Tim Lowe had a very unfortunate (to say the least) encounter with the law. This is from the preface to an interview in Manshots, October 1994. The author/interviewer is Jerry Douglas, who directed Tim in Fratrimony (1989):
This much is a matter of record: Sometime on the evening of January 4, 1989, Tim Lowe, one of the most popular stars in the history of gay adult films, had a fight with his roommate, Alan Kinkead, 52, in the apartment they had shared for a brief time in the Haight district of San Francisco. Later that evening, Lowe and a female companion, Kimberly Stephanic, fled the scene in Kinkead's 1991 red Pontiac Trans-Am, heading south to Los Angeles.
Kinkead's dead body was found on January 8.
After stops in Los Angeles and San Diego, Lowe and Stephanic continued south into New Mexico, where they were stopped at a roadblock outside Alamagordo on January 21 and promptly arrested. A few days later, they were transported back to San Francisco, where Lowe was charged with the strangulation murder of Kinkead and held on one million dollars bail. News reports at the time pointed out that if he were found guilty, he could face the death penalty.
For the next fourteen months, Lowe remained in a cell in the San Francisco County Jail. In February 1994, San Francisco County Municipal Judge Dominique Olcomendy reduced the charge to involuntary manslaughter after an autopsy showed high levels of amyl nitrate and methamphetamines in Kinkead's blood, and forensic reports could not conclusively rule out the possibility of cardiac arrest.
At the present time, Lowe is living in a halfway house in San Francisco, and has just completed his first film in nearly five years. It is called Lowe Down, and has been produced for All Worlds Video by Dirk Yates, who discovered him.
During a break in the shooting of the film, Lowe calls me at my home in New York, and we speak for the first time since that fateful week in January 1993, when he stopped by Sierra Pacific Studios where I was then editing Jock-a-holics. On that day he looked like hell, and I knew something was wrong, but I had no idea what. He was clearly asking for help--though in no specific way--and he revealed nothing of his predicament. We waltzed around a lot of generalities, and soon he was ready to leave. I walked him out to the car he was driving--a red 1991 Pontiac Trans-Am--in which a young woman seemed to be dozing, but he did not bother to introduce us. I watched him drive off and that was the last time I'd seen him or heard from him until this phone call.
Tim Lowe and I have been friends since he starred in my 1989 production of Fratrimony. He and his former wife have been guests in my home. And I was one of the last persons to have contact with him before his arrest.
No comments:
Post a Comment