North Rampart

Zach Bowen and Addie Hall were a good looking, hard drinking young couple who survived Hurricane Katrina and charmed all those who knew them. As the ravaged city of New Orleans recovered from the storm, Zach and Addie’s loving relationship spiraled out of control, ending in a two-week bender and an act of shocking violence that is still talked about today.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Murder Holmes is a production of iHeart Podcasts.

Speaker 2 (00:09):
It was the highest crime rate ever in New Orleans.
It was the worst time, the height of the anger
the PTSD after Katrina a year later, it was just
horrific for everyone in town. There was no place to
go to even have a drink with a friend and
forget what was going on without hearing a worst story.

(00:31):
So this was fed by all the darkness that was
see here. Our ghosts were gone. Our ghosts had built
a town that protected the dark side was here, but
our spirits, the balance that was normally here was gone.
There was no place to run. And then you add
sex drugs in rock and roll like they did, and
you have a recipe for disaster in the middle of
a disaster. And that is the story of Zach and Natty.

Speaker 1 (00:57):
On October seventeenth, two thousand and six, a twenty eight
year old Army vet named Zac Bowen might have been
mistaken for a quiet local at the rooftop bar of
the Omni New Orleans Hotel. All night, he'd been drinking steadily,
mostly keeping to himself. Around eight thirty pm, he asked
the bartender for a shot at Jamison's swigged it back

(01:19):
and left his last few dollars as a tip. Two
weeks before, he'd emptied his bank account, and with fifteen
hundred dollars, had gone on one last drug and alcohol
fueled bender. But now at the La rivera poolside bar
which boasted a splendid view of the Mississippi River and
the French Quarter, the cash had run out. He pushed

(01:40):
back the barstool and steadied himself. He nodded at the bartender,
took his time walking past the empty lounge chairs and
potted palm trees by the lid pool. The hotel security
camera caught him slowly walking over to the railing, looking
over it twice, then glancing one more time at the
he loved, before jumping to his death. He landed with

(02:04):
a sickening thump on the parking garage five floors below.
When police arrived minutes later, they thought they were dealing
with a routine suicide until they searched the right pocket
of his jacket and found a plastic bag containing his
army dog tags, a key, and a suicide note. But
it was anything but typical. It read as follows.

Speaker 3 (02:28):
This is not accidental. I had to take my own
life to pay for the one I took. If you
send a patrol guard to a twenty six North ram
Part then you will find this dismembered corpse of my
girlfriend Naddy in the oven, on the stove in the fridge,
with a full signed confession from myself.

Speaker 1 (02:52):
This is murder, Holmes, I'matmarinovitch. When the police converged at
a twenty six North rampart, they found an ancient looking
two story home with a voodoo shop on the bottom

(03:15):
floor and a cramped one bedroom apartment above. Unlocking the door,
police were first surprised by the blast of air conditioning,
which had been turned all the way down to have
frigid sixty degrees. Then they noted the silver spray painted
messages covering the walls. One said sorry I couldn't finish

(03:36):
end quote total failure spray painted on the refrigerator door,
together with an instruction to call Lena Bowen, his despised
ex wife. There was one more spray painted message on
the oven door in big block letters that dripped all
the way down to the cheap linoleum floor. This last
instruction left by Zach Bowen was more sinister. Don't look

(04:00):
it said, Opening it slowly, they found Addie Hole's arms
and legs in a roasting pan, mingled with crudely chopped
potatoes and carrots. The pots on the stove and the
refrigerator contained the rest of her. Bowen had scrolled more
messages in his girlfriend's journal. One of them.

Speaker 3 (04:18):
Said, today is Monday, sixteenth October two am I killed her.
At one am Thursday, fifth October. I very calmly strangled her.
It was very quick.

Speaker 1 (04:37):
Zach Bowen went on to write that he had stopped
halfway through his strangulation of Addie Brown, and, realizing he
didn't have a shred of remorse, finished the job. Then
he drained the last fifteen hundred he had in his
bank account and went on an eleven day bender until
the money ran out, spending it on good food, good strippers,

(04:58):
and good friends. Ca diary entries of each day of
the bender, sometimes on pieces of paper. Sometimes when he
was on the verge of blocking out spray painting the
more important thoughts on the wall. He wondered why he
could have so calmly strangled the woman he had loved
for one and a half years. He lowered the ac
so the putrid smell from the boiling pots of flesh

(05:21):
wouldn't be noticed by Princess Mariam, the owner of the
voodoo shop on the first floor. I'm a horrible person,
he wrote at the kitchen table as the water boiled away.
The autopsy on his shattered body would reveal two important things.
He had not ingested the remains of his girlfriend, and
his skin was covered with dozens of cigarette burns, one

(05:43):
for every year. He'd write in his confession letter that
I'd been a failure. But if you had asked anyone
about Sack Bowen, horrible wouldn't have been the word they use.
Just over a year before, Hurricane Katrina had inundated the city.

Speaker 4 (05:57):
For weeks.

Speaker 1 (05:58):
There was no power, no plumbing, and even after the
violent looting had died down, property owners both poor and rich,
carried rifles and side arms to defend their homes. Homes
were painted with an AX to signify the date they
were inspected, or with the letters dB to signify that
there was a dead body inside, or the letter L

(06:18):
meaning someone still inhabited the home. Army helicopters clattered overhead,
and army bulldozers cleared the streets of wreaking debris. After
Mayor Roy Nagen decided all residents had to be evacuated,
willing or not, for their own safety, only the most
die hard holdouts remained. Two of those were Zak and Addie.

(06:40):
There's a picture of Zach and Addie sitting outside a
doorway in the French Quarter on a wooden table. There's
some beer bottles, mixers, and honey. She sits in the doorway,
reaching back the pet astray cat as she smiles at
the camera half cocked. Zach also looks well lubricated, but
half smiles, shirtless, smoking cigarette and leaning forward slightly. The

(07:02):
photographer has interrupted their conversation, but they don't seem to mind.
In those traumatic days after the hurricane destroyed the city,
when bodies were still being found in attics and the
patrons of a local bar had to wade through ankle
deep water to buy a warm gin and watch a
TV powered by a generator, Zak and Addie were always
welcome faces. I challenge you to click on photographs of

(07:25):
Zach and find anything sinister about his disposition. The biggest
crime he seems capable of committing as being lit. They
were such familiar faces in the recovery period after Katrina
that a New York Times reporters stopped to speak to
them too, and soon found out that Addie made sure
police officers kept an eye on their home by flashing
her breast at them whenever they passed. She's half his size.

(07:50):
In one photograph, he's wearing a generic army shirt, his
arms loosely wrapped around her, the top of her head
barely cresting his shoulder. They had met at the Spotted Cat,
a narrow bustling bar on Frenchman Street where they were
both bartenders. The Spotted Cat still exists, and so does
a twenty six North rampart. It's now owned by a

(08:11):
woman named Mary Millan, whose voice you heard at the
beginning of this episode. Born on the Bayou, Mary Millan,
who also goes by the name Bloody Mary, is a
self proclaimed voodoo queen, ghost hunter, and celebrity psychic investigator.
She's turned the former home of Zack Bowen and Addie
Hall into a haunted museum. If you buy a ten

(08:32):
dollars tour, you can walk up the short flight of
steps to the second floor where Zach and Addy lived.
Very little has been changed the refrigerator is the same.
The oven is the same, and so is the stove.
Though Zach Bowen's last spray painted messages have been painted over.
I called up Mary and asked her to tell me
more about herself and if she had ever met Zach

(08:54):
ar Addy.

Speaker 2 (08:55):
I am known as Bloody Mary. I own the Haunted
Museum in New Orleans, tour company and na Voodoo Spirit
Shop where we do ghost hunts and seance and try
to communicate with the other side. We've got our own
ghosts too. I do remember that Addie worked at the
Spotted Cat. I had a friend that worked at the
Spotted Cat, so I would go in to see my

(09:17):
friend and if she wasn't there, so she doesn't work
tonight or whatever. And I think there was a commiseration
that they never served Jaegermeiser there and I wanted a
shot at Yeger when I drank. I drank a shot
at Yeg. They didn't have it. She liked it, they
didn't serve it. So that kind of exchange maybe also,
you know, bombing a cigarette kind of thing from him.
So very very loose, very loose. But there were only

(09:38):
a few bars that were open at the time. And
most of them if they were, we in the French
border mariny where they were. So it was a small
town literally at that point in history. Very few people
were left a year after, you know, not many things
were really open for almost three years. And I went
to a lot of these places and did a lot
of cleansings and vanishings because the dark side was winning here.

Speaker 1 (10:03):
We'll be back after a short break. We're back with
murder homes. As summer turned to fall in two thousand
and six, Zak and Addie had started to get a
reputation as a hard fighting, hard drinking couple, but considering
the apocalyptic conditions after the hurricane, substance abuse was the

(10:24):
least of anyone's worries. Even the cops were stealing whiskey
from locals and confiscating cash. There comes a certain point
when a bender, even a very long one, beats waking
up to a foul smelling reality. Stray dogs lapping at
shit filled pools of water, thirsty residents siphoning water from
swimming pools and fountains. But Addie and Zach were treating

(10:47):
it like an adventure, and for a time it seemed
to work. They'd gather up leftover bottles from ruined bars
and mixed drinks in front of their home in exchange
for food. As the weather grew chillier, they lick campfires
outside their home, tied red and blue balloons to the
window that soon started to sag. It was still the
best part of a bender, when finding each other still

(11:10):
felt like the only piece of luck they were looking for.
Imagined finding a drinking buddy, a friend, a lover who
was looking for the same easy nothing as you. They're genial,
good looking drunks who are so in love they don't
even look that drunk, or maybe they're so bombed that
it looks like love in those photographs they pose for.
They had both led troubled lives before they even set

(11:32):
eyes on each other. He'd spent time in Iraq and
Kosovo and was still technically married. His wife had left
him when he was overseas. He had served as a
military police officer in Kosovo and Iraq and been traumatized
by something he had seen in Baghdad, But exactly what
he had seen that shocked him as hazy. In one version,

(11:52):
a boy he had befriended in Baghdad had his home
blown up and his whole family died. In another version, Cky,
woman he had worked with, was labeled a trader and
killed by pro Sadame forces, And in yet another version,
he'd mentally disintegrated after a fellow soldier was killed in
a mortar attack. With Bowen. It's hard to tell if

(12:13):
he had whitewashed his own aggressiveness with PTSD, like his
profess love for Addie. The question is what was real
and what was embellished, but they are undeniable facts. Despite
earning a NATO Medal and the Presidential Unit Citation for
his service as a member of the five hundred and
twenty seventh Military Police Company, he only got a general

(12:35):
discharge after the war. It means there was something that
prevented him from performing his job adequately. It's impossible to
say for sure, but substance abuse is the first thing
that springs to mind. This left him extremely bitter, since
it means he didn't qualify for GI educational benefits after
the war. Addie was a closed book too. There are

(12:57):
only rumors, which sometimes contradict each other, tooo she was molested,
she was bipolar, she'd endured several abusive relationships and Zach.
She was either just following the same self destructive pattern
or hoping she'd found a way out. The only thing
that doesn't seem hazy was their drug use. Everyone who
was in contact with them confirms it. A friend named

(13:19):
Squirrel supplied them with the steady stream of cocaine. Mary
Milan has spent ten years communing with their spirits on
the second floor of a twenty six North rampart, though
she confesses that even she doesn't have the nerve to
turn on the stove. Here's what she told me.

Speaker 2 (13:36):
And I kind of saw Zach embedded in the wall,
so to speak, kind of like trying to pull his
way out of the wall and get out. And a
six foot ten shadow was pretty unmistakable as well. She
is more of an empathic kind of entity that talks
to you, greaches out and touches you. Makes some people
a lot of people pry, though she's doing that less

(13:58):
often now that she's more of a growing spirit. But
she was the shell of a ghost when I first
got there. It took a while. She didn't even believe
this really, that he did this. She didn't believe that
this had happened. She was very, very confused. Now he
is very forlorn and saddened over what went on in
his life. And you can feel that, and then you

(14:19):
can also see his shadow, his spirit, movements of things, sounds, grabs,
touching all the senses. Zak is the only one that
doesn't move around. I mean he moves around from the
kitchen to the living room, you know, like in a
small area. So I do not cook up there, I
do not eat up there. I do not shower up
there though I could. All of those things are still

(14:41):
there that were there, So the bathtybe he cut her
in the refrigerator that he stored her in, the oven
that he baked her in, the sink that he stared
out the window at the painting that he drew in
the bathroom, a bench that he made. Her bicycle was
in the backyard for years. And I've gifted them with things.
Gave him a guitar, she wants the selling machine, different toys.

(15:04):
She likes sunglasses. So there's stuff all around, and all
those things have become altars on their own. People bring things,
give them gifts, from champagne to sunglasses to money to joint.
Sometimes they don't last lunch.

Speaker 1 (15:18):
The problem with a bender that lasts a year and
a half is two things. First, you have to trust
your partner in crime, and second, you need to wait
to scrounge up money so that you can stay squarely shitfaced.
It's all fine when a storm has decimated a city
and you can pill for bottles from flooded bars. But
when the city begins to come to life again and
the sidewalk you're holding court on starts to fill with pedestrians,

(15:41):
the easy nothing of it all gets harder. And that's
when they began to get in each other's nerves. There
was no more liquor exchange in beach chairs, all day,
motormouthing with bearded strangers and tight I shirts. No more
King Queen of the French Quarter. Zach owed months of
child support and Addy owed rent, and their arguments turned vicious.
She was a mean drunk and he could be physically violent.

(16:05):
Above Princess Miriam's voodoo parlor, there was all night stomping
and screaming, the sharp crack of a pot hitting the wall.
I tried to reach Miriam Shimani, but only got her
answering machine.

Speaker 5 (16:17):
Twenty twenty three. This is the Princess Marian at the
Voodoo Spiritua tempo. There is friends laughter over fear. Turn
your worries into laughter, and let joy flow from your
soul and the world rejoices with you. May you be

(16:40):
ever blessed. Leave your name, your phone number, or call
us back.

Speaker 1 (16:48):
I've always had a dread of super positive voicemail messages,
but in thirty two seconds, I have to say, Princess
Miriam has kind of won me over. Still, I wonder
how much of her charm rubbed off on and Addie
in the last months of their lives, and whether she
felt something terrible coming, like agitated birds before an earthquake.

(17:10):
In the early days of October two thousand and six,
Addie became convinced that Zack had cheated on her, and
since it was her name on the lease, she said
she was kicking him out. I imagine that in the
few calm moments between raging arguments, Zach and Addie were
nostalgic for the days they were holdouts, when so many
residents had left that the survivors who stayed behind felt

(17:32):
as if they created a new city, new rules, a
new life. Another problem with a year and a half
long bender is that it always ends It can end
in a car where blocked out, you wonder why birds
are chirping in the tree above you at five am
and joggers are running by. It can end in a
hotel room with management pounding on the door, your cell
phone buzzing, your wallet gone. Or it can end in

(17:55):
your own home after you failed to convince your girlfriend,
the one who believes all your lies, that you're not
the most horrible person in the world. We'd be back
after a short break. We're back with murder homes. The
night of her murder, Addie had kicked Zack out. She

(18:18):
left for work, and in the back of her mind
during her whole shift, she had the nagging feeling that
he was burning another hole in his arm in a
twenty six North rampart, and when she arrived home and
opened the door, there he was. After he strangled Addie,
Zach went to work making deliveries for a nearby grocery store,
and by the time he came home, he had worked

(18:40):
out how to dispose of her corpse. Lifting her up
in his arms, he walked into the cramp bathroom and
lay her down in the bathtub. Then he cut her
up with a knife and handsaw, oblivious to the sounds
of passing cars and neighbors shouting greetings to each other
on North Rampart Street. After the deaths Priestess Miriam was

(19:01):
hounded by television crews and newspaper reporters. Finally breaking her silence,
she started to speak, and they all move closer with
their microphones and notebooks. You never know what's going on
in people's minds, she said. Mary Millan meanwhile tells me
that Zach and Addie might be dead, but they most
definitely have never left eight twenty six North Rampart. Sometimes

(19:25):
she watches a member of a tour group standing still,
seemingly stuck, looking out the same window Addie Hall once
looked out of. And sometimes she watches them start to cry.

Speaker 2 (19:35):
I know when they stand in the crying spot, how
they're going to feel sad. I watch how this happens
and how they reach out. The spirits are still looking
for understanding and closure, and I try to help with that.
And sometimes people run and they're scared, yeah, you know,
and sometimes they have fun with it. Sometimes Addie wants
to go out with my bacheorette tours and go drink

(19:57):
and believe me, Zach still wants to pensionize bottom and
grab people.

Speaker 4 (20:03):
There is still flirtation that absolutely goes on. The more
scantily clad my people are dressed, the more I know
he will come out. I don't think he thinks he's worthy.

Speaker 2 (20:13):
But he has made a baby stap or two, but
he's still hazed out. But I believe that all spirits
deserve a second chance, and I believe that you could
grow in your afterlife, in the in between life.

Speaker 1 (20:26):
I'm struck by those words in between life, because when
I picture walking up to Zach and Addie in those
days and weeks when they were holding court on the
sidewalk after Katrina, I think that is the life they
had found, the in between life, this temporary refuge between
two extremes. I think they wouldn't have let me let

(20:46):
you pass without having a drink, letting an hour or
two waste away time means nothing in the in between life,
whether it's in this world or another. This is Murder Holmes.
I'm met. Murder Holmes is created by and executive producer

(21:20):
by Matt Murdovich. Executive producers are Jennifer Bassett and Taylor Chakoine.
Story editor is Jennifer Bassett. Supervising producer is Carl Ktel.
Producer is Evan Tyre. Sound designed by Taylor Shakoine, Evan Tyre,
and Carl Katle. Special thanks to Ali Perry and Nikiatore.

(21:45):
Murder Holmes is a production of iHeart Podcasts. For more
shows from iHeart Podcasts, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Speaker 2 (22:00):
M