Paul Rowles’ only surviving victim shares her story
Of Paul Rowles’ victims, she is the only one who lived.
She was 15 in 1994 when Rowles crawled through a window in her family’s Clearwater apartment and forced her at knifepoint to leave with him. He bound her with duct tape and drove her to his Jacksonville apartment, where he sexually assaulted her.
When he let her go into another room to get a drink, she unlocked the front door with one hand and used the other to move the tire he had used to bar the door. She ran to a neighbor’s for help. She thinks the escape took 10 to 15 seconds.
Authorities told her then that Rowles had served time for strangling his neighbor in the 1970s. But it wasn’t until she saw his photo on the front page of a newspaper Thursday that she realized there were more suspected victims.
In a high-profile case that gripped Florida for decades, Alachua sheriff’s investigators held a news conference Thursday to announce they now believe Rowles killed 20-year-old University of Florida junior Tiffany Sessions in 1989. They found the connection after DNA linked Rowles to the death of another young college student, Elizabeth Foster.
“Now knowing there were two other victims, I know for sure I wouldn’t have made it out if I hadn’t escaped,” she said.
Rowles confessed to killing his neighbor Linda Fida in Miami in 1972. He was sentenced to life in prison, but was paroled in 1985 because of lax sentencing laws at the time.
His early release was widely criticized during his trial on kidnapping and sexual assault charges in the Clearwater case.
It was a fact not lost on the victim, who the Tampa Bay Times is not naming because of the nature of the crime.
“I feel the justice system should have never released him from prison after he murdered his first victim,” she said. “If not, what happened to me and the other victims at the hands of Paul Rowles would have never happened.”
Richard Kuritz prosecuted the case involving the Clearwater victim and pushed for the longest sentence possible, fearing Rowles would hurt other women if freed. Rowles got 19 years and died in prison last year.
Kuritz said he wasn’t surprised to learn of Rowles’ link to Sessions.
The victim, who is now 35 and still lives in Clearwater, says her faith kept her strong during and after her attack.
While she was held captive in Rowles’ red Ford Bronco, she prayed for protection. “I just really felt the Lord saved me,” she said.
These days, her prayers are more thankful, often focused on gratitude for her four children.
Her memory of the ordeal has faded over the years, she said.
She remembers him stopping in woods on the way to Jacksonville, but not the actual words he spoke there. According to reports from the time, he pointed out the spot as a good place to leave something he didn’t want found
Hearing that detail again made her cringe. He could have intended to kill her and dump her body there, she said.
Investigators say Rowles left Foster, a 21-year-old Santa Fe Community College student, in woods off Williston Road in Gainesville in 1992.
Crews recently searched that area for two weeks looking for Sessions’ body, but didn’t find it. It was there Thursday that investigators and Sessions’ family announced they had a prime suspect in the 25-year-old case.
They gave reporters pictures of an address book where Rowles wrote the date of Sessions’ disappearance.
The Clearwater woman’s name was there, too.
Rowles’ death gave investigators access to the address book, which provided a key link to Sessions’ case. But her family says they won’t have closure until her body is found.
For the Clearwater woman, that came in the mail last year.
It was a letter from the state informing her that Rowles, 64, had died in prison of lung cancer.
“I began crying tears of joy that we’d never have to fear him hurting me or my family again,” she said
Why did Tiffany Sessions’ suspected killer serve just 9 years for first murder
Tiffany Sessions was 7 years old the year her suspected killer, Paul Rowles, was sentenced to life in prison for the brutal rape and murder of a Miami woman.
The details of that crime, involving Rowles’ next-door neighbor, the first of Rowles’ known victims, were so disturbing that at his sentencing on March 25, 1976, Judge Leonard Rivkind emphasized that Rowles should never be released from prison, according to court records.
But nine years later, Rowles was released on parole. Records retrieved by The Sun from the Florida Parole and Probation Commission included a handwritten comment from the Department of Corrections that read: “Recommend parole release and if possible grant release prior to X-mas Holidays.”
Rowles was released from prison on Dec. 17, 1985.
Rowles would move to Gainesville in April 1988. Ten months later, 20-year-old Sessions disappeared on Feb. 9, 1989 — 25 years ago today — after going out for her routine power walk along a route that Rowles also regularly drove as a construction materials delivery driver. Rowles also took a job delivering pizza in the area during the same time frame.
A former construction co-worker, James Grant, reported to Alachua County Sheriff’s Office Detective Kevin Allen, who took over the Sessions case in 2012, that it was the first time he ever saw Rowles “happy.” Rowles told Grant he “saw a bunch of pretty women” on the new gig, Allen said.
On Thursday, Sheriff Sadie Darnell declared at a news conference that it is “highly, highly probable” that Rowles was responsible for the disappearance and likely murder of Sessions, despite the lack of a body or DNA evidence. A look back at the events that preceded and followed Sessions’ disappearance, beginning with the rape and murder of 20-year-old Linda Fida in South Florida, sheds some light on how the sheriff could voice such confidence.
Rowles’ first victim
“Detective Allen has done a herculean job resurrecting some very old information,” James Woodard said recently in a phone interview with The Sun.
Woodard was an assistant state attorney and lived in the same apartment complex in North Miami as Rowles and his first wife, Linda Rowles, as well as Linda Fida and her husband. The apartment complex was full of young professionals, many of whom worked in law enforcement.
Woodard said it had been many years since he talked about the Fida case until Allen contacted him late in summer 2013.
On the night of March 29, 1972, Woodard learned a homicide had occurred in the complex. Linda Fida’s husband had returned home from work at 10 p.m. to find his wife dead in their bathtub.
Responding officers quickly set up base in Woodard’s apartment at the other end of the apartment building. He recalls accompanying officers to the apartment and seeing the horrific scene. Something stuck out to several of the officers there — two bandages that were oddly rolled up. They were collected for prints.
The next evening, the young prosecutor observed a tall, blond, athletic-built Paul Rowles, a neighbor he’d never noticed before, but something stuck out to Woodard this time.
“He (Rowles) was either barefoot or wearing sandals, but his feet were exposed, and both his toes were wrapped in bandages,” recalled Woodard.
It turned out that Rowles, who was an avid tennis player, often jammed his toes and kept them wrapped for comfort and to hide their discoloration.
Officers were able to retrieve a toeprint from the bandages at the crime scene and match them to Rowles, who gave a full confession to killing Fida.
Rowles said he had stalked Fida for months and fantasized about exerting control over her and forcing himself on her sexually. When he saw her husband leave for work that afternoon, Rowles said he watched and waited, sneaking into the apartment when Fida took her laundry across the hall.
Rowles also admitted that since childhood he had desired to stab a woman in her breast, as Fida had been. Rowles denied he intended to kill her but said he realized he needed to after she saw his face.
According to police records, officers felt strongly they were dealing with a potential serial killer, based on his strong impulses and the fact that he fit the psychological profile. His desires, they said, were far less focused on sex than on control.
Rowles spent three years in a psychiatric facility, where he spoke of an abusive father who would beat him unconscious as a child and also of how he choked a cat at age 8. The record varies on whether or not he actually choked that cat to death.
Paroled after life
When asked how Rowles was paroled just nine years after being sentenced to life in prison, the parole board explained via email that prior to 1994, regardless of the length of sentence, any inmate convicted of murder was eligible for parole. While that does not explain why the board granted parole after such a short time, other factors may help explain it.
There is scant documentation in the records from the probation commission of Rowles’ crime or correspondence between the board and the victim’s kin, prosecutors or judge, but there are numerous pages of communication from Rowles’ second wife.
Kathryn Poole Rowles had worked at the prison where Rowles had been incarcerated and met him there. She promised in her letters to the parole commission to have a place for him to stay, vouched for his future employment, and spoke highly of his changed character. Rowles was a model inmate by all accounts, officials said.
Once paroled, Rowles stayed in compliance with the parole board for the first couple of years. Living with Kathryn, he made all his appointments and kept up with ordered therapy. He was able to terminate his probation early.
Shortly after that, in 1988, Rowles and Kathryn moved to an apartment in Gainesville.
Rowles in Gainesville
Tiffany Sessions would go missing the following year.
“I can still remember when her roommate called me,” Hilary Sessions, Tiffany’s mother, said in an interview with The Sun. “She said, ‘Mrs. Sessions, we have a problem.’ My knuckles turned white, and I felt faint.” The police already had been called and a search launched. Despite an extensive search and the fact that Tiffany’s father, Patrick Sessions, a prominent developer in South Florida, helped generate much attention to his daughter’s disappearance, there was no sign of Tiffany, who was last seen wearing red sweatpants and a white sweatshirt with the word “Aspen” written on the front in green letters.
She also was wearing a gold Rolex watch, authorities said.
Kathryn Rowles’ grandson, who was raised by the Rowleses during the late ’80s and early ’90s, recalled Paul Rowles giving Kathryn a watch and earrings when they lived in Gainesville. Tiffany Sessions’ jewelry was never recovered.
Two years later, on April 16, 1991, Rowles was stopped by two sheriff’s deputies in a wooded area behind a closed business at 3501 S. Main St., across the street from Bivens Arm Nature Park. When approached, Rowles dropped a pair of gloves and a towel, authorities said.
Approximately one year later, 21-year old Santa Fe College student Elizabeth Foster was found slain and sexually assaulted. On the day she disappeared, she had told a roommate she was going to read a book inside Bivens Arm Nature Park, authorities said.
Less than two months after Foster’s body was discovered, Rowles moved to Jacksonville.
The victim who got away
After Rowles moved to Jacksonville, he separated in 1992 from his wife, Kathryn, and she moved back to Clearwater. By late 1993, Rowles had begun visiting Kathryn with talk of reconciliation. He also had lost his job at Pizza Hut after being accused of coupon fraud.
The plan was for Rowles to move back to Clearwater early the next year. But on Jan. 31, 1994, Rowles was arrested in the rape and kidnapping of a 14-year-old Clearwater girl, a neighbor of his wife.
The teen told officers Rowles broke into her bedroom window in the middle of the night and kidnapped her at knifepoint. He stopped multiple times along the way back to his Jacksonville apartment and sexually assaulted her, she said.
Inside the Jacksonville apartment, the teen asked Rowles for a drink of water and used the moment to run outside naked to a neighbor for help.
With the new kidnapping and rape charges, Rowles was returned to prison for violating his earlier parole. The victim never had to testify in court. A trial would have added further trauma to the youth, authorities said.
DNA connects the dots
Rowles was not questioned in the disappearance of Sessions or Foster until a DNA match from Foster’s body was made in 2012 thanks to technological advances. By that point, Rowles had cancer, was deteriorating fast and was unwilling to be interviewed by detectives.
Allen made a final attempt to speak with Rowles on Jan. 30, 2013, but Rowles was unconscious in the final stages of the cancer. Allen left a photo of Sessions with the nurses to show Rowles if he came to, hoping for a deathbed confession. Rowles never woke up, but when Allen contacted the prison to retrieve Rowles’ property, he learned the inmate’s belongings had been picked up by pastor Joe Nilsen, a longtime confidant and spiritual adviser to Rowles who also had married Rowles to his first wife, Linda.
Nilsen initially was reluctant to cooperate with Allen’s investigation but agreed to visit the website tiffanysessions.com. The resemblance to Rowles’ first wife was uncanny, Nilsen said.