Bowman Murder Trial & verdict(Cold Ohio Case)

[Lady Cop]

the victim




Eileen Adams, a freshman in high school, was abducted from Toledo on December 19, 1967, as she left school. Her frozen body was found in a field in Whiteford Township, Michigan on January 30, 1968. It had been wrapped in a rug and mattress cover, and tied with an electrical cord. The girl had apparently been left alive but bound in such a way that her struggles to get free had tightened a telephone cord looped around her neck and tied to her ankles, which strangled her. Her shoes and coat were missing, and she had been raped. Police believed that her abductor had held her somewhere for up to two weeks before leaving her in the field in southeastern Michigan.

Although the case went unsolved for nearly forty years, Eileen's relatives had not forgotten. According to the Toledo Blade, Eileen's father raised the issue at dinner one day with an off-duty police officer, Sergeant Mike Mcgee. In ordinary circumstances, they'd never have crossed paths, but McGee's in-laws were in the habit of inviting the elderly from area nursing homes to join them; Eileen's father was one of them, and he took the opportunity to tell Mcgee the terrible story.

McGee alerted Lucas County cold case detectives, who'd recently received a considerable grant to investigate murders and sexual assaults, so they decided to re-open the case. They looked at evidence from the crime scene and managed to isolate DNA from semen found on the girl's underwear. They were also already aware of a potential suspect against whom to compare it.