‘Smooth Talker’ Is Charged With Fleecing Lovers

With flowers, fancy meals, lavish presents and sweet words, David Frederick Kohl made women across the country feel like royalty, offering them romance, friendship and the good life.

“He treats you like you have always dreamed of being treated. He makes you feel like you are so special,” said one woman who was married to him for a brief period.

“Women fall off their feet for the guy,” a Los Angeles County sheriff’s detective said.

But the checks he wrote to pay for their gifts usually bounced, and once Kohl won his way into the women’s hearts, investigators charge, he helped himself to their money, jewelry and other possessions.

Kohl, 42, is facing 12 felony charges for crimes he allegedly committed over the last two years in the Santa Clarita and Antelope valleys, where authorities say he romanced, moved in with and fleeced at least four women he met in bars, and through business contacts and personal ads in newspapers and magazines.

He also filched property from male roommates and his employers, wrote nearly $10,000 worth of bad checks to businesses in the two valleys, and opened a business in Lancaster that took prospective clients’ money without ever providing the promised services, said Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy Greg Palmieri.

“He is a professional,” Palmieri said. “He can con anybody.”

But Palmieri said Kohl has a long history of sweeping lonely women off their feet with romantic gestures and attentiveness, then taking advantage of their trust in him to steal money from their bank accounts or rack up huge credit card bills in their names.

“He found people who needed strong people to lean on and he was their strength,” Palmieri said. “He found people who were lonely, and jolted from bad marriages. As soon as he met a woman, he started working on her right away.”

Palmieri said that Kohl usually told the women that he was a well-paid professional, such as a psychologist, a lawyer or a business executive, and showered them with expensive gifts to corroborate his lies.

Carole Haas, 43, a San Diego cocktail waitress who met Kohl as a customer, said “he has a great personality. He knows how to talk to people about anything.”

“He showed me a lifestyle I was not accustomed to,” she said.

Kohl usually left the women after several months--sometimes fleeing the state in cars he stole from them--leaving his victims with broken hearts and debts he ran up in their names, Palmieri said. Often, while living with one woman, he would court others, according to Los Angeles and San Diego county investigators.

Even after he left them, some of the women refused to believe he deliberately stole from them, the investigators said.

Although Kohl was convicted of grand theft in 1982 for stealing thousands of dollars from Haas, she married him while he was serving his prison sentence.

San Diego County Sheriff’s Detective Roger Kamoss, who investigated the case, said the two moved in together and Kohl suggested that he transfer money from his Colorado bank account into Haas’ account. Believing he had made deposits, Haas let him write many checks against the account.

But a month later, Kohl disappeared and left Haas with bouncing checks and no money to cover them, Kamoss said. Kohl was eventually found wooing a woman in Del Mar, arrested and convicted of grand theft, Kamoss said.

But Haas said while he was in prison, Kohl “had me believing that I had destroyed his life.” He blamed the bounced checks on bank errors, and made Haas feel guilty that she had helped land him in prison, she said. Then he asked her to marry him in the hope that the marriage would help him win parole.

Haas said yes.

“I was devastated. I thought I had ruined this man’s life,” she said. They lived together for about a year, during which time other women frequently called the house looking for Kohl. Haas said he also often disappeared on weekends. Finally, she said, he left for good.

The charges now pending against Kohl stem from crimes allegedly committed since he moved to Santa Clarita from Colorado in January of 1988--in a car stolen from a woman he had met while serving time there on fraud charges, Palmieri said.

Palmieri said Kohl stole from four different women that he lived with, in addition to male roommates. Kohl is also charged with stealing from his former employer, Griffin Homes, a Santa Clarita development company.

In recent months, Kohl moved to Lancaster, where he was arrested May 7. He had opened a roommate referral business called “Your Place or Mine,” and Palmieri said he has received numerous complaints from customers of the business who paid a fee for services, but never received any referrals.

If convicted on all counts now pending against him--which include writing bad checks, burglary, grand theft auto, embezzlement, and stealing blank checks--Kohl faces a maximum sentence of about 10-15 years in state prison, prosecutors said.

Authorities and victims repeat the same word in describing him: “Smooth.”

“He is a smooth talker,” Palmieri said. “If you talk to the guy without knowing about his background you would think he is the nicest guy in the world.”