Bowman’s final interrogation yielded no new facts, frustrates investigators

It may have been the last time convicted killer Gregory Bowman met with police.

St. Clair County investigators Bill Kenny and Thomas Trice wanted to close a 1977 murder case — the strangulation of 17-year-old Sharrey Case near Belleville. They believed Bowman may be their man.

On June 23, 2015, Trice and Kenny traveled to the Potosi Correctional in Missouri, where Bowman was on death row for the 1977 murder of Velda Joy Rumfelt in St. Louis County. He was dying, and they hoped they could get him to confess to killing Case.

Case’s body was found just before Christmas in 1977 on a dirt road off Town Hall Road south of Belleville. She had been strangled with a wire and asphyxiated with her own sock and left under a pile of construction debris.

Instead of a man who was resigned to his fate, they found a defiant man — vowing to beat his death sentence and liver disease. He was in the prison’s infirmary in a single cell reserved for the most serious patients.

“He looked like death,” Kenny said.

“Absolutely, he looked like he was dying,” Trice said.

Bowman died Tuesday at age 64.

The investigators said Bowman was polite, nice and reserved, but he refused to discuss any criminal cases, even the case where he had already been convicted.

The Sharrey Case investigation was reopened in 2005 after Belleville News-Democrat reporters investigating a connection between Case’s death and the murder of Elizabeth West and Ruth Ann Jany in 1978 found police reports related to Case’s murder in the Sheriff’s Department storage room.

Kenny and Trice interviewed Bowman after the case was reopened, but they didn’t get anywhere.

Shirley Greathouse, Case’s sister, said she doesn’t know who killed her sister.

“Kenny had hoped that he would open up during that last meeting, but he did not,” Greathouse said. “He will never be able to tell us what happened to Sharrey, if he even knew.”

In 2005, Case’s body was exhumed from her grave in Bardwell, Ky., in an attempt to locate physical evidence that may have been missed in the original autopsy in 1977.

A hair was discovered, but testing revealed that it belonged to Case. With no physical evidence and no confession, there would be no prosecution, but Kenny and Trice went to Potosi one last time to try to get answers for Case’s family.

“I believe and continue to believe that Bowman was the lead suspect in Sharrey Case’s disappearance,” Kenny said.

Bowman was convicted of the murders of Elizabeth West, 14, and Ruth Ann Jany, 21, in Belleville in 1979. The evidence against him included statements he gave to sheriff’s investigator Robert Miller.

In 2000, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch published a story raising questions about the circumstances surrounding the conviction. Bowman retained new attorneys to fight his St. Clair County convictions.

While Bowman was being held in the St. Clair County Jail after being convicted for the kidnapping of another woman, Jeanne Taylor, in Belleville, fellow inmate Danny Stark told Bowman that he would help him escape from the St. Clair County Jail, but Bowman needed to delay his transfer to the Menard Correction Center. He could delay the transfer by talking to police about the Jany and West murders.

The escape plan later was discovered to be a ruse, but Bowman gave several statements over several days to Miller. He was then charged with the West and Jany murders.

Clyde Keuhn, the man who prosecuted Bowman in the West and Jany murders in 1979, has said he has no doubt about his guilt in the Jany and West murders, or the possibility he could have killed Case.

Stark, Bowman’s former prison pal, also remembered a chilling detail: Bowman talked about killing another girl.

Stark, now serving a federal prison sentence, has said that Bowman told him he allowed the victims to get dressed after they were sexual assaulted, so they would believe he was going to let them go, then he would kill them. Case, West and Jany all were dressed when their bodies were found.

During the taped confession in 1978 with Miller, Bowman said if West was strangled, she might have been strangled with a wire, but West was strangled with her bra strap. Case was strangled with a wire.

Trice credited Miller, who is now deceased, and former Belleville Police Chief James Rokita with getting Bowman off the streets and preventing him from committing other murders. Miller was the investigator who took Bowman’s confession. He was also the investigator who later came under fire for colluding with Stark to “trick” Bowman with the escape plot and getting him to talk to him about the Jany and West murders.

“After he was locked up in 1979, there were no more victims,” Trice said.

Greathouse isn’t sure whether Bowman killed her sister or not. In the end, she says, it doesn’t matter because she does believe he abducted and killed Velda Rumfelt, West and Jany.

“I don’t know why he was wired the way he was, to do the things he did,” Greathouse said.

Trice is now retired from the Sheriff’s Department. He teaches social and behavioral science in the criminal justice division at Lindenwood University in Belleville. Kenny is a captain at the Sheriff’s Department.

Kenny didn’t give up hope that Bowman would admit he abducted and murdered Case. He kept that hope until Tuesday when he learned Bowman had died. When he left that day of his visit last June, Kenny left his business card.

“I told him when his time got close, if he had a change of heart, to give me a call,” Kenny said.

“That call ever come, Bill?” Trice asked.

“Never did,” Kenny replied.

This story was originally published March 19, 2016 at 1:59 PM with the headline "Bowman’s final interrogation yielded no new facts, frustrates investigators."