Gary Ray Bowles, the “I-95 killer”, is set to be executed on Thursday, August 22, barring a stay by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
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Bowles, who was featured on America’s Most Wanted and was on the FBI’s Most Wanted list in 1994, murdered six gay men in 1994 across the East Coast. He was given a death sentence in 1996 for the murder of Walter Jammell Hinton in Jacksonville, Florida. The next year, Bowles pleaded guilty to two more murders, receiving two additional live senetences.
In 1998, the Florida Supreme Court overturned his death sentence citing that it was wrong to introduce his homophobia as evidence. Bowles has been serving a life sentence ever since, until DeSantis signed his death warrant on June 12, 2019.
Bowles had already served two prison sentences by the time he committed his deadly spate of killings in 1994. First arrested for beating and sexually assaulting his girlfriend in 1982, he was later incarcerated for unarmed robbery — serving a four-year sentence that was commuted to two.
Bowles worked as a male prostitute in the years since, attracting his victims with the promise of sex before brutally murdering them and stealing their credit cards. He was dubbed the I-95 killer because he committed most of his murders along the I-95 highway between Florida and Maryland.
His is the second death warrant issued by DeSantis, after that of Bobby Joe Lon who was executed on May 23