February 10, 2025 • 76 mins
Brenda and Dennis Bowman last saw their daughter Aundria on March 11, 1989. Dennis was the one who called the police when Aundria went missing that afternoon. He told them that he had come home from work and found Aundria missing, along with some of her things and some cash. He said that Aundria, 14-years old and adopted as an infant, was a troubled teen who fought with her mother and had run away before. When Brenda came home, she told the police that Aundria had stolen $150. This was enough for the police to get a warrant to arrest Aundria. Dennis was listed as the victim of Aundria’s crime.
Join us at the quiet end for The Lost Daughter. For decades, Aundria’s case was classified as a runaway. Then her biological mother began her own investigation, learning the stories of Aundria’s peers and those of similar women and girls who were victims of sexual assaults and murder. What they discovered was a much more complex and haunting story, leading back to Aundria’s adopted father.
Sources
Allegan County woman tells court her husband admitted to burying their daughter’s remains, WWMT, 9/15/2024.
Commonwealth of Virginia v. Dennis Lee Bowman, Defendant, 6/5/2020.The Girl in the Picture, The Atavist Magazine, No. 118, Nile Cappello.
Into the Fire: The Lost Daughter, docuseries, Netflix, 9/12/2024.
Justice for Aundri Bowman Facebook page, https://www.facebook.com/JusticeForAundriaMBowman/, retrieved 12/20/2024.
Man arrested in 1980 death of Virgina woman charged with murder of adoptive daughter in 1989, WSET-TV, Associated Press, 5/15/2020, retrieved 12/10/2024.
Man pleads guilty to 1980 killing of Navy wife, https://www.13newsnow.com/article/news/local/mycity/norfolk/man-pleads-guilty-to-1980-killing-of-navy-wife/291-0fdea0d8-95d4-46c0-b696-397f4437dbcd, 6/10/2020, retrieved 12/10/2024.
Michigan man charged in 1980 Virginia Homicide extradicted, WTVR-TV, 5/16/2020, retrieved 12/22/2024.
Mom: Man Confessed to killing adopted daughter in 1989, FOX17, 9/16/2020, retrieved 12/22/2024.State of Michigan, 58th District Court, Case No. C 741-00, Bail Bond, Felong Charges, Dennis Bowman, 5/30/1980, retrieved 12/10/2024.
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-brewery--4126935/support.
Join us at the quiet end for The Lost Daughter. For decades, Aundria’s case was classified as a runaway. Then her biological mother began her own investigation, learning the stories of Aundria’s peers and those of similar women and girls who were victims of sexual assaults and murder. What they discovered was a much more complex and haunting story, leading back to Aundria’s adopted father.
Sources
Allegan County woman tells court her husband admitted to burying their daughter’s remains, WWMT, 9/15/2024.
Commonwealth of Virginia v. Dennis Lee Bowman, Defendant, 6/5/2020.The Girl in the Picture, The Atavist Magazine, No. 118, Nile Cappello.
Into the Fire: The Lost Daughter, docuseries, Netflix, 9/12/2024.
Justice for Aundri Bowman Facebook page, https://www.facebook.com/JusticeForAundriaMBowman/, retrieved 12/20/2024.
Man arrested in 1980 death of Virgina woman charged with murder of adoptive daughter in 1989, WSET-TV, Associated Press, 5/15/2020, retrieved 12/10/2024.
Man pleads guilty to 1980 killing of Navy wife, https://www.13newsnow.com/article/news/local/mycity/norfolk/man-pleads-guilty-to-1980-killing-of-navy-wife/291-0fdea0d8-95d4-46c0-b696-397f4437dbcd, 6/10/2020, retrieved 12/10/2024.
Michigan man charged in 1980 Virginia Homicide extradicted, WTVR-TV, 5/16/2020, retrieved 12/22/2024.
Mom: Man Confessed to killing adopted daughter in 1989, FOX17, 9/16/2020, retrieved 12/22/2024.State of Michigan, 58th District Court, Case No. C 741-00, Bail Bond, Felong Charges, Dennis Bowman, 5/30/1980, retrieved 12/10/2024.
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-brewery--4126935/support.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
True Crime Brewery contains disturbing content related to real life crimes.
Medical information is opinion based on facts of a crime
and should not be interpreted as medical advice or treatment.
Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
Welcome to True Crime Brewery.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
I'm Jill and I'm Dick.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
Brenda and Dennis Bowman last saw their daughter Andrea on
March eleventh, nineteen eighty nine. Dennis was the one who
called the police when Andrea went missing that afternoon. He
told them that he had come home and found Andrea missing.
He said that Andrea, fourteen years old and adopted as
an infant, was a troubled team who fought with their
(00:54):
mother and had run away before. When Brenda came home,
she told the police that Andrea had stolen one hundred
and fifty dollars. So this was enough for the police
to get a warrant to arrest Andrea, and Dennis was
listed as the victim of Andrea's crime. Join us at
the Quiet End for the Lost Daughter. For decades, Andrea's
(01:16):
case was classified as a runaway. Then her biological mother
began her own investigation, learning the stories of Andrea's peers
and those of similar women and girls who were victims
of sexual assaults and murders. What they discovered was a
much more complex and haunting story which would lead them
back to Andrea's adopted father, Dennis Bowman. And here's my
(01:40):
handsome husband, Richard with a beer review.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
So we got a nice Michigan beer called M forty three.
I can only assume that's named after a road. Oh okay,
don't they all start with m's.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
Oh gosh, you know, I've got to admit I'm an
idiot when it comes to geography and directions.
Speaker 3 (01:58):
Anyway, mree It's a New England I Pa from Old
Nation Brewing Company in Williamstown, Michigan. It's a hazy apricot color,
small white head, nice lacing, has a very fruity aroma,
no citrus fruit and some tropical fruit, a little bit
of pine taste of mango and grapefruit. Late pininess Is
(02:18):
that a word? We'll use it? Pin It's a pretty
smooth beer. New England i pas are typically more fruity
than happy, which I prefer, which you prefer? And this
one did its job. Very good beer.
Speaker 2 (02:31):
Okay, Well, we've been to Williamstown for the beer and
we enjoyed it right.
Speaker 3 (02:35):
Yeah, a little town, driving from our son's house to
your parents house.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
That's right, making the rounds. This is what we were doing. Okay,
Well open it up, Dickie. I am a thirsty woman.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
Let's do it.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
All right, Why don't you start us out with this story.
I heard about this story first by watching a documentary
on Netflix called Into the Fire of the Lost Daughter,
and it just really had an effect on me. It
was fascinating, it was disturbing. I was enraged. I was
brought to tears. So I was really kind of adamant
that we cover it, and I'm happy that we're covering
(03:21):
it today.
Speaker 3 (03:22):
Yeah, some of your anger comes through.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
In the notes. Yeah, it's in my notes. But you know,
I'm sure a lot of our listeners will agree with me.
Speaker 3 (03:31):
Oh yeah. So. Andrea Bowman, whose birth name was Alexis
Miranda Badger, was adopted by Brenda and Dennis Bowman when
she was nine months of age. Brenda and Dennis met
while she was in high school. He was her first boyfriend.
When she graduated from high school. Dennis was in the Navy,
so they got married in nineteen seventy one, and Dennis
(03:52):
was stationed in San Diego. They lived there for six
months and then Dennis was allowed to choose where he
would be stationed. Next they moved to Norfolk, Virginia and
immediately tried to start a family. But when Brenda did
not become pregnant, she went to the doctor and the
doctor told her that her chances of getting pregnant were
not good due to a bicornuate uterus. Yes, that's where
(04:15):
a uterus is more heart shaped than pear shaped.
Speaker 2 (04:19):
Well, and I have to say, I've examined a woman
with that kind of uterus and I felt two cervixes,
which was really freaky.
Speaker 3 (04:26):
Yeah, yeah, that does happen. Sometimes it's not a consistent
thing with a bicorniate uterus, but does happen.
Speaker 2 (04:32):
So how does that interfere with becoming pregnant.
Speaker 3 (04:35):
Well, it's almost like you have a cleft in a UUs.
So it's it's tough to maybe not to get pregnant,
but to carry a pregnancy.
Speaker 2 (04:42):
The term Well that makes sense. Sure, Okay, so you know,
not to be a bitch, but maybe it would have
been better if she never had any children. Once we
get to talking about Brenda, people will understand why I say.
Speaker 3 (04:54):
That they probably will.
Speaker 2 (04:56):
They probably will. So after that the Bowman started working
towards adopting a child, and it took two to three years,
but then Brenda got the call that there was a
nine month old baby girl available for them to adopt.
Andrea was a sweet little girl and the extended family
all really loved her. Brenda and Dennis eventually moved from
Virginia back to the town of Hamilton and western Michigan.
(05:19):
Hamilton had a population of just over three thousand people,
located near Holland, Michigan. Nothing bad ever happened in Hamilton.
It had a lot of churches, like one gas station,
a couple of schools, and a grocery store, so really small,
and everyone there pretty much one hundred percent where Christian
and went to church every Sunday. In fact, if you
(05:42):
didn't go along with that, you'd be looked at as
kind of weird or as an outcast, which is really
very old school to think about. Yeah, but of course
Brenda and Dennis did fit in there. They were very religious,
and they went to church every Sunday, and they were
both Sunday school teachers, and they wanted to grow their family.
When Andrea was thirteen years old, Brenda found out that
(06:04):
she'd gotten pregnant, and Brenda ended up giving birth to
another daughter, who they named Vanessa. And Andrea really loved
her little sister, loved to help take care of her,
just thought this was the greatest thing ever. Andrea entered
high school shortly after her little sister was born, and
in high school, Andrea was a pretty good kid, just
an average student, but not a big troublemaker and had
(06:27):
quite a few friends. So now let's talk about Andrea's
biological mom, Kathy Turkanian. She grew up as one of
six children. Her stepfather was in the navy, and the
family moved seven times by the time she was in
the seventh grade. The stepfather was deployed for extended periods
of time, leaving Kathy's mother to care for all of
(06:48):
those kids, including one who had epilepsy, so she was
really on her own a lot. And Kathy was molested
by the husband of one of her mother's friends when
she was just ten years old. Then, when Cathy was twelve,
a teenager raped her. So obviously unhappy with her life,
but unsure what to do, She's just a kid. She
(07:09):
would end up running away. So in nineteen seventy two,
Kathy left Virginia with really just the clothes on her back.
She was fourteen, with no money and no one to
turn to for help. She hitchhiked to Tennessee, met up
with a friend in Memphis. Anne took a Greyhound with
no destination really in mind, but on the bus she
met a young woman who told her about the Marty
(07:32):
Grass down in New Orleans. The next day, she found
herself in the Big Easy, listening to jazz through the
French Quarter and partying with a lot of adults. So
this was the nineteen seventies and Cathy was not the
only runaway teenager in New Orleans. She met up with
a group of other young people who helped each other
to stay off the streets. In this group, she met
(07:54):
Randy Badger, a nineteen year old who'd hitchhike to Louisiana
from Los Angeles, US, so they found a place to
live together and spend all of their time together. They
both were able to find some work at a circus
side show, and Kathy thought that this was the life
she wanted to be living. She was, you know, it
wasn't probably the perfect life, but she didn't have to
(08:15):
worry about being molested or raped or beaten.
Speaker 3 (08:18):
Yeah. Well, and also consider that she was just fourteen, well,
of course, yeah, at fourteen, it might be the life
she wanted to be living.
Speaker 2 (08:26):
Yeah, but that wouldn't last, of course, right. So in
December of nineteen seventy two, Kathy and Randy traveled to
North Carolina. It was legal for miners to marry if
they had their parents' permission, so Kathy's parents did not
hesitate to give Kathy their permission. In fact, they were
actually in favor of the marriage. For them, it was
(08:47):
one less person to worry about. Once Kathy was married,
Randy would be the person the police would call if
Kathy got into trouble. So it made her mom feel
like she was kind of off the hook. And her
stepfather signed the next Nessy forms and that was it.
But Kathy and Randy were married for less than one year.
When Kathy was pregnant. Now, it wasn't expected, but to
(09:09):
her it was another way that she could feel like
an adult, and she wanted to do better with this
baby than her mother had done with her and her siblings.
So Kathy was excited to be a mother In June
of nineteen seventy four, Kathy gave birth to her daughter, Alexis,
who she named after the actor Alexis Smith. But as
you might expect, her relationship with Randy soon fell apart.
Speaker 3 (09:32):
Yeah, it turns out that Randy was more interested in
hanging out with the bros And drinking and having a
good time chasing after her other women. He liked that
better than being a husband or father.
Speaker 2 (09:42):
Well he was only twenty.
Speaker 3 (09:44):
Well it's still pretty young, isn't it.
Speaker 2 (09:47):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (09:47):
Yes, Then, when Alexis was five months old, Kathy came
home from work one day and found Randy with another
woman on the couch, while Alexis was crying in the
back bedroom, alone and neglected. So Cathy knew that she
had to leave, but her options were slim, and so
for the sake of her baby, she decided to return
to Virginia and live with her mother.
Speaker 2 (10:07):
Which means she must have been pretty desperate.
Speaker 3 (10:09):
I can only imagine how desperate she must have been.
Speaker 2 (10:12):
Her mother was not the greatest, Nope, and that whole
circumstance there was bad. So she found herself in a
really tough place. But one thing I'll say about Kathy is,
she's tough. This is a tough woman. Yeah. So whatever
confidence Kathy had built up as a mother and responsible
adult really left when she arrived in Norfolk and her mother, Shirley,
(10:34):
showed them no love and no encouragement. She soon learned
that Shirley had been diagnosed with breast cancer and had
a poor prognosis, and Shirley expected Kathy to care for
her and her younger siblings. Even though her mother never
told her outright, she did make it clear that she
didn't think that Kathy should have a child of her own,
which you know might be true, but the child's already here. Yeah,
(10:58):
so what good does it do to make her reel bad? Right? Right? Then?
One day, Shirley told Kathy that they were out of
baby formula and said, hey, how do you plan to
take care of this kid? You know, made her feel bad.
Kathy's doubts about whether she could properly care for Alexis
were growing, and then she did begin to consider adoption,
which her mom was really promoting and thought that was
(11:20):
her best option. So Shirley told Kathy it would be
the best thing for Alexis and oversaw the details of
handing Alexis over to Catholic charities. So of course she
was telling Kathy, this will be the best thing. She'll
have a wonderful life with a nice family. But that's
not always true.
Speaker 3 (11:38):
No, it isn't. But it's a lot of work. I
have a single mother without a husband to help out,
and you're living at home with your mother who is
not very motherly. Hell yeah, maybe even under the best
of circumstances, it's a tough thing to do.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
Exactly.
Speaker 3 (11:54):
Adoption, I think is a pretty viable option.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
Oh sure, I'm just saying it's not always perfect. Oh no,
and in this case it certainly wasn't. But we know
that Kathy was doing it for the right reasons. Of course,
So of course putting her daughter up for adoption, though,
was heartbreaking. She was very bonded to her, but she
assured herself that she was giving her daughter the best
possible life. A short time after the adoption, Kathy left
(12:19):
her mother's home again, and she would eventually go to
nursing school and meet her husband, who she would be
with for many, many years. Kathy and her husband never
had any children together, and she would spend the next
thirty years having no idea where her daughter was. So
Kathy hoped her daughter was happy and would one day
want to find her biological parents. So a quick break
(12:46):
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(13:07):
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(13:30):
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Speaker 3 (13:40):
So Kathy was living her life, but she never stopped
thinking about her daughter. Alexis, and then in April twenty ten,
kind of out of the blue, she received a letter
from a social worker who explained that Alexis had disappeared
from her adopted home back in nineteen eighty nine in Michigan.
Kathy was living in Massachusetts with her husband at this time,
so Alexis or Andrea had been considered a runaway, but
(14:04):
now the police were following a new lead. They thought
that Andrea might be a Jane Doe who was found
dead in Wisconsin, and the police were asking for a
sample of Kathy's DNA to compare and find out if
this Jane Doe was her daughter.
Speaker 2 (14:17):
So this was a real shock for Kathy to get
this letter.
Speaker 3 (14:21):
It must have been incredible.
Speaker 2 (14:22):
It's been like twenty yearss twenty years. Kathy was confused
because the letter gave her very few facts about what
had happened. The letter did not include Alexis's adopted name
or even the city where she'd lived, so they also
didn't give her any contact information for the police, and
they didn't give any details about her disappearance. That it
happened when she was fourteen years old, and this was
(14:45):
the same age that Kathy had been when she'd run
away from home. But now a Jane Doe had been
found dead next to a cornfield and the police thought
it might be Kathy's daughter. Kathy did want to give
her DNA to help out with this, so she did,
and she was told that she'd have to wait some
time for results. It wasn't going to happen quickly, but
(15:06):
like you said, at this point, she'd been missing for
twenty one years. So Kathy gives her DNA. She's got
this letter, but now she's like, well, now what am
I going to do? I've got all these emotions and thoughts.
What do I do with them? She didn't feel like
she could just wait around for the DNA results, so
she did contact the police and the adoption agency, but
(15:28):
neither could tell her her daughter's adopted name or even
where she had disappeared from. Because this had been a
closed adoption, Kathy really had no standing or rights to
any of this information. So Kathy decided, well, fuck it,
I'm going to find out on my own where my
daughter is, what happened to her at least, and all
she had was a birth date. Of course, she knew
the birth date she was her mom, so she asked
(15:50):
her husband, Eddie, who was the more computer savvy one
at that point, although I think Kathy did learn a
lot over the next few years to look on the
internet for a missing close to her daughter Alexis's birthday.
Eddie said he was only searching for about ten minutes
when he found a missing girl with the same birth
date as Kathy's daughter, June twenty third, nineteen seventy four.
(16:13):
And actually she was the first person listed on the
missing person section for the Michigan State Police. Now, Kathy
didn't recognize her right off, of course, because she'd been
a baby when she had last seen her. But as
soon as I looked at her face, especially around the eyes,
I thought, oh my god, she looks a lot like Kathy.
Did you get that feeling too, Yeah?
Speaker 3 (16:33):
I did.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
The eyes they both had these big, beautiful eyes. So
Kathy did soon learn that Andrea had ended up in
Virginia's Department of Social Services as a baby. Someone, probably
her mother, Shirley, had reported that Alexis was born with
fetal alcohol syndrome and that Kathy had taken LSD during
her pregnancy, and Kathy is adamant that these are lies,
(16:58):
so she realized the life that she she had wished
for for her daughter had never happened. They learned that
her name had been changed to Andrea Michelle Bowman, and
that she had lived in Hamilton, Michigan when she disappeared
back in March of nineteen eighty nine. So desperate to
find out more, Kathy decided to create a Find Andrea
Bowman page on Facebook and on classmates dot Com. She
(17:22):
knew that kids who knew each other from high school
might go looking for each other on these websites, and
she really hoped to hear from some of her daughter's peers.
Speaker 3 (17:31):
And it really worked, sure did. A bunch of messages
pretty soon started coming in. Sue Angwiler, who's a relative
of Andrea's, contacted Kathy as soon as she found the page.
Brenda Bowman is Sue Angwiler's cousin and they went to
the same school together in Muskegan, Michigan. She described Brenda
as quiet, a girl who kept herself a lot. Dennis
(17:53):
was her first and probably only boyfriend.
Speaker 2 (17:56):
You I've got nothing nice to say about Brenda.
Speaker 3 (17:58):
I know. So when Andrea disappeared, she was in high school.
She had a cute, short haircut. She liked to dance
the nineteen eighties music thank Cindy Lauper and Madonna. She
was sociable and funny, but she seemed to have a
difficult life.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
Yeah, her home life was far from ideal. She actually
dealt with similar things to her own mother, which was
heartbreaking for Kathy because she'd done the adoption to give
her daughter a better life, and her daughter kind of
ended up in a worse situation. You'd have to say yes.
So Kathy soon heard from a guy named Carl Koppelman
(18:33):
and they began exchanging messages and eventually talking on the phone.
So Carl Koepelman was a professional accountant and an unpaid
volunteer forensic sketch artist, and since two thousand and nine,
Copeleman has drawn over two hundred and fifty face sketches
and age progressions of missing and unidentified people. So Copeleman
(18:57):
has said that growing up in the nineteen seventies, when
there was growing news coverage of serial killers, had started
his fascination with solving crimes. He's pointed to incidents in
his youth as some of his formative memories. The first
happened when he was just nine during the nineteen seventy
two Summer Olympics when terrorists killed eleven Israeli athletes. The
(19:20):
next thing he remembered happening was in nineteen seventy seven,
when he was fourteen, a friend of Copeleman's brother, seventeen
year old John LeMay, was killed by the trash bag
killer Patrick Kearney. And the third notable incident didn't directly
impact Copeleman's life, but it was a notable experience for him.
(19:41):
This was in nineteen seventy nine when he was sixteen
and sixteen year old Lucinda Lynn Shaeffer was killed by
the Toolbox Killers in neighboring Redondo Beach, California. So Copeleman
did really become interested in crime and forensics, and in
August two thousand and nine, after the safe return of
(20:01):
abducted child j C. Dugard, he was really digging into it.
Kopelmann was sitting in his mother's home on the computer
looking at online news articles about that case, and he
began to look at the Websleuth's website and found himself
really gravitating to the forums for missing and unidentified people.
Over time, he progressed from reading the discussions to participating
(20:24):
in them, and eventually he was spending up to twelve
hours a day searching for leads from sources like old
yearbooks and classmates dot com. So I think it's probably
safe to say he was a bit obsessed. This became
his hobby.
Speaker 3 (20:39):
Well, I have this picture of this kind of guy
who doesn't hold a job, and he's at home living
with his mother and he's on the computer roles.
Speaker 2 (20:46):
I don't think that's the case, Sticky, because he was
a good account and he actually had a lot of
skills with you know, Excel and making up spreadsheets. So
I don't have any information that would make me think
he had trouble holding a job. But even if that's
the case, he was good at this absolutely.
Speaker 3 (21:05):
Yeah. Well, I just was looking at the picture that
it printed in my brain. Sure, which doesn't work well sometimes.
Speaker 2 (21:11):
Well, no, you're making assumptions, which is fine. But from
what I've read about him, because I did do some
additional research on his history, I think he was just
really really obsessed with this and he ended up being
good at it because he has solved crimes. Yeah, maybe
he was better at this than accounting. I'll give you that.
Speaker 3 (21:30):
Well, well they sort of maybe not go together, but
you know, accountants looking at numbers, hard facts exactly, and
that's what he's trying to do.
Speaker 2 (21:39):
Very detail oriented person.
Speaker 3 (21:41):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (21:42):
So it was while looking through missing person listings that
Kopelman identified Andrea Bowman as a strong candidate for being
the Racine County Jane Doe. The theory was that Andrey
had run away and then had been murdered years later
in nineteen ninety nine, So he began to investigate Andrea's
disappearance online, and he eventually came across the classmates dot
(22:05):
com page for Andrea that Kathy had created. So that's
how these two ended up meeting. So Kathy had met
other online sleuths, but she and Carl Koppelman began working
together to solve her daughter's case while she awaited the
DNA results. But finding out if it was Andrea's body
that was found would be just one piece of the
(22:27):
mystery because if she had died, how had it happened
and when had it happened. If she had been murdered,
who had done it? So Kathy contacted Pat O'Reilly, a
retired detective in Michigan who was familiar with Andrea's case,
and according to Kathy, he told her they botched this
case from the beginning. Then Riley told her that the
(22:49):
person they needed to be looking at was Andrea's adoptive father,
Dennis Bowman. So this is when some light bulbs really
were set off.
Speaker 3 (22:58):
Well in buching the case in the beginning, I think
that everyone who is involved just thought that she.
Speaker 2 (23:03):
Was a runaway, absolutely, but I think that the police
need to look further into it than that, especially if
they'd looked at Bowman's history and that he was the
one that reported Andrea missing, which, of course we'll get
into that more as we get into the case. But
I don't think it's okay for the police force to
just say she's a runaway. No, biggie, she's a fourteen
(23:24):
year old child. I don't care if she's a runaway
or if she's kidnapped.
Speaker 3 (23:28):
She's in danger, well, that's a different topic. Yes, the
police would probably be satisfied that she was a runaway
if her adoptive parents said, oh, she's done this before,
she'll be back.
Speaker 2 (23:40):
Well, that's part of the problem, right, because the adoptive
parents were not reliable historians.
Speaker 3 (23:46):
Well, as it turns out they weren't.
Speaker 2 (23:47):
As it turns out, Well, that's what I'm saying. You
can't just accept what the parents say, because the parents
are your first suspects when a child goes missing or dies.
Maybe they didn't know that in the seventies, but we
know that now.
Speaker 3 (24:00):
Oh you bet we do?
Speaker 2 (24:02):
You bet?
Speaker 3 (24:03):
You bet ya.
Speaker 2 (24:04):
So now we're going to talk about an incident that
happened in nineteen eighty in Holland, Michigan. This was nine
years before Andrea went missing, so she was just five
years old at that time. This was a sunny morning
in May of nineteen eighty and a nineteen year old
young woman was riding her bike north of Holland, Michigan,
when a man on a motorcycle ran her off the road.
(24:27):
He told her to get off of her bike and
walk into the woods. She didn't follow his orders, so
he pulled out a gun and fired a shot past her,
again telling her to do as he said. She still
didn't do it, so he fired the gun again, this
time into the ground at her feet, and he told
her his next shot would hit her. So this really
(24:48):
saved her life. I'm going to say that she didn't
go along with it. And I am of the belief
that you never get in the car with a man,
or walk into the woods or do things like that.
If they're telling you to do that, shoot me right here,
because once they get you somewhere on their own, you're doomed.
You are, yes. So she did the right thing, very brave,
(25:08):
and fortunately just then a car drove by, and the
man turned his head, and the young woman took that
chance to ride away on her bike as fast as
she could so he didn't shoot at her, chase after her,
and she was able to flag down someone in a
pickup truck who gave her a ride home. When she
got home and told her parents what had happened, they
called the police, and the young woman gave a description
(25:31):
of the man, a white male with tinted glasses and
a blue helmet. She said that his motorcycle had a
black case mounted on the back of it as well.
So that same day the police were able to find
and detain a suspect, and the young woman immediately confirmed
that he was the man who had tried to attack her.
It was Dennis Bowman, who was married and had his
(25:53):
adopted daughter Andrea at home.
Speaker 3 (25:55):
This is pretty quick police work.
Speaker 2 (25:57):
Yeah, it's impressive, yep. But she had a good description,
so she really was very helpful. Dennis was convicted of
assault with intent to commit criminal sexual assault. He was
sentenced to five to ten years in prison. He was
ordered to have psychiatric counseling, and the judge decided that
he would pose a danger to women if he were
(26:17):
ever set free. Still, Bowman only served the minimum sentence.
Speaker 3 (26:22):
So Dennis's wife, who was also Andrea's adopted mother name
is Brenda, stood by him. She stood by him again
in nineteen ninety eight. That year, a state trooper in Door, Michigan,
responded to an alarm at the mobile home of twenty
eight year old Vicki Vandenbrink. She had reported so many
break INDs that the Sheriff's department had installed a security system,
(26:43):
and this time when the trooper arrived, he found Dennis
Bowman walking away from her back door. So it turns
out the Bowmans had moved to Hamilton Is, a town
between Holland and dor in nineteen eighty nine, which was
shortly after Andrea went missing. Dennis Bowman told the trooper
that he was temporarilyst to with Vicky, who was a
former coworker of his. So he's let go. But when
(27:04):
the police contacted Vicky, she said that he was lying.
So after that Dennis changed the story, telling the police
that he had entered a trailer to use her bathroom.
He had been there at least once before, he claimed,
when his daughter wanted to sell girl Scout cookies to
VICKI So the police didn't believe his story. Oh this
is kind of leaky, isn't it?
Speaker 2 (27:22):
Very leaky? And I'm glad they didn't believe it.
Speaker 3 (27:25):
So they asked for his permission to search his property
and he agreed. In the loft of an outbuilding, they
found a duffel bag filled with lingerie, a shotgun, a
black shirt, a black sweatshirt, and a mask, and the
lingerie was identified as belonging to Vicky Vanderbrink.
Speaker 2 (27:41):
Right, So it's just a shame this guy wasn't stopped
right then or sooner. Obviously. Bowman pled guilty to one
count of breaking and entering in his sentencing memo, written
by his attorney. It does not mention the nineteen eighty
conviction or the prior break ins reported by Vicky Vanderbrink, attorney,
presented letters to the court written on Bowman's behalf by
(28:04):
his counselor who ran his sex offender group treatment program,
his boss, and a member of his church. The church
member wrote that Dennis had taught Sunday school to kindergarteners
for the past six years, and the court was also
given a letter from Brenda, who again defended her husband. Now,
I don't know if I'm dense, but why would being
(28:26):
a Sunday school teacher make it any less likely that
you're a sexual predator?
Speaker 3 (28:31):
Well, you're looking at kind of the facts, you know. Yeah,
And in this area of Michigan, if you go to
church regularly, or if you teach Sunday school, you're good.
You're with God, and you couldn't have possibly done all
those horrible things they're accusing you of.
Speaker 2 (28:48):
No, because there was no such thing as hypocrisy there.
Speaker 3 (28:51):
See.
Speaker 2 (28:51):
Yeah. So Dennis Bowman made a statement also saying that
he was a happily married man for twenty eight years.
And you know what, He said that he had two daughters,
but did not mention that his older daughter, Andrea, had
been missing for over a decade. That just never came
up for some brazy.
Speaker 3 (29:09):
Reason, well it was questioning, didn't follow up on it.
Speaker 2 (29:12):
No, So Kathy Turcanian only learned the details of Dennis
Bowman's criminal record after she submitted a Freedom of Information
Act requests. Based on what Detective O'Reilly had told Kathy,
she knew that they needed to look into his past.
When she read about what he had done to at
least two women, Kathy felt that the truth was Dennis
(29:33):
Bowman had killed her daughter. So Andrea and Racine Jane
Doe had similar physical characteristics. And Holland, where Andrea disappeared,
(29:55):
is directly across from Lake Michigan, where Jane Doe was found.
It's only four four hours by car from one location
to the other. Now, I know when we talked about this,
you thought, well, that's really not that close.
Speaker 3 (30:07):
What is right? As a crow flies? It's close, sure,
but there's a lot of water. Yes, so you got
to drive south then across the north right.
Speaker 2 (30:18):
But I guess, you know, because they were of similar
age and had some similar features, this was thought to,
you know, be a possibility.
Speaker 3 (30:26):
Oh yeah, I would definitely see that.
Speaker 2 (30:28):
Yeah. But the DNA test came back in twenty thirteen,
and Kathy was not related to the racing county Jane Doe.
Jane Doe was then identified as Peggy Johnson, a nineteen
year old who was assumed to be a runaway. Peggy
was last seen at a homecoming dance in Harvard, Illinois
in nineteen ninety four. An aunt was worried enough about
(30:50):
her to take out a classified ad in the newspaper,
but no one seemed to think something terrible had happened
to her. Peggy had disappeared a short time after her
own mother died. She did not have a father at home,
so she found herself homeless with a developmental disability that
made it really hard for her to get a job
and work a job. So she met a nurse, Linda Laroux,
(31:14):
who offered her a job as a live in housekeeper
and a nanny for her kids. But over the next
five years, Loreau would abuse Peggy. She beat her, starved her,
and made her live in a crawl space. In nineteen
ninety nine, at age twenty three, Peggy was murdered by Loreau.
When Peggy's body was found, no one could identify her,
(31:37):
but then, twenty years after Peggy's death, the police got
a tip about a nurse who had confessed to killing
someone who worked for her in the late nineteen nineties.
So in November twenty nineteen, Peggy Jensen's body was finally
identified and Loreau was arrested.
Speaker 3 (31:56):
I wonder what prompted her confession.
Speaker 2 (31:59):
Well, it wasn't a confession, and like, I'm going to
go to prison. It was like maybe they were having
drinks since she said, you know, or killed someone back then.
How sometimes these people do Okay, Yeah, I think, you know,
some people maybe are proud of it or they want
to get it off their conscience. I'm not sure what
the case is with this woman, but she was clearly a.
Speaker 3 (32:17):
Monster, I think so.
Speaker 2 (32:19):
So Kathy was relieved that her daughter was not this
Jane Doe, but she also felt certain now that Dennis
Bowman had killed Andrea. Copelman was as obsessive in his
detective work as Kathy was and getting justice for her daughter.
But Copelman was calculated and logical, while Kathy was impassioned
and not afraid one bit to show her anger. So
(32:42):
once she had Bowman's criminal record, she began writing posts
accusing Bowmen of killing Andrea.
Speaker 3 (32:49):
Yeah, she's doing a bit of a reach here to
finger him as the killer.
Speaker 2 (32:55):
Okay, but I also think that she had an intuition.
Speaker 3 (33:00):
You go back to what you said. She was impassioned
and intuitive.
Speaker 2 (33:04):
Absolutely, because even though it wasn't her fault, there had
to be some guilt that you put your child up
for adoption and this happened, because you know, as a parent,
there's always guilt. But why don't you tell us about
that Missing in Michigan conference because that's a good story.
Speaker 3 (33:19):
That's a great story. Yeah, this is September of twenty thirteen.
In September of twenty thirteen, Kathy met Carl Koppelman in
person at the Missing in Michigan Conference. This conference is
a way for the Michigan Police to raise awareness and
hopefully get leads on cold cases. Friends and family members
met in East Lansing for panels, support groups, and DNA collection,
(33:43):
which could help identify remains and match them to missing
family members. Kathy and Kopelman showed up in t shirts
that read Find Andrea Bowman. So as Copeman and Kathy
were sitting in on a morning group therapy session, Copeman
nudged Kathy and pointed out that Brenda and Vanessa Bowman
were there. Now, Vanessa's the child they had, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (34:04):
They had her when Andrea was thirteen.
Speaker 3 (34:07):
Right, So Brendan and Vanessa recognized Kathy Turcanian too and
knew what she had been posting about Dennis on Facebook.
Speaker 2 (34:15):
Well.
Speaker 4 (34:15):
Good, So when it.
Speaker 3 (34:17):
Was Brenda's turn to introduce herself, she told everyone, we
have a little situation here.
Speaker 2 (34:22):
Oh fuck her, come on.
Speaker 3 (34:24):
Then she looked at Kathy and said, I see that
you very much resemble Andrea.
Speaker 2 (34:28):
Oh how did she punch her fucking face?
Speaker 3 (34:30):
That's got to be raising a red flag at her.
Speaker 2 (34:33):
Yeah, because you say that she's reaching a little, but
you have to remember if you see this record of
what he's done. And then he's the one that reported
his teenage daughter missing, And we're going to get into
the fact that she had said he was abusing her.
It really it kind of makes sense that he killed her.
Speaker 3 (34:49):
It does.
Speaker 2 (34:50):
So Brenda tried to continue talking, but Kathy was furious
and she cut in. She turned to Brenda and said,
tell the truth, Brenda, tell them about your husband. So
when that drama subsided, the session continued. Then afterwards, Copelman
approached Brenda. She wanted to tell him her side of
the story. She said that she and Dennis had fully
(35:12):
cooperated with the police after Andrea went missing. She also
told him about sightings of Andrea after that day. So
she was talking as if she still believed that Andrea
had run away, although I don't buy it. Then Copeleman
brought up Dennis's criminal record, and Brenda said, I haven't
forgotten what he did, but I do forgive him. I
(35:33):
take my marriage vows very seriously. Oh my god. So
Cathy couldn't hold back any longer after overhearing this, and
she yelled, tell us how you abuse, starved and humiliated
her Brenda. Then Brenda's daughter Vanessa broke in to defend
her mother. You need to be put into an asane asylum,
she yelled at Kathy. So things were tense for the
(35:56):
remainder of the conference. The women avoided each other. But
I would have loved to have been there for that.
Speaker 3 (36:02):
Yeah, there were some fireworks.
Speaker 2 (36:04):
Absolutely. After the conference, Kathy and Karl Kopeman decided that
they needed a private investigator in Michigan who could work
on Andrea's case. So Kathy hired Jeffrey Flore, a former
Michigan state trooper who had helped to solve a gang
rape and murder from nineteen seventy nine. Floor got Andrea's
(36:25):
police case file, which Kathy and Kopeman had not yet seen,
and some of the documents were from before Andrea's disappearance
four months beforehand. So here's where we get a little
more information. It was four months before Andrea disappeared when
police first responded to allegations of child abuse in the
(36:45):
Bowman House. The report did not have details of what
had happened, but it noted that the allegations were not true,
and one thing became very clear. The police had mishandled
the investigation of these allegations and of Andrea's disappearance, because
it was obvious at this point that the police had
missed a lot of things, some kind of obvious things.
Speaker 3 (37:08):
So Kathy and Colpeoman found people who Andrea had confided
in and people who had witnessed her being mistreated at home.
Jennifer Jones was one of these friends. They were in
the middle school band and they both played musical instruments.
They were close in their family for they were close
in their freshman year of high school as well. So
(37:30):
one Tuesday afternoon, Andrea came home with Jennifer, but when
it was time for her to leave, she says she
didn't want to go, and according to Jennifer, Andrea said
that her father was sexually abusing her. So Jennifer's mother
let her spend the night and the next day she
took her to the principal's office. There, Andrea told school
officials about the abuse. Jennifer was sent back to class
(37:53):
and assured that the adults would handle it, so Andrea
was not in classes. Andrea was not in her classes
for the remainder of that day, so Jennifer assumed that
she was in protective custody or foster care, but later
she learned that Andrea had been sent back home with
Dennis and Brenda.
Speaker 2 (38:11):
Now how much does that piss you off?
Speaker 3 (38:13):
Yeah? Oh god. So the principal had brought Dennis and
Brenda into the school and questioned them in the office.
Brenda told the principal that Andrea lied. Dennis said she
lied all the time, So what could Andrea do with
her parents right there? So she said, yeah, I made
it all up.
Speaker 2 (38:30):
So obviously that's not the proper way to handle that.
And I hope they've corrected that. But if a child
says they're being abused, especially sexually abused, really, and then
you bring the parents in, yeah, and asked them right
in front of her. That's not the right kind of
investigation that needs to be done.
Speaker 3 (38:48):
No, not at all.
Speaker 2 (38:49):
And make her go right home with them. That's horrible. So,
around the same time, Andrea confided in Jennifer and her mother,
and she also confided in her. Around the same time
when Andrea confided in Jennifer and her mother, she also
confided in Arlene Ron, who was another mom in town.
Andrea had befriended Ron's sons in the church youth group,
(39:12):
and then she had begun spending time at their house. Eventually,
Andrea got comfortable enough that she told Ron that her
father was abusing her. She also told her that Brenda
knew about the sexual abuse but did not care. Ron
was hesitant to get involved for some reason, so she
told Andrea to talk to the pastor, so passing the buck.
(39:36):
And when you go to counseling with a pastor, it's
not real counseling. I'm sorry, you don't want that kind
of a counselor, especially when he has a relationship with
her parents.
Speaker 3 (39:46):
Yeah, need a neutral.
Speaker 2 (39:47):
Part, absolutely, and probably someone who's trained in that kind
of thing.
Speaker 3 (39:52):
Oh yeah, yeah, saying Then, on.
Speaker 2 (39:55):
An evening, when she pulled into the Bowman's driveway to
drop off Andrea, Dennis came out front and told her
to stay out of his business. But Ron never reported
any of this to the police or the school, and
then within a few months Andrea was gone. So a
lot of adults let her down.
Speaker 3 (40:15):
And there were many people that had a bad feeling
about Dennis Bowman. Yes, one couple who had grown up
with the Bowmans and Muskegan knew about his criminal record
and remembered him bragging about his sexual conquests as far
back as high school. And this couple had always felt
uncomfortable around him, and I kept an eye on their
daughter whenever he was around, and they ended their friendship
(40:38):
with the Bowmans when their daughter found the Facebook page
for Andrea. She said that her parents had never been
contacted or interviewed by police, and it wasn't until Kathy
contacted a couple that they spoke to anyone about their suspicions.
Speaker 2 (40:52):
Yeah, so more adults who did not go to the police.
Should the police have gone to them. Yes, they probably
should have been canvassing everyone who was friends with the family,
but that not being done. Why didn't this couple go
to the police and let them know about their concerns.
It's just very disturbing in how many things could have
been done that maybe could have prevented this, or at
(41:16):
least could have helped solve it sooner.
Speaker 3 (41:18):
You're right.
Speaker 2 (41:19):
So here's another story that's just bone chilling. When a
young woman named Metta macleoud saw the Facebook page that
Cathy had created, she contacted her about something that had
happened to her as a child that she felt could
be connected to Andrea's disappearance. So this had happened on
a September afternoon in nineteen eighty nine, when Meta was
(41:40):
only six years old. As she was walking to a
friend's house, she was waved over by a man in
a red truck who promised to take her to see
some puppies. He told her that her mother said it
was okay for her to go with him, and then
he just pretty much grabbed her and put her into
the truck. Now, remember she's six, so she's really helpless.
Speaker 3 (42:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (42:00):
Yeah, So as they drove into a rural area. Meda
kept asking if they were there yet, but when they
came to a four way stop, there was a police
cruiser beside them, and the man told her to get
down in the seat and hide. So he had seemed
like a nice guy at first, but once he pulled
over into a woodsy area with her, his whole demeanor changed.
(42:22):
He pulled off the road, parked the truck and dragged
her into some thick brush, holding her by her neck.
Then he tore off her sweater and wrapped it around
her mouth. Then he tied her hands behind her back
with rope and took off the rest of her clothing.
As he knelt over her and on zipped his pants,
Meta heard a dog barking nearby. Fortunately, the man was
(42:44):
spooked by this, probably realizing that there were people nearby
with the dog, and he ran off. Meda ran naked
and barefoot to the main road to get help, and
two cars pulled over and nine one one was called.
So the police did go to Meta's home that evening,
and a sketch artist made a sketch of the perpetrator
and of his truck. This man's face looked a lot
(43:06):
like Denis Bowman. And she said that the man smelled
like grease or paint. While Kopeman found out that Dennis
had been working at the Harbor as a carpenter right
down the road when Meta was abducted, and Bowman had
also owned a red pickup with a white cap.
Speaker 3 (43:22):
On the back.
Speaker 2 (43:23):
But the police did not find their suspect back in
nineteen eighty nine, the case went cold, and then the
statute of limitations eventually expired. As Metta got older, it
really haunted her to think that the man could be
victimizing other little girls. And when she came across the
Fine Audrey A Facebook page, the similarities to her attack
(43:44):
were significant to her. Then when she looked up a
family picture of the Bowman's and she saw Denis Bowman's face,
she was shocked because that was the man who had
abducted her the same year that Andrea had gone missing.
It was Dennis Bowman.
Speaker 3 (44:01):
What a shock that must have been for Metta. Oh
can you imagine to look at that and say, holy shit,
that's the guy who did it.
Speaker 2 (44:09):
Well, just living with that must have been hard. I
hope she got counseling, But then to find that out, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3 (44:16):
So after speaking with Metta, Kathy Turkanian and Karl Koppeman
were convinced that Dennis Bowman was a serial predator who
had killed Andrea and covered it up by saying she
had run away. But still there's no proof at that
point that Andrea was murdered or even though she was dead.
But still Kathy became convinced that he had buried Andrea
in his backyard. It's horrifying to realize that the adopted
(44:39):
father of her daughter had probably raped and killed her.
Speaker 2 (44:42):
Yeah, that's an understatement, I would say so. Talking with
Andrea's extended family members and friends from her childhood, Kathy
found out that Andrea was mistreated by her adoptive parents.
They had stories of Andrea being treated like she was
less than in her own home, and stories of Dennis
yelling at her, chasing after her, and hitting her. One
(45:04):
friend said that when the family had hamburgers one night,
Andrea was only allowed what they called a leftover sandwich,
which was bred with mustard, ketchup and relish on it.
And when she told a friend about this in front
of Dennis, he stood up and hit her so hard
that Andrea fell out of her chair. So how would
that be your visiting a little friend and the father
(45:25):
does that. Holy shit. So Andrea's friends encouraged her to
leave home, but Andrea really loved her baby's sister and
she didn't want to leave Vanessa there by herself. I mean,
Vanessa could have started getting abused as.
Speaker 3 (45:39):
Well, oh sure could.
Speaker 2 (45:41):
So she was kind of looking out for her little
sister and that she didn't leave sooner, which is incredibly sad. Then,
in the immediate time after Andrea's disappearance, there were some
people in the community who reported sightings of her, but
the police investigation was pretty much nothing. According to Brenda,
(46:01):
Dennis had picked up Andrea from school that day and
when they got home, she said, Andrea was very quiet.
Dennis then drove Brenda to work with the baby Vanessa
in their car. Then Dennis said that he had come
home and Andrea was gone. He said she had taken
some money, a travel bag, and her purple coat. He
said he looked around for her and then he called
(46:23):
the police.
Speaker 3 (46:25):
After Andrea was missing, Brenda said they borrowed other people's
cars and went into Holland in the evenings to look
for her, but they never found any clues to her. Whereabouts.
There were tips and sightings of Andrea at a roller
skating rink, at a grocery store, and working in the
adult entertainment industry. So the general belief at that time,
(46:45):
and which was encouraged by Dennis, was that Andrea had
run away. Dennis told the police that Andrea had been
using drugs and stealing and just generally getting into trouble,
so clearly a way to make it look like she
was a delinquent who had run away and the police
didn't even look for no.
Speaker 2 (47:02):
But it was another crime committed by Dennis Bowman that
would finally bring to light what really happened to Andrea.
This happened back in nineteen eighty in Norfolk, Virginia. On
the evening of September ninth, nineteen eighty, Vivian Mahoney, a
friend of twenty five year old Kathleen O'Brien Doyle, visited
Kathleen at her house. She was there at about seven
(47:23):
thirty pm and they each had a glass of wine
and topped. Mahoney would later tell police that she had
left Kathleen's house between nine and nine thirty pm. The
next day, September tenth, Vivian Mahoney tried to call Kathleen
several times but didn't get an answer. The next day,
September eleventh, Mahoney and her husband James decided to stop
(47:45):
by and check on Kathleen because she still wasn't answering
her phone. So a little afternoon on the eleventh, James
drove them to the Doyle house. When James parked the car,
Viviana got out and walked up to the door. She
noticed that the outdoor light, there was mail in the mailbox,
two newspapers were on the ground, and the screen door
(48:05):
was unlocked, which was unusual. Vivienne looked through the small
windows in the door and could see their two wineglasses
from September ninth still sitting in the living room, so
when she went to knock on the door, it opened,
it wasn't shut all the way. Vivianne walked into Kathleen's
house and looked around the living room and everything was
(48:26):
like they had left it on the night of the night.
When she walked into the bedroom, though, she found Kathleen
on the floor. Vivianne ran out of the house and
yelled to James that Kathleen was on her bedroom floor.
And she thought she was dead. James then ran into
the bedroom, and he later told the police that the
room was in disarray, with the mattress moved from its
(48:46):
normal position. The room looked like there had been a
struggle in there. He told police that he saw Kathleen
lying on the floor with various cords wrapped around her.
He had checked for a pulse, but there was none.
There was dried blood, which indicated that she had been
killed some time ago. Neither of the Mahonies had touched
anything in the bedroom other than to check for a pulse,
(49:09):
so James told Vivianne to call the police, but the
phone wasn't working, and it was later determined that the
internal mouthpiece of the phone had been removed, preventing a
collar from being able to communicate. And when I think
of that, I just think of that asshole Bowman thinking
he was so clever. So James ran next door and
called nine one one. The Norfolk Police and the fire
(49:32):
department responded to the house. Kathleen was declared dead. She
was naked, her hands were bound behind her, she was
gagged and she had an extension cord around her neck.
Her body was in full rigor and she was cool
to the touch. There was dry, matted, whitish material in
her genital area and it was noted to possibly be seamen.
(49:55):
In Kathleen's autopsy, it reads that the death resulted from
homicide and that she showed signs of sexual abuse with
punching and blunt force injuries to her face, kicking to
her stomach, and strangulation with an electrical cord. There was
also a burn mark on her that was about the
(50:15):
size of a cigar, but may have come from a
burnt Lincoln log because they did find a Lincoln log
that had won and burned and Kathleen did not have
any children. Kathleen had also been stabbed in the back,
and there was a second stab wound in the front
that had hit one of her ribs. Swabs were taken
from her vagina and cervix, which each had the presence
(50:37):
of sperm. Her formal cause of death was mechanical asphyxiation
by strangulation and stab wounds with internal hemorrhage. No weapon
was located which could have been used in the stabbing.
They never located the mouthpiece to the phone either. Phone
records showed that Kathleen's mother had tried to call her
at eleven p m. On September ninth, but Kathleen had
(51:00):
not answered. So that makes us think that something happened
to her between when her friend left at nine or
nine thirty and when her mom tried to call her
at eleven. So Kathleen's husband was never a suspect because
he was away with the US Navy. No leads were developed,
but the Norfolk Police continued to investigate, and through the
(51:21):
nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties, the family of Kathleen, especially
her father, really advocated for further investigation. With new forensic
(51:42):
science of DNA analysis, Norfolk Police Department homicide Detective Scott
Helverson started trying to locate all of the witnesses, family contacts,
military contacts, and any other persons of interest and getting
DNA samples from them. Then, in two thousand and one,
homicide Detective Donnie NoREL reviewed all of the evidence and
(52:05):
found that the green print bedspread that was found beneath
the victim had never been submitted for DNA analysis, So
in July two thousand and one, a DNA profile was
identified on the bedspread. The police department worked with Kathleen's father,
Captain O'Brien to get more leads and obtain DNA samples
to eliminate sources throughout the United States.
Speaker 3 (52:28):
So all samples were eliminated and there was no positive
matchdown in the DNA data bank. In a report written
in twenty nineteen by Parabon, Parabon Snapshot Genetic Genealogy report
provided information about their analysis of the DNA extracted from
the bedspread and search national sources to find similar genetic information.
(52:50):
That November, Parabon provided ancestry prediction and potential extended family
lineage to the sample, which consisted of more than thirty
potential kinship reallys Norfolk Police Department called case. Detective John
Smith attended a training seminar that November, which is also
attended by members of the Michigan State Police Department. So
(53:11):
during a conversation between Smith and some MSP detectives, the
detectives said they were familiar with Dennis Bowman, who was
one of the persons with potential kinship to the DNA
sample reported by Taraba. Very interesting uh huh. The MSP
detectives also said they did have a DNA sample from
Dennis Bowman.
Speaker 2 (53:31):
Yeah, So this is particularly interesting because it's kind of
a coincidence that there is they ended up meeting like
that at that point in time. But it turned out
that Bowman's DNA profile was consistent with the DNA profile
from the bedspread found beneath Kathleen Doyle. A murder warrant
was then obtained on November twentieth, twenty nineteen, and Dennis
(53:54):
Bowman was finally taken into custody two days later in
Elegant County, Michigan. His wife, Brenda complained that Dennis couldn't
have done it because they were living in Michigan in
nineteen eighty, so on February seventh, twenty twenty, he was
extradited to Norfolk, and at that time a sample obtained
(54:15):
from a drinking cup was taken from Bowman and submitted
to the forensic lab. The report confirmed that Bowman could
not be eliminated as a contributor to the swabs from
Kathleen Doyle's body. The probability of randomly selecting a person
who would be included as a contributor is one in
greater than seven point two billion people, which is approximately
(54:39):
the population of the entire world, so I'd say that's
pretty strong evidence.
Speaker 3 (54:44):
It is.
Speaker 2 (54:44):
Bowman was read his rights and interviewed by Detective Smith,
and he admitted to entering the home, but he said
it was to steal, and he'd entered through a back window.
He actually was able to just kind of overlook and
bypass all of the violent details of the attack and
claimed he just accidentally came across her in the home
and accidentally stabbed her. One time records show that Bowman
(55:08):
was in Norfolk at the time of the murder for
a two week active drill with the US Navy. And
kudos to Detective Smith who sat there with this awful
human being and spoke to him for hours and treated
him like he was just another person. Actually acted respectful
and kind to him for the most part, which I
think would be impossible for many of us. I never
(55:32):
understand how they do it, but of course I appreciate it.
Speaker 4 (55:35):
So.
Speaker 2 (55:35):
Reading about the Michigan case in May of nineteen eighty,
where Bowman had tried to get that nineteen year old
woman into a secluded area and had fired two shots
near her, detectives thought that he must have been in
jail for that offense at the time, but The trial
transcript from September sixteenth says that Bowman was not there
because he was on that two week drill in Norfolk, Virginia,
(56:00):
and they knew he was in Norfolk when Kathleen was murdered.
Speaker 3 (56:03):
In June twenty twenty, Dennis Bowman took a plea deal
where he admitted to the burglary, rape and murder in Norfolk.
So if you watch the interview with John Smith and Bowman,
it's quite creepy and you can see that he's a
disgusting manipulator who does this self pity routine.
Speaker 2 (56:20):
Poor man, Oh so gross, like talking about his mother
and YadA YadA, ew. Yeah, he's really bad. And then
the police also brought in Brenda and she was her
awful self. I'm afraid when told that Dennis confessed to
Kathleen's murder in Virginia, she still said that there's always
hope that he didn't really do it. Then she also
was not ready to think about what he could have
(56:42):
done to Andrea. I quite honestly think she knew damn
well about the sexual abuse of Andrea and that he
had to be behind her going missing. But his known
criminal history and the fact that his daughter is missing
and he was the one to report her missing should
have really knocked some sense into Brenda. Nope, it didn't.
So I really think she didn't honestly care about the
(57:04):
people that Denis harmed or killed. For both Dennis and Brenda,
it was all about their own needs. It's just icky.
So Brenda had lived with him for those thirty years
when Andrea was missing, so how did she not have
any idea? In that docuseries I mentioned Into the Fire,
they show a video call between the two of them,
(57:24):
Brenda and Dennis after his confession where they kind of
flirt and they talk about him sending her flowers and
how that made them cry. She even said that after
he got out of prison years ago, they should have
gone to counseling and gotten to the bottom of everything.
So this definitely refers to the things he did to
his daughter and other females, and Brenda stuck by him
(57:47):
in spite of all of it. On their call while
he's in jail, she says, I love you even though
I damn you at times, and then she giggles. He says,
I don't blame you a bit. I should be at
home and I'm not nothing at all about the people
that he has hurt, just all about how they feel,
which I find really gross. It's just upsetting that she's
(58:07):
not held responsible at all for any of this. She
was responsible for Andrea. She was supposed to be her mother.
She knew she was being molested by her husband, but
chose to do nothing about it. Then, when Andrea went
missing while at home with only him, she had to
have had some idea that something had happened to her.
But it doesn't matter because even after he confesses, she
(58:30):
will forgive him over and over again, so disgusting. Brenda
has proof and still talks to him and jokes with
him afterwards. So the police, knowing that Dennis really wanted
Brenda's support, came up with a plan to tell him
if he told them where they could find Andrea's body,
he could stay in Michigan, where Brenda would be able
(58:51):
to visit him in prison, because Brenda lives in Michigan,
so in his mind, if he knows he's going to
spend the rest of his life in prison, then he
would rather spend that time in Michigan. So they made
a tentative offer to Bowman that if he agreed to
be honest about Andrea. He could stay in a Michigan prison. Still,
he was difficult and very stubborn. Brenda said he couldn't
(59:13):
stay in state because he couldn't confess to something he
didn't do. They even got his daughter Vanessa involved, and
the three of them were on a call joking about
the police searching the Bowman's property. But the detectives began
putting pressure on Dennis Bowman about Andrea. He was spinning
his own tail, but he would eventually start bargaining. The
(59:33):
detectives were able to set up an in person meeting
between Brenda and Dennis that was supervised by two detectives.
Speaker 3 (59:41):
Yes, so when Dennis was brought out to the room
to meet with Brenda, he said to the detectives, I
hope you have your cameras rolling. Then he confessed to Brenda,
but of course he didn't tell the whole truth. He
told her that Andrea had been dead from the start.
And in this version, he said he came home and
went upstairs and saw Andrea coming out of their bedroom.
He said that Andrea told him that she was leaving,
(01:00:03):
and he said, no, You're not going anywhere. Then he
says that Andrea threatened to make up a story to
the counselors that he had been molesting her. He said, no,
you're not, and he hit her. Then he says she
fell backwards down the stairs, So his story now is
that she accidentally died and he covered it up. He
says she wasn't breathing and her neck felt bad and
he didn't know what to do. But Brenda doesn't tell
(01:00:25):
him to bug her off. She stays there and cries
with slb yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:00:30):
And he went on to say that he wrapped her
in a blanket, hit her in the barn, and reported
her missing. Then he says he couldn't fit her body
in this cardboard barrel he found, so he had to
cut her legs off. Can you imagine. He says he
put the barrel out front in the neighbor's trash after that,
and still Brenda stays and talks to him. Un fucking believable.
(01:00:51):
He actually says, as long as he didn't tell her,
there was hope for Brenda, like he did her some
kind of a favor. Come on, I know the whole
story was bullshit. He chopped her up, there's no getting
around that. And he actually spoke as if some of
it was Andrea's fault. So the police had a warrant
out for Andrea's arrest when he killed her because he
(01:01:13):
told the police that she had stolen money from them.
He really shows no remorse at all. He actually says,
just because she broke her neck doesn't mean I didn't
love her. And Brenda continued to defend him and continued
to quote the Bible to her murdering husband. Brenda just
chose to believe him because that's what she wanted to believe.
(01:01:34):
I guess it's really difficult to understand. But now the
police still wanted Andrea's remains, and they weren't believing his
story of putting her out with the trash. They were
monitoring his letters to Brenda, of course, and he was
continuing to contradict his story of what he had done
with Andrea's remains. On December twelfth, twenty nineteen, he wrote
(01:01:57):
to Brenda that Andrea did fall and break her head,
but that he didn't put her body in the trash.
He went on to say that he buried her in
a private cemetery. He said she was wearing her favorite
sweater and that he wrapped her in a clean white sheet,
wrapping her hands and feet with a red ribbon. He says,
she really liked that color. Then he says he put
(01:02:18):
her in a tarp with cedar chips, cloves, and cinnamon.
I'm sure she's with God, he says. Then he claims
that he loved her, that he loves Vanessa. Then he
claims to love her Vanessa and Andrea. So the police
used Brenda to get Dennis to tell them where Andrea's
remains were. The police met with her at her house
(01:02:38):
and tried to convince her that he owes her to
let her know where he left Andrea. So she called
him and told him, if he helps them find the body,
then he can stay in Michigan and they can continue
to visit each other. So, yes, she still wants to
be married to him and visit him.
Speaker 3 (01:02:56):
Yep. Dennis had tried to give Brenda a story that
might be March acceptable to her, with the whole thing
about a cemetery and a white sheet and all that.
Then Brenda called him and told him and she didn't
care how it happened or what had happened. She will
still love him no matter what. And she wanted him
to be in Michigan so she could visit. Sure, so
(01:03:17):
he finally agreed to tell them where Andrea's remains were,
and Kathy, Andrea's biological mother, had been correct. Dennis had
moved Audrea to their new house when they moved after
he killed her, and she'd been there the whole time.
Speaker 2 (01:03:30):
Yeah. So the police went out to the house with
the bulldozer and at one point the claw of the
bucket picked up the rim of a barrel and they
found Andrea's bones. Brenda was right inside the house at
that time. But what did Brenda have to say? She
said to a detective, Well, he didn't lie to me
this time. Wow, just wow, that's what she actually said.
Speaker 3 (01:03:53):
Well, you know, there's something definitely wrong about that lady.
Speaker 2 (01:03:57):
Oh, something seriously wrong with her.
Speaker 3 (01:03:59):
Yes, So Andrea's remains were found in four different bags
in the remnants of the barrel. She was in a
trash bag full of dirty diapers.
Speaker 2 (01:04:08):
Yeah, so total bullshit about cinnamon. Oh God, this scumbag.
Speaker 3 (01:04:14):
There's a pepper and Patty candy wrapper in the trash
with her and had the date of nineteen eighty nine
on it. So she had never been missing. She'd been
in the barrel. Ahlahlah. She was found just where Kathy
said she would.
Speaker 2 (01:04:26):
Be, which is pretty amazing because how many people would
kill someone and then dig them up and take them
to their new house. Yeah, most of the experts and
detectives didn't think that was a thing, but for some reason,
Cathy felt sure of that. So I think she had
a better grasp on who this Dennis Bowman is than
the police even did. So when Brenda called Dennis after that,
(01:04:48):
he actually blamed her for his lives because he said
he was trying to make her feel better. Then she
actually says, I don't want you to be mad, and
he says, at least you'll have her in a tin
jar on a shelf, and then she says, nothing's changed.
I still love you. So these people are so reprehensible.
And the autopsy report on Andrea's remains, of course matched
(01:05:10):
Kathy's DNA it was her daughter.
Speaker 3 (01:05:12):
Founder So the police again met with Brenda and they
told her about all of Nnis's confessions to sexual assault
and to the two murders. Brenda said, I don't know
that man, but the man I do know, I will
still stand by him, exactly he's a serial violent sexual offender,
so it's likely that he had victimized and killed women previously.
Speaker 2 (01:05:33):
Oh yeah, I think we've just seen the tip of
the iceberg.
Speaker 3 (01:05:36):
Really yeah. I mean that they're going to go back
and look at his history of where he'd lived, and
I think so seeing women.
Speaker 2 (01:05:44):
I think they might look at where he was at
certain times in unsolved cases and do DNA comparisons. Yes,
so Bowman did plead no contest a second degree murder
of Andrea Bowman also Alexis Badger, and that's I think
is what her mother, Kathy prefers for her to be
known as. Now is her birth name. He was sentenced
(01:06:05):
to thirty five to fifty years in prison. He was
not allowed to spend his sentence in Michigan. They weren't
going to give him that, thank God, So he was
sent to prison in Virginia. The prosecutors did not want
to allow him to have that control by allowing him
to stay in Michigan, and that's definitely a good thing.
Brenda was given Andrea's Alexis's cremated remains, and she wanted
(01:06:29):
to give half of the ashes to Kathy. Kathy of
course accepted them, but she was very upset that Brenda
kept half of them. So Kathy still wants to get
all of her daughter's ashes. But Brenda actually said, and
I heard it on a recording, that Kathy should be
happy with what she got. And Dennis says, well, it
was Kathy who threw her away. Can you imagine these monsters?
(01:06:52):
Can you imagine? Just unbelievable to me.
Speaker 3 (01:06:55):
So Dennis Bowman is serving two life sentences in a
Virginia prison, but the extent of his violent crimes may
never be known. In October twenty twenty four, Kathy created
a petition to get the rest of Alexis's remains from
Brenda Bowman. You can read it and if you sign
it on a Facebook page Justice for Andrea M. Bowman.
Speaker 2 (01:07:15):
Yeah, I mean, how do you feel about that about
Brenda actually keeping some of the remains. I think it's
really kind of nervy. She just doesn't seem to take
any responsibility.
Speaker 3 (01:07:25):
Yeah. Well, you know, he can also argue that for
fourteen years or so, she raised.
Speaker 2 (01:07:31):
The child and abused her and let her be abused,
and from what the friends and family said, treated her
pretty badly.
Speaker 3 (01:07:39):
Yeah. Now I'm just saying what she would, oh, sure
likely use as a reason.
Speaker 5 (01:07:44):
Well, yeah, sure, it's time for listener feedback.
Speaker 2 (01:08:07):
Okay, Dickie, what have we got for feedback? I need
a brain cleanser right now.
Speaker 3 (01:08:12):
Okay, Well, we have some interesting stuff here. So before
we get into some case suggestions, I have some recent
news concerning the Lucy Letbee case. An independent panel of
specialists there was like twelve or fourteen the enetologists pediatricians
that had meant to investigate but let be a conviction.
(01:08:34):
And doctor Shu Lee, who was the chairman of this
and he is the co author of a paper published
in nineteen eighty nine looking at air MLI in patients
and had mentioned that there was some distinctive skin changes
associated with their MBLI And this is what doctor Dewey Evans,
(01:08:55):
who was a witness for the prosecution, kept hitting back
on that there was evident and so the skin discoloration.
Now doctor Lee had already said that he misinterpreted his findings.
Speaker 2 (01:09:06):
Yeah, I remember that step, Yes.
Speaker 3 (01:09:09):
And the response from the courts was it, well, the
defense should have presented this at the time, so we're
not going to allow it anyway. So the panel of
specialists has been meeting and they announced on the fourth
of February that they find no evidence that let be
murdered or attempted to murder any of the babies in
her care.
Speaker 2 (01:09:28):
That's pretty amazing.
Speaker 3 (01:09:30):
They said pre existing conditions were responsible, and errors in
the treatment or care the infants received were the problems.
Speaker 2 (01:09:39):
Right, So, not specifically by Lucy, but by the doctors
who many were really not qualified for babies. That's sick.
And also the facility. Facility had problems.
Speaker 3 (01:09:50):
Right, So that's exciting. Now we got to see where
that leads.
Speaker 2 (01:09:54):
Well, it has to lead somewhere. She can't just stay
in prison with all of this coming out, No, you can't,
so hopefully sooner than later, because I mean, at this point,
I feel like she didn't do anything, and I feel
bad for I think when we first started looking at it,
I was, you know, I could go either way kind of,
but everything we found out since if she's not innocent,
(01:10:15):
she certainly is not guilty beyond a reasonable.
Speaker 3 (01:10:19):
Doubt, oh far from it.
Speaker 2 (01:10:21):
Yeah, Okay, So we will continue to keep an eye
on that one and we welcome your opinions on it.
Fascinating case. So we received an email from Stacy with
a case suggestion. Hi guys, love your pod. It was
the first true crime I started listening to. I wanted
to ask if you have heard of Lynn Hernan. She
was murdered by the daughter of a family friend with
(01:10:43):
tetra hydrosylene cosine and over a period of two years
she stole two hundred and fifty thousand dollars from her
and then she stole about one hundred thousand dollars from
her estate after her death. It is fascinating to me
her killer's lack of remorse and con stant lies. So
Jesse Krazuski was convicted of first degree murder in the
(01:11:06):
death of Lynn Hernon. She was a friend and caretaker
of Hernon, who was in poor health. Krazewski poisoned Hernan
with tetrahyddrosylene and this is a common ingredient in over
the counter eye drops, but can be neurotoxic when ingested orally.
So there have been a couple of cases in the
past we've read about. I don't know if we've covered
(01:11:26):
them with murder being done by these eye drops. I
remember a woman killing her husband with that.
Speaker 3 (01:11:32):
Yeah, that's one of the So this this woman Krzyski put,
I think those six little bottles of visene in the drink. Wow.
Speaker 2 (01:11:40):
See that's kind of scary to me too, that it
really doesn't take a lot of that to kill you,
I know, right, and you can just bite over the counter.
Speaker 3 (01:11:47):
It's scary over the counter and you.
Speaker 2 (01:11:49):
Really can't taste it. No. Yeah, And this was all
about money, which is really terrible because I believe this
woman was helping her mother and her and she just decided, oh,
I'm going to killer And I think at some point
she had stolen so much money that she was going
to be in trouble and decided, you know, to kill her.
Speaker 3 (01:12:07):
Yeah, because the victim was not a real wealthy woman.
I mean, she had the money that was taken from her.
Speaker 2 (01:12:14):
Right, she was comfortable, but she wasn't rich.
Speaker 3 (01:12:18):
No, no, yeah, he supposed to be friends.
Speaker 2 (01:12:20):
Yeah, that's that's heartbreaking. So thank you, Stacy. I would
like to cover that. I think I saw forty eight
hours or dateline on that too.
Speaker 3 (01:12:29):
There was forty eight hours on it, Okay, in this
particular case.
Speaker 2 (01:12:32):
I think we watched that sometime back. And then we
have another email from Karen with a case suggestion, why
don't you read that one.
Speaker 3 (01:12:40):
Karen says, I'm not great with words, but I found
a compelling story that only Jill and Dick could tell.
Speaker 2 (01:12:46):
Well, that's awfully nice.
Speaker 3 (01:12:48):
I'm sure you tell that story too.
Speaker 2 (01:12:50):
No, but it's super kind. Thank you, Karen.
Speaker 3 (01:12:53):
So this a guy named Anthony Pizzano. I was convicted
to serve three hundred years in prison from her he'll
never get out willly.
Speaker 4 (01:13:01):
No.
Speaker 2 (01:13:02):
So this was in Anchorage, Alaska.
Speaker 3 (01:13:04):
Right, yes, Okay. He killed three men in a gold
shot robbery. He was really diabolical and tried to hire
a hitman to kill witnesses. He was the former military
and the first trial ended in a mistrial. Bizano was
friends of the owners of the gold shop and he
was introduced to them by a member of the police force.
(01:13:25):
H Bazano said he killed in self defense. Check it out,
I'll see at the quiet end.
Speaker 2 (01:13:29):
Okay, So self defense, that's kind of a long shot.
Speaker 3 (01:13:33):
That's that's what he took for.
Speaker 2 (01:13:35):
And the jury did not believe that, apparently because Pisano, yeah,
three years in person.
Speaker 3 (01:13:41):
In the second trial, well, I had two charges of
first degree murder and six charges of relating to the murder,
and they had like ten charges against him.
Speaker 2 (01:13:52):
Well, if you're doing an armed robbery, that makes it
fell any murder, which is worse.
Speaker 3 (01:13:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:13:58):
Yeah, so yeah, that's another one we want to cover.
Then we have an email from Tina with a case suggestion,
and this is about the murder of Tricia, Jillian and
James and Doyle. So October two thousand and four, Christopher
Bernard killed his sister and her two children. He then
tried to kill himself by running onto a busy highway. WHOA.
(01:14:18):
Bernard blamed his actions on his drug addiction, and he
was sentenced to life in prison without parole.
Speaker 3 (01:14:24):
Yeah, this is a case in New Hampshire. I remembered it.
Speaker 2 (01:14:27):
It does sound familiar. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (01:14:29):
Well it stood out was that he ran into Interstate
ninety three, which is always a busy road. Well sure,
and he got hit and survived.
Speaker 2 (01:14:38):
Wow, so he was Do we know what he was
on for drugs? Because it sounds like he's.
Speaker 3 (01:14:42):
Pretty crazy, okay.
Speaker 2 (01:14:45):
And her children were minors. Minor children.
Speaker 3 (01:14:48):
Her children were four years old, two years old.
Speaker 2 (01:14:50):
Oh my god, it's so sad. Well, we'll look into
that one. It sounds a little heartbreaking, I have to
admit to you. Tina but we will look into it,
all right, let's do that, okay, all right, guys, Well,
thank you for joining us at the Quiet End today.
I hope I wasn't too angry. I hope I didn't
swear too much. But this case really got to me,
that's all I can say. It certainly did wow, And
(01:15:14):
I would love to hear other people's opinions on it
and how it affects you. I would suggest you watch
the documentary. I think it's on Netflix right into the Fire, I.
Speaker 3 (01:15:23):
Think so, yeah, but then again, I figure pretty much
everything's on.
Speaker 2 (01:15:27):
Netflix, right one app is just like another. Yeah, okay,
but if you enjoy watching true crime documentaries, I would
definitely recommend watching it because really affected me. Very emotional,
very emotional story. So we invite you to join us
here at the Quiet End again.
Speaker 4 (01:15:45):
Soon.
Speaker 2 (01:15:46):
We'll see you next time.
Speaker 3 (01:15:47):
Come on down.
Speaker 2 (01:15:48):
Plenty of room, all right, Bye, bye.
Speaker 4 (01:15:50):
Aie guys at and is ating bly met and
True Crime Brewery contains disturbing content related to real life crimes.
Medical information is opinion based on facts of a crime
and should not be interpreted as medical advice or treatment.
Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
Welcome to True Crime Brewery.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
I'm Jill and I'm Dick.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
Brenda and Dennis Bowman last saw their daughter Andrea on
March eleventh, nineteen eighty nine. Dennis was the one who
called the police when Andrea went missing that afternoon. He
told them that he had come home and found Andrea missing.
He said that Andrea, fourteen years old and adopted as
an infant, was a troubled team who fought with their
(00:54):
mother and had run away before. When Brenda came home,
she told the police that Andrea had stolen one hundred
and fifty dollars. So this was enough for the police
to get a warrant to arrest Andrea, and Dennis was
listed as the victim of Andrea's crime. Join us at
the Quiet End for the Lost Daughter. For decades, Andrea's
(01:16):
case was classified as a runaway. Then her biological mother
began her own investigation, learning the stories of Andrea's peers
and those of similar women and girls who were victims
of sexual assaults and murders. What they discovered was a
much more complex and haunting story which would lead them
back to Andrea's adopted father, Dennis Bowman. And here's my
(01:40):
handsome husband, Richard with a beer review.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
So we got a nice Michigan beer called M forty three.
I can only assume that's named after a road. Oh okay,
don't they all start with m's.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
Oh gosh, you know, I've got to admit I'm an
idiot when it comes to geography and directions.
Speaker 3 (01:58):
Anyway, mree It's a New England I Pa from Old
Nation Brewing Company in Williamstown, Michigan. It's a hazy apricot color,
small white head, nice lacing, has a very fruity aroma,
no citrus fruit and some tropical fruit, a little bit
of pine taste of mango and grapefruit. Late pininess Is
(02:18):
that a word? We'll use it? Pin It's a pretty
smooth beer. New England i pas are typically more fruity
than happy, which I prefer, which you prefer? And this
one did its job. Very good beer.
Speaker 2 (02:31):
Okay, Well, we've been to Williamstown for the beer and
we enjoyed it right.
Speaker 3 (02:35):
Yeah, a little town, driving from our son's house to
your parents house.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
That's right, making the rounds. This is what we were doing. Okay,
Well open it up, Dickie. I am a thirsty woman.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
Let's do it.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
All right, Why don't you start us out with this story.
I heard about this story first by watching a documentary
on Netflix called Into the Fire of the Lost Daughter,
and it just really had an effect on me. It
was fascinating, it was disturbing. I was enraged. I was
brought to tears. So I was really kind of adamant
that we cover it, and I'm happy that we're covering
(03:21):
it today.
Speaker 3 (03:22):
Yeah, some of your anger comes through.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
In the notes. Yeah, it's in my notes. But you know,
I'm sure a lot of our listeners will agree with me.
Speaker 3 (03:31):
Oh yeah. So. Andrea Bowman, whose birth name was Alexis
Miranda Badger, was adopted by Brenda and Dennis Bowman when
she was nine months of age. Brenda and Dennis met
while she was in high school. He was her first boyfriend.
When she graduated from high school. Dennis was in the Navy,
so they got married in nineteen seventy one, and Dennis
(03:52):
was stationed in San Diego. They lived there for six
months and then Dennis was allowed to choose where he
would be stationed. Next they moved to Norfolk, Virginia and
immediately tried to start a family. But when Brenda did
not become pregnant, she went to the doctor and the
doctor told her that her chances of getting pregnant were
not good due to a bicornuate uterus. Yes, that's where
(04:15):
a uterus is more heart shaped than pear shaped.
Speaker 2 (04:19):
Well, and I have to say, I've examined a woman
with that kind of uterus and I felt two cervixes,
which was really freaky.
Speaker 3 (04:26):
Yeah, yeah, that does happen. Sometimes it's not a consistent
thing with a bicorniate uterus, but does happen.
Speaker 2 (04:32):
So how does that interfere with becoming pregnant.
Speaker 3 (04:35):
Well, it's almost like you have a cleft in a UUs.
So it's it's tough to maybe not to get pregnant,
but to carry a pregnancy.
Speaker 2 (04:42):
The term Well that makes sense. Sure, Okay, so you know,
not to be a bitch, but maybe it would have
been better if she never had any children. Once we
get to talking about Brenda, people will understand why I say.
Speaker 3 (04:54):
That they probably will.
Speaker 2 (04:56):
They probably will. So after that the Bowman started working
towards adopting a child, and it took two to three years,
but then Brenda got the call that there was a
nine month old baby girl available for them to adopt.
Andrea was a sweet little girl and the extended family
all really loved her. Brenda and Dennis eventually moved from
Virginia back to the town of Hamilton and western Michigan.
(05:19):
Hamilton had a population of just over three thousand people,
located near Holland, Michigan. Nothing bad ever happened in Hamilton.
It had a lot of churches, like one gas station,
a couple of schools, and a grocery store, so really small,
and everyone there pretty much one hundred percent where Christian
and went to church every Sunday. In fact, if you
(05:42):
didn't go along with that, you'd be looked at as
kind of weird or as an outcast, which is really
very old school to think about. Yeah, but of course
Brenda and Dennis did fit in there. They were very religious,
and they went to church every Sunday, and they were
both Sunday school teachers, and they wanted to grow their family.
When Andrea was thirteen years old, Brenda found out that
(06:04):
she'd gotten pregnant, and Brenda ended up giving birth to
another daughter, who they named Vanessa. And Andrea really loved
her little sister, loved to help take care of her,
just thought this was the greatest thing ever. Andrea entered
high school shortly after her little sister was born, and
in high school, Andrea was a pretty good kid, just
an average student, but not a big troublemaker and had
(06:27):
quite a few friends. So now let's talk about Andrea's
biological mom, Kathy Turkanian. She grew up as one of
six children. Her stepfather was in the navy, and the
family moved seven times by the time she was in
the seventh grade. The stepfather was deployed for extended periods
of time, leaving Kathy's mother to care for all of
(06:48):
those kids, including one who had epilepsy, so she was
really on her own a lot. And Kathy was molested
by the husband of one of her mother's friends when
she was just ten years old. Then, when Cathy was twelve,
a teenager raped her. So obviously unhappy with her life,
but unsure what to do, She's just a kid. She
(07:09):
would end up running away. So in nineteen seventy two,
Kathy left Virginia with really just the clothes on her back.
She was fourteen, with no money and no one to
turn to for help. She hitchhiked to Tennessee, met up
with a friend in Memphis. Anne took a Greyhound with
no destination really in mind, but on the bus she
met a young woman who told her about the Marty
(07:32):
Grass down in New Orleans. The next day, she found
herself in the Big Easy, listening to jazz through the
French Quarter and partying with a lot of adults. So
this was the nineteen seventies and Cathy was not the
only runaway teenager in New Orleans. She met up with
a group of other young people who helped each other
to stay off the streets. In this group, she met
(07:54):
Randy Badger, a nineteen year old who'd hitchhike to Louisiana
from Los Angeles, US, so they found a place to
live together and spend all of their time together. They
both were able to find some work at a circus
side show, and Kathy thought that this was the life
she wanted to be living. She was, you know, it
wasn't probably the perfect life, but she didn't have to
(08:15):
worry about being molested or raped or beaten.
Speaker 3 (08:18):
Yeah. Well, and also consider that she was just fourteen, well,
of course, yeah, at fourteen, it might be the life
she wanted to be living.
Speaker 2 (08:26):
Yeah, but that wouldn't last, of course, right. So in
December of nineteen seventy two, Kathy and Randy traveled to
North Carolina. It was legal for miners to marry if
they had their parents' permission, so Kathy's parents did not
hesitate to give Kathy their permission. In fact, they were
actually in favor of the marriage. For them, it was
(08:47):
one less person to worry about. Once Kathy was married,
Randy would be the person the police would call if
Kathy got into trouble. So it made her mom feel
like she was kind of off the hook. And her
stepfather signed the next Nessy forms and that was it.
But Kathy and Randy were married for less than one year.
When Kathy was pregnant. Now, it wasn't expected, but to
(09:09):
her it was another way that she could feel like
an adult, and she wanted to do better with this
baby than her mother had done with her and her siblings.
So Kathy was excited to be a mother In June
of nineteen seventy four, Kathy gave birth to her daughter, Alexis,
who she named after the actor Alexis Smith. But as
you might expect, her relationship with Randy soon fell apart.
Speaker 3 (09:32):
Yeah, it turns out that Randy was more interested in
hanging out with the bros And drinking and having a
good time chasing after her other women. He liked that
better than being a husband or father.
Speaker 2 (09:42):
Well he was only twenty.
Speaker 3 (09:44):
Well it's still pretty young, isn't it.
Speaker 2 (09:47):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (09:47):
Yes, Then, when Alexis was five months old, Kathy came
home from work one day and found Randy with another
woman on the couch, while Alexis was crying in the
back bedroom, alone and neglected. So Cathy knew that she
had to leave, but her options were slim, and so
for the sake of her baby, she decided to return
to Virginia and live with her mother.
Speaker 2 (10:07):
Which means she must have been pretty desperate.
Speaker 3 (10:09):
I can only imagine how desperate she must have been.
Speaker 2 (10:12):
Her mother was not the greatest, Nope, and that whole
circumstance there was bad. So she found herself in a
really tough place. But one thing I'll say about Kathy is,
she's tough. This is a tough woman. Yeah. So whatever
confidence Kathy had built up as a mother and responsible
adult really left when she arrived in Norfolk and her mother, Shirley,
(10:34):
showed them no love and no encouragement. She soon learned
that Shirley had been diagnosed with breast cancer and had
a poor prognosis, and Shirley expected Kathy to care for
her and her younger siblings. Even though her mother never
told her outright, she did make it clear that she
didn't think that Kathy should have a child of her own,
which you know might be true, but the child's already here. Yeah,
(10:58):
so what good does it do to make her reel bad? Right? Right? Then?
One day, Shirley told Kathy that they were out of
baby formula and said, hey, how do you plan to
take care of this kid? You know, made her feel bad.
Kathy's doubts about whether she could properly care for Alexis
were growing, and then she did begin to consider adoption,
which her mom was really promoting and thought that was
(11:20):
her best option. So Shirley told Kathy it would be
the best thing for Alexis and oversaw the details of
handing Alexis over to Catholic charities. So of course she
was telling Kathy, this will be the best thing. She'll
have a wonderful life with a nice family. But that's
not always true.
Speaker 3 (11:38):
No, it isn't. But it's a lot of work. I
have a single mother without a husband to help out,
and you're living at home with your mother who is
not very motherly. Hell yeah, maybe even under the best
of circumstances, it's a tough thing to do.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
Exactly.
Speaker 3 (11:54):
Adoption, I think is a pretty viable option.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
Oh sure, I'm just saying it's not always perfect. Oh no,
and in this case it certainly wasn't. But we know
that Kathy was doing it for the right reasons. Of course,
So of course putting her daughter up for adoption, though,
was heartbreaking. She was very bonded to her, but she
assured herself that she was giving her daughter the best
possible life. A short time after the adoption, Kathy left
(12:19):
her mother's home again, and she would eventually go to
nursing school and meet her husband, who she would be
with for many, many years. Kathy and her husband never
had any children together, and she would spend the next
thirty years having no idea where her daughter was. So
Kathy hoped her daughter was happy and would one day
want to find her biological parents. So a quick break
(12:46):
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(13:07):
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(13:30):
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Speaker 3 (13:40):
So Kathy was living her life, but she never stopped
thinking about her daughter. Alexis, and then in April twenty ten,
kind of out of the blue, she received a letter
from a social worker who explained that Alexis had disappeared
from her adopted home back in nineteen eighty nine in Michigan.
Kathy was living in Massachusetts with her husband at this time,
so Alexis or Andrea had been considered a runaway, but
(14:04):
now the police were following a new lead. They thought
that Andrea might be a Jane Doe who was found
dead in Wisconsin, and the police were asking for a
sample of Kathy's DNA to compare and find out if
this Jane Doe was her daughter.
Speaker 2 (14:17):
So this was a real shock for Kathy to get
this letter.
Speaker 3 (14:21):
It must have been incredible.
Speaker 2 (14:22):
It's been like twenty yearss twenty years. Kathy was confused
because the letter gave her very few facts about what
had happened. The letter did not include Alexis's adopted name
or even the city where she'd lived, so they also
didn't give her any contact information for the police, and
they didn't give any details about her disappearance. That it
happened when she was fourteen years old, and this was
(14:45):
the same age that Kathy had been when she'd run
away from home. But now a Jane Doe had been
found dead next to a cornfield and the police thought
it might be Kathy's daughter. Kathy did want to give
her DNA to help out with this, so she did,
and she was told that she'd have to wait some
time for results. It wasn't going to happen quickly, but
(15:06):
like you said, at this point, she'd been missing for
twenty one years. So Kathy gives her DNA. She's got
this letter, but now she's like, well, now what am
I going to do? I've got all these emotions and thoughts.
What do I do with them? She didn't feel like
she could just wait around for the DNA results, so
she did contact the police and the adoption agency, but
(15:28):
neither could tell her her daughter's adopted name or even
where she had disappeared from. Because this had been a
closed adoption, Kathy really had no standing or rights to
any of this information. So Kathy decided, well, fuck it,
I'm going to find out on my own where my
daughter is, what happened to her at least, and all
she had was a birth date. Of course, she knew
the birth date she was her mom, so she asked
(15:50):
her husband, Eddie, who was the more computer savvy one
at that point, although I think Kathy did learn a
lot over the next few years to look on the
internet for a missing close to her daughter Alexis's birthday.
Eddie said he was only searching for about ten minutes
when he found a missing girl with the same birth
date as Kathy's daughter, June twenty third, nineteen seventy four.
(16:13):
And actually she was the first person listed on the
missing person section for the Michigan State Police. Now, Kathy
didn't recognize her right off, of course, because she'd been
a baby when she had last seen her. But as
soon as I looked at her face, especially around the eyes,
I thought, oh my god, she looks a lot like Kathy.
Did you get that feeling too, Yeah?
Speaker 3 (16:33):
I did.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
The eyes they both had these big, beautiful eyes. So
Kathy did soon learn that Andrea had ended up in
Virginia's Department of Social Services as a baby. Someone, probably
her mother, Shirley, had reported that Alexis was born with
fetal alcohol syndrome and that Kathy had taken LSD during
her pregnancy, and Kathy is adamant that these are lies,
(16:58):
so she realized the life that she she had wished
for for her daughter had never happened. They learned that
her name had been changed to Andrea Michelle Bowman, and
that she had lived in Hamilton, Michigan when she disappeared
back in March of nineteen eighty nine. So desperate to
find out more, Kathy decided to create a Find Andrea
Bowman page on Facebook and on classmates dot Com. She
(17:22):
knew that kids who knew each other from high school
might go looking for each other on these websites, and
she really hoped to hear from some of her daughter's peers.
Speaker 3 (17:31):
And it really worked, sure did. A bunch of messages
pretty soon started coming in. Sue Angwiler, who's a relative
of Andrea's, contacted Kathy as soon as she found the page.
Brenda Bowman is Sue Angwiler's cousin and they went to
the same school together in Muskegan, Michigan. She described Brenda
as quiet, a girl who kept herself a lot. Dennis
(17:53):
was her first and probably only boyfriend.
Speaker 2 (17:56):
You I've got nothing nice to say about Brenda.
Speaker 3 (17:58):
I know. So when Andrea disappeared, she was in high school.
She had a cute, short haircut. She liked to dance
the nineteen eighties music thank Cindy Lauper and Madonna. She
was sociable and funny, but she seemed to have a
difficult life.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
Yeah, her home life was far from ideal. She actually
dealt with similar things to her own mother, which was
heartbreaking for Kathy because she'd done the adoption to give
her daughter a better life, and her daughter kind of
ended up in a worse situation. You'd have to say yes.
So Kathy soon heard from a guy named Carl Koppelman
(18:33):
and they began exchanging messages and eventually talking on the phone.
So Carl Koepelman was a professional accountant and an unpaid
volunteer forensic sketch artist, and since two thousand and nine,
Copeleman has drawn over two hundred and fifty face sketches
and age progressions of missing and unidentified people. So Copeleman
(18:57):
has said that growing up in the nineteen seventies, when
there was growing news coverage of serial killers, had started
his fascination with solving crimes. He's pointed to incidents in
his youth as some of his formative memories. The first
happened when he was just nine during the nineteen seventy
two Summer Olympics when terrorists killed eleven Israeli athletes. The
(19:20):
next thing he remembered happening was in nineteen seventy seven,
when he was fourteen, a friend of Copeleman's brother, seventeen
year old John LeMay, was killed by the trash bag
killer Patrick Kearney. And the third notable incident didn't directly
impact Copeleman's life, but it was a notable experience for him.
(19:41):
This was in nineteen seventy nine when he was sixteen
and sixteen year old Lucinda Lynn Shaeffer was killed by
the Toolbox Killers in neighboring Redondo Beach, California. So Copeleman
did really become interested in crime and forensics, and in
August two thousand and nine, after the safe return of
(20:01):
abducted child j C. Dugard, he was really digging into it.
Kopelmann was sitting in his mother's home on the computer
looking at online news articles about that case, and he
began to look at the Websleuth's website and found himself
really gravitating to the forums for missing and unidentified people.
Over time, he progressed from reading the discussions to participating
(20:24):
in them, and eventually he was spending up to twelve
hours a day searching for leads from sources like old
yearbooks and classmates dot com. So I think it's probably
safe to say he was a bit obsessed. This became
his hobby.
Speaker 3 (20:39):
Well, I have this picture of this kind of guy
who doesn't hold a job, and he's at home living
with his mother and he's on the computer roles.
Speaker 2 (20:46):
I don't think that's the case, Sticky, because he was
a good account and he actually had a lot of
skills with you know, Excel and making up spreadsheets. So
I don't have any information that would make me think
he had trouble holding a job. But even if that's
the case, he was good at this absolutely.
Speaker 3 (21:05):
Yeah. Well, I just was looking at the picture that
it printed in my brain. Sure, which doesn't work well sometimes.
Speaker 2 (21:11):
Well, no, you're making assumptions, which is fine. But from
what I've read about him, because I did do some
additional research on his history, I think he was just
really really obsessed with this and he ended up being
good at it because he has solved crimes. Yeah, maybe
he was better at this than accounting. I'll give you that.
Speaker 3 (21:30):
Well, well they sort of maybe not go together, but
you know, accountants looking at numbers, hard facts exactly, and
that's what he's trying to do.
Speaker 2 (21:39):
Very detail oriented person.
Speaker 3 (21:41):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (21:42):
So it was while looking through missing person listings that
Kopelman identified Andrea Bowman as a strong candidate for being
the Racine County Jane Doe. The theory was that Andrey
had run away and then had been murdered years later
in nineteen ninety nine, So he began to investigate Andrea's
disappearance online, and he eventually came across the classmates dot
(22:05):
com page for Andrea that Kathy had created. So that's
how these two ended up meeting. So Kathy had met
other online sleuths, but she and Carl Koppelman began working
together to solve her daughter's case while she awaited the
DNA results. But finding out if it was Andrea's body
that was found would be just one piece of the
(22:27):
mystery because if she had died, how had it happened
and when had it happened. If she had been murdered,
who had done it? So Kathy contacted Pat O'Reilly, a
retired detective in Michigan who was familiar with Andrea's case,
and according to Kathy, he told her they botched this
case from the beginning. Then Riley told her that the
(22:49):
person they needed to be looking at was Andrea's adoptive father,
Dennis Bowman. So this is when some light bulbs really
were set off.
Speaker 3 (22:58):
Well in buching the case in the beginning, I think
that everyone who is involved just thought that she.
Speaker 2 (23:03):
Was a runaway, absolutely, but I think that the police
need to look further into it than that, especially if
they'd looked at Bowman's history and that he was the
one that reported Andrea missing, which, of course we'll get
into that more as we get into the case. But
I don't think it's okay for the police force to
just say she's a runaway. No, biggie, she's a fourteen
(23:24):
year old child. I don't care if she's a runaway
or if she's kidnapped.
Speaker 3 (23:28):
She's in danger, well, that's a different topic. Yes, the
police would probably be satisfied that she was a runaway
if her adoptive parents said, oh, she's done this before,
she'll be back.
Speaker 2 (23:40):
Well, that's part of the problem, right, because the adoptive
parents were not reliable historians.
Speaker 3 (23:46):
Well, as it turns out they weren't.
Speaker 2 (23:47):
As it turns out, Well, that's what I'm saying. You
can't just accept what the parents say, because the parents
are your first suspects when a child goes missing or dies.
Maybe they didn't know that in the seventies, but we
know that now.
Speaker 3 (24:00):
Oh you bet we do?
Speaker 2 (24:02):
You bet?
Speaker 3 (24:03):
You bet ya.
Speaker 2 (24:04):
So now we're going to talk about an incident that
happened in nineteen eighty in Holland, Michigan. This was nine
years before Andrea went missing, so she was just five
years old at that time. This was a sunny morning
in May of nineteen eighty and a nineteen year old
young woman was riding her bike north of Holland, Michigan,
when a man on a motorcycle ran her off the road.
(24:27):
He told her to get off of her bike and
walk into the woods. She didn't follow his orders, so
he pulled out a gun and fired a shot past her,
again telling her to do as he said. She still
didn't do it, so he fired the gun again, this
time into the ground at her feet, and he told
her his next shot would hit her. So this really
(24:48):
saved her life. I'm going to say that she didn't
go along with it. And I am of the belief
that you never get in the car with a man,
or walk into the woods or do things like that.
If they're telling you to do that, shoot me right here,
because once they get you somewhere on their own, you're doomed.
You are, yes. So she did the right thing, very brave,
(25:08):
and fortunately just then a car drove by, and the
man turned his head, and the young woman took that
chance to ride away on her bike as fast as
she could so he didn't shoot at her, chase after her,
and she was able to flag down someone in a
pickup truck who gave her a ride home. When she
got home and told her parents what had happened, they
called the police, and the young woman gave a description
(25:31):
of the man, a white male with tinted glasses and
a blue helmet. She said that his motorcycle had a
black case mounted on the back of it as well.
So that same day the police were able to find
and detain a suspect, and the young woman immediately confirmed
that he was the man who had tried to attack her.
It was Dennis Bowman, who was married and had his
(25:53):
adopted daughter Andrea at home.
Speaker 3 (25:55):
This is pretty quick police work.
Speaker 2 (25:57):
Yeah, it's impressive, yep. But she had a good description,
so she really was very helpful. Dennis was convicted of
assault with intent to commit criminal sexual assault. He was
sentenced to five to ten years in prison. He was
ordered to have psychiatric counseling, and the judge decided that
he would pose a danger to women if he were
(26:17):
ever set free. Still, Bowman only served the minimum sentence.
Speaker 3 (26:22):
So Dennis's wife, who was also Andrea's adopted mother name
is Brenda, stood by him. She stood by him again
in nineteen ninety eight. That year, a state trooper in Door, Michigan,
responded to an alarm at the mobile home of twenty
eight year old Vicki Vandenbrink. She had reported so many
break INDs that the Sheriff's department had installed a security system,
(26:43):
and this time when the trooper arrived, he found Dennis
Bowman walking away from her back door. So it turns
out the Bowmans had moved to Hamilton Is, a town
between Holland and dor in nineteen eighty nine, which was
shortly after Andrea went missing. Dennis Bowman told the trooper
that he was temporarilyst to with Vicky, who was a
former coworker of his. So he's let go. But when
(27:04):
the police contacted Vicky, she said that he was lying.
So after that Dennis changed the story, telling the police
that he had entered a trailer to use her bathroom.
He had been there at least once before, he claimed,
when his daughter wanted to sell girl Scout cookies to
VICKI So the police didn't believe his story. Oh this
is kind of leaky, isn't it?
Speaker 2 (27:22):
Very leaky? And I'm glad they didn't believe it.
Speaker 3 (27:25):
So they asked for his permission to search his property
and he agreed. In the loft of an outbuilding, they
found a duffel bag filled with lingerie, a shotgun, a
black shirt, a black sweatshirt, and a mask, and the
lingerie was identified as belonging to Vicky Vanderbrink.
Speaker 2 (27:41):
Right, So it's just a shame this guy wasn't stopped
right then or sooner. Obviously. Bowman pled guilty to one
count of breaking and entering in his sentencing memo, written
by his attorney. It does not mention the nineteen eighty
conviction or the prior break ins reported by Vicky Vanderbrink, attorney,
presented letters to the court written on Bowman's behalf by
(28:04):
his counselor who ran his sex offender group treatment program,
his boss, and a member of his church. The church
member wrote that Dennis had taught Sunday school to kindergarteners
for the past six years, and the court was also
given a letter from Brenda, who again defended her husband. Now,
I don't know if I'm dense, but why would being
(28:26):
a Sunday school teacher make it any less likely that
you're a sexual predator?
Speaker 3 (28:31):
Well, you're looking at kind of the facts, you know. Yeah,
And in this area of Michigan, if you go to
church regularly, or if you teach Sunday school, you're good.
You're with God, and you couldn't have possibly done all
those horrible things they're accusing you of.
Speaker 2 (28:48):
No, because there was no such thing as hypocrisy there.
Speaker 3 (28:51):
See.
Speaker 2 (28:51):
Yeah. So Dennis Bowman made a statement also saying that
he was a happily married man for twenty eight years.
And you know what, He said that he had two daughters,
but did not mention that his older daughter, Andrea, had
been missing for over a decade. That just never came
up for some brazy.
Speaker 3 (29:09):
Reason, well it was questioning, didn't follow up on it.
Speaker 2 (29:12):
No, So Kathy Turcanian only learned the details of Dennis
Bowman's criminal record after she submitted a Freedom of Information
Act requests. Based on what Detective O'Reilly had told Kathy,
she knew that they needed to look into his past.
When she read about what he had done to at
least two women, Kathy felt that the truth was Dennis
(29:33):
Bowman had killed her daughter. So Andrea and Racine Jane
Doe had similar physical characteristics. And Holland, where Andrea disappeared,
(29:55):
is directly across from Lake Michigan, where Jane Doe was found.
It's only four four hours by car from one location
to the other. Now, I know when we talked about this,
you thought, well, that's really not that close.
Speaker 3 (30:07):
What is right? As a crow flies? It's close, sure,
but there's a lot of water. Yes, so you got
to drive south then across the north right.
Speaker 2 (30:18):
But I guess, you know, because they were of similar
age and had some similar features, this was thought to,
you know, be a possibility.
Speaker 3 (30:26):
Oh yeah, I would definitely see that.
Speaker 2 (30:28):
Yeah. But the DNA test came back in twenty thirteen,
and Kathy was not related to the racing county Jane Doe.
Jane Doe was then identified as Peggy Johnson, a nineteen
year old who was assumed to be a runaway. Peggy
was last seen at a homecoming dance in Harvard, Illinois
in nineteen ninety four. An aunt was worried enough about
(30:50):
her to take out a classified ad in the newspaper,
but no one seemed to think something terrible had happened
to her. Peggy had disappeared a short time after her
own mother died. She did not have a father at home,
so she found herself homeless with a developmental disability that
made it really hard for her to get a job
and work a job. So she met a nurse, Linda Laroux,
(31:14):
who offered her a job as a live in housekeeper
and a nanny for her kids. But over the next
five years, Loreau would abuse Peggy. She beat her, starved her,
and made her live in a crawl space. In nineteen
ninety nine, at age twenty three, Peggy was murdered by Loreau.
When Peggy's body was found, no one could identify her,
(31:37):
but then, twenty years after Peggy's death, the police got
a tip about a nurse who had confessed to killing
someone who worked for her in the late nineteen nineties.
So in November twenty nineteen, Peggy Jensen's body was finally
identified and Loreau was arrested.
Speaker 3 (31:56):
I wonder what prompted her confession.
Speaker 2 (31:59):
Well, it wasn't a confession, and like, I'm going to
go to prison. It was like maybe they were having
drinks since she said, you know, or killed someone back then.
How sometimes these people do Okay, Yeah, I think, you know,
some people maybe are proud of it or they want
to get it off their conscience. I'm not sure what
the case is with this woman, but she was clearly a.
Speaker 3 (32:17):
Monster, I think so.
Speaker 2 (32:19):
So Kathy was relieved that her daughter was not this
Jane Doe, but she also felt certain now that Dennis
Bowman had killed Andrea. Copelman was as obsessive in his
detective work as Kathy was and getting justice for her daughter.
But Copelman was calculated and logical, while Kathy was impassioned
and not afraid one bit to show her anger. So
(32:42):
once she had Bowman's criminal record, she began writing posts
accusing Bowmen of killing Andrea.
Speaker 3 (32:49):
Yeah, she's doing a bit of a reach here to
finger him as the killer.
Speaker 2 (32:55):
Okay, but I also think that she had an intuition.
Speaker 3 (33:00):
You go back to what you said. She was impassioned
and intuitive.
Speaker 2 (33:04):
Absolutely, because even though it wasn't her fault, there had
to be some guilt that you put your child up
for adoption and this happened, because you know, as a parent,
there's always guilt. But why don't you tell us about
that Missing in Michigan conference because that's a good story.
Speaker 3 (33:19):
That's a great story. Yeah, this is September of twenty thirteen.
In September of twenty thirteen, Kathy met Carl Koppelman in
person at the Missing in Michigan Conference. This conference is
a way for the Michigan Police to raise awareness and
hopefully get leads on cold cases. Friends and family members
met in East Lansing for panels, support groups, and DNA collection,
(33:43):
which could help identify remains and match them to missing
family members. Kathy and Kopelman showed up in t shirts
that read Find Andrea Bowman. So as Copeman and Kathy
were sitting in on a morning group therapy session, Copeman
nudged Kathy and pointed out that Brenda and Vanessa Bowman
were there. Now, Vanessa's the child they had, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (34:04):
They had her when Andrea was thirteen.
Speaker 3 (34:07):
Right, So Brendan and Vanessa recognized Kathy Turcanian too and
knew what she had been posting about Dennis on Facebook.
Speaker 2 (34:15):
Well.
Speaker 4 (34:15):
Good, So when it.
Speaker 3 (34:17):
Was Brenda's turn to introduce herself, she told everyone, we
have a little situation here.
Speaker 2 (34:22):
Oh fuck her, come on.
Speaker 3 (34:24):
Then she looked at Kathy and said, I see that
you very much resemble Andrea.
Speaker 2 (34:28):
Oh how did she punch her fucking face?
Speaker 3 (34:30):
That's got to be raising a red flag at her.
Speaker 2 (34:33):
Yeah, because you say that she's reaching a little, but
you have to remember if you see this record of
what he's done. And then he's the one that reported
his teenage daughter missing, And we're going to get into
the fact that she had said he was abusing her.
It really it kind of makes sense that he killed her.
Speaker 3 (34:49):
It does.
Speaker 2 (34:50):
So Brenda tried to continue talking, but Kathy was furious
and she cut in. She turned to Brenda and said,
tell the truth, Brenda, tell them about your husband. So
when that drama subsided, the session continued. Then afterwards, Copelman
approached Brenda. She wanted to tell him her side of
the story. She said that she and Dennis had fully
(35:12):
cooperated with the police after Andrea went missing. She also
told him about sightings of Andrea after that day. So
she was talking as if she still believed that Andrea
had run away, although I don't buy it. Then Copeleman
brought up Dennis's criminal record, and Brenda said, I haven't
forgotten what he did, but I do forgive him. I
(35:33):
take my marriage vows very seriously. Oh my god. So
Cathy couldn't hold back any longer after overhearing this, and
she yelled, tell us how you abuse, starved and humiliated
her Brenda. Then Brenda's daughter Vanessa broke in to defend
her mother. You need to be put into an asane asylum,
she yelled at Kathy. So things were tense for the
(35:56):
remainder of the conference. The women avoided each other. But
I would have loved to have been there for that.
Speaker 3 (36:02):
Yeah, there were some fireworks.
Speaker 2 (36:04):
Absolutely. After the conference, Kathy and Karl Kopeman decided that
they needed a private investigator in Michigan who could work
on Andrea's case. So Kathy hired Jeffrey Flore, a former
Michigan state trooper who had helped to solve a gang
rape and murder from nineteen seventy nine. Floor got Andrea's
(36:25):
police case file, which Kathy and Kopeman had not yet seen,
and some of the documents were from before Andrea's disappearance
four months beforehand. So here's where we get a little
more information. It was four months before Andrea disappeared when
police first responded to allegations of child abuse in the
(36:45):
Bowman House. The report did not have details of what
had happened, but it noted that the allegations were not true,
and one thing became very clear. The police had mishandled
the investigation of these allegations and of Andrea's disappearance, because
it was obvious at this point that the police had
missed a lot of things, some kind of obvious things.
Speaker 3 (37:08):
So Kathy and Colpeoman found people who Andrea had confided
in and people who had witnessed her being mistreated at home.
Jennifer Jones was one of these friends. They were in
the middle school band and they both played musical instruments.
They were close in their family for they were close
in their freshman year of high school as well. So
(37:30):
one Tuesday afternoon, Andrea came home with Jennifer, but when
it was time for her to leave, she says she
didn't want to go, and according to Jennifer, Andrea said
that her father was sexually abusing her. So Jennifer's mother
let her spend the night and the next day she
took her to the principal's office. There, Andrea told school
officials about the abuse. Jennifer was sent back to class
(37:53):
and assured that the adults would handle it, so Andrea
was not in classes. Andrea was not in her classes
for the remainder of that day, so Jennifer assumed that
she was in protective custody or foster care, but later
she learned that Andrea had been sent back home with
Dennis and Brenda.
Speaker 2 (38:11):
Now how much does that piss you off?
Speaker 3 (38:13):
Yeah? Oh god. So the principal had brought Dennis and
Brenda into the school and questioned them in the office.
Brenda told the principal that Andrea lied. Dennis said she
lied all the time, So what could Andrea do with
her parents right there? So she said, yeah, I made
it all up.
Speaker 2 (38:30):
So obviously that's not the proper way to handle that.
And I hope they've corrected that. But if a child
says they're being abused, especially sexually abused, really, and then
you bring the parents in, yeah, and asked them right
in front of her. That's not the right kind of
investigation that needs to be done.
Speaker 3 (38:48):
No, not at all.
Speaker 2 (38:49):
And make her go right home with them. That's horrible. So,
around the same time, Andrea confided in Jennifer and her mother,
and she also confided in her. Around the same time
when Andrea confided in Jennifer and her mother, she also
confided in Arlene Ron, who was another mom in town.
Andrea had befriended Ron's sons in the church youth group,
(39:12):
and then she had begun spending time at their house. Eventually,
Andrea got comfortable enough that she told Ron that her
father was abusing her. She also told her that Brenda
knew about the sexual abuse but did not care. Ron
was hesitant to get involved for some reason, so she
told Andrea to talk to the pastor, so passing the buck.
(39:36):
And when you go to counseling with a pastor, it's
not real counseling. I'm sorry, you don't want that kind
of a counselor, especially when he has a relationship with
her parents.
Speaker 3 (39:46):
Yeah, need a neutral.
Speaker 2 (39:47):
Part, absolutely, and probably someone who's trained in that kind
of thing.
Speaker 3 (39:52):
Oh yeah, yeah, saying Then, on.
Speaker 2 (39:55):
An evening, when she pulled into the Bowman's driveway to
drop off Andrea, Dennis came out front and told her
to stay out of his business. But Ron never reported
any of this to the police or the school, and
then within a few months Andrea was gone. So a
lot of adults let her down.
Speaker 3 (40:15):
And there were many people that had a bad feeling
about Dennis Bowman. Yes, one couple who had grown up
with the Bowmans and Muskegan knew about his criminal record
and remembered him bragging about his sexual conquests as far
back as high school. And this couple had always felt
uncomfortable around him, and I kept an eye on their
daughter whenever he was around, and they ended their friendship
(40:38):
with the Bowmans when their daughter found the Facebook page
for Andrea. She said that her parents had never been
contacted or interviewed by police, and it wasn't until Kathy
contacted a couple that they spoke to anyone about their suspicions.
Speaker 2 (40:52):
Yeah, so more adults who did not go to the police.
Should the police have gone to them. Yes, they probably
should have been canvassing everyone who was friends with the family,
but that not being done. Why didn't this couple go
to the police and let them know about their concerns.
It's just very disturbing in how many things could have
been done that maybe could have prevented this, or at
(41:16):
least could have helped solve it sooner.
Speaker 3 (41:18):
You're right.
Speaker 2 (41:19):
So here's another story that's just bone chilling. When a
young woman named Metta macleoud saw the Facebook page that
Cathy had created, she contacted her about something that had
happened to her as a child that she felt could
be connected to Andrea's disappearance. So this had happened on
a September afternoon in nineteen eighty nine, when Meta was
(41:40):
only six years old. As she was walking to a
friend's house, she was waved over by a man in
a red truck who promised to take her to see
some puppies. He told her that her mother said it
was okay for her to go with him, and then
he just pretty much grabbed her and put her into
the truck. Now, remember she's six, so she's really helpless.
Speaker 3 (42:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (42:00):
Yeah, So as they drove into a rural area. Meda
kept asking if they were there yet, but when they
came to a four way stop, there was a police
cruiser beside them, and the man told her to get
down in the seat and hide. So he had seemed
like a nice guy at first, but once he pulled
over into a woodsy area with her, his whole demeanor changed.
(42:22):
He pulled off the road, parked the truck and dragged
her into some thick brush, holding her by her neck.
Then he tore off her sweater and wrapped it around
her mouth. Then he tied her hands behind her back
with rope and took off the rest of her clothing.
As he knelt over her and on zipped his pants,
Meta heard a dog barking nearby. Fortunately, the man was
(42:44):
spooked by this, probably realizing that there were people nearby
with the dog, and he ran off. Meda ran naked
and barefoot to the main road to get help, and
two cars pulled over and nine one one was called.
So the police did go to Meta's home that evening,
and a sketch artist made a sketch of the perpetrator
and of his truck. This man's face looked a lot
(43:06):
like Denis Bowman. And she said that the man smelled
like grease or paint. While Kopeman found out that Dennis
had been working at the Harbor as a carpenter right
down the road when Meta was abducted, and Bowman had
also owned a red pickup with a white cap.
Speaker 3 (43:22):
On the back.
Speaker 2 (43:23):
But the police did not find their suspect back in
nineteen eighty nine, the case went cold, and then the
statute of limitations eventually expired. As Metta got older, it
really haunted her to think that the man could be
victimizing other little girls. And when she came across the
Fine Audrey A Facebook page, the similarities to her attack
(43:44):
were significant to her. Then when she looked up a
family picture of the Bowman's and she saw Denis Bowman's face,
she was shocked because that was the man who had
abducted her the same year that Andrea had gone missing.
It was Dennis Bowman.
Speaker 3 (44:01):
What a shock that must have been for Metta. Oh
can you imagine to look at that and say, holy shit,
that's the guy who did it.
Speaker 2 (44:09):
Well, just living with that must have been hard. I
hope she got counseling, But then to find that out, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3 (44:16):
So after speaking with Metta, Kathy Turkanian and Karl Koppeman
were convinced that Dennis Bowman was a serial predator who
had killed Andrea and covered it up by saying she
had run away. But still there's no proof at that
point that Andrea was murdered or even though she was dead.
But still Kathy became convinced that he had buried Andrea
in his backyard. It's horrifying to realize that the adopted
(44:39):
father of her daughter had probably raped and killed her.
Speaker 2 (44:42):
Yeah, that's an understatement, I would say so. Talking with
Andrea's extended family members and friends from her childhood, Kathy
found out that Andrea was mistreated by her adoptive parents.
They had stories of Andrea being treated like she was
less than in her own home, and stories of Dennis
yelling at her, chasing after her, and hitting her. One
(45:04):
friend said that when the family had hamburgers one night,
Andrea was only allowed what they called a leftover sandwich,
which was bred with mustard, ketchup and relish on it.
And when she told a friend about this in front
of Dennis, he stood up and hit her so hard
that Andrea fell out of her chair. So how would
that be your visiting a little friend and the father
(45:25):
does that. Holy shit. So Andrea's friends encouraged her to
leave home, but Andrea really loved her baby's sister and
she didn't want to leave Vanessa there by herself. I mean,
Vanessa could have started getting abused as.
Speaker 3 (45:39):
Well, oh sure could.
Speaker 2 (45:41):
So she was kind of looking out for her little
sister and that she didn't leave sooner, which is incredibly sad. Then,
in the immediate time after Andrea's disappearance, there were some
people in the community who reported sightings of her, but
the police investigation was pretty much nothing. According to Brenda,
(46:01):
Dennis had picked up Andrea from school that day and
when they got home, she said, Andrea was very quiet.
Dennis then drove Brenda to work with the baby Vanessa
in their car. Then Dennis said that he had come
home and Andrea was gone. He said she had taken
some money, a travel bag, and her purple coat. He
said he looked around for her and then he called
(46:23):
the police.
Speaker 3 (46:25):
After Andrea was missing, Brenda said they borrowed other people's
cars and went into Holland in the evenings to look
for her, but they never found any clues to her. Whereabouts.
There were tips and sightings of Andrea at a roller
skating rink, at a grocery store, and working in the
adult entertainment industry. So the general belief at that time,
(46:45):
and which was encouraged by Dennis, was that Andrea had
run away. Dennis told the police that Andrea had been
using drugs and stealing and just generally getting into trouble,
so clearly a way to make it look like she
was a delinquent who had run away and the police
didn't even look for no.
Speaker 2 (47:02):
But it was another crime committed by Dennis Bowman that
would finally bring to light what really happened to Andrea.
This happened back in nineteen eighty in Norfolk, Virginia. On
the evening of September ninth, nineteen eighty, Vivian Mahoney, a
friend of twenty five year old Kathleen O'Brien Doyle, visited
Kathleen at her house. She was there at about seven
(47:23):
thirty pm and they each had a glass of wine
and topped. Mahoney would later tell police that she had
left Kathleen's house between nine and nine thirty pm. The
next day, September tenth, Vivian Mahoney tried to call Kathleen
several times but didn't get an answer. The next day,
September eleventh, Mahoney and her husband James decided to stop
(47:45):
by and check on Kathleen because she still wasn't answering
her phone. So a little afternoon on the eleventh, James
drove them to the Doyle house. When James parked the car,
Viviana got out and walked up to the door. She
noticed that the outdoor light, there was mail in the mailbox,
two newspapers were on the ground, and the screen door
(48:05):
was unlocked, which was unusual. Vivienne looked through the small
windows in the door and could see their two wineglasses
from September ninth still sitting in the living room, so
when she went to knock on the door, it opened,
it wasn't shut all the way. Vivianne walked into Kathleen's
house and looked around the living room and everything was
(48:26):
like they had left it on the night of the night.
When she walked into the bedroom, though, she found Kathleen
on the floor. Vivianne ran out of the house and
yelled to James that Kathleen was on her bedroom floor.
And she thought she was dead. James then ran into
the bedroom, and he later told the police that the
room was in disarray, with the mattress moved from its
(48:46):
normal position. The room looked like there had been a
struggle in there. He told police that he saw Kathleen
lying on the floor with various cords wrapped around her.
He had checked for a pulse, but there was none.
There was dried blood, which indicated that she had been
killed some time ago. Neither of the Mahonies had touched
anything in the bedroom other than to check for a pulse,
(49:09):
so James told Vivianne to call the police, but the
phone wasn't working, and it was later determined that the
internal mouthpiece of the phone had been removed, preventing a
collar from being able to communicate. And when I think
of that, I just think of that asshole Bowman thinking
he was so clever. So James ran next door and
called nine one one. The Norfolk Police and the fire
(49:32):
department responded to the house. Kathleen was declared dead. She
was naked, her hands were bound behind her, she was
gagged and she had an extension cord around her neck.
Her body was in full rigor and she was cool
to the touch. There was dry, matted, whitish material in
her genital area and it was noted to possibly be seamen.
(49:55):
In Kathleen's autopsy, it reads that the death resulted from
homicide and that she showed signs of sexual abuse with
punching and blunt force injuries to her face, kicking to
her stomach, and strangulation with an electrical cord. There was
also a burn mark on her that was about the
(50:15):
size of a cigar, but may have come from a
burnt Lincoln log because they did find a Lincoln log
that had won and burned and Kathleen did not have
any children. Kathleen had also been stabbed in the back,
and there was a second stab wound in the front
that had hit one of her ribs. Swabs were taken
from her vagina and cervix, which each had the presence
(50:37):
of sperm. Her formal cause of death was mechanical asphyxiation
by strangulation and stab wounds with internal hemorrhage. No weapon
was located which could have been used in the stabbing.
They never located the mouthpiece to the phone either. Phone
records showed that Kathleen's mother had tried to call her
at eleven p m. On September ninth, but Kathleen had
(51:00):
not answered. So that makes us think that something happened
to her between when her friend left at nine or
nine thirty and when her mom tried to call her
at eleven. So Kathleen's husband was never a suspect because
he was away with the US Navy. No leads were developed,
but the Norfolk Police continued to investigate, and through the
(51:21):
nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties, the family of Kathleen, especially
her father, really advocated for further investigation. With new forensic
(51:42):
science of DNA analysis, Norfolk Police Department homicide Detective Scott
Helverson started trying to locate all of the witnesses, family contacts,
military contacts, and any other persons of interest and getting
DNA samples from them. Then, in two thousand and one,
homicide Detective Donnie NoREL reviewed all of the evidence and
(52:05):
found that the green print bedspread that was found beneath
the victim had never been submitted for DNA analysis, So
in July two thousand and one, a DNA profile was
identified on the bedspread. The police department worked with Kathleen's father,
Captain O'Brien to get more leads and obtain DNA samples
to eliminate sources throughout the United States.
Speaker 3 (52:28):
So all samples were eliminated and there was no positive
matchdown in the DNA data bank. In a report written
in twenty nineteen by Parabon, Parabon Snapshot Genetic Genealogy report
provided information about their analysis of the DNA extracted from
the bedspread and search national sources to find similar genetic information.
(52:50):
That November, Parabon provided ancestry prediction and potential extended family
lineage to the sample, which consisted of more than thirty
potential kinship reallys Norfolk Police Department called case. Detective John
Smith attended a training seminar that November, which is also
attended by members of the Michigan State Police Department. So
(53:11):
during a conversation between Smith and some MSP detectives, the
detectives said they were familiar with Dennis Bowman, who was
one of the persons with potential kinship to the DNA
sample reported by Taraba. Very interesting uh huh. The MSP
detectives also said they did have a DNA sample from
Dennis Bowman.
Speaker 2 (53:31):
Yeah, So this is particularly interesting because it's kind of
a coincidence that there is they ended up meeting like
that at that point in time. But it turned out
that Bowman's DNA profile was consistent with the DNA profile
from the bedspread found beneath Kathleen Doyle. A murder warrant
was then obtained on November twentieth, twenty nineteen, and Dennis
(53:54):
Bowman was finally taken into custody two days later in
Elegant County, Michigan. His wife, Brenda complained that Dennis couldn't
have done it because they were living in Michigan in
nineteen eighty, so on February seventh, twenty twenty, he was
extradited to Norfolk, and at that time a sample obtained
(54:15):
from a drinking cup was taken from Bowman and submitted
to the forensic lab. The report confirmed that Bowman could
not be eliminated as a contributor to the swabs from
Kathleen Doyle's body. The probability of randomly selecting a person
who would be included as a contributor is one in
greater than seven point two billion people, which is approximately
(54:39):
the population of the entire world, so I'd say that's
pretty strong evidence.
Speaker 3 (54:44):
It is.
Speaker 2 (54:44):
Bowman was read his rights and interviewed by Detective Smith,
and he admitted to entering the home, but he said
it was to steal, and he'd entered through a back window.
He actually was able to just kind of overlook and
bypass all of the violent details of the attack and
claimed he just accidentally came across her in the home
and accidentally stabbed her. One time records show that Bowman
(55:08):
was in Norfolk at the time of the murder for
a two week active drill with the US Navy. And
kudos to Detective Smith who sat there with this awful
human being and spoke to him for hours and treated
him like he was just another person. Actually acted respectful
and kind to him for the most part, which I
think would be impossible for many of us. I never
(55:32):
understand how they do it, but of course I appreciate it.
Speaker 4 (55:35):
So.
Speaker 2 (55:35):
Reading about the Michigan case in May of nineteen eighty,
where Bowman had tried to get that nineteen year old
woman into a secluded area and had fired two shots
near her, detectives thought that he must have been in
jail for that offense at the time, but The trial
transcript from September sixteenth says that Bowman was not there
because he was on that two week drill in Norfolk, Virginia,
(56:00):
and they knew he was in Norfolk when Kathleen was murdered.
Speaker 3 (56:03):
In June twenty twenty, Dennis Bowman took a plea deal
where he admitted to the burglary, rape and murder in Norfolk.
So if you watch the interview with John Smith and Bowman,
it's quite creepy and you can see that he's a
disgusting manipulator who does this self pity routine.
Speaker 2 (56:20):
Poor man, Oh so gross, like talking about his mother
and YadA YadA, ew. Yeah, he's really bad. And then
the police also brought in Brenda and she was her
awful self. I'm afraid when told that Dennis confessed to
Kathleen's murder in Virginia, she still said that there's always
hope that he didn't really do it. Then she also
was not ready to think about what he could have
(56:42):
done to Andrea. I quite honestly think she knew damn
well about the sexual abuse of Andrea and that he
had to be behind her going missing. But his known
criminal history and the fact that his daughter is missing
and he was the one to report her missing should
have really knocked some sense into Brenda. Nope, it didn't.
So I really think she didn't honestly care about the
(57:04):
people that Denis harmed or killed. For both Dennis and Brenda,
it was all about their own needs. It's just icky.
So Brenda had lived with him for those thirty years
when Andrea was missing, so how did she not have
any idea? In that docuseries I mentioned Into the Fire,
they show a video call between the two of them,
(57:24):
Brenda and Dennis after his confession where they kind of
flirt and they talk about him sending her flowers and
how that made them cry. She even said that after
he got out of prison years ago, they should have
gone to counseling and gotten to the bottom of everything.
So this definitely refers to the things he did to
his daughter and other females, and Brenda stuck by him
(57:47):
in spite of all of it. On their call while
he's in jail, she says, I love you even though
I damn you at times, and then she giggles. He says,
I don't blame you a bit. I should be at
home and I'm not nothing at all about the people
that he has hurt, just all about how they feel,
which I find really gross. It's just upsetting that she's
(58:07):
not held responsible at all for any of this. She
was responsible for Andrea. She was supposed to be her mother.
She knew she was being molested by her husband, but
chose to do nothing about it. Then, when Andrea went
missing while at home with only him, she had to
have had some idea that something had happened to her.
But it doesn't matter because even after he confesses, she
(58:30):
will forgive him over and over again, so disgusting. Brenda
has proof and still talks to him and jokes with
him afterwards. So the police, knowing that Dennis really wanted
Brenda's support, came up with a plan to tell him
if he told them where they could find Andrea's body,
he could stay in Michigan, where Brenda would be able
(58:51):
to visit him in prison, because Brenda lives in Michigan,
so in his mind, if he knows he's going to
spend the rest of his life in prison, then he
would rather spend that time in Michigan. So they made
a tentative offer to Bowman that if he agreed to
be honest about Andrea. He could stay in a Michigan prison. Still,
he was difficult and very stubborn. Brenda said he couldn't
(59:13):
stay in state because he couldn't confess to something he
didn't do. They even got his daughter Vanessa involved, and
the three of them were on a call joking about
the police searching the Bowman's property. But the detectives began
putting pressure on Dennis Bowman about Andrea. He was spinning
his own tail, but he would eventually start bargaining. The
(59:33):
detectives were able to set up an in person meeting
between Brenda and Dennis that was supervised by two detectives.
Speaker 3 (59:41):
Yes, so when Dennis was brought out to the room
to meet with Brenda, he said to the detectives, I
hope you have your cameras rolling. Then he confessed to Brenda,
but of course he didn't tell the whole truth. He
told her that Andrea had been dead from the start.
And in this version, he said he came home and
went upstairs and saw Andrea coming out of their bedroom.
He said that Andrea told him that she was leaving,
(01:00:03):
and he said, no, You're not going anywhere. Then he
says that Andrea threatened to make up a story to
the counselors that he had been molesting her. He said, no,
you're not, and he hit her. Then he says she
fell backwards down the stairs, So his story now is
that she accidentally died and he covered it up. He
says she wasn't breathing and her neck felt bad and
he didn't know what to do. But Brenda doesn't tell
(01:00:25):
him to bug her off. She stays there and cries
with slb yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:00:30):
And he went on to say that he wrapped her
in a blanket, hit her in the barn, and reported
her missing. Then he says he couldn't fit her body
in this cardboard barrel he found, so he had to
cut her legs off. Can you imagine. He says he
put the barrel out front in the neighbor's trash after that,
and still Brenda stays and talks to him. Un fucking believable.
(01:00:51):
He actually says, as long as he didn't tell her,
there was hope for Brenda, like he did her some
kind of a favor. Come on, I know the whole
story was bullshit. He chopped her up, there's no getting
around that. And he actually spoke as if some of
it was Andrea's fault. So the police had a warrant
out for Andrea's arrest when he killed her because he
(01:01:13):
told the police that she had stolen money from them.
He really shows no remorse at all. He actually says,
just because she broke her neck doesn't mean I didn't
love her. And Brenda continued to defend him and continued
to quote the Bible to her murdering husband. Brenda just
chose to believe him because that's what she wanted to believe.
(01:01:34):
I guess it's really difficult to understand. But now the
police still wanted Andrea's remains, and they weren't believing his
story of putting her out with the trash. They were
monitoring his letters to Brenda, of course, and he was
continuing to contradict his story of what he had done
with Andrea's remains. On December twelfth, twenty nineteen, he wrote
(01:01:57):
to Brenda that Andrea did fall and break her head,
but that he didn't put her body in the trash.
He went on to say that he buried her in
a private cemetery. He said she was wearing her favorite
sweater and that he wrapped her in a clean white sheet,
wrapping her hands and feet with a red ribbon. He says,
she really liked that color. Then he says he put
(01:02:18):
her in a tarp with cedar chips, cloves, and cinnamon.
I'm sure she's with God, he says. Then he claims
that he loved her, that he loves Vanessa. Then he
claims to love her Vanessa and Andrea. So the police
used Brenda to get Dennis to tell them where Andrea's
remains were. The police met with her at her house
(01:02:38):
and tried to convince her that he owes her to
let her know where he left Andrea. So she called
him and told him, if he helps them find the body,
then he can stay in Michigan and they can continue
to visit each other. So, yes, she still wants to
be married to him and visit him.
Speaker 3 (01:02:56):
Yep. Dennis had tried to give Brenda a story that
might be March acceptable to her, with the whole thing
about a cemetery and a white sheet and all that.
Then Brenda called him and told him and she didn't
care how it happened or what had happened. She will
still love him no matter what. And she wanted him
to be in Michigan so she could visit. Sure, so
(01:03:17):
he finally agreed to tell them where Andrea's remains were,
and Kathy, Andrea's biological mother, had been correct. Dennis had
moved Audrea to their new house when they moved after
he killed her, and she'd been there the whole time.
Speaker 2 (01:03:30):
Yeah. So the police went out to the house with
the bulldozer and at one point the claw of the
bucket picked up the rim of a barrel and they
found Andrea's bones. Brenda was right inside the house at
that time. But what did Brenda have to say? She
said to a detective, Well, he didn't lie to me
this time. Wow, just wow, that's what she actually said.
Speaker 3 (01:03:53):
Well, you know, there's something definitely wrong about that lady.
Speaker 2 (01:03:57):
Oh, something seriously wrong with her.
Speaker 3 (01:03:59):
Yes, So Andrea's remains were found in four different bags
in the remnants of the barrel. She was in a
trash bag full of dirty diapers.
Speaker 2 (01:04:08):
Yeah, so total bullshit about cinnamon. Oh God, this scumbag.
Speaker 3 (01:04:14):
There's a pepper and Patty candy wrapper in the trash
with her and had the date of nineteen eighty nine
on it. So she had never been missing. She'd been
in the barrel. Ahlahlah. She was found just where Kathy
said she would.
Speaker 2 (01:04:26):
Be, which is pretty amazing because how many people would
kill someone and then dig them up and take them
to their new house. Yeah, most of the experts and
detectives didn't think that was a thing, but for some reason,
Cathy felt sure of that. So I think she had
a better grasp on who this Dennis Bowman is than
the police even did. So when Brenda called Dennis after that,
(01:04:48):
he actually blamed her for his lives because he said
he was trying to make her feel better. Then she
actually says, I don't want you to be mad, and
he says, at least you'll have her in a tin
jar on a shelf, and then she says, nothing's changed.
I still love you. So these people are so reprehensible.
And the autopsy report on Andrea's remains, of course matched
(01:05:10):
Kathy's DNA it was her daughter.
Speaker 3 (01:05:12):
Founder So the police again met with Brenda and they
told her about all of Nnis's confessions to sexual assault
and to the two murders. Brenda said, I don't know
that man, but the man I do know, I will
still stand by him, exactly he's a serial violent sexual offender,
so it's likely that he had victimized and killed women previously.
Speaker 2 (01:05:33):
Oh yeah, I think we've just seen the tip of
the iceberg.
Speaker 3 (01:05:36):
Really yeah. I mean that they're going to go back
and look at his history of where he'd lived, and
I think so seeing women.
Speaker 2 (01:05:44):
I think they might look at where he was at
certain times in unsolved cases and do DNA comparisons. Yes,
so Bowman did plead no contest a second degree murder
of Andrea Bowman also Alexis Badger, and that's I think
is what her mother, Kathy prefers for her to be
known as. Now is her birth name. He was sentenced
(01:06:05):
to thirty five to fifty years in prison. He was
not allowed to spend his sentence in Michigan. They weren't
going to give him that, thank God, So he was
sent to prison in Virginia. The prosecutors did not want
to allow him to have that control by allowing him
to stay in Michigan, and that's definitely a good thing.
Brenda was given Andrea's Alexis's cremated remains, and she wanted
(01:06:29):
to give half of the ashes to Kathy. Kathy of
course accepted them, but she was very upset that Brenda
kept half of them. So Kathy still wants to get
all of her daughter's ashes. But Brenda actually said, and
I heard it on a recording, that Kathy should be
happy with what she got. And Dennis says, well, it
was Kathy who threw her away. Can you imagine these monsters?
(01:06:52):
Can you imagine? Just unbelievable to me.
Speaker 3 (01:06:55):
So Dennis Bowman is serving two life sentences in a
Virginia prison, but the extent of his violent crimes may
never be known. In October twenty twenty four, Kathy created
a petition to get the rest of Alexis's remains from
Brenda Bowman. You can read it and if you sign
it on a Facebook page Justice for Andrea M. Bowman.
Speaker 2 (01:07:15):
Yeah, I mean, how do you feel about that about
Brenda actually keeping some of the remains. I think it's
really kind of nervy. She just doesn't seem to take
any responsibility.
Speaker 3 (01:07:25):
Yeah. Well, you know, he can also argue that for
fourteen years or so, she raised.
Speaker 2 (01:07:31):
The child and abused her and let her be abused,
and from what the friends and family said, treated her
pretty badly.
Speaker 3 (01:07:39):
Yeah. Now I'm just saying what she would, oh, sure
likely use as a reason.
Speaker 5 (01:07:44):
Well, yeah, sure, it's time for listener feedback.
Speaker 2 (01:08:07):
Okay, Dickie, what have we got for feedback? I need
a brain cleanser right now.
Speaker 3 (01:08:12):
Okay, Well, we have some interesting stuff here. So before
we get into some case suggestions, I have some recent
news concerning the Lucy Letbee case. An independent panel of
specialists there was like twelve or fourteen the enetologists pediatricians
that had meant to investigate but let be a conviction.
(01:08:34):
And doctor Shu Lee, who was the chairman of this
and he is the co author of a paper published
in nineteen eighty nine looking at air MLI in patients
and had mentioned that there was some distinctive skin changes
associated with their MBLI And this is what doctor Dewey Evans,
(01:08:55):
who was a witness for the prosecution, kept hitting back
on that there was evident and so the skin discoloration.
Now doctor Lee had already said that he misinterpreted his findings.
Speaker 2 (01:09:06):
Yeah, I remember that step, Yes.
Speaker 3 (01:09:09):
And the response from the courts was it, well, the
defense should have presented this at the time, so we're
not going to allow it anyway. So the panel of
specialists has been meeting and they announced on the fourth
of February that they find no evidence that let be
murdered or attempted to murder any of the babies in
her care.
Speaker 2 (01:09:28):
That's pretty amazing.
Speaker 3 (01:09:30):
They said pre existing conditions were responsible, and errors in
the treatment or care the infants received were the problems.
Speaker 2 (01:09:39):
Right, So, not specifically by Lucy, but by the doctors
who many were really not qualified for babies. That's sick.
And also the facility. Facility had problems.
Speaker 3 (01:09:50):
Right, So that's exciting. Now we got to see where
that leads.
Speaker 2 (01:09:54):
Well, it has to lead somewhere. She can't just stay
in prison with all of this coming out, No, you can't,
so hopefully sooner than later, because I mean, at this point,
I feel like she didn't do anything, and I feel
bad for I think when we first started looking at it,
I was, you know, I could go either way kind of,
but everything we found out since if she's not innocent,
(01:10:15):
she certainly is not guilty beyond a reasonable.
Speaker 3 (01:10:19):
Doubt, oh far from it.
Speaker 2 (01:10:21):
Yeah, Okay, So we will continue to keep an eye
on that one and we welcome your opinions on it.
Fascinating case. So we received an email from Stacy with
a case suggestion. Hi guys, love your pod. It was
the first true crime I started listening to. I wanted
to ask if you have heard of Lynn Hernan. She
was murdered by the daughter of a family friend with
(01:10:43):
tetra hydrosylene cosine and over a period of two years
she stole two hundred and fifty thousand dollars from her
and then she stole about one hundred thousand dollars from
her estate after her death. It is fascinating to me
her killer's lack of remorse and con stant lies. So
Jesse Krazuski was convicted of first degree murder in the
(01:11:06):
death of Lynn Hernon. She was a friend and caretaker
of Hernon, who was in poor health. Krazewski poisoned Hernan
with tetrahyddrosylene and this is a common ingredient in over
the counter eye drops, but can be neurotoxic when ingested orally.
So there have been a couple of cases in the
past we've read about. I don't know if we've covered
(01:11:26):
them with murder being done by these eye drops. I
remember a woman killing her husband with that.
Speaker 3 (01:11:32):
Yeah, that's one of the So this this woman Krzyski put,
I think those six little bottles of visene in the drink. Wow.
Speaker 2 (01:11:40):
See that's kind of scary to me too, that it
really doesn't take a lot of that to kill you,
I know, right, and you can just bite over the counter.
Speaker 3 (01:11:47):
It's scary over the counter and you.
Speaker 2 (01:11:49):
Really can't taste it. No. Yeah, And this was all
about money, which is really terrible because I believe this
woman was helping her mother and her and she just decided, oh,
I'm going to killer And I think at some point
she had stolen so much money that she was going
to be in trouble and decided, you know, to kill her.
Speaker 3 (01:12:07):
Yeah, because the victim was not a real wealthy woman.
I mean, she had the money that was taken from her.
Speaker 2 (01:12:14):
Right, she was comfortable, but she wasn't rich.
Speaker 3 (01:12:18):
No, no, yeah, he supposed to be friends.
Speaker 2 (01:12:20):
Yeah, that's that's heartbreaking. So thank you, Stacy. I would
like to cover that. I think I saw forty eight
hours or dateline on that too.
Speaker 3 (01:12:29):
There was forty eight hours on it, Okay, in this
particular case.
Speaker 2 (01:12:32):
I think we watched that sometime back. And then we
have another email from Karen with a case suggestion, why
don't you read that one.
Speaker 3 (01:12:40):
Karen says, I'm not great with words, but I found
a compelling story that only Jill and Dick could tell.
Speaker 2 (01:12:46):
Well, that's awfully nice.
Speaker 3 (01:12:48):
I'm sure you tell that story too.
Speaker 2 (01:12:50):
No, but it's super kind. Thank you, Karen.
Speaker 3 (01:12:53):
So this a guy named Anthony Pizzano. I was convicted
to serve three hundred years in prison from her he'll
never get out willly.
Speaker 4 (01:13:01):
No.
Speaker 2 (01:13:02):
So this was in Anchorage, Alaska.
Speaker 3 (01:13:04):
Right, yes, Okay. He killed three men in a gold
shot robbery. He was really diabolical and tried to hire
a hitman to kill witnesses. He was the former military
and the first trial ended in a mistrial. Bizano was
friends of the owners of the gold shop and he
was introduced to them by a member of the police force.
(01:13:25):
H Bazano said he killed in self defense. Check it out,
I'll see at the quiet end.
Speaker 2 (01:13:29):
Okay, So self defense, that's kind of a long shot.
Speaker 3 (01:13:33):
That's that's what he took for.
Speaker 2 (01:13:35):
And the jury did not believe that, apparently because Pisano, yeah,
three years in person.
Speaker 3 (01:13:41):
In the second trial, well, I had two charges of
first degree murder and six charges of relating to the murder,
and they had like ten charges against him.
Speaker 2 (01:13:52):
Well, if you're doing an armed robbery, that makes it
fell any murder, which is worse.
Speaker 3 (01:13:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:13:58):
Yeah, so yeah, that's another one we want to cover.
Then we have an email from Tina with a case suggestion,
and this is about the murder of Tricia, Jillian and
James and Doyle. So October two thousand and four, Christopher
Bernard killed his sister and her two children. He then
tried to kill himself by running onto a busy highway. WHOA.
(01:14:18):
Bernard blamed his actions on his drug addiction, and he
was sentenced to life in prison without parole.
Speaker 3 (01:14:24):
Yeah, this is a case in New Hampshire. I remembered it.
Speaker 2 (01:14:27):
It does sound familiar. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (01:14:29):
Well it stood out was that he ran into Interstate
ninety three, which is always a busy road. Well sure,
and he got hit and survived.
Speaker 2 (01:14:38):
Wow, so he was Do we know what he was
on for drugs? Because it sounds like he's.
Speaker 3 (01:14:42):
Pretty crazy, okay.
Speaker 2 (01:14:45):
And her children were minors. Minor children.
Speaker 3 (01:14:48):
Her children were four years old, two years old.
Speaker 2 (01:14:50):
Oh my god, it's so sad. Well, we'll look into
that one. It sounds a little heartbreaking, I have to
admit to you. Tina but we will look into it,
all right, let's do that, okay, all right, guys, Well,
thank you for joining us at the Quiet End today.
I hope I wasn't too angry. I hope I didn't
swear too much. But this case really got to me,
that's all I can say. It certainly did wow, And
(01:15:14):
I would love to hear other people's opinions on it
and how it affects you. I would suggest you watch
the documentary. I think it's on Netflix right into the Fire, I.
Speaker 3 (01:15:23):
Think so, yeah, but then again, I figure pretty much
everything's on.
Speaker 2 (01:15:27):
Netflix, right one app is just like another. Yeah, okay,
but if you enjoy watching true crime documentaries, I would
definitely recommend watching it because really affected me. Very emotional,
very emotional story. So we invite you to join us
here at the Quiet End again.
Speaker 4 (01:15:45):
Soon.
Speaker 2 (01:15:46):
We'll see you next time.
Speaker 3 (01:15:47):
Come on down.
Speaker 2 (01:15:48):
Plenty of room, all right, Bye, bye.
Speaker 4 (01:15:50):
Aie guys at and is ating bly met and
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