Victim’s Kin Keeps Suspect in Hot Water

Lawrence Raymond Cowell of Anaheim, convicted of manslaughter in one incident and awaiting a new trial after a separate murder conviction was overturned, is in trouble again.

And all thanks to the same woman responsible for Cowell’s arrest in the April 17, 1982, murder of Scott Campbell in an airplane near Santa Catalina Island--the victim’s mother, Collene Campbell, who has become a leader of a crime victims’ rights organization.

“This woman is absolutely amazing, the way she has kept track of this Cowell fellow,” said one law enforcement official in Parker, Ariz., where Cowell faces an arrest warrant for assault with a deadly weapon in connection with a boating accident that left several people injured, one seriously.

Cowell, 40, is scheduled to turn himself in to La Paz County authorities in Parker on Monday, where he has been charged with assault with a deadly weapon and three counts of endangerment for piloting a boat while under the influence of alcohol in connection with the June 10 incident on the Colorado River, Arizona officials said Wednesday.

Prosecutors in Arizona say Cowell is “somewhere in California now.” But he has made arrangements through his attorneys to appear in court in Parker to face arraignment.

Cowell was one of two men convicted in 1985 of first-degree murder in Campbell’s death. Cowell and co-defendant Donald P. DiMascio, 40, both told undercover police agents that they killed Campbell in a rented airplane--which Cowell was flying--and tossed his body out at 2,000 feet a few miles from Catalina.

At the time Scott Campbell was murdered, Cowell was already facing trial for felony vehicular manslaughter in connection with a traffic accident on Katella Avenue in Anaheim. He later pleaded guilty to that charge and was sentenced to serve a year in Orange County Jail. He had been released from the jail on a work-furlough program at the time he and DiMascio spoke with undercover agents in March, 1983.

But last Oct. 31, more than two years after Cowell began serving his prison sentence of 25 years to life in the Campbell murder, his conviction was overturned by the 4th District Court of Appeal in Santa Ana. The justices said that Cowell’s confession, which was the key evidence against him, had been coerced.

A month later, Cowell was released on $250,000 bail, after which he moved in with his parents in Arizona, authorities said.

It was the Cowell and DiMascio arrest in 1984 that first catapulted Collene Campbell of San Juan Capistrano into the news. Anaheim police and prosecutors credit her and her husband, Gary, with leading investigators to Cowell and providing the evidence needed to convict him. It was Collene Campbell who initiated the undercover operations where Cowell and DiMascio confessed to their roles.

The Campbells had been upset over the prospect of a new trial for Cowell, scheduled for Nov. 13. But they were shocked to hear about the boating mishap in Arizona.

Cowell was driving a powerboat with friends on the Colorado River on June 10 when it ran into another boat that was drifting downstream. Several people sustained minor injuries, authorities, say, but one woman in the drifting boat suffered a concussion and a broken arm.

Cowell pleaded guilty to drunk driving in the incident. But it wasn’t until the victim in the boating case called to complain about her injuries that the county attorney’s office reopened the case and recently filed new charges.

The woman called, authorities say, only after Collene Campbell tracked her down and informed her of Cowell’s background.

“Can you believe this woman (Campbell)?” one law enforcement official in Arizona said Wednesday. “We think it’s great the way she has kept after this guy. There’s no doubt it led to our reopening the case.”

Campbell did not know about the new charges filed in the Arizona case until Wednesday, when she spoke with Orange County prosecutors who were in attendance at a rally for a crime victims initiative in Santa Ana.

Orange County Deputy Dist. Atty. Thomas M. Goethals said Wednesday that he would investigate whether the new charges against Cowell mean that he should be returned to California for a violation of bail regulations.

“I don’t think he should have ever been turned loose in the first place,” Goethals said. “But we have a very firm trial date, and I don’t want to do anything that might jeopardize that.”