A 70-year-old man has been accused of murdering a Navy pilot’s wife in Norfolk nearly 40 years ago — a slaying in which police once suspected two notorious serial killers.
On Friday, police arrested Dennis Lee Bowman in the 1980 strangulation and stabbing of 25-year-old Kathleen O’Brien Doyle. He was arrested in Allegan County, Michigan, where he now lives.
Friends found Doyle’s body on Sept. 11, 1980, inside her Ocean View area home in the 9400 block of Granby Street, police said at the time. Doyle had been raped, stabbed with a knife, and choked with a cord, according to police. She had been dead for at least 24 hours by the time her body was found.
At the time, Doyle’s husband of nine months, Lt. Stephen Doyle, was away at sea on the USS Eisenhower in the Indian Ocean. While her husband was deployed, Doyle had been living in her home alone with her tabby cat. They had no children.
Doyle grew up in a Navy family. Her father was a retired Navy officer in San Diego and her grandparents reportedly lived in Tidewater at the time of her death.
Bowman, who was 31 in 1980, is being held Michigan and awaiting extradition to Virginia.
Police did not specify what cracked the case 39 years later, but in a press release credited an extended investigation by Norfolk detectives and Naval Criminal Investigative Service agents, “along with forensic evidence.”
Two other men were previously accused of murdering Doyle.
In 1984, Norfolk police charged Henry Lee Lucas, then 47, and Ottis Elwood Toole, 37, with rape and murder.
By that time, Lucas had already been convicted of murdering a Texas woman in 1979, and sentenced to death, according to a 2001 Associated Press story reporting that Lucas had died in a Texas prison of an apparent heart attack at 64.
Before being sent to prison in Texas, Lucas served 15 years in Michigan for beating his mother to death.
After his arrest in 1983, he claimed to have killed as many as 600 people around the country, prompting detectives from 40 states to interview him about some 3,000 homicides, according to the AP article.
One of them: Doyle’s.
In June 1984, Norfolk police Sgt. R.E. Hazelette interviewed Lucas in Texas, where the death row inmate confessed to killing Doyle, and implicated Toole as well, according to a Ledger-Star article about Lucas being charged.
After getting Lucas to confess, Hazelette requested authorities in Florida send him reports about Lucas and Toole’s hair and blood types. Norfolk detectives determined that information “matched forensic evidence found at the scene,” resulting in the two men being charged.
Lucas also admitted to killing a Virginia Beach woman, 18-year-old Alice Margeret Eskew, a hitchhiker whose naked body was found in September 1979 in a wooded area in Virginia Beach.
Lucas told police he murdered because hated women. “I wanted to destroy every one I could find,” he said. “I was doing a good job of it.”
Lucas later recanted many of his confessions, and the Texas prosecutor who helped send him to death row said he believes Lucas killed between three and a dozen people — a fraction of the total he once claimed.
”I don’t think he knew exactly,” the prosecutor said. ”It’s difficult to imagine you can rely on anything he said, but the fact remains he was a serial killer, even though we’re unable to pinpoint the exact number.”
Norfolk prosecutors eventually dropped the charges against Lucas and Toole, said Amanda Howie, spokeswoman for the Norfolk Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office. She said she’s not sure when that happened.
Norfolk police did not immediately respond to a call and an email requesting comment.
Before he died, Lucas told The Houston Chronicle he concocted the hoax to make “the police look stupid. I was out to wreck Texas law enforcement.”
In 2003, Doyle’s father, John O’Brien, chastised Norfolk police and city leaders in a letter to the editor in The Virginian-Pilot. O’Brien said he thinks they, like many other officials and law enforcement agencies around the country, were eager to believe Lucas so they could “clear their books.”
“It is my opinion that my daughter’s case might have been solved long ago if only the Norfolk Police Department had not been duped into believing a national-scale hoax perpetrated by Henry Lee Lucas,” O’Brien wrote.
Jonathan Edwards, 757-598-3453, jonathan.edwards@pilotonline.com
