Thomas Bowman came home at about half past eleven on the night of December 17, 1968, after an overtime shift at the American Can Company plant, and found his wife face down on the bed in their apartment in Ballard, in north Seattle. Sandra Darlene Bowman was sixteen. They had been married about five months, and she was three months pregnant, wearing a green maternity dress. Her hands were tied behind her back. She had been raped and stabbed at least fifty-seven times, the figure in the court documents; later reference accounts put it at sixty.
That morning she had told him she felt ill and would stay in bed. Some time during the day she opened the door to a stranger, and the man who knocked would say, thirty-six years later, that he had picked her door at random.
As the husband, Thomas Bowman was the obvious suspect. Police checked his alibi, he passed a polygraph, and he was cleared; he cashed in some of his own savings toward a reward for information. None of it produced a name. "I was the husband and the natural suspect," he said in 2004, and in the minds of some people, he said, he had never entirely stopped being one.
The man at the door was John Dwight Canaday, who had turned twenty-four the day before. He had served in Vietnam and worked as a pipeman's helper for the Seattle water department. He had married Suzan Gray Higgins in Idaho in September 1964, when he was nineteen and she was seventeen, and they had two children. She was granted a divorce on grounds of cruelty on March 3, 1969, by which time he was in jail.
King County Deputy Prosecutor Timothy Bradshaw, who finally charged him with Sandra Bowman's death, argued that the killing "evidently emboldened" him. Within weeks Canaday attacked six more women, and two of them died.
On January 4, 1969, he knocked on the door of Mary Annabelle Bjornson, a twenty-one-year-old airline stewardess, and told her he was having car trouble. She had food on the stove for a friend who was coming to dinner. He pulled a knife, tied her wrists with rope, drove her to a park, raped her and strangled her. The friend arrived to find the dinner cooking and the apartment empty.
Three weeks later Lynne Carol Tuski, twenty, was walking to her car outside a department store in north Seattle when he approached her. He forced her into the car at knifepoint, tied her hands, raped her and strangled her. Both women's bodies were left in Snohomish County near the town of Index, off the Index River Tract Road, and he burned their clothes in his parents' fireplace. The Seattle reporting at the time of his 2004 plea identifies Tuski as a junior at the University of Washington; some other accounts call her a Washington State University student.
A survivor ended it. In February 1969 he was arrested for kidnapping and assaulting a woman he had known at Leavenworth High School and had held for close to three days. She was found alive at his parents' house, with rope burns and bruises, after a witness placed her with him shortly before she vanished. While he was in custody on that charge, Tuski's body was found half buried in snow. Under questioning he admitted both killings and led detectives to Bjornson. The arrest is usually dated February 22, 1969; some reference accounts give March.
He was convicted of the murders of Mary Bjornson and Lynne Tuski that year and sentenced to hang. The rope was never used. In 1972 a United States Supreme Court ruling effectively struck down the death penalty in more than thirty states, Washington among them, and his sentences became life terms. Nothing in the reprieve turned on the facts of his own case.
The Bowman file stayed open. Seattle cold-case detectives sent evidence preserved from her body to the state crime laboratory, where a forensic scientist matched sperm recovered in 1968 to Canaday's genetic profile, which was in the state database because of his two murder convictions. Reports differ on the timing: the charging coverage of September 2004 says the evidence went to the laboratory two years earlier, while other reports place the match early in 2004. A detective went to the penitentiary at Walla Walla and told him he had left his DNA at the scene. According to the charging papers, Canaday sighed, held up his hands and said, "Yes, I killed her."
He pleaded guilty in King County Superior Court on October 14, 2004, at fifty-nine. Bradshaw set up a photograph of Sandra Bowman smiling and read ten aggravating factors, among them that she was sixteen and pregnant. "The layers of repugnancy in this crime are tenfold," he told the court. Canaday's attorney, Pat Valerio, said he had owned up to his crimes and served his time as a model prisoner, and asked for a life sentence with the possibility of parole.
Thomas Bowman, by then a deputy with the Walla Walla County Sheriff's Department, spoke at the hearing and looked straight at the man who had killed his wife. "You basically destroyed my life, too," he said. "I was the one that found her and I will never forget what I saw."
Judge Richard Jones called the crimes torture. "The horror of your crimes are beyond words," he said, and told Canaday that Sandra Bowman's mother and husband had also been sentenced to life by what he had done. He imposed a third life term, to begin only when the first two were complete. The King County prosecutor's office called the Bowman killing the oldest cold case ever solved in Washington, and the Seattle Times described Canaday as possibly the state's earliest known serial killer.
He died at the Clallam Bay Corrections Center on December 26, 2012, at sixty-eight, with all three sentences still running.