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Bernice Bowen is charged with accessory after the fact to Hank Earl Carr's escape and the slaying of two Tampa police detectives.
By DAVID KARP
© St. Petersburg Times, published August 8, 2001
TAMPA -- Bernice Bowen will go on trial for the second time on charges that she helped boyfriend Hank Earl Carr evade arrest after he killed two Tampa police detectives in 1998.
Once again, Bowen will face accusations that she failed to give police her boyfriend's real name moments after he killed detectives Ricky Childers and Randy Bell in May 1998.
"We feel strongly that she should be held accountable for her actions," Chief Assistant State Attorney Karen Stanley said Tuesday.
A second trial will likely rekindle controversy over what Bowen did and didn't do on May 19, 1998, when the two detectives and Florida Highway patrol Trooper James Crooks were murdered.
On that day, Bowen sat in the Tampa Police Department just hours after her boyfriend had shot her 4-year-old son. As she waited, officers told her that Carr had escaped from police and killed two detectives. They needed her help to catch him, and asked Bowen for Carr's real and assumed names.
Police said that she never gave them Carr's true name and that she bore responsibility for what happened next.
Before the day was over, Carr had also killed a highway patrol trooper, taken a hostage in a gas station in Hernando County, and then shot himself to death.
Prosecutors charged Bowen with five counts of accessory after the fact to her son's death, the three officers' murders, and Carr's escape from police. A jury in 1999 found her guilty on all counts, and Circuit Judge Daniel Perry sentenced her to 211/2 years in prison.
But in June, a state appeals court overturned all five convictions and acquitted Bowen of two charges of aiding Carr after he killed her son and after he killed the highway patrol trooper.
The court, however, said prosecutors could try Bowen again on three of the charges: accessory after the fact to Carr's escape and the two police detectives' deaths.
Hillsborough State Attorney Mark Ober decided within days of the appeals court decision that he would try Bowen on the remaining charges, but first prosecutors asked the court to reconsider its ruling.
On Tuesday, the 2nd District Court of Appeal declined to do so.
"I think everyone agreed that this is a case that needed to be tried," said Stanley, who is Ober's second-in-command.
But outside the office, there were other opinions. Bowen's supporters raised thousands to pay for her legal defense fund, saying that police turned Bowen, an abused girlfriend, into a scapegoat for her violent boyfriend's crimes.
"I think it's a vast waste of taxpayer dollars," said Dyann Bowen, 48, who is not related to the accused. "I think the woman has been punished enough."
Her supporters say Bowen's second trial will be far different from her first. Instead of having a court-appointed attorney, Bowen's supporters raised funds to hire private defense lawyer Claude Tison Jr.
This time, the appeals court also put new restrictions on prosecutors. For one, the court said a second trial should concentrate on what Bowen did after she learned Carr had killed two police officers, not before.
In the first trial, prosecutors told jurors about Bowen's silence before the murders -- when she didn't tell police that Carr carried a handcuff key and vowed to avoid arrest at any cost. He used that key to get out of his handcuffs and kill the detectives.
There can be no mention of that key -- or Bowen's knowledge of it -- in her second trial.
In a second trial, the appeals court also cautioned the judge about letting jurors hear about Carr's previous flights from police in South Dakota.
Whatever the verdict in a second trial, Bowen will serve the remainder of a 15-year sentence.
Although the appeals court overturned the accessory charges that resulted in a 211/2 year prison sentence, the court did not alter Bowen's conviction on child neglect charges. She pled guilty to those charges and was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
- Times staff writer David Karp can be reached at (813) 226-3376 or karp@sptimes.com