Warning. This episode contains details that some listeners may find disturbing. For about 60 years. A chilling story was a tight lipped family secret. In 1962, in Rapid City, South Dakota, in the dead of night, John Bowman carried out an unthinkable act. He took the lives of his wife and two of their children before turning the gun on himself. He did not leave a suicide note in his motives are still a mystery.
Not many people in the family knew about this story until author and journalist Jo Strep came across the tale of his great uncle, John Bowman. And Strub spent years investigating the case And his findings are in his new book, Death on St Charles Street. Today, Joe Strub joins us talk about the book and investigating true crime. This is a study of strange. Welcome to the show. Michael. May your host into, well, all sorts of strangeness.
Today is a special episode, because while I normally share a strange story with the guest today, I have a special guest who's going to talk to me about some strange stories. I have with me author and journalist Joe Strap. Hi, Joe. How are you doing? of course. I'm very excited to have you. You've been a journalist for a long time. You've written four books, two of which kind of fit the genre of the show, which are true crime books, a Long Walk Home, which I believe is an unsolved murder.
Is that right? Yes. And your most recent book, Death on Saint Charles Street Sure. Sure. The book is, as you said, Death on Saint Charles Street. It concerns a quadruple murder suicide that occurred in 1962 in Rapid City, South Dakota, which is where my grandmothers from, my grandmother, Peggy Snyder. She was one of six children. And that's three girls and three boys and one of her sisters. Alberta was married to a man named John Bowman.
They lived in Rapid City while the rest of the siblings eventually moved away. So her one one of her two sisters was married to this man. They had three children. And one day in 1962, he killed two of the children and his wife. My grandmother's sister and himself in a multiple murder suicide. The third son was not at home. He was away at college. Otherwise, he probably would have been involved as well.
And they were basically found dead in their home on a Sunday morning by two guests who happened to be staying over in the basement. He apparently let them live. And there was always a mystery as to why he was not a violent man. He had never made any kind of threats. He was, however, suffering from different kinds of mental illness, depression, anxieties, some some paranoia. And he had actually been in and out of a mental hospital.
And I was able to actually get records from the state hospital there in South Dakota. But all this happened on a Sunday morning in 1962, and I was not even born yet. So I did not hear about it until about 20 years ago. I was at a family reunion and my aunt was showing slides and home movies and she was pointing out different people, You know, this is your Aunt Dorothy, this is your Uncle Morris, This is this person.
And then there was one woman I had never seen, and she said, that's your Aunt Alberta. And I said, did I ever would I have never known her. And she said, No, she died before you were born. And I said, And then my wife actually piped up and said, How did she die? And the room got kind of quiet. And my aunt then said, Well, she was murdered. And I was like a light bulb in my reporter head went off murder. You know, I never, never had any relatives that had that kind of death.
And so I started asking questions. And then over the years, I kept wanting to find out about her. And then in about 20, 2016, I started working on my first true crime book called A Long Walk Home, which is about an unsolved murder. As you mentioned, of a 17 year old high school student in Maplewood, New Jersey, which is where I used to live. And I started working on that. And that came out two years ago. A woman had been strangled and she had just been on her way home from work, this student.
And she never made it. She was last seen leaving her job at a diner, walking home. And then an hour later, her body was found strangled in a driveway about half mile away. And there's never been any suspects, never any arrests. And I wrote extensively about that element. I also found her sister, who was only 11 at the time, who was a big part of the book. So I did that book and I really enjoyed doing it. I liked looking into the criminology of it.
I liked looking into the background So after that was done, I said, Well, let me look back at this case in my family. And so I started with newspaper clippings at the time, which were very extensive, and that led to information about people who knew the family. It was basically the mother and the father, my great uncle, my great aunt, the great aunt being my grandmother's sister and their three children.
And I was able to track down people who knew them, And also my mother and her two sisters had known a lot about the family. They gave me insights into the funerals and when they heard about these killings. And then I was also able to get mental health records from my great uncle at a state hospital in South Dakota. And that really helped piece it together because he had suffered from depression. He had suffered from anxiety. He had been in and out of this hospital, but he had never been violent.
He had always been sort of sorrowful and depressed. And it turned out his wife was an alcoholic, as was one of his children. And I like a lot of that from different relatives and their friends. And so I was able to piece a lot of this together and track down a lot of information about the killings and their lives, but also about my family. My grandmother was, as I said, one of six children. They grew up in really troubled times in South Dakota.
That area of the country really saw the Dust Bowl long before it. Really the fact there was a book I one of the books I used for reference was called The Dust Bowl of South Dakota, which really hit about 20 years before the famed Oklahoma died. Southern states that, you know, Grapes of Wrath talks about. And so they were living a really tough time. And it's still while they know who killed the people, they don't necessarily know why.
And so I get into a lot of theories and a lot of background about mental illness and also talk to some criminologists and psychiatric experts who have good hypotheses about what would make this happen. And I also learned as I went along that, you know, a lot of times we look at mental ill people who commit crimes as some kind of monster that's depicted in movies, Psycho or Falling Down or some of these other. And they're really a lot of times they're just sick.
You know, I don't think my great uncle was a bad person. I think he was dealing with a lot of demons. And it doesn't make it okay what he did, of course. But it does help you to try to understand what drives this. It's not just I'm sure, no craft. No, it's good question. No good. I think he was kind of between the ages. He was 51 when he died in 1962. So during World War Two, he was in his thirties and probably a little young for World War One. By all accounts, he was not in the service.
He was a very successful car dealer, auto salesman. Rapid City, Black Hills, Oldsmobile, Chrysler. And he was he was in fact, I learned that the funeral home that handled the funeral there, their hearses had been serviced at his dealership for all the small town craziness. I also learned that many times there were not ambulance services in Rapid City in those days, that the local funeral home would use the the I guess they were kind of dual vehicles. They would have people on call.
And I got to interview the actually one of the one of the responders who came to remove the bodies, who said they'd also work part time at night manning the ambulances. And that was just the way it was back then. You know, Rapid City was, you know, is a major city, still is in South Dakota. Yes. Yes. Very rural. It has a few major. I mean, the capital is pure. There are a few other big cities. But Rapid City is now it's it's right next to the Black Hills where Mount Rushmore is.
I had never been there until I started working on the book. And it's kind of more of the Old West, you know, It's about an hour south of Deadwood, South Dakota, which is known for a while. Both Hitchcock and then the TV show Deadwood. But it's it's you know, it has a lot more Old West history and ranching than farming. And but it is a it is a major city. You know, they have their own major newspaper and TV.
It's a TV market. And but even in 1962, you know, it was it was not like today's big cities. and also learned that South Dakota did not have a lot of gun related deaths then or today. I mean, I think it was less than 35 gun related deaths, although it is big gun country. You know, there's hunting and fishing and all. But, you know, you don't see the kind of mass murders that sadly we're seeing in a lot of places. That's all.
But my my reporting found that the gun that was used to kill that family was a it was a 22 caliber rifle that one of John Bowman's sons had gotten. And he had gone hunting with people went hunting early on. My father grew up in Minnesota. I think he started hunting when he was ten. And so to have guns in the house was not unusual. And some of the mental health records indicate John Glenn was not seen as dangerous. He was not violent. In fact, he had always been a volunteer patient.
He was never ordered to go to the hospital. So, yeah, that was one of the reason. It was very surprising. He also didn't leave a suicide note of any kind, which makes investigators think it was probably something of a of a random act of act of passion in the moment. There just happened to be a gun in the house and he thought for whatever reason, he had to do this right? Yeah, sure.
Yeah, that would make the whole as I learned more and more about it, I was more intrigued because it so happened that these two men, John and Tom May, who were very responsive, although John was, was not very talkative, I think he he had also served in Vietnam after this. So he had traumatic issues and he didn't say say, Donald Trump failed. But Tom was very helpful. They were friends who were visiting.
They actually knew the family from Canton, Minnesota, which is where my grandmother and grandfather ended up living with other siblings. My grandmother, Peggy, who was Alberta's sister, she married my grandfather, who was from Canton and interestingly, another sister, theirs, Dorothy, married my grandfather's brother.
So you had two sisters marrying two brothers, which was probably not all that unusual back then, but they ran this nursery in Canton, which is about 600 miles from south from Rapid City. But they would go all over the Midwest to sell their wares. And one of the stops that his brother Cyril, was the one married to grandma's sister, he he would you know, he would go to South Dakota to sell trees and shrubs and things. And that's where he met Dorothy.
And then Dorothy brought my sister, my her sister, my grandmother, Peggy, back to Minnesota. And so they really built their life. And my mother and her sisters all grew up partially in Minnesota, but so they knew this, these two men, Tom and John Faye, and they knew the family. So they were visiting Rapid City. I think one of them was even working out there. So they just happened to be staying overnight in the basement.
And they woke up in the morning expecting to go to church with everyone and found the bodies they claim in the book I talk about, yeah, they didn't hear gunshots. They claim that they heard some kind of thump in the night and one of the criminologists I talked to said that might not be unusual if you because it was a rifle, was a 22 caliber rifle. And they said that sometimes if you put a gun right against someone's head, it muffle sound. That was the theory.
Yeah. One of the problems, although I don't think it really affected me, was there were no police records because South Rapid City years later had a terrible flood that flooded out police department and many other buildings. And at a time when, you know, you didn't have the Google cloud to upload documents or other technology of the day. So the reports were all.
But it was interesting because the newspaper clippings of the time really filled in a lot of the holes and also recollections of people like I interviewed both the as I said, the the funeral home employee who helped bring the bodies away and the priest who responded to give last rites. And he was an interesting character. He had just become a priest two months earlier, and he was serving mass that morning because it was a Sunday morning.
And when the police responded, they had these four dead bodies. They needed someone to perform last rites. So they called the church and whoever answered the phone basically literally went up to the priest during the service and said, look, we need someone to to go give last rites. And he left and another priest had to finish the service. And he told me his descriptions of what he found. One of the bodies, I believe it was Maurice, the youngest son.
It looked like he'd been shot under the chin and had a very clean wound where Bruce, the other son, he seemed like he had thrashed around because there was blood on the walls and all over. And not to get too graphic, he probably didn't die right away. And but it wasn't clear if he was shot from far away or not. You know, it was, you know, let's see, 60 years ago, you know, Tom Fay may have not realized he had heard a noise, but he didn't you. Plus, I don't know.
You hear a shot. Maybe you're sort of half awake. However you know, four shots, that's still a lot. You would think. Only that. One of the things I found was, again, in all the psychiatric records, which were very detailed, he was generally seen as depressed, anxiety ridden. But in both he had been in and he had been in a Yankton state hospital, which I think has a different name now, twice the year before, for about four months. And then that same year, 1962, the the killings have on July 29th.
He had been in the hospital for a couple of weeks in the spring, gotten out in May, but he had already started separation efforts from his wife. He was still living in Yankton. He had actually lived with another woman for a while. And he just this. So it's also thinking, you know, he was kind of getting a new life. So why would he pull this? Although he was still dealing with financial problems, he had been a very successful car salesman.
And as I go through in the book, you know, the auto industry was having some ups and downs right after during World War Two. They shut down a lot because the auto plants had to be used for the war. But then afterwards, there was a big boom in car sales in 52, 53, and he was doing very well, but then he was still having his own issues. It seems from the records, because of anxiety, because I think a lot of pressures, you know, you have to keep making money as a salesman.
And his wife and one of his sons were alcoholics. So that's another thing that comes about. You know, you have a lot of angst in the family, a lot of stress. He had gone to the he had gone to a mental hospital years earlier. He had gone to the Mayo Clinic, which is up in Minnesota briefly. And had gotten out there. He'd always gotten these, you know, these good marks. It's okay. You're you're he's okay to leave. But, yes, yes.
And I thought very, very unusual for that time, especially for a man in the Midwest. You know, men are supposed to be tough, macho, the stigma of mental illness is it's still still not great today. But even back then, worse. So the fact that he was willing to do that and he seemed very lucid and according to the reports and was getting better.
But some of the experts I talked to theorized that, you know, what was going on in his head was still maybe guilt because he was his marriage was breaking up and he didn't feel like he was making the money for his family, perhaps, and embarrassed. And as the fifties went along, he started to do worse and worse at work and he ended up leaving his job. And that's you know, it's a lot for a lot of men to take. And again, especially back then in that area.
And so a lot of this was going through his head. And like I said, he was in the hospital just months earlier and, you know, the treatment at the time, I'm sure wasn't what it is today medically terms of medications or even therapy and the acceptance. So it's a lot of mixed bag. And then you have a wife who's alcoholic. One of the kids is having trouble. It's a lot swirling around. Guess what? Just a week. A week before 911. Yeah.
Yeah. He was actually my mother's cousin, her age and also my aunts. And they said he a lot of people talked about right after the deaths, he had to kind of help plan the funeral and that he was very, very matter of fact, very stoic, very kind of focused on the task at hand. he stayed with one of the friends I talked to. And they said he was just very you know, he wasn't wallowing in pity in the corner, but he wasn't, you know, throwing a party either.
He was just sort of even keel focused on what he had to do. And years later, go ahead. Not that I ever learned. No. I don't think a lot of people wanted to talk a lot of people my family didn't talk about this at all for years. I mean, you know, it took my nosiness, I guess, too. But then I learned in talking to a lot of family members, they really were curious about it.
It's not like I was wondering if, well, do they want me to go down this road as I started research and if they had come to look, we don't talk about it. It's family history. Keep it where it is. That would have been interesting to me. It probably made it more difficult, but they were all very open. My cousins, my uncle, my uncles and aunts and friends who knew the family were very, I guess, wanting to kind of tell it. No one had talked about it for, you know, 50 years, 60 years.
Yeah. And I wanted to know I like I, I was a lot of times I do books because I want to learn about the stuff. And it was it was very helpful, though, that they were willing to help. And then he went on, he actually and graduated college. He eventually became an airline pilot. So he was doing pretty well for years. And then in like I guess the nineties, he kind of kind of fell out of touch. And he was actually living on the street for a while.
I think when he died, his last known address was some kind of halfway house or, or a homeless place in California. And when he died, I think my grandmother and my aunt were very involved in in transporting his body back. And he's buried right there in the cemetery in Rapid City, next to his brother's and his. Yeah, they're all in the same cemetery as though they were. They're put there at the same time. Well, I just think it's a it's, if you like, true crime.
It's I think it's a great true crime story because it involves mental illness and some mystery as to why this happened. But also I try to look into this idea that a mentally ill person isn't some kind of monster of, you know, like before you hear about in movies and you realize these are just sometimes these are just sick people. I don't think my uncle, my great uncle, was a bad person or evil. I think he was sick. He suffered from depression and anxieties and he went over the edge.
Does that make him guilt free? No. What he did was still a horrible thing, and it always will be. But I think to understand what brings you to this kind of a tragedy is a way to prevent it in the future. And also to understand, you know, these these are all people. This can happen to anyone, anyone can deal with any kind of emotional issue, whether it's depression or anxiety or paranoia or drug addiction or, you know, it all stems from emotions.
And maybe the other cautionary tale is, you know, if someone is dealing with this, get them to help. He got help at the time, but it was 1962. You know, how good was mental health treatment? It sounds like it was better than I would have thought because there was medication he was on, there was treatment, there was therapy. And then some of the experts I talked to in the book also point out, you know what, today you don't always have all the answers either.
As we know there's shooting sprees that go on. People have mental illness. So you kind of have to look at this as a as a victim in their own right in some ways and as a troubled person, not just some evil monster that just wants to kill them. Well, let him get in a long walk home. There have been no official arrests, but there are some suspects that I go through in the book, and I do in the end, I do point to one person I think is the most likely suspect.
a man who had worked just across the street from where the girl, Caroline Farina, was last seen and who years later was actually arrested and tried for another murder of a young woman. But he was acquitted on that case. But there are a lot of reasons why he's probably the most likely suspect. And also some other suspects in New Jersey. I learned that in New Jersey, we have quite a history of of multiple murderers who prey on young women.
It's really kind of there's one man, Richard Cottingham, who was also one of my suspects. He is in recent years admitted to killing. I think it's up to 15 women over a 20 year span and several others. So it's kind of a frightening Leigh long list of, you know, young, attractive women being murdered by by multiple killing men. But that is unsolved in terms of no one has ever been arrested or convicted on it.
But and then in this case, I know the way I approach it is, you know, I've been a reporter for 35 years. I've covered a lot of different kinds of things, including crime. I just start with the basics. In the case of Caroline Ferrigno, I was able to get police reports, although we're still actually in a legal battle with the Maplewood Police Department in New Jersey and the Essex County prosecutor's office to get more access.
There's apparently a large folder of information on Carol's case that they will not release, even though the case is is more than 50 years old and nothing has been done on it. And her sister, who's still alive, was a big part of the book. And I have been trying to get access to these records that we were promised access to at one point. And then the county prosecutor's office in New Jersey. We don't have district attorneys there, call them county prosecutors.
I in New Jersey, the county prosecutor's office. And each county basically has jurisdiction over all serious crimes. So they came in and said, no, you can't have access. I file public information requests. They've been denied.
We're in touch with a lawyer so that we think there's a lot in there that will paint a picture of what really happened and how the police in Maplewood really botched much of the case because they seemed to focus on people she knew and her family, including her father, who had a very clear alibi.
And they didn't really look into the fact that it could have been a stranger, someone she didn't know because she worked in this diner at night in a very busy part of town where they got a lot of night crawlers, if you will, a lot of cab drivers and right across from the train station. So people come in and out of the train. They never went down that road.
And I think a lot of criminologists I've talked to and her sister believe that they missed their chance and that it was more likely someone she didn't know rather than someone she did know. But in the case they basically started with that it could get a the few police reports I could get and then talk to her sister. And then her sister knew a lot of people who knew her, who knew her, who knew Carol.
And then I went on some Facebook pages and Facebook had a few pages, as many towns have, you know, growing up in this town. So there's a couple of Facebook pages. People have lived in South Orange and Maplewood. They're kind of sister towns. These are your school district. And so I went on a couple of those Facebook pages and just said, Hey, I'm working on this case. And I just got flooded with with people. I know Carol, or I remember this and I remember that.
And I asked her sister about did she know these people? And she said, yeah, this guy was her friends. And even her boyfriend at the time came through and they all had all kinds of memories of what happened that night. One girl had a party that night and members of police come in the next day asking questions. And that led to even more people who had information. And it really painted a good picture of of what happened leading up to.
And then the years that followed, how the police didn't really it kept trying to find out and really didn't follow the right leads. And then I kind of do a story, also the side story on her sister. Her sister, you know, grew up with this hanging over her head. She got married young and got divorced, and then she moved out to the Midwest and had all kinds of her own demons and issues because, you know, her only sister was killed when she was 11 years old and she was asked by her mother.
After a while, her sister had left this diner, milk's cup and saucer in downtown Maplewood at about 730. She was last seen a little before eight walking home. And when she didn't get home around 830, her mother said, you know, wake your father up to go look for because the father was sleeping. He had been a newspaper delivery guy. So he worked early hours. He come home and take a nap. So he's sleeping. The sister, Cynthia went to wake him up. He went out to look for.
And then at some point the sister fell asleep on the couch and she said she was woken up at about, you know, between 11 and midnight by a policeman who essentially told her, yeah, your sister was killed. when you write a book, you can kind of take it wherever you want, which I really like, because I go off into some side stories, You know, it's not just, here's this terrible crime.
It's, you know, back story on this person, on this time in this year, in this town, what it was like and I was able to do a lot of that in both books and in the Long Walk Home I'm sorry in doesn't say Charles Street. I started with newspaper clippings at the time, and back then the stories on funerals would often list all the pallbearers were people buried in this funeral. So that six pallbearers each? Yeah. And so I just started tracking them down.
And, you know, the Internet is a great source for tracking down phone numbers and started calling one and then another and another. And that led to another person who knew this person and everyone very responsive. And then I got the state hospital records, which helped fill in some holes.
And then a lot of my relatives who not only talked about the killings and what happened, but just the family at the time and growing up in South Dakota, which, you know, was a very poor area and it really well drowned nicely. In fact, one of my great aunts by Greg Delores Connolly, who they called Jiggs, she just died last year, I think 104. It lived next door. Her and her husband had lived next door to the Bowmans prior to the killings, so she had great insight into what the couple was like.
And she, like everyone, painted a picture of him as a very quiet, nice man who never cause any trouble. And bang, you know, here's here's this terrible ending. it's available at Amazon.com or Barnesandnoble.com. And any bookstore can order it. If you want people to order some of these bookstores, I'm in New Jersey. So if someone wants to get one and have me sign it or I. I only have a few copies sell, you can get information on me at my website.
Joe STRATCOM But a lot of times bookstores around New Jersey, you can order from them if you don't want to necessarily pad the Amazon pockets. A lot of local bookstores called Call Your Favorite Bookstore, and they'll order it and I'll talk. Let's find a way to sign it if you want. so it's available anywhere that any other book is available online or in person. Just ask them to order it or get it on Amazon.
And you can also download the copy if you if you're all about the Kindle, which I am too. Awesome. Well, thank you thank you so much stay safe. Thank you for listening. That'll do it for the show. Before you go, take a quick second to subscribe and please leave a rating or review wherever you listen to podcasts. If you want additional content or know of different ways to support the podcast, visit our website. A study of Strange XCOM. We will be off next week, but back soon after that.
Thank you and good night.