A Squamish Climber Was Murdered in 2017. Now, Another Local Climber Searches for Answers.

Steven Chua had been working as a reporter for the Squamish Chief for only a month or two when he received a press release about a body found at the Cat Lake Recreation Site in Squamish, British Columbia. Chua had just moved to town, and anticipated the “bread and butter” of community reporting: school board meetings and small-town sports. He hadn’t expected to hear about the discovery of a charred SUV at the Cat Lake site on the morning of June 14, 2017, with a local climber known as Jesse James inside—killed by gunshot.

“Things are a lot less sleepy here than I thought,” Chua remembers thinking at the time.

It became clear that “Jesse James” was likely a pseudonym. But the man’s real name—or at least his legal name at the time of his murder—would take another three years to figure out. In 2020, police revealed that they had found that legal name: Davis Wolfgang Hawke. And with the name came a trail of dark, bizarre past lives, heavily publicized for the havoc they wrought.

Davis Wolfgang Hawke, the neo-Nazi

Chua’s reporting on Jesse James eventually led to Dirtbag Climber, a new podcast from CBC’s Uncover series. As the host of Dirtbag Climber, Chua retraces James’s history as Davis Wolfgang Hawke, from his upbringing in Westwood, Massachusetts, to his college years in South Carolina in the late 1990s. At age 20, Hawke caused a stir at Wofford College—and in the national news—for his grassroots organizing as a neo-Nazi. Hawke ran the Knights of Freedom website with a paid membership system, outfitted his dorm room with swastikas and Mein Kampf, and attempted to enact a plan for American history’s largest white nationalism rally.

Dave Bridger, the “Spam King”

Hawke’s movement lost steam, however, when the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Report exposed his birth name: Andrew Britt Greenbaum, of Jewish lineage. That revelation turned hate group ire back onto Greenbaum and forced him to shed his neo-Nazi persona. But he immediately found a new one: Dave Bridger, “Spam King.” At the advent of spamming, Hawke-slash-Greenbaum-slash-Bridger’s company, Amazing Internet Products, bombarded millions of Americans with emails to trick a tiny percentage of them into buying junk products, including “herbal penis enlargement pills.”

Jesse James, the Squamish dirtbag

Greenbaum had to abandon this hustle when he was hit with a $12 million dollar lawsuit for buying a list of 90 million email addresses illicitly leaked from inside AOL. He fled internationally to avoid paying it. And then, in 2009, he reemerged “in his final form,” as Chua puts it in Dirtbag Climber: Jesse James, the rock climber and online troll who lived out of his truck. James would become known to the Squamish climbing community for ranting about routes and calling pro climbers “mutants” online. Yet at the crag, he showed a friendly, helpful side to new climbers and old friends.

As Chua works to peel back the layers of each of Jesse James’s past personas in the podcast, he makes one thing clear: James had made plenty of enemies in his 38 years. But Chua’s pondering of who may have murdered James is not the most interesting part of Dirtbag Climber. It’s the discovery of a boy, then a man, driven by the desire for money, authority, and most of all, influence. Dirtbag Climber depicts Jesse James as an early online influencer who toyed with now-prescient subjects a decade before they’d spread all over social media, including white nationalism, tech-savvy scamming, red pilling and the manosphere—even biohacking.

Listen to episode 1 of Dirtbag Climber

Chua caught up with Climbing ahead of the release of Dirtbag Climber’s final episode on podcast platforms on October 6 (though you can listen to all five episodes now on CBC’s Youtube channel). He shares how he used his own experience as a Squamish climber to further crack the story open, and the question that nagged him as he reported on it: How many of us are climbing with a Jesse?

Our interview with Steven Chua of Dirtbag Climber

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Climbing: First off, which name do you choose to call the subject of Dirtbag Climber?

Steven Chua: We’ll just call him Jesse. We’ll keep it simple that way.

Climbing: Take us back to when you first found out about the murder. What were the initial facts?

Chua: The initial picture we got was: this guy called Jesse passed away. There wasn’t anyone who was willing to talk to us about him on the record. We knew by word of mouth that it was 99 percent certain that he was killed, but no one was willing to go on the record and confirm it for us. So we held back on reporting it. The Davis Wolfgang Hawke stuff was still lightyears away at that point. We saw that on his Facebook page, there were a bunch of RIPs. Those were written by people who were on better terms with him. It seemed typical: “It’s a shame this guy got killed.”

Climbing: What impression did you get of him from early conversations with local climbers?

Chua: There were people who thought he was a nice, caring dude. But from all the folks I’ve talked to, it didn’t seem like anyone really knew about his past, aside from the fact that he was evasive about it. As people tried to ask him more about it, he kept on stuffing those questions down. They sort of accepted that.

I haven’t spent a lot of time in other climbing communities, but in Squamish, some people adopt a character in their climbing. You’ll hear about people with larger-than-life names like King Can Al and Heavy Duty. It’s just what people call them and that’s how they’re known around town. You’re just like, “Okay, that’s who they are.” Whether or not they’ll choose to share more personal details, you don’t know. A lot of people just accept it.

Climbing: Once Jesse’s previous name, Davis Wolfgang Hawke, was revealed, what did you set out to learn as a reporter for the Squamish newspaper?

Chua: A lot of the Neo-nazi stuff and the spamming stuff—that was stuff that you didn’t necessarily need local connections to report on. It was out there. So the way that we tried to add our own, different take on that story was to examine those things within the Squamish context. How could someone with this kind of past—as a very controversial, very public figure—adapt to life in Squamish and carve out a life for himself here? What did he do here? That was the different kind of value we could add, because we had that ability to tap into the community and get those bits and pieces that were harder for reporters who were just parachuting in to get.

Climbing: You shared in the podcast that you were able to do that in part because you’re a local climber yourself. Tell me more about your climbing experience in Squamish.

Chua: I started to climb in the later part of 2017. It wasn’t for a story. I was just like, “Man, if I’m going to be here, I’m going to be super miserable if I don’t learn how to do any of the Squamish things.” Because if you don’t do any of the outdoor stuff, the nightlife is nothing, the culture is nothing, really. You’re going to go to the same three bars over and over again and just languish.

I went to the gym, I made some friends, I started to boulder outdoors, and people showed me how to lead sport outdoors. Over time, I would learn how to trad climb and do multi-pitches. Eventually, I became addicted to the sport, and it became my favorite thing to do. And still is.

By 2020, I’d already been climbing for a few years. I had a pretty good working knowledge of the sport, and I’d made friends in the climbing community. Those friends knew people, who knew people. That was what allowed me to connect with one of Jesse’s old climbing partners, and with his romantic partner. And that was what allowed me to get a bit of an edge over other reporters, who didn’t necessarily climb or know much about climbing.

Climbing: As you learned more about each of Jesse’s neo-Nazi, spammer, and online climbing troll personas, what shape was this person taking to you, in terms of his patterns of behavior?

Chua: He was an archetype for a lot of the things that we see right now. He was an archetypical online influencer who managed to gain this pretty sizable following before social media became a thing, just using basic, `90s-style websites. He was an archetypical crypto bro, because he was investing heavily in it before any of us even knew what Bitcoin was. He was an archetypical spam advertising guy who was able to prey upon people’s insecurities long before any of us got high-speed internet. He knew there was a lot of influence in rage. Rage baiting. Controversy.

He’s a patient zero for a lot of these strange and unsettling trends that we’re seeing today. It’s just so interesting that one guy could be so involved in all those things in one go. The team I was working with, we call him the Catch Me If You Can of the dark web. You have this figure who is always on the run from authorities, putting on different personas, milking them for all they’re worth, conning a bunch of people, and throwing it away and doing it all over again.

Climbing: Why do you think Jesse did what he did, in all of his past lives?

Chua: This might just be me projecting or speculating, but the impression that I got is—especially from the stuff that his mother had to say at the time—he was bullied at a certain point in school. I think that even though his dad brushed it off, it left a very big mark on him.

In order to adapt to that, he felt the need to develop this skill of being able to influence people and get certain types of people to bend to his will or to follow him. In order to get himself out of this place of vulnerability, he started to practice that more and more. And in order to keep that influence going, he would adopt whatever persona would allow him to do that best. At first, it would be as this Neo-Nazi leader, and then, it would be as this Spam King. That’s the common thread that you see. Talking to his dad when I was doing the initial few stories, his dad was like, “He just wanted attention and influence.” I wouldn’t be surprised if that were actually true.

Climbing: Some people may see this guy’s high-level descriptors—Neo-Nazi, scammer, online shitposter—whatever you want to call him—and ask: “Why give this literal dirtbag any more attention?” Why did it feel important to you to keep digging and to tell this person’s full story?

Chua: That’s definitely a question I had in my mind for quite some time. It’s a very valid point—why are we continuing to give this person the spotlight? I can understand why people would have concerns about that, because we don’t want to glorify this kind of lifestyle. But at the same time—especially with a case like this, where it so deeply exemplifies all these things happening in our present-day world—I think it’s really important to understand where this all comes from and where it can go. The personal can sometimes have elements of the universal. If we try to understand the course of a person’s life, maybe we can better understand how we can live with all these things that are happening now.

Climbing: Did the process of recapturing this story in a podcast surface new insight for you about Jesse as a climber or as a person?

Chua: It brought conflicting perspectives. His old climbing partner had a very positive view of his experiences with the guy. In his experience, Jesse was maybe a bit of a troll, but generally a good dude and a good person to climb with. Then you hear from someone like Jennifer Archie, the AOL lawyer who was filing suit against him as a spammer, and you see the effect that this guy had, scamming so many people out of so much money.

It made me think of all the times you’re on the sharp end with someone, and you experience these very intimate things that only climbing can really bring out. You can see what a person is like when they’re runout half a pitch up. Their family and friends who don’t climb will never see that kind of fear or focus. But at the same time, you might not know very basic things about them. What’s their real name? It just made me think about: How much can you really know about a person?

Climbing: What’s your best guess as to what happened to Jesse?

Chua: What eventually happened is that his personality and his hubris made him too noisy—it made him a target. That character flaw propelled him to great heights, but eventually got the better of him.

I think if he had just shut up and lived a normal, quiet life, he would have been able to happily climb anonymously well into his old age, and probably just die in a hospital like a normal person. But instead, that one part of his personality just kept on showing up over and over again. And eventually, whether it was through him pissing people off or flashing obscene amounts of cash around town, someone realized that he would be a great target. Whether it was for money, because they were angry, or whatever, we don’t know, but I think that’s what did him in.

Climbing: You describe this as “the biggest story of your life” as a journalist in Dirtbag Climber. What are the life lessons you’re walking away with, from the story of Jesse James?

Chua: The one that probably stays with me is that duality of knowing and not knowing someone. I think the reason why people can get so attached to their climbing partners is because you see a part of them that is basically unknowable in day-to-day life. A climbing partner can give you amazing experiences in such an immediate, visceral way, like when a buddy of mine belayed me for the first time on a trad lead. I’m going to remember that for the rest of my life.

At the same time, maybe you just need someone to hold your rope, and you don’t care who. It made me think of how much you can know about someone you climb with, without really knowing them in the rest of their life. Maybe that’s a good thing, maybe that’s a bad thing. I don’t know. It’s funny in that way.

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