Copley News Service
SAN DIEGO — A man who police say is linked by DNA to the brutal kidnap rape and murder of an Ohio teenager almost 39 years ago may be in San Diego County, and authorities have issued a warrant for his arrest.
Robert Bowman, 70, is wanted in connection with the murder of 14-year-old Eileen Adams, whose beaten and strangled body was discovered in Monroe, Michigan, six weeks after she was reported missing from her Ohio home in December 1967.
According to The Toledo Blade, Adams, who was a freshman at a Catholic high school, disappeared after she got off the bus she normally took after school. She told a friend she was going shopping and was never seen again.
Her frozen, clothed body was found wrapped in a mattress cover that had been tied with electrical cord. The teenager had been sexually assaulted, her wrists and ankles were bound and a telephone cord was looped around her neck and tied to her ankles, the paper said.
She had been held in a basement fruit cellar for as long as two weeks.
The case, which had long since gone cold, was reopened after a family member mentioned it to an off-duty Toledo police officer.
Bowman had been identified as a suspect in 1981 after his then-wife told authorities she had known that Bowman had kidnapped the girl, but was afraid to come forward because she was afraid of him. Police questioned Bowman but did not have enough evidence to arrest him at the time.
DNA technology has since allowed investigators to match bodily fluid found in the girl’s underwear with DNA taken from Bowman’s only child, who was an infant at the time of the slaying. That further linked him to the crime.
Authorities in California last had contact with Bowman in 2003. It is not known if he is still alive, but it is believed he may among the homeless in San Diego County or Riverside County.
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