On the afternoon of Wednesday, December 22, 1999, a delivery man from the main Greenville-Pelham Florist shop was sent to check on the small branch store on Rutherford Road in Greenville, South Carolina, because nobody there was answering. He found the lights off and the "Sorry, we're closed" sign hanging in the front window, and he had to unlock the door to get in. Karen Moore Hayden, thirty, a young wife and mother who ran the shop, was lying face down in a back storage room with her throat cut. The vases and flowers she had been working with were untouched. The lieutenant in charge of the detective division said there were a lot of similarities to another case and that it bothered him.
He meant the Radio Shack on Laurens Road. On Saturday, June 26, 1999, the clerk there, Jonathan Lemuel Lara, had been found in the back room fastened to a chair with flex ties and stabbed in the neck with a screwdriver. The killer had locked the front door, turned out the lights, hung the closed sign in the window and left by the back. Money was missing from the register, and Lara had last been seen with an unknown man and woman.
Early the next morning, December 23, a man broke into Timothy Ott's house in Easley, in neighboring Pickens County. Sandra Roberts Ott, thirty-three, a nurse, had fled there to her former husband after paging him with an emergency message. The intruder shot her in the head in the kitchen, then chased Timothy Ott, thirty-two, as he tried to get away for help and shot him too. Their son was asleep in the house. The police had a name at once: Dallen Forrest Bounds, twenty-eight, a short-term boyfriend of Sandra Ott's whom she had rejected, and who was said to have been stalking her; he had once scattered rose petals across her driveway, and he kept a diary in which he wrote about suicide.
The manhunt lasted about twelve hours. Around one in the afternoon Bounds walked into a house on South Third Street in Easley where a mother and daughter lived, who took him at first for an acquaintance of the family. He closed the blinds and told them he had killed two people. While he sat in the living room watching a Christmas program on television, the daughter got word to a neighbor, and when he saw a police officer standing behind him he put his pistol to his head and fired. Both women were unhurt.
At that point he was known only for the Otts. An anonymous call then tied him to the two shop killings in Greenville, and in January 2000 police said they had enough evidence to show he had killed Hayden and Lara. Two weeks after his death they arrested Casandra Laster, twenty-nine, who had lived with him, in connection with the Radio Shack killing. In 2001 she was convicted of accessory after the fact to felony murder and sentenced to fifteen years, and in 2003 the South Carolina Court of Appeals dismissed her appeal; the court heard that she had not told police of his part until after he was dead.
Bounds had been born in Ashland, Oregon, on August 9, 1971, to Dallen Terry Bounds and Sharon Lee Forrest Bounds, and grew up in Lacey, Washington. He had served prison time before 1999 and had a daughter. He lived on East Park Avenue in Greenville, less than a mile from the county law enforcement center. Officials in Washington later named him as a suspect in at least three unsolved murders there; those remain suspicions. No motive for the shop killings was ever established.