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Two lives, one story

Twins Jennifer and Charlotte Rowse shared everything: a promising start in life, a close bond and careers as police officers. Then tragedy struck and their lives spiraled down. Together.

By BRADY DENNIS
Published April 24, 2005

	[Times files]
	Jennifer (left) and Charlotte Rowse were good students at Dunedin High School, and the local Elks Lodge once named them both Teenager of the Month, unable to pick one over the other.
	Above are their jail mug shots: Jennifer is at left, and Charlotte is on the right.

Their lives began, five minutes apart, in a windowless Lakeland hospital room in November 1960. Their mother watched Edward R. Murrow on television that night, just before her water broke.

She remembers how boldly the girls arrived - first Charlotte, then Jennifer - blond-haired and blue-eyed and kicking their way into the world. From then on, they never ventured far from each other.

"What one did, the other did," said their mother, Doris Rowse. "They were always together, always."

Together.

Through grade school and high school and college. Through the joy of marriages and the birth of Charlotte's daughter. Through the realization of their dream to become Tampa police officers.

Together.

Through divorces and depression. Through a police shooting one December evening that haunted them. Through the downward spiral that followed, dragging them to the wrong side of the law and into the shadows of drug addiction.

Earlier this month, more than 44 years after that November night in 1960, the sisters were found dead in Room 223 of a dingy, run-down Lakeland motel. The door was locked. The curtains had been pinned shut. There were no signs of foul play.

Only the two of them, side by side.

Theirs is a story that began with such promise, with two girls eager to face the world. It ended with two broken women, weary of life.

Growing up, the twins hunted for pet turtles along the shores of Lake Alfred. They joined the Girl Scouts and loved to visit Walt Disney World. Neighbors had trouble telling Charlotte and Jennifer apart, so they took to calling them "Charlo-fer."

They were the babies of the family, years behind their siblings, who already were heading for careers in accounting and nursing and pharmacy.

At Dunedin High School, the twins ran track together, helping the team to a school-best, 13th-place finish in the state finals.

"With hard work and dedication," the yearbook stated that year, "the girls ran all summer long in trying to build a good team."

Charlotte was the history club president; Jennifer was secretary. Charlotte won a National Merit Scholarship; Jennifer was in the National Honor Society.

The local Elks Lodge once named them both Teenager of the Month, unable to pick one over the other. "They are so much alike," a woman said at the awards ceremony. "They almost go hand in hand."

The twins interned at the Largo Police Deparment, confused their boyfriends with their similar looks and finished each other's sentences.

At the University of South Florida they studied criminal justice together. They both worked as security guards. Jennifer joined the Tampa Police Department in 1982; Charlotte followed four years later.

"We tried to talk them out of it," Doris Rowse recalled. But the twins pressed on.

Marriages eventually changed the twins' names to Charlotte Johnston and Jennifer Foster, but they remained close.

"They were hard-working, full of life. They were also very pretty," said Steve Cole, the Tampa police spokesman at the time.

And they were tough.

Jennifer earned a reputation as a gritty officer known for working the streets and arresting drug dealers. She compiled notebooks with 600 names - crack dealers, drug users, their criminal records, pictures, addresses, the cars they drove. Her tenacity earned her a nickname, The Bitch.

"Drugs make life hell for the people who live in these projects," she told a reporter in 1987.

They loved police work so passionately that they would watch cop shows at home after duty.

Then came Dec. 30, 1988, the night everything changed.

Charlotte's friend and partner, Officer Porfirio Soto, was shot to death as the two of them tried to arrest a man in east Tampa. Ten months later, when the killer was spared the death penalty, Charlotte unleashed a tirade outside the courthouse.

"That man is nothing but an animal," she told a bank of television cameras. "The lives of police officers ... should mean more than what the judge and the jury said (they mean) today."

The next day, acting Chief Curtis Lane placed Charlotte and Jennifer on administrative leave, saying, "They've been through this thing together."

"It was very tragic and very emotional," Cole said. "You have a tragedy like that, and it kind of takes the shine off the life."

Everyone noticed an immediate change in the sisters. Jennifer, who had been outgoing and gregarious, "started getting some rough edges," Cole said. "She no longer was the pretty, smiling blonde officer out on patrol. She was trying to protect her sister."

And Charlotte?

"(She) became much quieter after that, and much more inward," Cole said. "And I think the more inward she became, the more Jennifer tried to come to her rescue and protect her. The two really fed off one another. . . . It just seemed like (they) never bounced back."

At home, Doris Rowse saw them wither.

"I thought (Charlotte) might not come out of it," she said. "I guess she didn't, really. She brooded on it, wondered what she might have done differently. I told her, "I think you did the best you could, honey.' She hasn't had a very happy life since then."

Along with the shooting, Jennifer faced another crisis. Her marriage to Detective Mark Foster - her second - had turned unhappy. In the summer of 1990, according to her mother and official records, Jennifer took an overdose of pills and nearly died.

Several months later, investigators were called to her house in Plant City when she fired a .380-caliber handgun in the back yard after arguing with her husband. She said her marriage was over and she had "no reason to continue to live."

A doctor admitted her for psychological evaluation under Florida's Baker Act. Jennifer later was released, and her marriage ended several years later, not long after Foster got an injunction against her, claiming she slammed a TV on the floor and took $400 from his police car.

Charlotte retired from the Tampa Police Department in autumn 1990 and received a disability pension. Jennifer applied for the same pension but was denied. She left several months after her sister. By age 30, the law enforcement careers they had cherished were gone.

"That was the beginning of the end," Doris Rowse said. "They changed. They changed."

The twins headed north, to Ocala.

Doris Rowse said they enrolled together in a technical school to become court reporters. Charlotte dropped out, but Jennifer finished.

Even so, the sisters never again held a steady job. And they ventured onto the wrong side of the law.

In March 1998, Marion County deputies arrested Charlotte on charges of DUI, marijuana possession and possession of narcotic equipment. The judge withheld adjudication. The next year she was arrested again in Ocala, this time on charges of cocaine possession. She spent 10 days in jail, records show.

Jennifer, who had been so adamant about getting drugs off the street, also stumbled.

In 2001, a Polk County deputy who pulled her over found a crack pipe in her car, along with three tubes of beige makeup, presumably to cover the "obvious multiple sores on her arms," a report stated. He arrested her on cocaine charges.

"They were addicted," the twins' mother said. "They didn't seem to be able to break away."

The problems went beyond drugs.

Their arrests - more than 19 in all - included charges of passing bad checks, domestic battery, driving without a valid license, failure to appear in court and violation of probation.

Jennifer twice pretended to be her older sister Christine Buckley when stopped by deputies. The sisters moved often, sometimes returning to live with their mother, occasionally listing addresses at aging motels such as the Relax Inn.

The months peeled away. They drifted through life, rudderless.

Even with their troubles mounting and the years of turmoil showing on their faces, there were good days. When their mother suffered a stroke last fall, the sisters looked after her.

"They were a great help to me," Doris Rowse said. "Jennifer did the housework; Charlotte did all the cooking."

And then there was Rachel.

Charlotte had given birth to an angel-faced girl in 2000 after a relationship with a man named Chester Michael Stewart, who had a criminal history of his own and didn't support the child.

Rachel was the calm in Charlotte's stormy life.

"I heard her say so many times, "She's the only thing I have to live for. Rachel saved my life,' " Doris Rowse said.

Charlotte had been teaching her daughter to swim. Jennifer was teaching her to dance. They took her to Busch Gardens and to a nearby public park.

But the good days never lasted.

In October, Jennifer told Lakeland police that she had locked herself in a bedroom during a fight with her sister in their mother's apartment. She said Charlotte forced her way in and scratched her face. Jennifer didn't want to press charges, but officers arrested Charlotte on a battery charge.

With the sisters in and out of jail, and with Doris Rowse too frail to care for Rachel, the state Department of Children and Families put the girl in foster care. A judge ordered Charlotte to pay child support.

"It is only right that I pay support for Rachel," she wrote in a December letter from her jail cell. "I only ask that being a low-income, single mother that the support be minimal. ... This disability and my criminal record has made it impossible for me to work."

In December, another blow came when the twins and their mother lost their apartment and split up.

Rowse said her daughters grew increasingly despondent, often contemplating suicide.

"They talked about it a lot. They'd just say they thought that would be the best way," Doris Rowse said. "I said, "Well, I don't think that's the answer. Think of the others.'

"What else could I do?"

On April 8, the manager of an old Days Inn on Memorial Boulevard in Lakeland called police. Charlotte had rented the room for a week. When no one checked out, he came knocking. No answer.

Inside he found the twins dead, one on a mattress, the other sprawled on the floor.

The curtains had been fastened with safety pins. The air conditioner was on. Police said that there were no signs of violence and that the women had been dead for more than a day.

An autopsy didn't reveal exactly what killed them. Toxicology tests are pending, and the twins' bodies have since been cremated, officials said.

Doris Rowse feels certain what happened.

"I really think the world just got (to be) too much for them," she said. "I think they thought they couldn't take it anymore."

Whatever the case, the sisters left behind a painful example of how good lives can turn tragic with the squeeze of a trigger.

They left behind stunned and saddened former co-workers at the Tampa Police Department and two haunting mug shots, with years of sadness carved into their drawn faces, a far cry from the fresh-faced smiles of their youth.

They left behind their 81-year-old mother, who's putting together a memorial picture album for a little girl they left behind, too.

Doris Rowse aches for her daughters and wishes their lives had turned out differently. She hopes, in death, that they escaped whatever demons had chased them in life.

"I hope they are at peace," she said. "I'm certainly hoping they're together in heaven."

In her prayers, she asks God to grant her that much.

Brady Dennis can be reached at 813 226-3386 or dennis@sptimes.com

[Last modified April 24, 2005, 10:55:29]