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On January 4,
1993, 52 year-old telemarketer Allen Kinkead was strangled to death at
his home, 2027A Oak Street, in the panhandle. A few weeks later, gay porn
star
Tim Lowe, 27, was arrested for the
murder at a road block in Alamagoro, New Mexico. Lowe, whose real name
is David Cody, and a girlfriend, Kimberly Stefanic, had absconded from
San Francisco in Kinkead's prized 1991 red Pontiac Trans-AM after the murder.
In the late '80s, Lowe was known as the star of dozens of gay titles. Soon,
however, he was washed up in the adult film industry, addicted to drugs,
and infected with HIV. By the early 1990s he was supporting a wife and
son by selling sex to older men in the Los Angles area, where the family
lived. In 1992, divorced from his wife, Renne, Cody moved to San Francisco.
He met Kinkead at the Campus Theater, where Cody performed as Tim Lowe.
Cody and Kinkead began an affair and Cody soon moved in with Kinkead on
Oak Street. Friends of Kinkead say their conversations with Cody were bizarre,
as Cody insisted he was straight despite what he was doing with Kinkead.
The friends say Cody was always irritable and paranoid, that he believed
he was being spied on and followed. After Cody began a relationship with
Stefanic, a tough he met on Haight Street, Kinkead attempted to break off
his relationship with his favorite porn star. When Kinkead failed to show
up for work for four days, firefighters broke into the apartment and found
Kinkead dead, bound with duct tape, on the floor of his bedroom. There
was evidence of sex and signs of a struggle inside the room. Because Cody
and Stefanic stole Kinkead's car and credit cards, they faced a possible
death penalty for murder in the commission of a robbery. However, after
a year in county jail, Cody pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of involuntary
manslaughter. Cody was given three years in state prison, plus his time
in county, and probation. To Kinkead's friends it seemed that the infamous
Tim Lowe had done what made him famous in the first place - he got off. |