So Supernatural - HAUNTED: Zack & Addie

Episode Date: May 13, 2020

In 2006, a young man jumped to his death from a hotel roof in New Orleans. In his pocket, police found a note with instructions on where to find the pieces of his girlfriend's dismembered body. The location...a small apartment with a dark past, right above the famous New Orleans Voodoo Spiritual Temple.  

On October 17, 2006, a young man jumped off the roof of the Omni Royal Hotel in New Orleans. When police arrived, they found a folded piece of paper in his pocket that said, For Police Only. They opened it, and the note read, This is not accidental. I had to take my own life to pay for the one I took. If you send a patrol to 826 North Rampart, you will find the dismembered corpse of my girlfriend Addie in the oven, on the stove, and in the fridge along with full documentation on both of us and a full signed confession from myself.

826 North Rampart Street was a second-story apartment right above the famous voodoo spiritual temple, and what the police found inside could only be described as demonic. This is Supernatural, and I'm your host, Ashley Flowers. It's Mental Health Awareness Month, so for this episode, we're going to be looking at a case that's a little different. There's a long, long history of mental illness being conflated with the paranormal, like demonic possession or ghost sightings. This is pretty dangerous not only because it stigmatizes mental illness,

but because it stops us from addressing the real human problems that are usually at the root of it. And nothing exemplifies this better than the 2006 murder-suicide of Zach Bowen and Addie Hall. When you think of New Orleans, you probably picture a bustling city, jazz music, and Mardi Gras parades. But in 2006, it was a ghost town. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, most of the population had evacuated, except Zach and Addie.

They were among the few thousand holdouts who refused to evacuate the French Quarter. They were also both bartenders, and after Katrina, bartenders were like gods. They kept the morale up and basically held the community together during the recovery effort. So everyone was shocked when just a year later, the happy young couple's relationship ended in the most gruesome way imaginable. Following the instructions from Zach's note, police arrived at 826 North Rampart Street at about 10 p.m. on October 17th. The place was trashed. The floor was covered in beer cans and cigarette stubs, and unopened moving boxes were stacked around the living room. And here's the strange part.

All of the walls were graffitied with black spray-painted messages. One of them said, please call my wife. Another said, I love her. One, I'm a total failure. And on the ceiling above the bed read, please help me stop the pain. And finally, and the most ominous of all, look in the oven. When officers opened the oven, it took a moment to register what they were really looking at. Arms and legs burnt to a crisp in a tinfoil pan. And on the burner, there was a pot containing an unrecognizable head. And behind that was another pot with two severed hands and feet.

And in the fridge is where they found her torso. From Zach's suicide note, they knew what had happened, but why was still unfathomable. Eventually, they found an eight-page confession written in the last few pages of Addie's journal. Almost immediately, the details leaked to the press and excerpts from the note were published everywhere. From ABC News to the UK's Daily Mirror, it described in exacting detail everything that led to the grisly scene before them. Zach starts off with his motive. About two weeks earlier, on October 4th, he and Addie had gotten into a fight.

They'd just moved into the new apartment a few days ago, and Addie had apparently tried to take his name off the lease. Their argument lasted into the late hours of the night, and then, at about 1 o'clock in the morning, Zach strangled her. So right off the bat, this sounds like a pretty intense reaction to the situation, right? Like, it would be one thing if Zach had a history of violent behavior or domestic abuse, but by all accounts, that wasn't the case. He was never a violent guy, and in fact, he was really level-headed. It's true that everyone has a breaking point, but, like, this? This was it? A disagreement about moving in together?

What makes it even more horrifying is that he didn't just strangle Addie. He allegedly sexually assaulted her corpse before falling asleep next to it. The next morning, he just went to work. And when he got home, he moved her body into the bathtub, got a hacksaw and a knife, and spent the entire night cutting up her body. Zach had the whole weekend off work, so he had plenty of time to finish up the task. However, according to his note, quote, due to laziness, I spent most of the time coked up in various bars with different girls. I scared myself not by the action of strangling the woman that I've loved for one and a half years, but by my entire lack of remorse. I decided to quit my job and spend the $1,500

in cash I had being happy and kill myself, end quote. And that's exactly what he did. For the next four days, Addie's remains continued to rot while Zach was out partying, spending all his money on drinks and drugs. And when Zach finally did get around to cleaning up the body, he decided to cook the parts in the oven. Now, there's no evidence that he actually ate any of her body parts. And in his explanation, he claimed it was basically just to make it easier to dispose of. But as we know, he just left the burnt pieces in the kitchen and called it quit. So that doesn't even really make sense to me. By October 17th, nearly two weeks the burnt pieces in the kitchen and called it quits. So that doesn't even really make sense to me. By October 17th, nearly two weeks after the murder, the tension finally snapped.

He ends his confession note with a list of regrets. Quote, friends, jobs, military, marriage, love. Every last one of these I failed at. According to the note, he burned himself with a cigarette 28 times, one for each year of his life. And then he jumped off the roof of the Omni Royal Hotel. To anyone who knew Zach, this was totally incomprehensible. Sure, his relationship with Addie wasn't always rosy.

They'd been on again, off again for the past few months, but they always managed to work through their differences and stay together until they moved into this apartment. The building was a converted two-story cottage. Zach and Addie lived on the second floor, and right below them on the ground level was the New Orleans Voodoo Spiritual Temple. Almost immediately, there was speculation that the location itself wasn't a coincidence. Now, some of that speculation came from their neighbor, John Boutte. John had lived on the property for years in a few different units, actually, but no matter which one

he lived in, he just never felt comfortable there. For a while, he'd lived in Zack and Addie's apartment. He got such bad vibes there that he actually had to have a priest come in and bless it. But that must have not even worked because eventually he settled into a studio in the back building, which is just across the courtyard. He was up late on the night after the murder, and he felt a sense of foreboding that he just couldn't quite place. Then just before dawn he looked outside and he swears that he saw someone standing on the balcony outside his window. So he goes over to check but when he gets there there's no one there. Now at first he let it go but a little while later he sees it again. By

now John was so freaked out that he actually called in a friend to come over and look outside, but once again no one was there. Now to be fair it kind of sounds like John might just be superstitious, but he wouldn't be alone in that. New Orleans has a reputation for hauntings. As John explained to the reporter Ethan Brown, this is an old city with old spirits. Don't tempt them. Naturally, with the apartment being right above the voodoo sacred temple, some people wondered if there was dark magic involved in the murder. The temple only opened its doors in 1990, but the building itself has a history with voodoo that stretches back for centuries. It was originally a Creole-style cottage built in 1829 right down the street from Congo Square.

In the 1800s, Congo Square is where enslaved Africans would gather every Sunday to sell goods, dance, sing, and practice their native religions. The different African religions actually mixed with the Catholic beliefs of the French colonists to create Louisiana voodoo. What happened at the square, though, was more entertainment than actual ritual. The serious magic took place somewhere else, either out on the bayou or at someone's house, for example, the courtyard of a cottage just across Rampart Street. The problem is those ceremonies probably weren't as dark as you might be imagining. There are different types of voodoo, and while some of them do include harmful magic,

some only focus on healing and protection. Priestess Miriam Shimani, who opened the voodoo temple in 1990, is in the second group. Her practice is mainly about herbal and spiritual healing. If there's a demonic presence in the building, she isn't the one who summoned it. But if something was summoned there

way back, say the 1800s, it's possible that it might still be lingering in 2006. And it might have been what drove Zach Bowen over the edge. At least, that's the story that was making the rounds at the time. It's really just speculation. Apart from their neighbor getting bad vibes, there isn't any evidence. But then how do you explain what happened? Why would a normal non-violent guy

suddenly snap and turn into a cold-blooded killer? And there's also those messages on the walls, like, please help me stop the pain. Now, we know he's not talking about the pain of what he's done because Zach himself said that he didn't feel any remorse. So if his conscience wasn't hurting him, what was? Even though this case got a lot of attention in the press, there wasn't much information out there about Zack and Addie themselves. That's partly why demonic possession looked like the only reasonable answer. But in September 2009, investigative journalist Ethan Brown published a book called Shake the Devil Off. It was the first of a few works that took a deeper look into Zach and Addie's relationship.

And the full story paints what happened in a totally different light. Coming up, we'll look at the truth about Zach and Addie's final days. Let's get back to the story. By 2006, Zach Bowen had been wrestling with demons for a long time, but they were the metaphorical kind. Growing up in Santa Maria, California, he had a reputation as a class clown, but underneath his goofy sense of humor, he was painfully shy. He always felt like he didn't belong. In early 1996, just months before he was supposed to graduate, Zach dropped out of high school. The 17-year-old Zach went on a cross-country road trip with his dad,

and they ended up in New Orleans, where they made their new home. Zach gets a job as a bartender, and soon he starts dating a woman named Lana, who's 10 years his senior. And soon after that, Lana gets pregnant. Being a father is a huge responsibility for an 18-year-old kid. But when their son Jackson is born, Zach is fully committed. He gets a second job to support the family, and eventually he asks Lana to marry him. But when their second child is born in 1999, even Zach's two jobs aren't enough to make ends meet.

He's a 21-year-old high school dropout, so he doesn't have a lot of luck on the job search. With no better options in May of 2000, just a few months after receiving his GED, he decides to enlist in the military. Now, this is bad timing because a year and a half later, the September 11th attacks happen. By the end of 2002, Zak's regiment is shipped out to Kuwait. And in March 2003, his company is one of the first to invade Iraq. When Zak enlisted, it was during peacetime. He was totally unprepared for the chaos of Baghdad. He lost one of his best friends in a mortar attack, which was difficult to cope with. But what really sent him over the edge was the death of a civilian. He'd befriended a young

Iraqi boy whose family owned a shop near the police station in Baghdad. In September of 2003, the shop was blown up by insurgents, killing the entire family, including the little boy. After that, Zach was depressed and completely demoralized. All he wanted was to go home and to be with his family again. So he starts purposefully failing his weekly fitness test, hoping that it'll get him discharged. Now, eventually it works. And in November 2004, he's sent home on a general discharge under honorable conditions. Now, this is different from an honorable discharge, and it means that you might lose some of your VA benefits. It can hurt your

civilian job prospects, too, since it indicates that, like, you may have had some kind of conduct violations. Now, Zach had only joined the Army in the first place because he needed a leg up financially. After four years, he's basically right back at square one. And understandably, when he tells his wife Lana, she is furious. Worst of all, Zach is too ashamed to tell her the truth about why he was discharged. Lana assumes he was just kicked out for bad behavior, and she's so disappointed that she ends up leaving him. So at 26 years old, Zach is at an all-time low. He's already struggling with survivor's guilt from the war, and now he's also taking the blame for tearing apart his family. But he has shared custody of the kids, who are now five and seven, and are still living in New

Orleans with Lana. So he tries to stay positive and keep forging ahead. In the spring of 2005, he gets a bartending job at an old dive in the French Quarter called Hogs Bar. And that's where he meets 29-year-old Addie Hall. Addie was like the archetypal manic pixie dream girl. She lived a sort of like bohemian, free-spirited lifestyle, seemingly without much plan or direction. For someone like Zach, who'd been saddled with huge responsibilities from a young age, that freedom was really alluring. After his graveyard shift was over, he'd stay at the bar to keep Addie company during her shift. By August, he'd won her over and they had started dating.

Just a few weeks after they got together, Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Florida. As the storm made its way to New Orleans, the mayor issued a mandatory evacuation. But Zach and Addie decided to stay. They figured Addie's apartment in the French Quarter would be fine. So they hunkered down to ride out the storm. Now, they weren't totally in this alone. It's estimated that up to 200,000 people in the city didn't or couldn't evacuate before the hurricane hit. But among those holdouts, almost all of them finally evacuated after the storm.

There was no water, no electricity, and the streets were covered in debris. It was just not a safe place to be. But once again, Zach and Addie stayed. In fact, they thrived. The disaster zone was like a vacation from real life. No jobs, no bills, no pressure to do anything except survive. As two of the only bartenders left in town, Zach and Addie became the center of the small community.

They set up a makeshift bar and grill outside Addie's apartment, serving cocktails and cooking canned food over a bonfire. More than anything, they kept the neighborhood's spirits up. Addie told one reporter that since the storm, they've been able to see the stars for the first time. But the party had to end eventually.

In early September, the military was called in to help with the recovery effort. Zach was dealing with untreated PTSD from his time in Iraq, and seeing so many members of the National Guard rolling through town led to flashbacks. Now, at the same time, Addie's problems were starting to surface, too. One night, she went into an abandoned grocery store alone to loot for supplies and a man attacked her and tried to rape her. Addie managed to escape but she had been sexually abused as a child so this incident brought back a wave of traumatic memories. To make things even more difficult Addie had been diagnosed bipolar disorder and after the

hurricane she didn't have any way to refill her meds so for the first time Zack was seeing a different side of her personality. Addie had a talent for finding people's weak spots. When she was in a bad mood she would lash out at everyone around her. Now usually it was just insults and verbal attacks, but when she was drinking, which was a lot of the time, she could become physically violent as well. By this point, she and Zach were both drinking heavily and using cocaine to cope with their own problems. This created a vicious cycle. Addie would pick a fight with Zach. Zach would argue back, and by the end of the day, they'd be even more upset than they were in the first place.

Then they'd blow off some steam by drinking more. The tension built up over the next few months, and by the spring of 2006, it finally reached a breaking point. Zach and Addie were out drinking with one of their friends, and Addie unleashed one of her typical tirades. By this time, when they got back to the apartment, Zach told Addie that he'd had enough. He wanted to take a break. Now, they were both too drunk to remember what happened next, but Addie woke up the next morning with bruises on her arms,

and Zach woke up on a train to Oregon where his dad was living. Now, this should have been the end of Zach and Addie, but even though their relationship was obviously toxic, it was also addictive. They still loved each other. And after a few days, they were ready to forgive and forget. For the rest of the summer, the same cycle continued. The fights never became physical again, but their screaming matches were so intense, the cops intervened at least twice. When things were bad, Zach had to pack up his stuff and move in with friends.

For a while, he lived with their cocaine dealer, who went by Squirrel. Squirrel was a veteran, too, but he wasn't very sympathetic to Zach's PTSD. According to Shake the Devil Off by Ethan Brown, when Zach mentioned that he was still having nightmares about the war, Squirrel told him, you were just an MP in Iraq. I was a medical corpsman in Afghanistan. I had to literally sew people back together. What did you do that was so horrible? So with his relationship at a dead end and no help from his friends, Zach starts looking for support somewhere else. In the summer of 2006, he starts seeing a man he met at a local bar.

Zach is just starting to come to terms with being bisexual, and most of his friends don't even know about it. So he tries to keep the new relationship under wraps. But of course, by September,

word gets back to Addie. And she's furious. First of all, she's furious that Zach's cheating on her, although it's hard to say how much they were actually together at this point. But to her, the fact that he's cheating on her with a man somehow makes it much worse in her eyes. For the next few weeks, she taunted him with homophobic slurs, even in front of his friends and coworkers.

This was very nearly the last straw for both of them. Then, at the end of September, Addie comes to Zach with one last offer of reconciliation. She'd gotten into a dispute with her landlord and she was about to be evicted. Now, she couldn't afford to put down a deposit on a new place, so she asked Zach to move in with her, for real this time, their own equally shared home, a year lease and a fresh start. This seemed promising to Zach, so he agreed to give it one more shot. So at the beginning of October 2006, they move in at 826 North Rampart Street. Zach pays the first and last month's rent out of his own pocket, and he's under the impression

that when the landlord gets the paperwork together, they're both going to be listed as tenants. However, on the morning of October 4th, Addie shows up at the office and asks to sign the lease alone with only her name on it. About five minutes later, the landlord gets a call from Zach. Zach obviously sees where this is heading. If the apartment's in Addie's name, she can kick him out whenever she wants, as usual. And since he was the one who put down the move-in fees, he's going to be homeless and broke. So the landlord goes back to Addie to ask her what's going on. The first thing she says is that Zach cheated on her and she's kicking him out. Now, at this point, the landlord's like, listen, you guys need to sort out your own drama.

I don't want to be involved in this. And so he leaves. And that's the last time anyone sees Addie alive. Now, when police first look at this crime, it seemed totally senseless. But that's because they were only looking at the days around the murder itself. When you actually put together the full story, the year and a half slow burn of tension, it makes perfect sense. The argument about the lease was actually a fight about everything. The financial instability, the infidelity, Zach's sexuality, Addie's emotional abuse, both of their past traumas and untreated mental illnesses,

not to mention the drinking and drug use. With such a perfect storm of stress, it's not surprising that Zack reached his breaking point. Knowing all this, at the end of the day, it looks like the only demons involved were psychological ones. The fact that the new apartment was above a voodoo temple is just a stray thread in the story. And for the next few years, that was it. The case was closed and the rumors about dark magic were put to rest. But in June of 2012, something happened that raised fresh questions about Zach and Addie's demise. Another young woman from New Orleans was killed and dismembered, and the killer happened to be one of Addie Hall's closest friends. Coming up, we'll explore the connection between these two gruesome murders. Now, back to the story.

On June 7, 2012, a woman's torso washed up on the beach in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. Severed limbs and a decapitated head followed close behind it. The body was identified as Jaron Lockhart, a 22-year-old dancer from New Orleans. Almost immediately, the investigators zeroed in on their suspects, Terry Speaks and Margaret Sanchez. At closing time in the early hours of June 6, the couple had appeared at the club where Jaron danced. Terry and Margaret both used to actually work at the club too, as a dancer and a doorman respectively,

so they knew Jaron and everyone else pretty well. Margaret asked around to see if any of the dancers wanted to work a private party. A few girls turned them down, but Jaron hadn't made very many tips that night and rent was due soon, so she agreed. Security cameras picked up Margaret, Terry, and Jaron walking down the street together at about two o'clock in the morning, and that was the last time Jaron was seen alive. Margaret and Terry were both arrested on June 12th, just a week after the murder. There was a mountain of evidence against them, though admittedly no clear motive. But before the two suspects could be formally charged, police were hit with a curveball. On July 4th, the ABC docudrama show Final Witness aired an

episode about Zach Bowen and Addie Hall's murder-suicide. One of the main subjects they interviewed was Addie's best friend, none other than Margaret Sanchez. On the show, which was taped more than a year earlier, Margaret talks in detail about her friendship with Addie. They'd met before Hurricane Katrina when they were both working as bartenders in the French Quarter. Margaret also knew Zach pretty well, and it was clear that she'd been around the couple in the months leading up to their deaths. In one segment, she imagines what was going through Zach's head after killing Addie.

Quote, What am I going to do to get rid of the body? That would be the first thought. How am I going to fix this? End quote. The detectives on the Jaron Lockhart case couldn't just ignore this. Deputy Chief Don Bass told the Times-Picayune, Let me ask you this. How many personal friends do you have who've been murdered?

And how many personal friends do you have who were murdered and dismembered? But no matter how closely they looked, there wasn't any evidence linking Margaret to Addie's death. To be fair, the investigation in 2006 would have been quick since all signs pointed to Zach, so it's possible that there's something that they missed. As far as anyone could tell though, there really was no connection. It was just an unbelievable freak coincidence. The situation looks even stranger when you consider the motive for Jaron Lockhart's murder, or rather, the total lack of motive. Just like with Addie and Zach, no one could figure out what drove Margaret and Terry to murder. They knew the victim,

but not well. Nothing of value was stolen. The crime was obviously premeditated, but for no apparent reason. So once again, with nothing else to go off of, the investigators start to wonder if other forces were at play. This time, the theory they landed on was ritual sacrifice. On the night of the murder, there was this really rare astronomical event called Venus Transit, which is when Venus passes between the Earth and the Sun. It only happens twice every 243 years, so it's kind of a big deal to scientists. But it doesn't have any real significance to any culture except the ancient Maya.

Most Maya rituals were based around the planets, particularly Venus. And a lot of those rituals included human sacrifice. You might remember that in 2012, there was this big panic around the apocalypse because the Maya calendar ended that December. Now, it's hard to say exactly what the Maya thought would happen in 2012, but they considered it the end of a cycle for humanity and the beginning of a new world. The Venus transit in June of 2012 was supposed to usher in that shift. So, a likely time for human sacrifice if you live in ancient Mesoamerica. But as for how it relates to our suspects, according to the lead investigator,

Margaret and Terry had mentioned the Venus transit in emails to each other. But that's all we have. The full emails have never been released to the public, so we don't even know what they said about the Venus transit. They could have just heard about it once on the news. And beyond those emails, no other evidence supports the ritual sacrifice theory. Jaron had been killed by a single stab wound to the heart. The decapitation and the dismemberment occurred post-mortem, and according to investigators, the only purpose was to make it harder to identify the body. Ironically, it looked like Jaron was cut apart for the same reason as Addie,

pure and simple convenience. We can't say for sure, but it's possible that Margaret was thinking back to her friend's death. The further you look into it, this is the only real connection between the two murders. They weren't committed by the same people or the same demonic force, The further you look into it, this is the only real connection between the two murders. They weren't committed by the same people or the same demonic force, but they were both rooted in the same emotional trauma. Like Zach, Terry Speaks was also a veteran. He served in the Marine Corps from 1991 to 1992, and during his service was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder.

Later on, he was hospitalized for a suicide attempt. As for Margaret, according to a friend, she had bipolar disorder just like Addie. And when two people who are both dealing with such difficult issues get together, well, we already saw what can happen. Instead of building each other up, you might bring out the worst in one another. However, even though there's an earthly answer, the voodoo rumors about Zach and Addie never really stopped. In October 2016, on the 10-year anniversary of Addie's murder, the TV show Paranormal Lockdown traveled to what they call the Rampart Street murder house. For 72 hours, two paranormal investigators locked themselves in Zach and Addie's apartment to finally put the rumors to the test. Their results were inconclusive. The only solid findings were from a device called the Geobox,

which supposedly allows spirits to communicate through radio waves. The device captured a voice saying, you're not alone, and more shockingly, strangled to death. But before we get too carried away with that, we have to take a look at the geobox itself. It's essentially a radio scanner with a few modulars attached. Supposedly, if there is a spirit nearby, they'd be able to manipulate the radio frequencies to send you a message. But the creator of the box admits that without the interference of a spirit, all you're going to get is bleed from AM radio broadcasts. If the words you hear match up with the answers you're looking for, it's most likely just a coincidence. Coincidences are hard to accept, which is partially why there are so many occult theories about this case in the first place.

But in a way, coincidence is an even scarier explanation than a dark magic voodoo curse. Zach and Addie, and Margaret and Terry for that matter, were all haunted by common everyday issues. Mental illnesses, PTSD, abuse, infidelity, alcohol and drugs. Pretty much everyone has dealt with at least one of those issues in their lifetime, and it usually doesn't end with a severed head on a stovetop. But when you put them all together, it doesn't matter how level-headed you are or how much you love your partner. The right combination of stress and trauma could push anyone over the edge.

Thanks for listening. I'll be back next week with another episode. To hear more stories hosted by me, check out Crime Junkie and all AudioChuck originals.