VANCOUVER —
More than two months after investigators revealed a man murdered on a logging road near Squamish was an American hiding from multi-million dollar lawsuits and allegations of neo-Nazism, his girlfriend is coming forward to try and re-ignite interest in the case.
Eva McLennan began dating a vegan rock-climber she knew as Jesse James in late 2015, a man she describes as tight-lipped about his past while claiming to have amassed millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency as he was living “off the grid.”
He was found shot inside a burning vehicle in 2017.
In late October 2020, days before making a public announcement, RCMP investigators told McLennan that DNA evidence from “Jesse’s” remains had matched a missing person investigation for Davis Wolfgang Hawke, who was reported missing in the U.S. in 2006.
“I never believed that he was Jesse James, I knew that that was an alias,” said McLennan in a one-on-one interview outside the Zephyr Café in Squamish, where she and Hawke often went. “I knew he had a lot of secrets – everybody knew this person had a lot of secrets.”‘
McLennan couldn’t elaborate when asked what made her suspect her former partner was keeping secrets.
Recounting the day she learned of his death, McLennan told CTV News she was camping “not far away” from the location where Hawke’s body was discovered. She said she’d been wondering where he was, and why she handn’t heard from him, when she “stumbled upon the police cordon looking for him.”
She also said she was shocked to learn of a past that earned Hawke the “Spam Nazi” nickname.
“I was sickened,” McLennan said. “That was not on the radar, no. That was absolutely not on the radar.”
As a college student in South Carolina, Hawke garnered widespread media coverage and attention for advocating white supremacist ideology under a pseudonym, though he failed to gather support for an anti-government march he’d planned on the U.S. capital in 1999.
Hawke would go on to reinvent himself as a prolific email spammer, earning six-figure profits each month he hawked pornography and fake prescription drugs through countless unsolicited emails – which ultimately caught the attention of internet service providers and saw him lose a multi-million dollar lawsuit against him.
Disappearing act
Hawke fled the country, amidst rumours he’d hidden gold bullion bought with his profits. Whether it was buried in the mountains of New Hampshire, where he hiked with his wolf-dog hybrids, or buried on his parents’ Massachusetts property, rumours proliferated that Hawke had gold.
“At one point he was allegedly carrying around hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of gold bars,” explained Brian McWilliams, a former investigative journalist who wrote extensively about Hawke in a book titled “Spam Kings,” and wasn’t surprised to hear McLennan claim Hawke was wildly successful in cryptocurrency. “He put his wealth into gold and that’s just so…
Read more:Crypto-millionaire, ‘Spam Nazi’ on the run, or both? Squamish murder mystery deepens
