Homicide detectives said they originally thought the man found June 14, 2017 in a torched SUV on a logging road in Squamish, British Columbia was a local rock climber known to others in the area as a politically progressive vegan named Jesse James. No one had linked Hawke with James, but they were the same person.

But according to a report from CTV News, at a press conference late last month authorities said new DNA evidence linked to a missing persons investigation has confirmed the man's true identity as Davis Wolfgang Hawke.

Hawke was a subject of the book Spam Kings by Brian McWilliams, For many years, Hawke was a big time purveyor of spam emails hawking pornography and male enhancement supplements, such as herbal Viagra.

In 2005, AOL won a $12.8 million lawsuit against him for relentlessly spamming its users. More recently, Hawke's Jesse James identity penned a book called Psychology of Seduction, which claimed to merge the "shady world of the pickup artist with modern science, unravelling the mystery of attraction using evolutionary biology and examining seduction through the lens of social and evolutionary psychology".

The book's "about the author" page said James was a "disruptive technology pioneer" who was into rock climbing and was a resident of Squamish. It also claimed James held a PhD in theoretical physics from Stanford, and that he was an officer in the Israeli Defence Force.