A 72-year-old accused child murderer arrested in Cathedral City waived extradition today to Ohio, where he allegedly raped and tortured a teenage girl before killing her 41 years ago.
Robert ``Bo'' Brent Bowman is expected to be picked up by Ohio authorities within the next two weeks. In the interim, he'll remain jailed at the Robert Presley Detention Center in Riverside.
``We will notify Ohio to come pick him up,'' said Riverside Superior Court Judge Helios Hernandez, who signed the extradition order this afternoon.
Hernandez set a confirmation hearing for Oct. 20, but noted that ``if Ohio does its job and picks you up before that time, Mr. Bowman, you don't have to be here'' for the hearing.
Bowman was arrested last Thursday in Cathedral City when two District Attorney's Office investigators, working on an unrelated case, noticed a man riding a bike and thought he was a person wanted on a local subpoena.
The investigators, who were joined by Cathedral City police officers, interviewed the man, identified him as Bowman and discovered he was wanted for murder in Ohio and had been featured recently on Fox's ``America's Most Wanted'' for the murder of 14-year-old Eileen Adams, said District Attorney's Office spokesman Michael Jeandron.
Authorities did not disclose what Bowman was doing in the Coachella Valley, but said he has been quoted as saying he preferred warmer climates.
Prosecutors provided reporters with transcripts of the ``America's Most Wanted'' TV show and Web site that outlined the background of the case.
Adams, a freshman at Central Catholic High School in Toledo, vanished December 18, 1967, and was most likely abducted after she stepped off a school bus and headed to her sister's house, according to ``America's Most Wanted.''
Adams told a friend she was going Christmas shopping but was never seen again.
About six weeks later, on Jan. 31, 1968, Adams' frozen body -- clothed, wrapped in a mattress with her hands and feet bound -- was found in a field in nearby Monroe County, Mich., according to investigators.
She had a telephone cord looped around her neck and a forehead wound where her attacker had hammered a nail into her skull after her death.
In December 1981, there was a break in the case when Bowman's wife contacted the Toledo Police Department and alleged that her husband had murdered a girl in 1967, investigators said.
His wife gave Toledo police detectives chilling details, including how Adams was allegedly kept alive in the fruit cellar of their basement, ``hanging like Jesus,'' naked, gagged and bound to the wall. The girl was down there for days and even weeks, investigators believed.
The wife said she attempted to help the girl down off the wall, but before she could, the teen screamed and Bowman was alerted, according to AMW.
She said that when she questioned him about it, Bowman went downstairs and killed the girl, then made his wife help him dump the body in a farmer's field in Michigan, investigators said.
After hearing the wife's story, police tracked Bowman down in Florida in 1982 and interviewed him. Bowman was homeless and living in a burned-out restaurant with roaches, rats and snakes, all of which he named and treated like pets, according to investigators.
Bowman never confessed to the crime, but he never denied it, investigators said. Nevertheless, evidence at the time was insufficient to prosecute him and he soon vanished from Florida.
In September 2006, the victim's father met an off-duty Toledo police sergeant at dinner and told him about the case. The sergeant, Mike McGee, promised to look into it.
A cold case detective who worked with McGee pulled the case file and found there was DNA evidence left behind: a small sample of semen left in the victim's underwear. But 1980s technology had not been sufficiently developed to make use of the evidence, investigators said.
A DNA match was made in 2006 when officers tracked down Bowman's daughter and did a reverse paternity test on her. A murder warrant was then issued for the suspect.
