WARNING: If it makes you uncomfortable to read about murder and dismemberment, or if it would offend you to read humorous remarks about said murder and dismemberment, you may want to skip the following passage. I will tolerate no complaints! You have been warned!
A friend and patient from my old practice in New Orleans came to see me last Thursday, and as a favor brought me a copy of the New Orleans Times-Picayune. My nurse left it on the desk in my office, and as soon as I glanced at it I was compelled to pick it up. On page one, in bold sans-serif type ran the headline:
BOYFRIEND CUT UP CORPSE, COOKED IT
It made me laugh. No, it shouldn't have, but I would expect that kind of headline on the front page of the National Inquirer, not a local newspaper. It was the word "boyfriend" that especially stuck me as peculiar. Most headlines in serious papers start with words like governor, or hurricane, or catastrophe, or school board. Boyfriend? So this was going to be a love story, gone very, very bad. Funny as it was, the headline was true; all of it.
This was a story that goes far beyond proving that truth is stranger than fiction. It is an obnoxious taunt at the fiction writer: "Don't even try to beat this one. You can't dream up stuff like this."
The story, even in its vaguest outlines, is marvelously awful, so impossible that it has to be true. A boy named Zackery Bowen met a girl named Addie Hall in the New Orleans French Quarter just before Hurricane Katrina. They "fell in love" on the night of the storm and stayed in New Orleans through the horrible week afterwards. In the anarchic days after the hurricane they survived by trading aliquots of an enormous beer and liquor stash for food and water. Together they emerged from the storm arm-in-arm, a his-and-her bartender tandem, serving up fire water to the recovering city. On the horizon, the happy ending.
But then hints of danger surfaced like ice cubes in a Bourbon street cocktail. He and she both had vague pasts. He said he was a soldier once, offered no proof, but during heavy drinking bouts waxed darkly about his army days and something about a discarded wife and kids. She maintained she was from Pennsylvania, turning up in the French Quarter in 2001, also with a nondescript but invariably sad history. They lived together in an apartment above a voodoo supply shop (and no, I am not making this part up).
They fought. They split up. They got back together. They split up again. She failed to show up at her bartender job on October 1. He was found lying in the street in front of the Omni French Quarter hotel on October 18. He had jumped off the roof.
Zackery Bowen left a suicide note in his room at the Omni. The suicide note said he had strangled his girlfriend Addie at 1 am on October 5th, and, well, let me just quote directly from the note itself:
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 N. 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 the both of us and a full signed confession from myself.
It was nice of him to provide full documentation. If Lee Harvey Oswald or O.J. Simpson had thought to do that, it would have saved us all so much trouble.
One could say that the suicide, or the dismemberment, or the corpse gumbo is the most astonishing thing about this story. But I don't think it is. The most astonishing part of this story is that after Zack murdered Addie he checked his financial reserves, and, finding that he had $1,500, then quit his job and resolved to spend it "being happy" until he paid his debt back by killing himself. According to Zack: "That's what I did: good food, good drugs, good strippers, good friends and any loose ends I may have had."
It reads better than an Albert Camus novel. Jean-Paul Sartre would gotten on his knees and begged God for a plot like this. Zack Bowen kills his girlfriend, and then calmly decides to kill himself out of some twisted sense of cosmic karma. Then he stops himself and says, "Wait. I still have $1,500 to burn. Let's put the suicide thing on a back burner until the party's over."
He realizes his ex, now ex in more ways than one, will start to smell in the next few days. He turns the air conditioner down to 60. Then he chops her up in the bathtub and cooks her. And again — no French existential novelist could ever hope do better — he cooks her head on the stove, and puts her butchered legs in baking pans inside the oven and sprinkles seasoning over them. On the counter top next to the head-in-a-pot were sliced carrots and potatoes. The killer left no indication in his "documentation" if the vegetables were to go in the stew or if he intended to serve them a la mode.
The police said in a public statement that there was no evidence of cannibalism found during the autopsy of either the victim or the perpetrator. But consider this: They had to check. For your typical murder, it is not necessary to rule out cannibalism. I filled out a Louisiana death certificate the other day, and though there is a check box in the cause-of-death section for homicide, there is no check box for cannibalism.
The Times-Picayune article says Zack Bowen "descended into madness" prior to the murder. From the facts in the article, I would say this is an unsubstantiated guess. It is certainly clear why the reporter, Walt Philbin, would think this. Could anyone who would murder another so callously, then dispose of the body in such a ghastly fashion, still be sane?
As a writer of a scant amount of fiction and a reader of much more, I'll answer that question: Maybe. True, no normal person would do what Bowen did, but abnormal and wacko are not necessarily synonymous. Was Meursault crazy when he murdered the Arab in The Stranger? Albert Camus's novel depends on the fact that he was not. Was Hamlet insane? Probably a little unhinged, but not nutty enough to ruin a ripping good plot.
Bowen can't be completely insane because it ruins the sense of the whole story if he were. Bowen murdered Addie Hall and then calmly decided to live it up until his final accounting. Fifteen hundred dollars got him all the drugs and strippers and great food he could want for 13 days. This may not be a normal decision, but it could be rational one, if one believes in a certain brand of karma. If you go nuts and kill your girlfriend and then feel you have to give up your own in return, there is no reason to feel guilty about it. You play by the rules. Go ahead and live it up, get your kicks, and then settle with the Big CPA in the Sky. It's as simple as math.
The story is sprinkled with evidence that Bowen was at least partially rational. Hamlet rational, perhaps, but rational nonetheless. He says he planned out the method of disposing the body. He wrote out an eight page suicide note that, from the excerpts I have seen, is fairly well written, considering who he was. Consider the final words of his suicide note:
Halfway through the task, I stopped and thought about what I was doing. The decision to halt the first idea and move to Plan B (the crime scene you are now in) came after awhile. I scared myself not only by the action of calmly strangling the woman I've loved for one and a half years, but by my entire lack of remorse. I've known forever how horrible a person I am (ask anyone).
Not the words of a lunatic. Someone with a farfetched ethical system, perhaps, but not a lunatic.
Once Zack decided he would go ahead with the plan of burning through the $1,500, he really seemed to enjoy himself. The Times-Picayune reports that his neighbor, Voodoo Priestess Miriam Chamani, said that on the Saturday prior to his death Zack looked "all jolly . . . . He was (in) a great mood, best mood I've ever seen him in."
Okay, he burned himself with a cigarette 28 times prior to killing himself, once for every year of his life. He and rationalism were not completely copasetic. Still, the murder-suicide, taken as a whole, does not suggest someone descending into madness. Instead, it hints at a person with an absurd sense of morality who decided at the end of an argument with his girlfriend that he would pursue that absurdity to its logical conclusion.
What those two weeks must have been like! He killed his girlfriend, and in his conscience, such as it was, he knew payback was due. While he sat in strip bars stuffing dollar after dollar into a dancer's G-string, did he think to himself that each dollar brought him 1/1500th closer to suicide? Or did he block it out of his mind, refusing to keep count?
This dilemma could be the hook of a fabulous short story. The Devil gives a man $1500 and tells him when the last dollar is gone his soul goes straight to hell. The man shrewdly invests the money in a sensible bond fund so it will grow forever, and His Satanic Majesty is eternally frustrated. Then, in an O. Henry finish, there is a Wall Street scandal and it turns out that the money was stolen and not a dime remains.
To his credit, Zack never considered doing anything but spending the money. There was to be no cheating the devil. He exhausted his bankroll with the decency of a player fairly beaten and then goes willingly to his sleep. Knowing all the time that his bed in Hotel Hell was made, he was intent on living it up until his last dime was gone, and then accepting his fate. Like the city of New Orleans these days.
Remorse? There is no need for remorse when you live by Zack Bowen's ethos. You pay back a life with a life and you are even. Since life is nothing more than a celestial debt repayment plan, once the debt is paid the deal is complete. There is no more need to fuss over a murder than there is to feel guilty about spending 99 cents on a hamburger. Seller and buyer are satisfied with the result and the ledger is reset to zero. By Zack's accounting, he came into the world as a zero, left it as a zero, and did a lot of drugs and women in between.
Those blissful two weeks were a poetic completion of his life. He gave himself the opportunity to do something terrible, then paid it back, and lived for the two weeks in between knowing that he would have to settle his accounts in the end. It may be that in his mind he created an opportunity in killing Addie. I had a cousin once who, to create a credit rating for herself, borrowed $500 from a bank and then paid it back over 6 months. She did not need the money and spent none of it, but by making the payments on time she created her own credit identity.
Perhaps in his logically mad mind Zack was creating a credit rating for himself. Perhaps he felt his life amounted to nothing, and in the murder and suicide he forced an accounting. Knowing he had created his debt but would soon pay it off, he lived out his last 13 days in a kind of peace.