York County killer Kevin Dowling heads back to death row after high court denies new trial

In August 1995, Jennifer Myers was tied up, robbed and sexually assaulted in the art gallery she owned in West Manchester Township.

She didn’t know her assailant, who robbed her of $40 after sexually assaulting her, but a few days later, she spotted the man working at a Sheetz convenience store not far from her gallery.

She called the police and when the officers searched his car, they found a loaded gun, rope and a newspaper article about the robbery. They also found a pair of sunglasses that resembled the ones Myers told police her assailant was wearing.

Kevin Dowling, then 39, was charged with robbery, indecent assault and attempted rape.

On Oct. 20, 1997, two days before Dowling was to go to trial on those charges, Myers, a 44-year-old mother of two, was found dead in her new art gallery, The Gray Fox Gallery in Spring Grove’s Spring Forge Plaza, shot three times, once in the chest, once in the shoulder and once in one of her eyes. Witnesses told police that they had heard three loud bangs at about 1 p.m. that day.

Dowling was charged with her murder a short time later. He had tried to concoct an alibi, according to prosecutors, by staging a video of a solo fishing trip in Lancaster County. He also claimed he was at a strip joint in Harrisburg at the time of Myers’ murder.

The jury didn’t buy it and convicted Dowling of first-degree murder and sentenced him to death.

Dowling appealed the conviction and in February 2022, Lebanon County Senior Judge Robert Eby ruled that Dowling’s defense lawyer was ineffective and that prosecutors did not turn over evidence that may have pointed to his innocence. Further, the judge ruled that prosecutors presented evidence that “it knew or should have known to be materially false,” the judge wrote in his 31-page ruling.

Eby ruled that Dowling should receive a new trial.

Now, two years later, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, reviewing the case, overturned Eby’s ruling, sending Dowling back to death row from York County Prison, where he had been held since being granted a new trial.

At issue in the appeal was a register tape from Kennie’s Market in the shopping center. A witness told police, and later testified, that she had seen Dowling in the parking lot at about 11:30 a.m. the day Myers was murdered. However, the time printed in her receipt showed it was earlier. A state police trooper testified that the clock on the register was slow by 20 minutes and that the receipt could have collaborated the witness’s statement.

Coverage of the trial: Fish, lies and videotape: Read YDR's complete 1998 coverage of Kevin Dowling's murder trial

Previously Kevin Dowling, sentenced to death in infamous 1997 Spring Grove murder, awarded new trial

Dowling also claimed that weight given to the testimony of his daughter and a fellow inmate should be discounted, that the inmate could have gleaned details of the crime from news reports and that his daughter was “mentally ill” and had a poor memory and suffered from blackouts. His daughter had testified that Dowling told her, when she was 13, that “the (sexual assault) case is too much for him to handle; that, you know, it can’t go on any longer and that (Myers) was going to die for it.”

Supreme Court Justice David Wecht reviewed Dowling’s claims, along with the claim raised by Dowling that his trial attorney, Gerald Lord, had failed to investigate the matter and also failed to call an expert witness to testify about the time stamped on the register tape, and found them wanting.

Dismissing Dowling’s assertions, Wecht wrote in a decision dated May 31 that the evidence established “there was no reasonable probability that ... the result of the proceeding would have been different.”

Wecht concluded that “the totality of the evidence” supported Dowling’s conviction and the lower court “erred in granting Dowling relief.”

Dowling, now 65, will return to death row to wait execution. It may not happen any time soon, if ever. Former Gov. Tom Wolf, citing the cost, placed a moratorium on executions in 2015 and current Gov. Josh Shapiro has said he will not sign any death warrants while in office and has asked the state Legislature to abolish the death penalty in the commonwealth.

This article originally appeared on York Daily Record: York County PA killer Kevin Dowling heads back to death row