On June 28, 1987, the body of Leza Chandler, a twenty-nine-year-old schoolteacher, was found in the middle of her bed in Odessa, Texas, lying on her back in what the appeals court later described as a posture of quiet repose. A friend visiting from Midland found her. Chandler had taught at Permian High School and at a junior high, and nothing in the room suggested violence. The autopsy did. She had died of acute chloroform poisoning, and the medical examiner thought it was probably homicide.
Detectives learned that Chandler and a circle of friends used to gather at her house and inhale chloroform so they could talk about their troubles in a relaxed state, and that one of the circle was David Albert Dowler, thirty-four, who had a history of supplying chloroform to friends. There were rumors that Chandler had been having an affair with him. There was also a pattern around him that nobody had put together. Chandler was the third of his close acquaintances to die unexpectedly in four years, and her former husband, Tony Casillas, had been his business partner.
Dowler had grown up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the elder son of an Air Force colonel and his Japanese wife. At Sandia High School he was an above-average student who wrestled and earned a black belt in karate, and his brother remembered his passion for electronics and ham radio; once, when a riot knocked out the city's phone lines, he helped police and firefighters talk to each other. He studied electrical engineering, physics, chemistry and mathematics at the University of New Mexico without taking a degree, married in 1976 and had two daughters. In the early 1980s the family moved to Midland, Texas, where he sold for Daniel Industries. He told friends he was an undercover agent for the government.
His first victim was Lisa Blythe Krieg, whom he had met while working at Daniel Industries, twenty-six, who was found dead in her home on August 16, 1983. The autopsy showed she had been suffering from anorexia, but it could not settle whether that was what killed her. That same day Dowler telephoned her former husband, Tim Krieg, and told him that Lisa had killed herself with cyanide he had given her, and that he had cleaned her body so that her death would "look natural." He said he was an undercover FBI agent working with her, that he had saved her several times from assassins sent after her over a government operation, and that he had killed them in return. Tim Krieg asked the FBI whether any of it was true and got no answer. Afraid of being taken for a madman, he said nothing to the police.
Juan Antonio Casillas, twenty-eight, who went by Tony, ran a photo-processing business in Odessa with Dowler. He was found dead at his home on February 12, 1986. Cyanide was found in his body, along with small traces of amyl nitrite, and because the exact cause of death could not be fixed, his body was preserved for more testing.
According to later accounts, a friend of Chandler's agreed to meet Dowler while police listened, and he talked with her about how people could be killed and warned her she might be next. He was arrested on August 20, 1987. Searches turned up bottles of chloroform, a .22-caliber pistol and two homemade silencers. In September a grand jury indicted him for Chandler's murder and for possessing the two illegal sound suppressors, and his bond was set at $100,000. His family refused to believe it; to them he was a gentle man who would not hurt a fly and must have been framed. Investigators looked at three more deaths among his acquaintances, among them Kathy Hicks, twenty-nine, who had collapsed at an arts and crafts show at the Ector County Coliseum in 1986; her death was later traced to heart trouble and ruled out. On December 30, 1987, he was indicted for the murders of Krieg and Casillas.
He was tried in January 1988 for Chandler alone. Detectives testified that they had found two empty two-pint bottles of chloroform at his home on West Louisiana Street, and one of them, Detective Mickey Brown, conceded under questioning by the defense lawyer, H. Thomas Hirsch, that the state had no other evidence that Dowler had poisoned her. Hirsch said the chemicals were for making fireworks and pointed the jury toward Chandler's estranged husband; a psychiatrist called by the state testified that the husband suffered from depression and was not violent. A man who sometimes worked in Dowler's shop said he had seen friends use chloroform but had never seen Dowler give it to anyone. Tim Krieg, silent for four and a half years, told the jury about the phone call after his former wife's death. The trial court let the jury hear about the cyanide deaths, a ruling the appeals court later upheld as relevant to the chloroform charge.
On January 28, 1988, the jury found him guilty of murdering Leza Chandler and assessed life in prison, with the possibility of parole. District Attorney Eric Augesen called him a vicious murderer and a cruel manipulator who liked control and liked to snuff out human life. The Court of Appeals in El Paso affirmed the conviction on August 23, 1989. He has never been tried for the deaths of Lisa Krieg and Tony Casillas. He is held at the Clements Unit, and on March 13, 2023, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles denied him parole on the ground that he remains a continuing threat to public safety and set his next review for March 2028.