CHAPTER 26
Mel Soames and I had both worked high-profile cases before, but nothing could have prepared us for the storm of controversy we’d fallen into this time. It’s one thing for a derelict pig farmer to be murdering folks society is ready to label throwaway prostitutes. Cops who bring down a guy like that are heroes while, through some warped logic, society views those kinds of victims as somehow complicit in their own deaths-as in, they were asking for it. As for the killer? He’s a nutcase, to be sure, but he was also doing some of society’s dirty work, so let’s put him away somewhere and move on.
Anita Bowdin and her gang of female vigilantes turned that whole scenario on its ear. She and Destry Hennessey were and are well known and ostensibly respectable women in Washington State, with plenty of people who, without knowing any of the story, were ready to back them to the hilt. As far as those folks were concerned, the two of them could do no wrong, whereas Mel and I were nothing but a pair of malcontents who should never have brought any of this up. Ditto Todd Hatcher, who, I learned much later, did indeed turn his fifteen minutes of fame into a whopping two-book publishing contract.
What really ended up pulling all the various threads together, however, was a young IT wizard, also a friend of Todd Hatcher, who, search warrant in hand, went on a mission through Anita Bowdin’s computer’s hard drives. The information he uncovered there was nothing short of a gold mine.
Destry Hennessey’s initial position-that she had been duped the same way Mel had-went bye-bye when we uncovered and decoded a secret recording Anita had made of a telephone conversation between her and Destry. In it the two women not only discussed exactly when Juan Carlos Escobar was due to be released from jail but also how serendipitous it was that both Destry and her husband would be in Washington, D.C., at the time. Ambrose Donner of Bountiful, Utah, was especially pleased to hear about that one.
Anita was someone who liked to keep score. Several weeks into the now-public investigation, Mel and I found ourselves scrolling through one of Anita’s files that the IT guy had lifted from her computer. It was a chilling rogue’s gallery of the people she had successfully targeted and had taken out. With the exception of Richard Matthews, who had never been arrested, the record for each man came complete with mug shot, copies of fingerprints, and rap sheets. No doubt all that official information had been obtained with the help of Destry Hennessey. And side by side with each mug shot was a second photo of the same face, often a postmortem one, taken by a grainy cell phone camera and annotated with a caption that listed the date of death.
As we worked our way through the list by Analise Kim’s preferred LIFO fashion, the names we saw were far more familiar to Mel than they were to me. After all, these were “her guys”-violent sexual predators-who were dead now for crimes they had committed but for which they had never been either officially tried or convicted. It was only when we scrolled down to the last one-the earliest one-that we found another record missing its mug shot.
“What’s he doing here?” Mel demanded.
I had gone to refill our coffee cups. When I returned I was looking at the head-shot photo of a pleasant-faced balding man in a jacket and tie. The caption beneath it read: “Professor Armand P. Bowdin.”
“I thought he committed suicide,” Mel added.
“So did I.”
We went back through the now dog-eared collection of papers Todd Hatcher had amassed for us the day we started closing in on the truth. Searching through them all, we came up with nothing more than “died unexpectedly in his home.” A call to the Ann Arbor Police Department didn’t add much to what we’d already surmised. Armand P. Bowdin had committed suicide by taking an overdose of prescription medications.
“That doesn’t change the fact that his picture is here,” Mel said determinedly.
And off we went on the trail of Anita Bowdin’s mother Rachel. It took time for us to bring her to ground. Widowed for a second time, Rachel A. Trasker lived in a retirement compound near Tampa, Florida.
“This is about my daughter?” Rachel asked warily once we finally had her on the phone. “If you’re a reporter…”
Clearly we weren’t the first people to make the connection between Mrs. Trasker and her errant daughter.
“I’m definitely not a reporter,” Mel corrected. “I’m an investigator for the Washington State Attorney General’s Office. We’re calling about your husband-your first husband.”
Mel’s remark was followed by a long period of dead silence. “What about him?” Rachel asked finally.
“Did he commit suicide?”
“Why do you ask?” Rachel wanted to know.
“Did he?” Mel insisted.
There was another long pause. “What if she comes after me?” Rachel asked finally.
“What if Anita comes after you?” Mel clarified.
“She always said she would. If I ever told anyone, she said she’d get rid of me, too. I happen to believe her.”
“Your daughter is an accused serial murderer. She’s jail awaiting trial on twelve cases of homicide. She isn’t getting out anytime soon.”
“Armand never did any of the things Anita said,” Rachel declared after a time. “He wouldn’t. He was a nice man. She tried to tell me that he did things to her, messed with her, touched her. It was just too crazy. I never believed a word of it. But she told me she gave him a choice, either take the pills or she’d go to the police. She told me she sat right there and watched him do it. How could her father and I have raised such a monster?”
Unfortunately, the answer to that question was all too apparent-to everyone but Anita Bowdin’s mother. And now we knew why Armand’s picture was the very first entry on Anita’s scorecard.
Meanwhile the case kept grinding on in other people’s hands. In the end, Yolanda Andrade turned out to be the weakest link. She had come to the crime lab with a phonied-up resume after being fired from working at CODIS, the national DNA database. With her expertise it had been simple enough for her to make inroads into Washington State’s far less secure DNA database-the shortcomings of which Ross Connors is even now working to fix.
I think it was shocking for the whole law enforcement to realize that this invaluable crime-fighting tool, DNA profiling, had been perverted into a targeting device for murder. But once Yolanda confessed to her part in the scheme and agreed to testify against the others, other guilty pleas started falling into place. Eventually Destry and Anita will either cop pleas as well or else stand trial. When that will happen is anyone’s guess.
As the investigators closest to the case, Mel and I were put in charge of victim and family notifications. Every single case was one of justice denied. Talking to those folks was grueling, emotional work-some of the hardest police work I’ve ever done. With the notable exceptions of Richard Matthews and LaShawn Tompkins, all the victims were either convicted sexual predators or else convicted felons. That made them a less than sympathetic lot, but the same wasn’t true of their survivors. For the parents or grandparents or siblings or wives or girlfriends of all these bad boys, the murdered victim was still
Of all of those family notifications, the hardest for me was the one with Etta Mae Tompkins. In the intervening months she had become far frailer. She sat quietly in her corner chair and listened to what I had to say. When I finished, she nodded.
“It’s all right,” she said. “My Shawny’s in heaven now. I pray to Jesus every night that he’ll come soon and take me, too. With LaShawn gone, I’ve got nothing else to live for.”
I felt honor-bound to go back to King Street Mission to tell Pastor Mark I had been wrong and he was off the hook as far as LaShawn Tompkins’s murder was concerned. When I got there, though, the building was gone- demolished. What I found instead was a hole in the ground with a construction crane parked in the middle of it. I never found Pastor Mark again, and I never found Sister Elaine Manning, either.
Then there was the matter of dealing with the victims of all those long-ago, never-solved rapes. As the rape kits were tested, or rather, as they were retested, results led back to one or another of Mel’s dead sexual offenders. And one by one we located the rape victims involved to let them know that their cases were now considered solved and closed, even though they would never have the benefit of a trial to help put the attacks behind them.
For a long time I wondered if LaShawn Tompkins’s case would ever surface. One of the last profiles developed was that of a fourteen-year-old rape victim, Jonelle Lenora DeVry, who claimed she had been attacked and raped on her way home from school by an unidentified gangbanger.
It took us a while to track down Jonelle DeVry Jackson, but we finally did. That was how, two months later,
