary changed his appearance and became apparently invisible, which contributed to making his identification difficult, but did not prevent him from killing again. It was November 18, 1994 when he ended the life of his last victim, Walter Hinton, whom he hit on the head with a 20-kilo concrete block and suffocated by introducing toilet paper and a rag down his throat. .
The testimony of the victim’s neighbors helped identify the possible suspect, a tenant who had lived in the home for a few days and who called himself Tim. On November 22, officers located the killer and took him into custody, believing it to be Timothy Whitefield. However, when they took his fingerprints, they discovered that they had hunted down the elusive Gary Bowles, the I-95 killer.
During questioning at the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office, Gary confessed to Walter’s crime, but also to five other men whose deaths were still unsolved. “We are all relieved that he is off the street. There is no question that there probably would have been more,” Sheriff Jim McMillan told the assembled media after Gary’s arrest.
The gay community, greatly affected by these vile murders, received the news with great relief. And it is that knowing that a murderer of homosexuals was on the loose caused real fear among the members of the group.
Everyone left home with the mind that a murderer was camping out. Above all, because of the type of crime perpetrated: they were not instant deaths, in which someone is shot and dies, it was a life or death fight.
During the trial, held in May 1996, Jacksonville prosecutor Bernie de la Rionda made it clear to jurors that “each of the murders was brutal” and that the “only appropriate sentence for a serial killer like he” was the death penalty. That’s how it went.
However, a year later, the Florida Supreme Court annulled the sentence, finding that the jury should not have taken into account the prosecutor’s words pointing out the defendant’s alleged homophobia as the main motivation for the crimes. This gave rise to a new legal process against Gary Bowles.
In 1999 a second trial was held against the I-95 killer. Once again, another Jacksonville jury found the defendant guilty of first degree murder and sentenced him to death. The victim’s sister, Gay Logan, expressed her satisfaction at this second death sentence and hoped there would be no further appeal.
Two years later, Gary was sentenced to two more consecutive life terms after pleading guilty to the murders of John Roberts and Albert Morris. Since then and for the next 22 years, the inmate remained on death row at the Florida state prison awaiting his execution date, dated August 22, 2019.
In a final written statement, Gary apologized “for the pain and suffering” caused. “I never wanted my life to look like this. You don’t wake up one day and decide he’s going to become a serial killer,” he wrote. He even dedicated a few words to his mother: “I want to tell you that I am also very sorry for my actions. Having to deal with your child being called a monster is terrible. Very sorry”.
Gary Bowles’ execution by lethal injection was scheduled for 6 p.m., but was delayed for several hours while the court considered a final appeal: the defendant’s lawyers argued the alleged intellectual disability of his patron to prevent capital punishment. It was rejected.
Meanwhile, the killer agreed to a last supper, which consisted of hamburgers with bacon, cheese, and fries. At 10:44 p.m., Gary was ushered into the execution chamber, in full view of about twenty onlookers, and injected with 100 milligrams of a lethal cocktail of various hypnotics, sedatives, and painkillers.
At all times and until his last breath, Gary kept his eyes completely closed. He didn’t want to meet anyone’s gaze, he just waited for his heart to stop. His body collapsed fourteen minutes later, at 10:58 p.m. He was 57 years old.
