If something sounds too good to be true, run and hide. That’s been a motto for me since the spring of 2023.
That is when my wife Gosia and I handed a $2,000-plus check for rent and deposit to a conman advertising a rental home he didn’t own.
Nonetheless, this week we saw an online ad asking a mere $99,000 for a three-bedroom Fairbanks house with 3.3 wooded acres. Neighboring properties cost up to half a million dollars.
We hopped right over to the Steele Creek property. We discovered the acreage covered with abandoned appliances, vehicles, long trailers and miscellaneous objects the listing described as “treasures.”
I read the owner’s name, Asa Dowdy Jr., on the gate. His life had a story to tell, I learned from court cases, news clippings, and trooper reports.
His story began in 1968. The 26-year-old Air Force veteran and college student married a bank teller, the former Barbara Kluesner, 21. They moved to Fairbanks and built their homestead in the woods.
Wife Barbara was attractive, resembling a popular country singing star with a voluminous, teased hairstyle. Asa was a sturdy man with protruding ears and a prominent, walrus moustache. Asa gained a reputation as a haunter of auctions. When all his treasures wouldn’t fit in his large red house, he bought trailers and metal bins to hold them.
Barbara dowsed for water with L-rods and wrote two books on the topic. She wrote another book about her personal spiritual journey. She taught classes in quilting/sewing, reflexology and healing.
The two kept a garden. Their children teased them because local moose invaded the large greenhouse and cleaned out the greenery.
On weekends, the Dowdys indulged their mutual passion for square dancing. They swung and they spun and moved up and down to the middle and back.
They raised four children, including Heather Angela Dowdy, born June 23, 1983. Blue-eyed, long-haired Heather was rebellious, her dad once said. She had run away but come back.
At 17 in 2000, she matured and was a popular student at Lathrop High School. She earned her spending money working at Rover City Cafe. She fell in love with photography, and her parents built her a darkroom.
On Jan. 30, 2000, she collected her unwanted and outgrown clothing and left home in her mother’s car to drop them off at a thrift store.
As fate had it, local union steward Kirk Jackson elected that day to get into his big pickup after guzzling drinks at a Fairbanks bar and the American Legion Post 57, according to civil litigation records. He had a previous 1988 DUI conviction.
At 3 p.m., Jackson in his pickup truck swerved on Old Steese Highway, left his lane, and swerved toward Heather’s sedan. She slammed the brakes, but Jackson’s truck kept coming. The momentum carried his vehicle right over the top of the Dowdy vehicle. Her legs shattered on impact.
Investigating troopers said icy conditions contributed to the accident.
Emergency personnel transported Heather to Fairbanks Memorial Hospital (FMH). Court records stated that doctors treated her for abdominal and massive head injuries. Barbara Dowdy arrived at the hospital and prayed in the chapel.
She came out at the request of doctors to identify the pale, battered body as her daughter Heather. Hospital authorities pronounced her daughter dead just before 6:20 p.m.
“I remember screaming and shouting and I lost all rationality,” Barbara later wrote in a memorial published by Forget Me Not Mission, an anti-drunk driving activist group.
In an affidavit for a civil suit against an insurance company, Asa Dowdy wrote this: “I started to cry, and I physically felt a painful change in my chest as if there was a hole in my heart.” Asa later drove to the collision site and found a disintegrated mass of ruined metal and glass.
Doctors treated Kirk Jackson for minor facial injuries. His blood alcohol content recorded at nearly three times the legal limit.
The Dowdys attended his trial. Rachelle Dowdy, the big sister of Heather, expressed her feelings at a hearing.
“Kirk chose to drink a lot of alcohol,” she said. “This is a result of his choices; this was not an accident.”
Superior Court Judge Charles Pengilly accepted the driver’s no contest plea for manslaughter and drunk driving. The court sentenced him to 5 ½ years in prison, with an additional 15 ½ years suspended.
“There’s nothing I can say that’ll make you feel any better; I know that,” Jackson said to the Dowdy family. “I hurt an awful lot of people and caused an awful lot of pain. I wish I could trade places with her. I really do.”
The Dowdy family went to the fatal curve in the highway and put up a six-foot cedar cross and a wreathe with Heather’s photo inside.
The Alaska Department of Transportation demanded the family take it down. DOT officials offered to erect blue-and-white “Please Don’t Drink and Drive” signs with the victim’s name. The Dowdys rejected the compromise.
“An official road sign wouldn’t have been her,” Barbara Dowdy told DOT officials and a reporter. “It was not a statement of her life.”
By 2003, their daughter’s death and other circumstances doomed the Dowdys’ marriage, but they won a two-year battle to get passed House Bill 127 legalizing memorials meeting all DOT safety concerns.
“Every year on her birthday and on the date of the accident, we always make sure we stop by and visit, and we always see some of Heather’s friends there,” Asa Dowdy told the Juneau Empire.
They fought other battles as well. They began a local chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD). They gave anti-drunk drinking talks before any group that would host them. Asa Dowdy ran a failed campaign to try to stop a liquor store from being built.
Barbara in 2004 married Daniel T. Trabke, a retired U.S. Air Force captain. The couple left Alaska and moved to Reno, Nevada. Barbara Ann Trabke died at age 65 of breast cancer on Dec. 13, 2011.
Asa stayed at the house. He continued to haunt auctions. The clutter in his yard shocked passersby.
Some friends defended him. They countered that in Alaska an owner was entitled to do what he wanted with his property.
Asa died at 80 years old on Aug. 12, 2021. The family held a huge garage sale, but much of Asa’s clutter remained unsold.
This year Fairbanks authorities announced efforts to get property owners to pack all trash to the landfill. A neighbor of the deceased posted on Facebook that he wanted the borough to clean up Asa’s 3.3 acres.
So, after due consideration, my wife and I will pass on purchasing the house, land and treasures as an investment.
It would take us years to remove the semi-trailers, abandoned bulldozer, junk vehicles, and thousands of pounds of debris covering the woods and grounds.
However, I circled Sept. 30 on my calendar.
On that day, I’ll carry on the crusade of Heather’s parents with a prayer to honor their greatest treasure – a teen whose promising life was stolen by a man who now has to live with what he did.
Through no fault of his own, Asa Dowdy lived his last two decades of life in a house rocked by sorrow.
Hank Nuwer is an adjunct professor at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.
