Harold 'Butch' Knight: Wanted for Murder — Murder, She Told: Maine & New England True Crime

Sara Lee Clore

Sara Lee Clore was born in the city of Midland, Michigan—a sprawling grid of streets and people in the flat Midwest—home to 42,000 residents. Between 1966 (the year of her birth) and the 1980’s, her family moved to nearby, town-sized, Gladwin, Michigan. They lived right near the town center, just a few blocks from the courthouse.

When Sara was 20 years old, she had her first child, a girl she named Roxanne. Two years later, when she was 22, she gave birth to another girl—Angelica.

She grew up with acute asthma, and it inspired her to work as a respiratory therapist as an adult—helping patients with breathing disorders. She often traveled to patients’ homes for treatment, maintenance, and checkups. She was treating an elderly woman in nearby Midland and got to know her son, Harold Knight. Harold, who went by “Butch,” to those that knew him, was 18 years Sara’s senior.

Harold Wesley Knight, aka “Butch”

Around 1995, when Sara was 29 years old, she got a divorce from her first husband. Her oldest daughter was about 10 years old and her younger sister was 8. Roxanne later recalled that Butch was very charming—showing her mom a lot of attention and affection. He bought her flowers and took her to dinner. He would take her on trips and they would pack picnic lunches. Butch won her over and they would often write love notes to one another. Every Valentine’s Day, Butch got her an oversized card, and she called him her “every day Valentine.” He called her his “hunny bunny.”

Six years later, on January 18th, 2001, Sara and Butch got married—they eloped. They formed a blended family—Butch had children from a previous relationship as well, but they were adults and out of the house.

Things with Butch deteriorate

A few years after marriage, Butch became abusive to Sara’s teenage daughters Roxanne and Angelica.

Roxanne remembered Butch treating her like she was stupid, taunting her, and telling her she had no future. Once on a fishing trip, he said, “You know, you are not the smartest. You better figure something out, because I’m not going to be paying for you forever.” She was just 14 years old. She remembered how Butch’s personality would change depending on who he was talking to like a chameleon. She felt he often played her mom and her sister against one another.

Roxanne remembered that Butch became very controlling of her mom. Butch put a lot of pressure on Sara to bring in money for the both of them.

A fresh start in Maine

4 years later, in 2007, Sara and Butch moved together to Maine. Their marriage was at an all-time low, and Sara thought that the move could give them a fresh start. Sara loved lighthouses—she even used them as a decorative theme in her home—and Maine gave her plenty to explore with its 65 lighthouses along its hundreds of miles of coastline.

She soon got a job as a nurse and Butch got a job driving trucks for a hospital, transporting medical supplies. Her hiring manager at Central Maine Medical Center in Lewiston said that she hired Sara because of her expertise at inserting and removing breathing tubes. They kept her because of her compassion. Roxanne later explained, “She was smart, energetic, loving, and cared deeply about her job. She was the sweetest person in the whole planet, and saved many lives.”

Soon after getting this job Sara would purchase a home in rural Turner, Maine. According to Roxanne, Butch didn’t keep the truck driving job for long, and at one point Sara was working three different jobs along with the household chores and the cooking while Butch was unemployed.

Problems resurface, Sara returns to Michigan

In early 2014, she had had enough of Butch. Sara called one of her daughters and said “I don’t want to be a maid anymore.” She moved back to Michigan by herself and moved in with her daughter, Roxanne, who by this point had married. Meanwhile, Butch lived alone in their house back in Turner, Maine.

By May, Sara decided to give it another go with Butch. He, too, left Maine and returned to Michigan. They moved in together, renting a house about 45 minutes southwest of Grand Rapids in a tiny town called Fennville.

Butch said that he had gotten a job as a truck driver. Roxanne would sometimes take him to the truck yard on Sundays and pick him up on Fridays. He had a GPS, a road atlas, and a cooler that Sara had packed for him. Though they didn’t know it at the time, Butch may not have worked at all, and this may have just been charade. No records have been found of him working for a truck company in late 2014.

The final days

In early January of 2015, Sara told her daughter, Roxanne, that Butch had been acting odd. He would sometimes take her car and disappear for hours and hours. She confronted him about it, and he said that his secret errands were for their upcoming anniversary on January 18th. That seemed to mollify her. Still, Roxanne and Sara’s mother, Carolyn, had both offered her a place to stay if she needed to leave.

On Saturday, January 10th, Butch went to the bank and withdrew $1,250 from their joint account. He was starting to liquidate their remaining assets. He was also searching around on the internet for ‘how to hurt someone’ and ‘different ways to murder people.’

January 11, 2015

On Sunday, January 11th, Butch put his plan into action. He strangled Sara to death in their home with a ligature around her neck. Butch was 66 years old and Sara was 48.

Butch remained with Sara’s body through Sunday night. On Monday, he went back to the bank and closed their account, leaving with $3,314—police later reviewed the bank’s surveillance footage. He went to a firing range near Grand Rapids, Michigan and did some target practice and bought a .40 caliber Glock handgun and 40 rounds of armor-piercing ammunition. He also pawned a rifle.

Butch took her money and then took off in her light blue-green 2009 Subaru Forrester, a mid-sized SUV.

On Tuesday morning, around 8:00AM, Butch called 911. He said that “a person is dead at the Knight home on 116th Avenue, west of 62nd Street.” The call came from the southeast region of Michigan near Ann Arbor based on cell tower records. In the call, he said, “I strangled her. She is dead, and she is laying on the living room floor. You need to get law enforcement out there... to do whatever they do... with dead bodies.” When the operator asked for his name, he said, “That’s not important. I’m getting ready to leave the country.” He sounded calm, assertive, and to the point. Butch was later ID’d by his son by his voice.

Police find Sara’s body

Deputies from the Allegan County Sheriff’s Office raced to the home. It was bitter cold, -7 degrees Fahrenheit. About a foot of crusty, densely-packed snow was on the ground.

They discovered Sara’s body immediately. It was in clear view and covered with a sheet. They checked her for signs of life, but she was long gone—icy cold to the touch. Her body was very well-preserved because of the frigid cold of the heatless house.

The place was tidy and clean. Butch had laid things out for the cops on the dining table. A red-colored hanging file folder lay open. On the left were sheets of white copy paper with hand-written instructions of who to contact in her family. On the right were some business cards and photos of Sara. Just to the right of the folder was her driver’s license. There were post-it notes, scrapbooks, and personal items placed around her body. Her phone and its passcode were left on the table. A note, written in red marker read as follows:

“1-11-15, Approx 3:00PM—
Sara Knight is in Heaven with her maker and the angels. In fact, Sara is an angel now.”

There were ligature marks on her neck, but no other “obvious traumatic injuries.” Though he had not yet been identified, police assumed that the 911 caller was Butch. An APB went out to look for the 2009 Subaru Forrester that was registered to Sara with Michigan license plate GM-74A. Butch had cleared out the place of all his personal belongings, taking all photos of himself. Police had to get a photo of Butch from Sara’s family to send out to law enforcement.

Breaking the news to Roxanne

When Roxanne arrived at work, there were police cars waiting for her in the parking lot. They asked her to come inside with them, where they broke the news that her mother was “gone.” She thought that they meant she was missing, so she offered to help them find her, thinking that perhaps her mother was upset after losing a patient and had gone off on her own. Once she understood that they meant she was dead, she thought that perhaps it was an accident and that Butch might have died as well—she had never considered the possibility that Butch would have hurt her mother.

When reporters started approaching her before she could even leave the parking lot, she knew it was no accident. But it wasn’t until she saw her mother’s body laying at the morgue that the truth of the situation finally set in.

The next day, an arrest warrant was issued for Harold “Butch” Knight—for murder.

Butch’s timeline in Maine

From Thursday, January 15th, to Monday, January 19th, Butch stayed at the Town and Lake Motel in Rangeley, Maine. Rangeley is in mountainous western Maine, just 20-30 miles from the Canadian border. He paid cash and used a fake name.

On the second day of his stay, Friday, January 16th, he drove to the nearest Walmart, which was 43 miles away in Farmington, Maine. He was caught on surveillance leaving the store, dressed head-to-toe in camouflage, wearing what looks like a Russian hat. His moustache is no longer gray, but dyed black. He appears to be having car problems, looking under the hood of his wife’s Subaru. He closes the hood, grabbing a suitcase from the vehicle, and walks off. He gets into another vehicle and they leave the parking lot together, and that’s the end of the footage. Police were later able to track this person down, and he revealed that Butch offered him $100 to drive him back to Rangeley because his car broke down and he needed a lift. He agreed.

A bold letter

The next day, Saturday, January 17th, Sara’s mother, Carolyn, got a package in the mail. It was one of those white “priority mail” boxes you get at the post office, and it was sent through the US Post. There were three words written on the front in all caps in black Sharpie: “VERY IMPORTANT READ.” As soon as Carolyn brought it inside, she knew who it was from and called 911. The police tracked the package to its origin: a quiet post office in small-town Rumford, Maine. It was sent the previous day—the day that Butch was stranded at Walmart.

Investigation, continued

On January 31st, the 18th day of Butch being on the run, authorities discovered the Subaru Forrester, abandoned, in the Walmart in Farmington. Walmart had called the Farmington Police, saying that there was a car in the parking lot that had been there awhile... with North Carolina plates. When police ran the VIN number, it came back to Sara. It’s unknown where he got the plates from. The Allegan County Sheriff’s office got the data from the built-in GPS unit in the vehicle and traced Butch’s route from Michigan to Maine.

They were able to pin down the motel he stayed at in Rangeley, and learned that the day he checked out, a snowmobile festival was taking place, which roused suspicions that he might have hitched a ride over the Canadian border.

But even into February 2015, there were sightings of Butch in the Rangeley area. It was a great time to be invisible. It was a cold and snowy winter, and he looked like the every-man of backcountry Maine, dressed in warm camouflage clothing and hats. There are many back roads and lakes and small rustic shelters (called camps) in the woods, lakes, and hills of western Maine, and authorities thought he could be hiding out.

By May of 2015, the FBI was involved as well, meaning that there were at least four organizations in the hunt: the Allegan County Sheriff’s Department, the US Marshals, the Maine State Police, and the FBI.

Incredibly, Butch managed to remain undetected for the rest of 2015, inspiring lead detective with the Allegan County Sheriff’s office, Craig Gardiner, to make a New Year’s Resolution: to find Butch and bring him back to Michigan.

Family grieves

While law enforcement had a mission, Sara’s family and friends were rudderless. Roxanne said, “Mom was just the type that took care of everything. She was like everybody’s rock. We’re just lost without her. We’re completely lost.” Her phone was no longer lighting up. She said, “I truly miss the annoying phone calls a hundred times a day. I can remember my mom saying, ‘I just wanted to say hi,’ and I would be, like, ‘Dude, I’m so busy,’ and she would say ‘I know... But I just wanted to say ‘Hi’ and see what you’re doing.’ I miss those phone calls.”

Roxanne wanted to do something to help the investigation, so she started to raise reward money. She began by making custom-printed pink t-shirts that read “No evil goes unpunished... Justice for Sara.”

Butch’s letter revealed

In January of 2016 police released to the public the contents of the package Butch had sent to Sara’s mother. It contained a rambling 4-page letter that attacked Carolyn and other relatives for a family rift that had developed over the years. It also brought up some bad blood over how Butch and Sara were disciplining, quote, “their rambunctious daughter Angelica.” Roxanne referred to this note as a “hit list” because it specifically named people and Butch’s complaints about them.

The note also spoke to Butch’s motive. He wrote,

“I had to do what I had to do, to make a coin or two.
Enclosed my approximate daily take, $2,000 cash, on my drug sales to help pay for Sara cremation expense.
You know damn well SARA wanted to be cremated at her death, and you better have done, CREMATION.
Sara didn’t agree or understand my new way of making a coin or two, to supplement income.
Sara pissed me off, and I had to do what I had to do to keep my drug sales incoming.
Sara became a liability to me and assets (income) overpower liabilities every day.
Over and out!”

He threw in taunts to the police as well, saying,

“The murder is done. I’m free as a bird, now.
I was 5 to 10FT away from Captain Baker. Maybe I was supposed to do an interview. He didn’t show a lot of interest...
They’re not smart enough to catch me. I will turn myself in when I feel I want to, and I will never spend a day in jail.”

The family doubted his motive and police have found no evidence that Harold was peddling narcotics. The family believes that she was going to leave him, and that is why he killed her.

A friend of Sara’s believed that the money and the request to have her cremated was not about honoring her wishes, but about Butch asserting control over Sara—even in death.

Finding Harold Wesley Knight

On the 2-year anniversary, law enforcement gave an interview to Fox 17 in Grand Rapids, Michigan. A US Marshal Fugitive Task Force supervisor expressed surprise that Butch had managed to stay under the radar. He said, “In the last year, we have followed up on leads from coast to coast. From North Carolina to Texas to the west coast and in between—all the way up to Alaska.” He commented on Butch’s looks, saying that he looked like “everyone’s 68-year-old father or grandfather.”

He believed that Butch was quietly earning cash with some skills that he accumulated over his life, explaining, “He has a pilot’s license. He is a pretty accomplished woodworker. He did time in the Navy. He has a computer background. He has training in accounting, and he was a truck driver for a number of years.” He emphasized a few things about Butch to keep in mind: he is hard of hearing, he has a scar on his stomach, and he has an interest in specialty health foods. They said there was no evidence that he made it to Canada.

Almost a decade late, Butch still hasn’t been found.

It will take only a single misstep for Butch to be found. Perhaps his hubris will be his undoing.

Harold Wesley Knight, who goes by “Butch,” is white, male, 6 foot 4 inches tall, 250-300 pounds, balding, with gray hair that may be dyed black, hazel eyes, and a mustache. He was born in 1948 and is hard of hearing. He may have diabetes. He has a scar on his abdomen. He also may be disguising his appearance. He is considered armed and dangerous.

If you have seen Butch or have any information, please contact the US Marshals at 1-877-WANTED2 (926-8332) or leave a tip online at usmarshals.gov/tips. You can also call the Allegan County Sheriff's Department at 269-673-0500, or 911.

This text has been adapted from the Murder, She Told podcast episode, Harold ‘Butch’ Knight: Wanted for Murder. To hear Sara Lee Clore and Harold Knight’s full story, find Murder, She Told on your favorite podcast platform.

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Sara Lee Knight, center, with daughters (PC: Investigation Discovery)

Sara Lee Knight, right (PC: Investigation Discovery)

Sara Lee Knight (PC: Investigation Discovery)

Harold ‘Butch’ Knight, Sara Lee Knight, right to left (PC: Investigation Discovery)

Harold ‘Butch’ Knight, Sara Lee Knight (PC: Investigation Discovery)

Sara Lee Knight, Harold ‘Butch’ Knight (PC: Investigation Discovery)

Harold ‘Butch’ Knight (PC: Investigation Discovery)

Harold and Sara’s house in Fennville, Michigan

Allegan County Sheriff’s Office (PC: Investigation Discovery)

Crime scene, Butch and Sara’s house in Fennville, MI (PC: Investigation Discovery)

Note that Butch left for investigators and Sara’s family/friends (PC: Investigation Discovery)

Hall Kokotovich Funeral Home (Gladwin, MI)

Map of relevant locations (PC: Crime Watch Daily)

Harold ‘Butch’ Knight - driving Sara's Subaru

Gun shop and firing range, Grand Rapids, MI, January 2015 (PC: Investigation Discovery)

Letter that Butch sent to family (PC: Investigation Discovery)

Town & Lake Motel, Rangeley, ME, last known location of Harold ‘Butch’ Knight

Carolyn Clore, Sara Lee Knight’s mother (PC: Investigation Discovery)

Friend of Sara Lee Knight’s (PC: Investigation Discovery)

Roxanne Harris, Sara Lee Knight’s daughter (PC: Investigation Discovery)

Sources For This Episode

Newspaper articles

Various articles from Bangor Daily News, Detroit News, Grand Rapids Press, Morning Sentinel, Portland Press Herald, Sun Journal, The Herald Palladium, The Holland Sentinel, and The Muskegon Chronicle, here.

Written by various authors including Andrew Lersten, Angie Jackson, Audra Gamble, Becky Kark, Brian McVicar, Christopher Williams, Curtis Wildfong, Dawn Gagnon, Dennis Hoey, Donna Perry, Francis Donnelly, Heidi Fenton, Jim Dalgleish, John Tunison, Julia Bayly, Rachel Ohm, and Ryan McLaughlin.

Photos

Photos from In Pursuit With John Walsh S1E1: Tragic Entanglement, Investigation Discovery, Crime Watch Daily, US Marshals, and Google Maps.

Online written sources

'Sara Lee Porter-Knight' (Facebook), 1/14/2015

'Husband Facing Open Murder Charge in Allegan Co. Woman's Death' (Fox 17 Online), 1/14/2015, by Matt Erspamer

'Woman's Husband Named as Suspect in her Murder' (Holland Sentinel), 1/14/2015, by Curtis Wildfong

'MI-Sara Knight, 48, Allegan County, 11 Jan 2015' (Websleuths), 1/14/2015, by OkieGranny

'Harold Wesley Knight' (U.S. Marshals), 1/16/2015

'Justice for Sara Lee Knight' (Facebook), 1/19/2015

'Police Seek Husband of Slain Former Maine Resident' (Maine Public), 1/20/2015, by AP

'Michigan Police Seek Husband of Slain Former Mainer' (Press Herald), 1/20/2015

'Police Seek Husband of Killed Former Maine Resident' (Petoskey News), 1/21/2015, by AP