David Dowler was born in 1967 and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the son of an Air Force colonel and his Japanese wife. By contemporary accounts he was a well-adjusted child who kept a B average at school while wrestling, worked with electronics and ran a ham radio. He spent three years at college without graduating and took a black belt in karate. He moved to Odessa, Texas in 1981 and found work as a sales representative for an oil company.
He told selected friends that he was a former secret agent and had taken out six men on government assignments. They took it with a pinch of salt, but they could not dispute that he seemed able to predict danger.
On the morning of August 16, 1983 he telephoned the father of Lisa Krieg, a twenty-six-year-old colleague, to say she was late for work, that he was worried and that he could think of nobody else to call. Her father went to her flat and found her dead on the bed, partly undressed. Her death was put down to long-standing anorexia nervosa. Dowler told friends a different story, about spies who had tried to kill her several times before for no apparent reason, and said that he had found her naked and had partly dressed the body to make the death look natural before ringing her father.
On February 12, 1986 he rang Leza Chandler to say he was worried about Juan Casillas, her former husband and his partner in a one-hour photograph developing business. She went to his flat and found him dead on the kitchen floor. The post-mortem examination found traces of drugs that were not identified.
On June 28, 1987 he rang another woman friend and asked her to check on Leza Chandler, just in case. She found her dead in bed with her infant daughter crawling about on the mattress beside her. The medical examiners found acute chloroform poisoning, and a murder investigation began.
By then friends and detectives had begun to wonder about his sixth sense. The woman he had telephoned agreed to wear a microphone to several meetings with him in July, and hours of conversation were recorded about espionage, assassination and the uses of chloroform.
He was arrested on August 20, 1987. A search of his flat produced bottles of chloroform, a .22 calibre pistol and two homemade silencers. He was held on a hundred thousand dollars' bond and indicted on September 8. While he was in custody the remains of Lisa Krieg and Juan Casillas were re-examined and lethal doses of cyanide were found in both, and he was indicted for those two murders in December 1987.
The police also looked at the death of Dorothy Nesbitt, another acquaintance who had died in unexplained circumstances in November 1986. No charges were ever brought over it, and she is not part of the count.
He was tried in January 1988. The prosecutor said he liked to be the power that snuffed out life and liked that supreme power. He was convicted of first-degree murder on January 27 and sentenced to life imprisonment with two trials still pending.
So the count is one conviction and three indictments. What became of the two outstanding prosecutions is not recorded in anything accessible here.