ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, February 16, 1997 TAG: 9702170075
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: CHRISTIANSBURG
SOURCE: LISA K. GARCIA STAFF WRITER
MICHAEL KNOWLES HAS WRITTEN many letters about his wife's slaying in Christiansburg. But this one, which includes an allegation of adultery, will be printed nationwide.
A Christiansburg man awaiting trial on murder charges is using Ann Landers to spread his claim that he killed his wife because she was having an affair that started on the Internet.
Michael Knowles' letter appears today in Landers' advice column, which claims a readership of 90 million people. Knowles is in the Montgomery County Jail, accused of killing Angie Knowles, who died of a shotgun wound to the abdomen.
Landers takes Knowles to task for his assertion that the Internet led to the shooting.
"While the Internet may increase opportunities for an affair, the danger to your wife came from YOU, not the computer," Landers states. "Blaming the Internet is a cop-out. You killed your wife because she left you."
John-Michael Knowles, the eldest of the couple's four children and a senior at James Madison University, said he was advised by two lawyers not to comment about his father's letter.
"Although I want to, I better not," he said in a telephone interview.
In his letter to Landers, Michael Knowles says, "I took her life because of an affair that started on the Internet."
The prosecutor in the case said he knew of nothing to indicate Angie Knowles had an affair.
Despite his pending trial, Knowles has persisted in a letter-writing campaign to various newspapers and columnists.
Landers picked his letter from the more than 5,000 she gets each week as being unusual enough to print, according to her editorial assistant Marcy Sugar. Knowles' letter is being published in more than 1,200 newspapers worldwide, including The Roanoke Times' Extra section.
Knowles will go on trial May 27 on charges of murdering Angie Knowles and the malicious wounding of their daughter, Vanessa, who was shot in the hand during the fatal confrontation between the couple March20.
Sugar said in a telephone interview from Landers' Chicago office that Knowles had given her boss the impression - without saying it directly - that he had already been convicted.
"We did not know the case was pending," Sugar said. "He gave us the distinct impression that he was in prison for the rest of his life."
She noted that the return address on Knowles' envelope was the Montgomery County Jail, lending credence to the assumption that he had already been tried and convicted.
Although there is no screening process for inmate letters, Landers' staff would have made some calls to find out the status of cases that appeared to be pending, Sugar said.
"This was unusual. [Ann Landers] does not usually get letters from people confessing to major crimes," Sugar said. "This was out of the ordinary even for what she gets."
It's also unusual for The Roanoke Times to see a regional crime story turn up in a nationally syndicated column. When editors saw the Landers column a few days before it was to run, they debated printing it.
"It wasn't an easy decision, but we felt we should publish the column," editor Wendy Zomparelli said. "Our first concern was for the feelings of the children and for those in the community who knew Angie Knowles. But Michael Knowles' letter is now in a national spotlight. It seemed better to let people in this community see what he wrote, rather than leaving them to hear about it secondhand - possibly in garbled accounts.
"Publishing it also meant we had a responsibility to report how this unusual letter came to be featured by a national columnist and what it might mean to those involved in the case."
"Unusual" would be an apt description of the content of many of Michael Knowles' letters. In some sent to The Roanoke Times, he says God and and an angel told him to kill his wife. In others, he says he did it because his wife had several lovers, and he asks for help tracking these people down through the Internet.
A mental evaluation of Michael Knowles conducted in mid-December showed him to have "schizophrenia, paranoid type," according to a report filed in Montgomery County Circuit Court.
Jerome Nichols, a Roanoke clinical psychologist who evaluated Knowles, also reported that Knowles said he talks to an angel who gives him advice. It was an angel who told Knowles to run for the U.S. Senate many years ago, the report stated.
Despite the obvious mental problems Knowles displayed, Nichols said, Knowles understood the charges against him and could help in his own defense. In other words, he was deemed competent to stand trial. The rest of the mental evaluation - such as whether Knowles was sane at the time of shooting - will not come out until the trial.
Aspects of any delusions are not as apparent in Knowles' letter to Landers. He talks about his 22 years of marriage and a 19-year career with the U.S. Postal Service. Knowles also mentions the trip he took right before the slaying.
"I decided to take a trip to the Holy Land to clear my head and perhaps get some divine guidance. When I returned on Valentine's Day, I found a note. It simply said she had left for good," his letter states.
A little more than a month passed from the day Knowles found his wife's note until the day she died. Vanessa Knowles, then 18, attempted to stop her father by putting her finger in the barrel of the shotgun, she testified at the preliminary hearing in May, but he shot anyway and wounded her in the process.
Police were able to arrest Knowles at the scene of the killing only after he laid his gun down and his daughter threw it out the front door of the house where she and her siblings had moved with their mother a month earlier.
Support for the children and anger over Angie Knowles' death poured from the community. Hundreds of people attended her funeral and recalled her many hours of service in four Parent-Teacher Associations, as a soccer coach and a driving force of the town's After-Prom celebration.
Phil Keith, Montgomery County commonwealth's attorney, said it concerns him that Landers would give Knowles' letter such publicity.
After hearing the content of the letter, Keith said some of it appears factual, but other parts are questionable.
"There is no indication that his wife ever had an affair," Keith said. "She did use the Internet."
Max Jenkins, lead defense attorney for Knowles, said he had no comment about the letter or its contents.
"I didn't know anything about it," Jenkins said.
LENGTH: Long : 119 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: (headshot) Knowles. color.by CNB