Crime Fix with Angenette Levy - Doctor Accused of Poisoning Wife Identified as 'Widower' Before Murder: Police

Episode Date: May 9, 2024

Former Mayo Clinic physician Dr. Connor Bowman is charged with murdering his wife, Betty Bowman, last August. Police say Bowman poisoned Betty with medicine he ordered online and then tried to cover his tracks. Detectives now say Bowman was calling himself a widower before Betty died. Law&Crime’s Angenette Levy looks at the newly-revealed evidence with forensic death investigator Joseph Scott Morgan in this episode of Crime Fix — a daily show covering this biggest stories in crime.If you’ve used Incognito mode in Google’s Chrome browser, find out if you have a claim in a few clicks by visiting https://incognitoclaims.com/crimefixHost:Angenette Levy  https://twitter.com/Angenette5Guest:Joseph Scott Morgan  https://twitter.com/JoScottForensicCRIME FIX PRODUCTION:Head of Social Media, YouTube - Bobby SzokeSocial Media Management - Vanessa BeinVideo Editing - Daniel CamachoAudio Editing - Brad MaybeGuest Booking - Alyssa Fisher & Diane KayeSTAY UP-TO-DATE WITH THE LAW&CRIME NETWORK:Watch Law&Crime Network on YouTubeTV: https://bit.ly/3td2e3yWhere To Watch Law&Crime Network: https://bit.ly/3akxLK5Sign Up For Law&Crime's Daily Newsletter: https://bit.ly/LawandCrimeNewsletterRead Fascinating Articles From Law&Crime Network: https://bit.ly/3td2IqoLAW&CRIME NETWORK SOCIAL MEDIA:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lawandcrime/Twitter: https://twitter.com/LawCrimeNetworkFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/lawandcrimeTwitch: https://www.twitch.tv/lawandcrimenetworkTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@LawandCrimeSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can binge all episodes of this law and crimes series ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. New details about the pharmacist accused of poisoning his wife and what he was telling women he met on a dating app about when his wife died. The newly revealed allegations about Connor Bowman coming in court documents and shocking details about what he's accused of doing before she died. Thanks for joining me for Crime Fix. I'm Anjanette Levy. Connor Bowman faces a first-degree murder charge for the death of his wife, Betty, last August. Connor was a pharmacist who had done some poison control work for the University of Kansas,

but he was also employed by the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. An application for a search warrant for Connor's Bumble account, a dating app, says that Connor and Betty had an open relationship. They were agreeing to see other people as long as those relationships didn't include an emotional attachment. But that didn't last, according to Rochester police, who investigated Betty's murder. Friends told detectives last year that Betty was planning to divorce Connor because he was hiding debt that he had racked up, and she felt that he was developing feelings for a woman he was seeing, which was a violation of what they called their, quote, ethical, non-monogamous relationship. On August 20th, Betty Bowman died five days after drinking a rum drink that Connor had mixed for her, according to the search warrant application. A man Betty was seeing

reported receiving a text message from her on August 16th saying that she had become seriously ill after drinking that rum and she was suspicious that the drink had caused her symptoms. An autopsy revealed that Betty died from an overdose of a drug called colchicine, a medication that's actually used to treat gout. Investigators say Betty didn't have gout. There was no reason it should have been in her system. The application for the search warrant claims that Connor Bowman ordered that drug and then tried to delete records showing that he actually ordered it. Earlier in August, Betty Bowman even said to a friend jokingly that she wondered whether Connor was trying to poison

her because he made a smoothie for her in a Lilo and Stitch cup and it tasted salty. She asked her friend to taste it and the friend agreed it didn't taste right, so she threw it in the trash. Detectives got a search warrant for Bowman's digital devices and found he was searching the internet two days before Betty died. One of the questions he searched, according to police, was, is widow gender neutral? I'll have more on Connor Bowman's internet searches in a bit. But first, the application goes on to say that just two weeks after Betty died, a woman on Bumble said she met Connor on the app and he identified himself as a widower. She said Connor said that his wife had died earlier in the summer, but Betty had just died 15 days earlier. One of the women told detectives she thought that it was odd that Connor was on Bumble flirting with women so soon after his wife's death. The woman is quoted as telling detectives that Connor told her that her questions about them flirting were fair,

but that Betty would want him to be happy and that he knew what he wanted in life. This is a law and crime legal alert. Google Incognito trapped users browsing data without their knowledge. Masked Toward Alliance, one of our legal sponsors, is helping users file for compensation because Google misled users about the privacy of its Incognito browser. If you've used Google Incognito anytime since 2016, you can start your claim by answering less than 10 questions. Log on to incognitoclaims.com slash crime fix. Joseph Scott Morgan is a forensic death investigator and also the host of the Body Bags podcast. Joseph, this guy, according to the application

for the search warrant, had a Bumble account where two weeks after his wife dies, he's identifying himself as a widower and he's on there flirting with women. And these women are kind of like, wow, your wife just died. So what does this mean for this case? Doesn't it kind of sound like, you know, for people that experience this kind of loss in their life, you have kind of a bounce back period along and it lasts different lengths for different people. All right. So you can't put everybody in

the same category. As a death investigator, I've had family members that have called me up to seven years after their spouses died, weeping at night, just wanting somebody to talk to. And you contrast that with his behavior in this particular case, where, you know, God rest her soul, she's not deceased that long. And he's already out allegedly playing the field at that point in time. And I think from a behavioral standpoint, you can kind of look at that and you can begin to think, was this part of planning? Was this part of a farsightedness on his part to want to put himself into this position? And given the planning, and just go with me here, because given the planning that had to go into acquisition of this drug and understanding the mechanism of this drug that he applied, I'm listening more toward planning here. And this is kind of the next step in that goal of being separate from his wife now.

So this happens on the Bumble account, you know, about two weeks, two and a half weeks after she dies, after Betty Bowman dies. But there apparently were internet searches that they said they found as well before she died, two days before Betty died. So she's probably in the hospital dying. And there were searches on the internet, according to the search warrant application, quote, is widow.gend and is widow gender neutral? So, yikes. He's already planning while his wife is dying in the hospital, you know, or in the process of dying, that he's searching whether or not he can put that on his Bumble account and whether or not it will be gender neutral. Widower, I always thought was

for a man. Widow is for a woman. So he's really putting some thought into this. So that goes, I think, to the premeditation aspect of this as far as prosecutors and detectives would go. Let me frame it this way. A physician is going to know the effects of this particular medication, which, by the way, is used for gout. Right. called an unrecoverable flat spin. And in medicine, we have terms that apply to people that are unrecoverable. They're past a point of rescuing at that point in time. That goes to knowledge of the drug and the effect of it because she's being driven into a coma at this point in time. And it's very hard to pull back from this poison. And it's not necessarily a poison.

All drugs are a poison if taken in the inappropriate manner or amount. But, you know, this drug, Anjanette, has a history. 1900 A.D. is when it's first recognized by the Egyptians. The Greeks had an awareness of it, and they also knew that it was poisonous. And they were using it to treat things like gout. So it's been around a long, long time. And that's important because when you go through medical training, in particular, particularly when you go through the pharmacology portion of training,

you're going to learn about drug interactions. Gout's a very common problem that a lot of people suffer from. And they would know, he would know about the treatment of this condition with a medication. And he also would have been warned of the level of toxicity that it requires. There are some other interesting clues in these documents. A legal representative from the University of Kansas contacted Rochester police after hearing about the suspicions about Connor Bowman. She told the detectives that she found information on the university servers showing that Connor Bowman had researched lethal doses for various substances. That wouldn't have been unusual, of course, because of his work with poison control calls. But what really raised the woman's suspicions was that she said Connor Bowman had searched for these interactions for

people who weighed 120 pounds, the same weight as Betty, and the drug searched most often was colchicine. You know, another thing that's so disturbing about this case, Joseph, is the fact that people are saying, witnesses are saying, Betty suspected that Connor might be trying to poison her. This is according to witness statements included in here. She was given a smoothie by Connor in in early august and she said this this doesn't taste right right and she gave the cup to her friend and said we taste that and she said it was unusual because connor would never make her a smoothie anyway and so she gives the cup uh to her friend her friend tastes it and is like yeah this tastes awful it just did not taste right. Betty pours it out. And then, you know, she,

she actually suspected that maybe he was trying to poison her. She was upset because he had all this college debt. And then he, upon her death, he's telling people, yeah, I got $500,000 from her life insurance policy. You know, so it just seems to me, if he indeed carried out this murder, as prosecutors and police say, for a doctor, somebody who has to go to school for a really long time to get a degree and study hard, and you're supposed to be smart, this seems very, wow, this was very premeditated and he really didn't take a lot of steps to cover his tracks very well. I mean, there are red flags all over the place. Well, I think you have to take the view of this. How would any other person outside of this realm have access to this particular agent. OK, you that's the first thing on the table here. And that would have given the police a clue early on, because, you know,

when you're treating a patient, you know, they're in a clinical environment. And this woman is in a comatose state. Trust me, the physicians, the nurses, they're all standing around her bedside scratching their heads. They're pulling labs. They're trying to figure it out. And this particular drug is not something you're going to look for in a standard panel when you're, you know, screening somebody. What you're looking for are physical manifestations. You might experience some internal bleeding with this drug, obviously coma,

these sorts of things. And so you have to kind of reverse the script as a medical investigator to try to determine what's going on with your patient. And many times, particularly with these kind of clandestine poisonings like this, where you have these people that have medical skills, that's what they're looking for. It's about stealth and how are you going to hide it? And this goes to this kind of passive end that she had, where it's kind of a slow walk toward death. Someone in the medical field would have been aware of this toxicity, how incompatible with life it is, and would know what the risks are. And that's what makes this all the more chilling, I think.

Very chilling. And the fact that she is actually texting a guy that she was seeing that night and talking about how Connor mixed up a drink and then she started feeling sick. So she had the foresight to do that. I'm certainly not convicting him here, but there is a lot of evidence that we are reading about in this search warrant affidavit that points directly to him. when the doors swing open on the courtroom and everybody's seated, they're trying this case. For trial watchers in particular, if you're interested in poisoning, forensic toxicology, and to a lesser degree, forensic pathology, but also the mind of the clinician, how were they working her in there? How did they make this discovery? This is going

to be a fascinating case to watch, to keep tabs on. Because I've got to tell you, Anjanette, there has not been a case involving this agent that I'm aware of that has gone to trial. And so I'm going to be glued watching this. Yeah, it will be interesting to see how this case pans out. But poor Betty Bowman, that poor young woman, she had her whole life ahead of her. Yes, she did. Hoping she rests in peace and that her family and friends get some justice and some answers because this is, reading through these documents is absolutely awful. Joseph Scott Morgan, thank you so much, as always. Always my pleasure. thank you so much as always. Always my pleasure.

Thank you, Anjanette. There's another key point in these documents that's really interesting. Detectives say Connor Bowman purchased colchicine nine days before Betty died. Detectives say Connor requested to delete that online account and even searched delete Amazon data police. I'll tell you right now, you can never delete that stuff. That digital fingerprint will always be there. Connor Bowman is right now in jail being held without bail. And we're going to keep an eye on this case for you as it develops. That's it for

this episode of Crime Fix. I'm Anjanette Levy. Thanks so much for being here. I'll see you back here next time.