THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, November 26, 1994 TAG: 9411260089
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A5 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: JACKSONVILLE, FLA. LENGTH: Medium: 81 lines
When police interrogators sat down here this week with Tim Whitfield, they thought they were talking to a day laborer who might have slain his roommate. For the first hour of questioning Tuesday, Whitfield offered nothing to change their minds.
But as the suspect stared back at the detectives, ``Tim Whitfield'' apparently decided he had grown weary of guarding the grotesque secrets that had kept him in hiding for eight months.
``Look, I'm tired of this,'' the man finally announced, according to John Best, a Savannah, Ga., detective who interviewed him here this week. ``Do you really want to know who I am? I'm Gary Ray Bowles.''
Asking only for cigarettes, Bowles, a native of Clifton Forge, Va., calmly said that he had brutally killed six men in Maryland, Florida and Georgia since March, according to Jacksonville police.
Henrico County, Va., police have also identified Bowles as a suspect in the death of Henry W. Weatherford Jr., 50, an antique dealer whose body was found in his Richmond area home June 12.
Bowles gave detailed accounts of the killings, Best said, and told the detectives: ``It's time. I want the killing to stop. . . . I'm either getting six life sentences or the electric chair.''
And with that, the 32-year-old ex-convict, drifter and prostitute who prowled gay bars and turned tricks with men for as little as $10 ended a rampage that had spread fear through the gay community in Washington and other cities.
Since the March beating death of an insurance agent in Daytona Beach, Fla., Bowles had led police all over the eastern half of the nation, from the District of Columbia and suburban Wheaton, Md., to Missouri, Virginia, Georgia and Florida. Police said Bowles targeted older gay men he met in bars, sometimes moving in with them before killing them and disappearing with their cars, cash and credit cards. Last week the FBI named Bowles to its Ten Most Wanted list.
A rookie police officer here finally caught Bowles on Tuesday, two days after a florist he had been living with under the Tim Whitfield alias was found slain.
During repeated police interviews this week, according to several detectives, Bowles said the killing rampage started in Daytona Beach in March, when he sank into depression because his girlfriend became pregnant and left town without telling him. Released only a few months earlier from a Florida prison where he served time for robbery, Bowles had been staying with John Hardy Roberts, a 59-year-old insurance salesman he met in a local bar.
Roberts was under the impression that his sexual relationship with Bowles signified something meaningful, Daytona Beach police said, and he was troubled by Bowles' preoccupation with his departed girlfriend. Bowles told police that Roberts gave him an ultimatum on March 15: ``Make up your mind: It's me or her.''
Bowles said he deliberated a short time and answered by crushing Roberts' skull with a lamp, then continued beating him and finished by shoving a rolled-up towel down his throat, police investigators said.
It was a ritual that would be repeated in the five other killings Bowles said he committed: Each slain man was found with something stuffed down his throat.
Bowles told police that when he ran away from home at age 14, the first man who picked him up hitchhiking offered money for sex; Bowles said he accepted. He acknowledged that he made money for the next 18 years by selling his body to men. But according to Best, he told police: ``I don't consider myself gay. I just lived off these people.''
Bowles has said that his father died when he was an infant and that he was mentally and physically abused by a series of stepfathers.
Police said Bowles told investigators he had been here since June, hanging out in bars, holding down odd jobs and using an alias that kept area police agencies from identifying him even as they arrested him several times and jailed him for minor infractions.
Bowles remains imprisoned without bond in the Duval County Jail.
KEYWORDS: MURDER
by CNB