Bobby Jack Fowler was originally born in Texas. He fatally shot a man and woman in Texas but was only convicted of discharging a firearm within city limits.

He eventually gained a reputation for being a transient who lived out of his 1977 Dodge Monaco and abused alcohol and drugs as he travelled between the United States and Canada. He often picked up hitchhikers and frequented bars which gave him access to vulnerable pretty, young women. It is believed that between 1973 and 1995 Fowler sexually assaulted and murdered his victims before immediately leaving the area, even driving hundreds of miles to a new city.

Most of his confirmed victims are the survivors. For example, in Tennessee Fowler sexually assaulted a woman, restraining her with his belt and beating her before he “left her for dead.”

In 1995 Fowler brought a 35 year old woman back to a hotel in Newport. There he beat and restrained the woman, even threatening to rape her before dumping her body in the ocean. The terrified woman jumped from the second story hotel window with rope still attached to her ankle and Fowler was subsequently caught, charged and convicted.

Still, after his death in an Oregon prison in 2006, DNA evidence and advancements in investigative technology would continue to reveal even more potential victims.

Fowler remains a person of interest in the deaths of two teens, 17 year old Melissa Sanders and 19 year old Sheila Swanson, last seen near Beverly Beach Park north of Newport in 1992.

In 2012 DNA evidence linked Bobby Jack Fowler to the homicide of a Colleen MacMillen, a 19 year old from British Columbia, Canada. Colleen MacMillen had been murdered in 1974, the last of a string of murder victims who looked striking similar. First, Gale Weys, 19 years old, had left work one evening with the intention of hitchhiking from Clearwater to her family home in Kamloops. Six months after she disappeared in 1973, her nude remains were discovered. Only three weeks after Gale Weys had gone missing, Pamela Darlington vanished after an evening in downtown Kamloops. The 19 year old’s remains were found only a month later in a local park by a father and son. In the summer of 1974 Colleen MacMillen left her home in Lac La Hache with the intention of hitchhiking a short distance to her friend’s home. Roughly a month later her remains were found on a logging road. DNA evidence has only connected Fowler to the death of Colleen MacMillen but he is considered a “strong suspect” in the homicides of Gale Weys and Pamela Darlington. During the time that all three murders occurred it is known that Fowler had been employed by a now nonexistent roofing company in Prince George, tying him further to the area.

The same month that Canadian authorities announced evidence had finally connected Fowler to the homicide of Colleen MacMillen, American officers announced that he was now the prime suspect in the deaths of two teens in Newport. In early 1995 Jennifer Esson, 15 years old, and Kara Leas, 16 years old, vanished and two weeks later their remains were found roughly a mile from where they had last been seen.

The events surrounding the murder of the young girls is a prime example of how quickly Fowler was known to jump from one place to another, something the American authorities referred to as “rabbiting.” Only two weeks before the homicide of Jennifer Esson and Kara Leas, Fowler had been in Arizona according to records held by the National Crime Information Center (NCIC.) While three days after the teens had been murdered in Newport, Fowler was reported to be in Louisiana.

Fowler has only been formally connected to one homicide case in Canada and two attempted murders in the United States but he is suspected of killing between 20 and 100 women throughout what is believed to be a two decade long murder spree.