Though he’d never wish death on anyone, Mike Lewinski is breathing a little easier now that Edward “Eddie” Davidson is gone for good.
The escaped criminal spammer was found dead last week with his wife and three-year-old in an apparent murder suicide after four days on the run.
“I just had a general vague bad feeling when I heard he had escaped,” said Lewinski, who once fired Davidson as a broadband client.
Davidson walked away from a minimum-security prison in Colorado on July 20, just weeks into a 21-month sentence for spamming-related crimes. Four days later, he reportedly told his wife that he was ready to turn himself in and convinced her to meet him with their three-year-old daughter, seven-month-old son and Davidson’s teenage daughter by a previous marriage.
Once at the Home Depot parking lot where they agreed to meet, Davidson reportedly forced his way into the couple’s SUV and drove the family to a home they had recently sold.
He then reportedly pulled a gun out of a bag, which he had earlier said contained a gift for the family, shot and killed his wife, their three-year-old and himself. The seven-month-old boy was found in the SUV physically unharmed. The teenage girl was shot in the neck, but managed too run to the safety of a neighbor’s home a quarter mile away.
Lewinski—the technical director for Colorado business-to-business broadband Internet access provider RockyNet—dealt with Davidson as a client early this decade when RockyNet sold high-speed Internet access to Davidson and rented him office space.
According to Lewinski, his dealings with Davidson were generally unpleasant.
As a result, until last week when the news broke that Davidson was dead, Lewinski had been locking his office door at the Rockynet facility from which Davidson once ran his spamming operation—just in case.
He said he believed rumors that Davidson was a heavy drug user with a particular fondness for cocaine and its smoked counterpart crack. He said he also believed rumors Davidson physically abused the woman in his life at the time.
Indeed, according to a report in the Denver Post, sheriff’s deputies in Pinellas County, FL, in 1998 responded to a call from Davidson’s soon-to-be ex-wife Merry, who told officers that he had kicked and slapped her and beaten her with a belt at their home in Palm Harbor, FL.
Later, Merry also moved residences at least twice, taking the couple’s daughter with her without telling Davidson where she went. Both times, Davidson hired a private investigator and found her, according to the Post.
The attorney who represented Davidson in his divorce from Merry, Jim Saffell, described Davidson as both charming and “menacing,” according to the Post.
And throughout it all, Davidson was a hardcore, unrepentant, criminal spammer, who by many accounts behaved as though he thought rules were for other people.
Steve Sobol—now a system administrator for a California company—said he thought something wasn’t right with Davidson as early as 1995, when Davidson was a client of a company Sobol worked for in Cleveland: New Age Consulting.
“His whole world view was that he thought he could do anything without repercussion,” Sobol said. “Eddie felt he was above the rules.”
Lewinski tells a similar story. He said Davidson’s account at RockyNet was shut off twice in the late 90s for spamming.
Then in early 2001, Davidson came back to RockyNet, claiming he had changed his ways and that he wanted to strike a large-dollar deal.
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“This was during the dot-com bust, and they were losing a lot of clients, so it was hard to say ‘no,’” said Lewinski.
Within weeks, Lewinski said, Davidson was using servers in Florida to do dictionary attacks on RockyNet’s servers to try and get the names and e-mail addresses of its users. Essentially, Davidson was using his computers in Florida to attack his own service provider in Colorado in an effort to further his spamming activities.
Then, Lewinski said, he started getting complaints from other Internet system administrators that someone was using RockyNet’s machines to try and sniff out so-called open proxies, or machines on other networks that could be compromised to disguise the source of spam.
As Lewinski investigated, he said he became aware that Davidson was engaged in pennystock pump-and-dump scams—one of the types of crimes for which Davidson would later be sent to prison.
So Lewinski decided to alert the Securities and Exchange Commission. He sent SEC the a letter—on Sept. 10, 2001. The next day, terrorists attacked lower Manhattan, and the SEC began focusing on issues more pressing than pennystock scams.
Lewinski said the SEC responded to his inquiry, but said it was “still doing a headcount” after the attacks.
In any case, on Jan.1 2002, Lewinski said, he shut off Davidson’s account.
The phone call that followed was a fairly typical exchange between Davidson and Lewinski, he said.
“He was a hostile person in general,” said Lewinski. “Every conversation with him was kind of an adrenaline rush because he was always so belligerent.”
During one such previous conversation, Lewinski recounts, Davidson said: “Everybody knows that ever since I came to RockyNet you’ve had a hard-on for me!”
After his account was shut off, Davidson left owing RockyNet $30,000, Lewinski said. However, over the ensuing years he’d occasionally call RockyNet’s CEO to see if they might strike another deal. Though the CEO strung Davidson along, hoping he might recoup some of his losses, they never were able to reach an agreement, said Lewinski.
When news came out that Davidson had escaped prison, Lewinski did a Google search on himself to see if Davidson might be able to find his home address. And he also began locking his office door. The day Davidson was found dead, Lewinski said he still locked his office door “out of habit.”
Now that Davidson is gone, Lewinski is understandably relieved, but shaken. “I’m still kind of processing it all,” he said. “I may have had some malice toward the man, but I never wished him dead.”
And though he didn’t say it outright, Lewinski is also clearly haunted by Davidson’s murders of his wife and daughter.
“The biggest thought I have been having is what if I would have reported him to the SEC a year earlier?” said Lewinski. “Maybe they would have got him earlier and maybe he would not have met that woman and killed her. But then maybe he would have gone to jail, gotten out, and met another woman and killed her and another little girl.”
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