The End of the Dream (44 page)

Kay Owens had been very beautiful, with a lovely figure.

She could have been a woman that a man with a sexual quirk desired beyond all reason. The name that kept coming up was Burt Cowan’s. He had been fascinated with Kay’s long legs and he’d pestered other people in the apartment complex with questions about her. He was definitely a flirt, a man who came on to women around the apartments, and he was apparently the last person to see Kay alive on the night she died.

A check into his background unearthed information that he was sexually kinky. His first wife had divorced him because of what she termed his perverted sexual practices, she had caught him molesting his own children.

According to both his first and second wife (who was currently estranged from him) he was a man with an extremely small penisa condition they blamed for his sexual attraction to young girl sand boys. Burt Cowan’s exes listed sexual aberrations that included such bizarre practices that they might have come right out of Krafftebing’s study on aberrant sex.
 
Burt Cowan emerged as the prime suspect in Kay Owens’ murder. Although Cowan had left his new girlfriend before midnight on July 29 and apparently gone directly to his apartment and turned on his stereo, there was no reason to assume that he could not have slipped out to peer into Kay Owens’ bedroom window. And then, inflamed at the sight of her, he might have cut the screen over her dinette table and gone in. One question niggled, though. If Cowan really had an abnormally small sex organ, would he have been capable of raping a woman so violently that he made her bleed? As it turned out, Burt Cowan was arrested on August 5but not for the murder of Kay Owens, he was charged with the sexual assault of his own three-year-old son. While he was incarcerated, Cowan was given a polygraph examination concerning the death of Kay Owensand, in police jargon, he blew ink all over the walls. To the layman, he flunked the lie detector test.
 
On August 6, It. James Stovall interviewed Burt Cowan.

Stovall was a skilled interrogator, and he not only listened to what a subject had to say, he observed physiological signs as the subject responded. “I watch for their rate of breathing, for an increased pulse beat in the throat or wrist, for perspiration, “ he explained.

“It often tells me as muchor more as what the subject is saying.” Stovall’s interview with Burt Cowan was extremely interesting, he soon saw that what Cowan said aloud and his body language didn’t mesh. As expected, Cowan denied that he had killed Kay Owens. Jim Stovall used a time-honored technique to get a suspect to talk, he allowed him to become an “expert” giving advice to a puzzled detective. He asked Cowan his theories on how Kay Owens might have been killed and how someone could have silenced her so that no one had heard her cry out.

Cowan said, “Well, she could have been gagged with something.”

“Like what? “ Stovall probed. “Oh, something like .. . paper, maybe.” It was an electrifying statement.

Nobody outside the investigation knew that tissue paper had been forced down Kay Owens’ throat. Still, something about Burt Cowan didn’t fit.

Stovall studied him and saw that he was absolutely calm. He wasn’t sweating, the pulse in his throat beat at a slow, steady pitch, and he wasn’t even breathing heavily. In short, Burt Cowan was reacting like a completely innocent man who was merely surmising what had happened to his pretty neighbor.

Despite the lie-detector results, and Cowan’s mention of paper used as a gag, Stovall wondered if he was looking at a man who, although culpable in other sex crimes, might very well be innocent of this one.

If not that, Cowan’s emotions were so flat that he hardly felt them at all. Any good detective has had a few cases where he was convinced that he had found a killer, where everything fit but one small piece.

And any layman would have sworn that Cowan was the killer of Kay Owens.

Stovall wasn’t so sure. Criminalists tested some hairs found in the orange scarf in the bushes outside Kay’s duplex against hairs that had been found on her body. They matched, but neither sample matched Burt Cowan’s hair in class and characteristics when they were placed under a scanning electron microscope. This mismatch wellnigh eliminated Cowan from consideration. The footprint lifted from Kay Owens’ bathroom didn’t match Burt Cowan’s feet. Kay herself had left it there. And there wasn’t a single fingerprint in the apartment that couldn’t be traced to either Kay or her fiance.

There was absolutely no physical evidence that linked Burt Cowan to Kay Owens. Although Burt Cowan’s past perversions made him a good suspect, nothing but circumstantial evidence connected him to her murder. Yes, he had certainly had the opportunity to spy on her through her bedroom window. He could have let himself into her duplex, and he had the physical strength needed to strangle her, he weighed over two hundred pounds. But there wasn’t enough to go into court with murder charges against Cowan. . The Marion County District Attorney and the Salem Police had only Cowan’s “guesses” about how Kay died and a “guilty” polygraph reading. But lie detector results are not admissible in court unless the defendant agrees to let them in. Why would Burt Cowan agree?
 
The State declined to file murder charges against Cowan. He was put on probation on the sexual molestation charge involving his son and released from jail. Still, Salem Police detectives kept track of Cowan.
 
They learned he had gone from jail to the waiting arms of Lily Peele, the woman he’d spent the evening with the night Kay Owens died.

The two lived together for a few months and then moved to another Oregon city where Cowan took classes at a community college using his air force benefits. He studied practical nursing and got a job in a nursing home.
 
When Salem detectives visited him, Burt Cowan told them that he had “gotten religion” and he wished them well in their continuing probe of the Owens case. They accepted his good wishes bleakly, if ever a man looked good for a homicide, it was Burt Cowan.

Only Jim Stovall felt that Cowan was probably not Kay Owens’ killer. A sexual weirdo, yes but his demeanor during Stovall’s interview with him had not been that of a man guilty of the crime he was being questioned about. Homicide investigations are rife with unexpected twists and turns. A detective with tunnel vision who focuses on only one suspect is liable to miss seeing the forest for the trees. But they were back to square one. If Burt Cowan hadn’t killed Kay Owens, who then? A lot of men had wanted her. Her first husband was in the clear. Her fiance had never been a suspect, he was miles away on the night she was killed, and besides, it was obvious how much he had loved her.

Everything the investigators had turned up indicated that she had been absolutely faithful to Dan Stone. He was the last man in the world who might have wanted to harm her.

However, as they dug deeper into Kay’s past and talked to her friends, detectives learned of a very prominent and married professional man.

He had reportedly been obsessed with Kay Owens. He’d courted her assiduously before her engagement to Dan Stone, and he’d had the means to do it. He had showered her with unwelcome gifts and flowers to no avail. Kay Owens had had no interest in being the secret love of a married man. She didn’t need a back street romance. With her beauty, brains, and personality, she could have any man she chose. She had told the married man “no” and “no” again. Discreetly, detectives checked the man out. They found he had been entranced with the tall brunette and might even have been angry at being rejected. But they also were able to account for his time on the night of July 29-30. The married suitor was so relieved to be cleared that the Salem investigators doubted that he would ever wander far from home in the future. The detectives continued to track Burt Cowan.

When they looked for him in January, 1972, they found him in a Portland hospital not as a nurse, but as a patient. He had undergone a complete colostomy after being diagnosed with colon cancer. Physicians at the veterans’ hospital said he would recover. The Salem investigators had worked every lead on the Owens killing that came up. In truth, homicide detectives work ten times as hard on a case they wryly term “a loser, “ as they do on the cases where a successful arrest and prosecution ensue.
 
It seemed as if they had been so close to Kay Owens’ killer, and it galled them that he still walked free. But there were no more cases in the Salem area where the MO matched that used in Kayss murder, there were no helpful witnesses or informants. They’d been over every aspect of the investigation not once but a half-dozen times, and they’d come up with nothing. Although the Owens case was no longer mentioned in Salem papers, it was far from forgotten by the Salem detectives. Jim Stovall pulled the thick case file out every six months to see if he had missed something that might show up on rereading. Some Salem detectives still felt that Burt Cowan was the guilty man, others were not so sure. But, by 1978, any hope of a definitive solution to the Owens case was pretty dim. Seven years had gone by. Kay Owens would have been thirty-three years old, probably an attorney and a happily married woman if tragedy had not intervened.

None of the detectives or patrolmen who had gone to 1830 Court on that misty morning in July of 1971 had forgotten Kay. But they knew that if a case isn’t solved soon after a murder, the chances that it ever will be diminish proportionately as time passes. And a lot of time had passed.
 
464 46 By 1978, Jim Stovall was the commander of the Salem Police Department’s Criminal Investigation Unit, and two former patrolmenvern Meighen and Tom Mason had become detectives. Stovall asked the new detectives to read the Owens case. Meighen and Mason learned that Kay Owens had been alive at 10,00 P. M. on July 29, 1971, and dead some four to six hours later. She had been raped and strangled with her own nightgown. And she’d been dead for almost seven years. The trail left by her killer was ice cold. However, Jim Stovall wasn’t the only one who thought often about Kay Owens. It was Friday, May I2, 1978, when an inmate in the Marion County Jail approached jailer Walter Tappy. “Hey, “ the prisoner said, “one of the guys in my cell is talking about some rape-murder he did about seven years ago. He’s talking about a lot of other sex crimes too.”

“Which man is it? “ Tappy asked. “I don’t want to be a snitch, “ the informant hesitated. Tappy convinced the inmate that if the other con was telling the truth, it wasn’t something that could simply be forgotten. “OK, “ the man sighed. “The guy’s Ivan Miller*. He’s been getting weirder and weirder ever since that guy in the next cell hung himself two weeks ago. It freaked us all out because he did it so quick we couldn’t stop him, and we all saw him strangle. But Miller, it hit him harder, and he really flipped out. Something’s eating at him. His conscience is bothering him bad.” The prisoner said that Ivan Miller had told him he was in jail for molesting a little girl.

“And I says to him, Hey, it’s not like you killed somebody or something, and then he says he did kill some chick and raped her and all.” Tappy got as much information as he could and then he called Detective Jan Cummings of the Marion County Sheriff’s Office. Cummings checked the county’s list of unsolved homicides and found nothing that sounded like a match. She suggested that Miller might be confessing to a City of Salem case. Walt Tappy went to the cell that Ivan Miller shared with the informant, hoping to get a more precise fix on his alleged confession.
 
“Tell Tappy what you told me over the weekend, “ the informant urged.
 
Suddenly Ivan Miller erupted with words, “I did it, “ he said. “I killed a girl when I was about seventeen years old, and I’ve done a lot of other sex things. I have to tell somebody about it.” This torrent of words was more than Walt Tappy had expected. He told Miller to write down as much as he could remember about the killing, but to say no more.
 
Then he hurried to call the Salem Police Criminal Investigation Unit.
 
“This guy said he killed a girl in Salem when he was seventeen and he’s twenty-four now, “ Tappy said. “Do you have an unsolved murder from about seven years ago? “ Vern Meighen had no trouble pinpointing the murder Miller was confessing to.

The only rape-murder in Salem seven years before was Kay Owens’.

Meighen and Tom Mason drove the few blocks to the Marion County Jail in minutes. The young prisoner who wanted to confess to a murder was brought out to an interview room. They saw that Miller was an unprepossessing figure, a very short skinny man who hardly looked capable of a brutal murder. Since there was virtually no physical evidence gleaned from the Owens crime scene, Vern Meighen and Tom Mason had a delicate interrogation ahead of them. Ivan Miller would have to tell them details about the victim and the inside of her apartment that no one but the killer could know. Otherwise, they would have to write him off as just another chronic confessor. It was 5,00 P. M. on May 15, 1978, when the answers to the mystery of Kay Owens’ murder finally came.
 
Vern Meighen, Tom Mason, and Walter Tappy listened to one of the most incredible confessions any of them would ever hear. After the two Salem detectives advised him of his rights, Ivan Miller began to talk into a tape recorder. He evinced relief that he was finally able to get the murder off his conscience. And then he appeared to be in a trance as he recalled in chilling detail the night Kay died. It was not just a confession, the investigators were watching a man whose mind was back in Kay Owens’s bedroom, a man who was reliving an ugly crime.

“OK, Ivan, “ Meighen said. “We want to talk to you specifically about a girl who was killed at 1830 Court Street. Do you know her name? “

“Yeah. I read it in the papers. It was a real pretty name, Kathryn Owens. I’m not sure of the address, but I can show you where it is.

It’s close to the Deluxe Ice Cream on State Street.” It was indeed.

Miller said he’d been living with his parents and sister during the summer of 1971. He gave an address less than a mile from Kay Owens’ apartment. “Have you talked to anyone about this crime until the last few days? “ Meighen asked. “No. Yes but only once in Arizona. I confessed it to a priest. He didn’t know my name, and he didn’t even see my face. I must have been about nineteen or twenty then.” Miller said he had dropped out of school when he was fifteen and had stayed home, not working, from then on. He thought he’d been about seventeen when Kay Owens died. “What caused you to go to that particular house?