Bowen says fear made her lie

She wasn't just protecting Hank Earl Carr, his former lover says. She was an abused woman protecting herself from his wrath.

[Times photo: Fraser Hale] Bernice Bowen acknowledged that she lied to police when she said Carr had never been arrested.

By CHRISTOPHER GOFFARD, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published June 20, 2002

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TAMPA -- Bernice Bowen loved Hank Earl Carr. She loved him, she said, even though he beat her regularly and called her worthless. She loved him even after he shot to death her 4-year-old son and murdered three law officers in May 1998.

But it was fear, she said, that made her lie for him.

"I feared him more than I feared God himself," Bowen testified Wednesday at her trial. It was a line she would utter twice more as she described a violent five-year relationship in which Carr, a career criminal, dominated her totally.

Bowen, 28, who is accused of aiding Carr during his murderous rampage of May 19, 1998, said her boyfriend needed little excuse to brutalize her. She said he kicked her in the ribs and poked her in the eyes, flying into rages if his food was cooked wrong or if she challenged his authority. He bought her a diamond ring, then forbade her to wear it. He bought her clothes, only to destroy them.

Bowen, a ninth-grade dropout, said he sabotaged her efforts to get a high school equivalency certificate and controlled her finances so completely that he tore money right from her garter at the strip club where she worked.

"I didn't feel like a human being," said Bowen, who called Carr by the name "Boo."

"He had me believing that I was worthless."

To escape the relationship, she said, she considered killing him in his sleep, and regrets now that she didn't.

"Because then I would be in prison for a real reason," she said. "Those officers would be alive, and my son would be alive."

With all the aliases he used, Bowen said, she didn't know his real name was Hank Earl Carr, even on May 19, 1998.

Her failure to say that name -- and her insistence to officers that day that his name was Joseph Bennett -- are the crux of the state's case that she lied to protect Carr. She is charged with accessory after the fact to the murders of Tampa Detectives Randy Bell and Ricky Childers, and to Carr's escape from their custody.

Under blistering cross-examination from prosecutor Curt Allen, Bowen acknowledged she lied to Tampa police on the day of the murders when she said Carr had never been arrested before. Bowen knew Carr had been arrested in South Dakota.

The prosecutor confronted Bowen with correspondence she wrote to a friend, after Carr had committed suicide. Her love for Carr remained so intense that it "still burns to this day," she wrote, adding: "My heart will always belong to him, forever."

Bowen told the prosecutor: "At that point in time, I had a very sick mind, sir."

Bowen's romantic interests, it appears, have since shifted.

Late Wednesday, her defense lawyer called private investigator Frank Taylor to the stand. Taylor came to court wearing a 911 commemorative pin on his tie. He was clean-cut, affable, spoke of studying the Bible. He bore no obvious resemblance to the killer she once called her soul mate.

Taylor gave a quick piece of technical testimony on distance tests he made between police headquarters and the home of Carr's mother. It was meant to challenge the state's account of Bowen's actions on the crucial day.

But when Allen, the prosecutor, rose to cross-examine him, a surprising twist emerged, over the defense's objections.

"Sir," Allen asked, "are you in love with Bernice Bowen?"

"As a Christian man, I can say yes, I love her, she's my sister," Taylor replied.

"I'm not talking Christian, man! I'm talking romantic. Do you have a romantic love (for) this woman?"

Yes, Taylor said, he had professed his love for her. But, he acknowledged, their relationship will have to wait.

This is Bowen's second trial. A jury convicted her in 1999 of five counts of aiding Carr, but an appeals court threw two of those charges out. She is already serving 15 years for child abuse for exposing her children to Carr. If convicted on the current charges, she could face 18 more.

-- Christopher Goffard can be reached at (813) 226-3337 or goffard@sptimes.com

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