Dallen Forrest Bounds was born at Ashland, Oregon on August 9, 1971, to Dallen Terry Bounds and Sharon Lee Forrest Bounds. He was twenty-eight when he died. He was living on East Park Avenue in Greenville, South Carolina, less than a mile from the county law enforcement centre.
On Saturday June 26, 1999, Jonathan Lemuel Lara, an employee at a Radio Shack on Laurens Road in Greenville, was found dead in the back room. He had been fastened to a chair with flex ties and stabbed in the neck with a screwdriver. There was no sign of a struggle. The killer had turned off the lights, locked the front door, hung the closed sign in the window and left by the back.
Nearly six months later, on the afternoon of Wednesday December 22, the same thing happened at a small flower shop on Rutherford Road. Karen Moore Hayden, thirty, a wife and mother, was left face down in a back storage room in a pool of blood with her throat cut. A delivery man sent from the main branch to check on her had to unlock the door to get in, and found the lights off and the closed sign hanging in the front window. The vases and flowers she had been working with were untouched. The lieutenant over the detective division said at the time that there were a lot of similarities and that it bothered him.
Early the next morning he broke into a house at Easley, in Pickens County, and killed his girlfriend, Sandy Roberts Ott, and her former husband, Timothy Ott, in Timothy Ott's home.
He then left that house and took refuge in a neighbourhood several miles away, where he held two women hostage. An earlier version of this entry said the hostages were the Otts and that he killed them during the siege. That is wrong: the Otts were already dead at the other house, and the two women he held survived. He shot himself in the head shortly afterwards, on December 23, 1999, as police closed in.
He was never charged or tried. Officers in Greenville and Pickens counties closed all four murders against him.
Someone else was convicted. Casandra Laster, described as his accomplice in the killing of Jonathan Lara, was found guilty in 2001 of accessory after the fact to felony murder and sentenced to fifteen years. Her appeal was dismissed by the South Carolina Court of Appeals in 2003. The court was told that she had not told the police about his involvement until after he had killed himself.
Officials in Washington state later named him as a suspect in at least three unsolved murders there. Those are suspicions and are not part of the four.
No motive was established for the two shop killings.