In a tragic and bizarre case that sounds like was ripped from the pages of a medical murder mystery, a poison specialist has been accused of poisoning his wife in Minnesota after the woman died under "suspicious circumstances" in August.
The specialist in question, 30-year-old Connor Bowman, is the subject of a criminal complaint in Rochester, Minnesota after investigators began to suspect that he may have poisoned his late wife, 32-year-old Mayo Clinic pharmacist Betty Bowman.
According to the complaint, Betty Bowman was admitted to the hospital where she worked on August 16 with severe gastrointestinal issues and died just a few days later, with her cause of death formerly listed as Hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis or HLH, a rare illness in which white blood cells build up and become overactive in the organs.
Her husband, who worked as a poison control counselor taking calls about potential poisonings, attempted to have Bowman cremated, but the county medical examiner's office intervened because it had, as the complaint points out, begun to believe that the woman died under "possible suspicious circumstances."
And boy, were those circumstances suspicious. After speaking to people close to the couple, investigators learned that not only had the Bowmans discussed divorce due to infidelity, but that Connor, who was wracked with debt, told someone that he would get a $500,000 life insurance payout from his wife's death.
What's more, upon accessing his search history, police found that the poison specialist had been researching the gout drug colchicine, which was found in her system in spite of no records showing that she had ever suffered from that illness. In the days leading up to his wife going to the hospital and subsequently dying there, Bowman had even looked at an academic journal article about lethal doses of various drugs, converted his wife's weight to kilograms, and multiplied it by 0.8, which is "considered the lethal dosage rate of colchicine," the complain states.
Along with the gout drug searches, Bowman also made other seemingly incriminating queries, such as "internet browsing history: can it be used in court?" and questions about police tracking Amazon purchases. He went on, the complaint claims, to purchase sodium nitrate, "which can be used to limit oxygen transport through the body," and visited a Google shop page that featured online vendors selling the chemical.
Satisfied with the evidence against him, cops arrested Bowman on October 20 after his wife's cause of death was updated from HLH to homicide. When searching the Bowman residence, the complaint added in its conclusion to dramatic effect not often found in such documents, police found a deposit slip for $450,000.
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