Convicted spammer and prison escapee Edward “Eddie” Davidson was found dead late last week along with his wife and three-year-old daughter in an apparent murder suicide in rural Colorado.
The couple’s seven-month-old son was reportedly found in their SUV physically unharmed. Davidson’s teenage daughter by a previous marriage was shot in the neck, but was reportedly able to run away and save herself.
Davidson was sentenced by U.S. District Court Judge Marcia Krieger in April to 21 months in jail and ordered to pay $714,139 to the Internal Revenue Service.
He was just weeks into his sentence when during a visit from his wife and children, he reportedly forced his wife Amy into the family vehicle and drove away. According to reports based on information gathered by authorities from Davidson’s teenage daughter, he then dropped Amy and the children off at Amy’s parents’ home and left.
Four days later, Davidson reportedly called Amy and said he was going to turn himself in, but wanted to see the family first. Amy reluctantly agreed and took the children to meet him at a Home Depot parking lot where Davidson muscled his way into the vehicle, forcing Amy into the passenger’s seat. He reportedly had with him a Kohl’s bag, which he said contained a “gift for everyone.”
After driving the SUV to a home the couple had recently sold, Davidson reportedly took a gun out of the bag and turned it on himself. After his wife pleaded with him not to shoot himself, he began shooting her and two of the children.
Davidson was well known to many in the anti-spam community, including Steve Linford, executive director of blocklisting concern Spamhaus.
“Words can't express how sorry I feel for the family,” wrote Linford in an e-mail exchange with Newsline.
“That said, Davidson had all the characteristics of a sociopath and had made death threats to an anti-spammer some years ago. The world of spam botnets, malware and fraud spammers is highly criminal and violent. Many of the hard-core spammers we track are sociopaths and it's a small step for them to go from their daily criminal activity over into violence,” Linford continued. “It's tragic that Davidson chose to take with him innocent lives he saw as his property.”
Steve Sobol, 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 worldview was that he thought he could do anything without repercussion,” Sobol said. “Eddie felt he was above the rules.”
As a result, Sobol added, getting a prison sentence and a hefty fine were probably unfathomable to Davidson.
According to authorities, from 2002 to 2007 Davidson ran a business called Power Promoters, which spammed on other companies’ behalves to sell products such as watches and perfume. He also forged headers, a violation of the Can Spam Act, and engaged in a penny stock pump-and-dump spamming scheme on behalf of an unnamed Texas company, the FBI said.
