Truth trumps fiction.

Since its the time of year for spooky stories, I will repost this news piece from Yahoo I saw regarding a murder down in New Orleans. It sounds so lurid, you want to believe its made up but sadly, no, its a true story. Neither were NO natives- he from California and she from Pennsylvania but they lived right there in the Quarter and she even bartended at The Spotted Cat where I have had a drink or two over the years. I wonder if she made me one. She has that "familiar" look to her. Just so beyond the scope of what you think someone is capable of...wow...just shocking. RIP Addie.

 

By CAIN BURDEAU, Associated Press Writer 40 minutes ago

 

NEW ORLEANS - New Orleans is a city fascinated with the macabre. Carriage drivers regale French Quarter tourists nightly with phantasmagoric tales of black magic, debauchery and murder. Visitors stroll around the legendary cemeteries, known as "Cities of the Dead," and enjoy picnic lunches amid grand but crumbling tombs that look like something from the fevered mind of Edgar Allan Poe.

In recent days, New Orleans has been riveted by an all-too-true tale of tragedy: A man chopped up his girlfriend and cooked her head and legs in a French Quarter garret above a voodoo temple earlier this month before leaping to his death. It is one the ghastliest cases ever in a city drawn to the morbid.

In just about any other city, the spot where such horror took place might lie empty for years, regarded as cursed. But Midge Jones, a cemetery guide and enthusiast of the 19th-century voodoo queen Marie Laveau, said he has already inquired about renting the one-bedroom 1829 apartment, still cordoned off as a crime scene.

"As long as it is cleaned up and painted, and (has) a new gas stove, I've got no problem with it," the 64-year-old said.

According to police, Zackery Bowen, 28, strangled and dismembered 30-year-old Adriane "Addie" Hall, on Oct. 5. Eleven days later, Bowen jumped to his death from a hotel roof with a suicide note in his pocket telling police about the killing. Police found Hall's charred head in a pot, her arms and legs in the oven and her torso in the refrigerator.

For days, French Quarter residents have seemed unable to talk of anything else, in large part because the couple were so familiar. They partied on Mardi Gras, drank at the best watering holes and knew every colorful character in the Quarter.

"Everybody seems to have known them one way or another," said Amy O'Neal, while tending bar at a nightspot that sells absinthe and Transylvanian wine. "Everybody knows your business. The French Quarter is a small place."

Bowen and Hall apparently got together the night Hurricane Katrina hit in August 2005, when Hall gave Bowen refuge in her French Quarter apartment. They defied the mayor's order to evacuate, and fell in love. Bowen delivered groceries and meals by bicycle; Hall was described by friends as a poet and dancer, and worked in bars.

But Bowen also talked about being disturbed by events he experienced while serving in

Iraq and Bosnia with the U.S. military, and in his suicide letter he spoke of using drugs. And friends said Hall told them about abuse in her past.

Over time, their love affair unraveled. Hall apparently tried to extricate herself from the relationship by renting the apartment above the voodoo shop on her own. Shortly before her death she complained to others that Bowen had cheated on her.

There is no suggestion the slaying had anything to do with voodoo. But some guides are already dropping the story into the yarns they spin as they take visitors on tours of the Quarter, a place of Gothic spires, curlicued wrought-iron balconies, and shop windows cluttered with voodoo candles and bottles of exotic potions.

Michaela Reid, a 33-year-old guide who leads tourists on mule-driven carriage rides, said she relates some of the couple's story as she tells tales of the Quarter's macabre history. "You've got to," she said. "It's kind of creepy."

Kalila Katherina Smith, a self-described psychic who runs the haunted history tour business Jones works for, said she wants to use her paranormal powers to see if there any spirits lingering at the spot where the murder took place.

"What happened to her was very violent, very sudden," Smith said. "It's likely that she's still wandering there and doesn't even know she's dead."

But the voodoo priestess who lived next to the couple, above her temple, said the effort to capitalize on the tragedy troubles her.

"People in New Orleans might be gearing up to make another ghost story, to make a dollar," Priestess Miriam said. "I could do that, but I'm not eager to make a dollar off this."

I found a more in-depth report from The Times-Picayune in NOLA:

By Walt Philbin and Laura Maggi
Staff writer

A suicide note in the pocket of a man who jumped off the Omni Royal Orleans Hotel late Tuesday led police to the grisly scene of his girlfriend’s murder, where they found her charred head in a pot on the stove, her legs and arms baked in the oven and the rest of her dismembered body in a trash bag in the refrigerator, according to police and the couple’s landlord.

The man, Zackery Bowen, a tall 28-year-old man with long blond hair, confessed in the note to have killed his girlfriend, Adriane “Addie” Hall, 30, on Oct. 5, according to police sources and friends of the couple. Officially, police declined to release the name of the victim, saying she was still a “Jane Doe” until the remains of her body could be forensically identified.

“This is not accidental. I had to take my own life to pay for the one I took,” Bowen wrote in a short suicide note found in a plastic bag in his pants’ front pocket, which directed police to the scene of the crime and gave a synopsis of what he had done, according to sources familiar with the case.

A source familiar with the investigation said that detectives found two pots on the stove, one containing a the victim’s head and the other her hands and feet. Next to the pot containing the head were carrots and potatoes that had been cut up, but none had been placed in the pots.

In the oven were turkey-basting trays containing human legs and arms, the source said. At least one of the pans had seasoning sprinkled on the human remains, the source said.
At an afternoon news conference, Chief of Detectives Anthony Cannatella said there was no evidence of cannibalism on the scene, and an autopsy on Bowen, done some 13 days after he claimed to have committed the murder, showed no evidence of body parts in his system.

Police gave no indication they suspect Bowen might be a serial killer, but detectives said they were compiling a detailed profile of Bowen to submit to a an FBI database that stores suspected acts of serial violence. Homicide detective Ronald Ruiz said he is looking at other murders nationwide to see if they can be connected to Bowen.

When police arrived late Tuesday night at the apartment Bowen and Hall shared, they found a second screed from Bowen, printed on eight pages in his girlfriend’s journal, providing a graphically detailed accounting of the slaying. He started the note formally, giving his full name, social security and driver’s license numbers, as well as his date of birth.

“Today is Monday 16 October 2 a.m. I killed her at 1 a.m. Thursday 5 October,” Bowen wrote. “I very calmly strangled her. It was very quick.”

But what Bowen did after he killed Hall was anything but quick. He claimed in his note to have sexually violated the body several times, eventually passing out in a drunken stupor on the futon next to his girlfriend’s corpse. The next day, after he got off work delivering groceries, Bowen moved the body to the bathroom tub and dismembered her remains with a handsaw and knife.An autopsy conducted on Wednesday confirmed that Hall was strangled and dismembered after her death, police said.

“He appeared to clean up the bathroom a lot after he did it,” one officer said.

Directed by a spray-painted note on the wall, police found the victim’s head burned beyond recognition in a pot on top of the stove. Her legs and arms were in the same condition in pans inside the oven, police said. In his note, Bowen wrote that he put her feet and hands in pots of water on the stove burners.

Bowen hailed from Los Angeles, police said, but apparently had lived in the New Orleans area for some time. He registered to vote in Louisiana in August 1996. Friends said he claimed to have served in the military in Iraq and Bosnia, and displayed both pride and angst over that experience.

Hall, too, was not a New Orleans native, although police said only that they believed she originally came from Pennsylvania. She registered to vote at a New Orleans address in 2002.

As of Wednesday, police had found no other evidence of domestic violence in Hall and Bowen’s relationship, said Cannatella at a New Orleans Police Department press conference.

After being tossed out of their apartment on Gov. Nicholls Street in the French Quarter at the end of September, the couple rented an apartment together at 826 N. Rampart Street, above a voodoo shop, said their landlord, Leo Watermeier, who recently ran for mayor.

“He may have in retrospect seemed a little troubled,” Watermeier said early Wednesday morning, hours after he led investigators to the gruesome scene inside the apartment.

Though they appeared happy when they rented the Rampart Street apartment — telling Watermeier they had fallen in love on the night Hurricane Katrina struck, when Hall gave Bowen shelter — they soon had a bitter falling out, Watermeier said. After the storm, the couple lived a vagabond existence in the shattered city, becoming feature fodder for the swarm of national media eager to profile post-flood diehards.

But on Oct. 5, during a dispute over which of their names would appear on the lease, Hall told Watermeier she intended to kick Bowen out of the apartment, after finding out that he had cheated on her, Watermeier said.

Bowen did not take the news well, Watermeier said.

“He said, ‘Did you just let her sign a lease alone? Because I’m screwed. I’m totally messed up now. She’s trying to kick me out of our apartment,’ ” Watermeier said.

Hall admitted she was trying to throw Bowen out, he said.

“I caught him cheating on me, and I am kicking him out of this apartment,” she told Watermeier.

Watermeier told the couple to work through their differences and get back to him.

He never saw Hall again, and assumed they’d worked it out.

Bowen’s suicide was first discovered Tuesday at around 10:30 pm when his body was spotted by someone in an upper floor lounge of the Omni Royal. Police determined that Bowen had jumped from an outside terrace near a swimming pool on an upper floor to the roof of the Chartres Street garage on the fourth floor, police said.

Bowen methodically planned the suicide. He left police the phone number of his estranged wife, spray-painted on the wall in the Rampart apartment, while warning them in his note that he hadn’t talked to those closest to him.

“I didn’t contact any of my family,” he wrote. “So that’ll explain the shock.”

On Oct. 9, according to his letter, Bowen came home from work andagain began to dismember Hall’s body, in an apartment where he’d set the air conditioning at a frigid 60 degrees. Then he stopped.

“Halfway through the task, I stopped and thought about what I was doing,” he wrote to police in his girlfriend’s journal. “The decision to halt the first idea and move to Plan B (the crime scene you are now in) came after awhile. I scared myself not only by the action of calmly strangling the woman I’ve loved for one and a half years ... but by my entire lack of remorse. I’ve known for ever (sic) how horrible a person I am (ask anyone) ...”

   

Killer's suicide note leads cops to grisly scene
By Walt Philbin, Steve Ritea and Trymaine Lee
Staff writers

Zackery Bowen walked up the ledge, looked over, then turned around and walked back.

A surveillance camera trained on the eighth floor at the poolside bar in the Omni Royal Orleans caught Bowen, 28, repeating the action, over and over, apparently hesitating as he prepared for one final, horrific act.

His descent into darkness began more than two weeks ago, police and associates said, when he murdered his girlfriend, 30-year-old Adriane “Addie” Hall, strangling her in their one-bedroom apartment over a French Quarter voodoo shop. Bowen killed his girlfriend of more than a year without a tinge of remorse, according to a suicide note he carried in his right front pocket, in a plastic bag, for police to find on his corpse.

Bowen left a second, rambling letter in the couple’s apartment, a graphic narrative scrawled of the his murder and descretion of Hall’s body, scrawled on eight small pages of his girlfriend’s journal. That letter, along with interviews with police investigators and the couple’s friends and co-workers in the French Quarter and Faubourg Marigny, tell a sordid tale of extreme highs and lows, starting with a Katrina-inspired love affair and ending in among the most gruesome slayings in the city’s history.
In the letter, Bowen confessed that for almost two weeks after the killing he continued to live with the corpse of the woman who had repeatedly proclaimed her love for him. In those final days, driven by an accelerating madness, underpinned by unrelenting fury and self-loathing, he dismembered her corpse — baking her limbs in the oven and cooking her head in a pot on the stove, police said — until he decided to methodically end his own life.

Bowen had planned every detail before heading to the hotel bar Tuesday night, except, perhaps, for the hestitation he faced on the ledge. The hotel security tape, described in an interview with police sources, shows him struggling to muscle up the courage.

Up to the railing, then back. Up again, then back.

Just before 8:30 p.m., he did it, leaping to his death on the street down below.

“I just find it so hard to believe,” said Caryn Lott, owner of Buffa’s, the French Quarter outpost where he had tended bar. “I’d be willing to bet it was something in his past...something that was underneath. I just don’t think we looked far enough.”

Life as bartenders

Much of Bowen’s past remains a mystery, only known by the painful details he leaked out to his friends in New Orleans. He ends the letter with a list of his “failures — school, jobs, military, marriage, parenthood, morals, love.”

“Every last one of these I failed at,” he wrote. “Hence the 28 cigarette burns” — 13 on each arm two on his chest — one for each year of my existance (sic).”

Friends said he grew up in Los Angeles, but the details that drove him to inflict those burns into his flesh are few.

Before meeting Hall, he had been married and had two children, a girl and a boy, said Louis Matassa, who later hired Bowen to make deliveries for his French Quarter grocery.

Lott recalled how Bowen claimed he had served in the military. Efforts to confirm his military service were unsuccessful Wednesday.

Though typically gregarious, Bowen’s demeanor took a dive when he talked about that part of his life, often after several rounds of Miller High Life and shots of Jameson Irish Whiskey, his drinks of choice. He would grow angry and distraught, Lott said, talking of how the government “messed him over,” referring to his military service, which he told friends included stints in Iraq and Bosnia.

While he sometimes spoke of that service with pride, somewhere overseas there had been an incident concerning a child that weighed heavy on him, said Donovan Calabaza, another bartender at Buffa’s, “but we really didn’t get into it.”

Lott didn’t like it when he talked about the military.

“How ‘bout them Saints?” Lott would say, trying to move him onto a lighter topic.

Hall’s life carried its own burdens. Friends said she grew up in Pennsylvania, though they had few other details of her past. Calabaza said he and Hall occasionally shared details about their similar childhood traumas.

She and Bowen fell in love the night Hurricane Katrina struck, said former mayoral candidate Leo Watermeier, who would later rent them their last apartment on N. Rampart Street, relaying the story they told him.

Blond and petite, Hall harbored an intense attraction to Bowen, a tall, strapping man with a magnetic personality. Lott said she hired him as “a little eye candy for the ladies.” They visited each other at the bars where each of them worked — she visiting him at Buffa’s, he visiting her at The Spotted Cat in the Faubourg Marigny.

Sometimes he took advantage of his looks at her expense, associates who knew the couple said, flirting or even making out with other women. Their relationship veered between highs and lows, but “she loved that guy,” said Eura Jones, who worked with Hall at The Spotted Cat. “She really loved him.”

When the blaring music at Buffa’s drowned out their conversation, they wrote love notes to each other, Calabaza said.

Would not leave Quarter

In the weeks after the storm, they became French Quarter icons, some of the last holdouts who resisted calls from the mayor and the military to leave the city. They peacefully resisted, inventing a new brand of post-disaster bohemianism.

They became inventors by necessity, fashioning a fly swatter from a pair of plastic plates taped onto a wire hanger. He fashioned a stove of sorts out of a metal bucket packed with felled branches and covered with an old barbeque grill.

In the afternoons, they sat on the stoop of their powerless Gov. Nicholls Street apartment, getting their news from neighbors and passers-by, often offering them cocktails. Bowen usually went shirtless in those humid weeks after the storm. Hall wore a tank top, lovingly stroking stray cats that sauntered up to where she and Bowen sat, sharing cigarettes.

“It’s actually been kind of nice,” Bowen said in those first weeks after the storm. “And I’m getting healthier, eating right and toning up.”

“We’ve been able to see the stars for the first time,” Hall said. “Before, this was a 24-hour lit city. Now it’s peaceful.”

Both working as bartenders at the time, Hall and Bowen were flush with booze and beer, sometimes trading it for water and ice when they couldn’t get enough from the Salvation Army. They got a three months’ supply of food, mostly canned, when a local grocer opened his doors and invited people to peacefully take what they want, rather than face the destruction caused by looters.

Hall devised a provocative way to lure police protection to their neighborhood. The New York Times described her habit of flashing her breasts at passing police cars to make sure their house got routine patrols.

But as the year wore on and life began to stabilize in New Orleans, their relationship began to fall apart.

Several months ago, Hall failed to show up for work — distraught by a brief breakup with Bowen. He also disappeared from his jobs at Buffa’s and making deliveries for Matassa’s. They would reuinite, but only for a time, friends said, before his downward spiral into madness took hold.

“It was a revolving door,” said Lisa Perilloux, a regular at Buffa’s.

One night in particular, she was seen screaming at him from Buffa’s doorway as he stood in the street, Perilloux said.

“He was getting rid of her,” Perilloux said, who said she never heard him say anything nice about Hall.

While Bowen struggled with his own demons, Hall had her own moments of instability. Friends describe her as having at-times a frightening mean streak. She was arrested on Aug. 14 after pulling a gun on a man at a French Quarter corner early in the morning. According to the police report, Hall pointed a “blue steel” handgun at the man and said, “What the (expletive) is wrong with you?”

As the man called the police, Hall ran to her apartment on Gov. Nicholls, where officers found her changed out of blue jeans and T-shirt and into a nightgown. At the apartment, officers found the gun, along with a bag of what police believed to be marijuana and two pipes. The man identified Hall as the woman who pulled a gun on him, according to the police reports.

Hall was booked with aggravated assault with a firearm, first offense possession of marijuana and possession of drug paraphernalia.

The morning of Sept. 28, police again arrived at the Gov. Nicholls apartment, responding to a call about a disturbance, according to a police report. They found Bowen on the stoop of the apartment. Upon spotting the officers, Bowen got up and dropped an object that turned out to be a clear plastic bag of marijuana, according to the report. He was booked with first offense possession of marijuana.

Looking for a home

Even as they were falling apart as a couple, Jones said they faced more stress when they were evicted from the Gov. Nicholls apartment around the time of Bowen’s arrest. Hall also disappeared permanently from her job at The Spotted Cat around that time.

“I had a feeling something was seriously wrong,” said Ed Parrish, The Spotted Cat’s co-owner.

Around Oct. 1, they rented an apartment from Watermeier at 826 N. Rampart Street, above the Voodoo Spiritual Temple and Cultural Center.

But a few days later, they were fighting again — this time over which of their names would appear on the lease. Hall told Watermeier she was going to kick Bowen out. He had been cheating on her, Watermeier said, and she had not had enough.

No one ever saw her again.

On Oct. 6, a day after Bowen said he killed Hall, he wrote in his confession that he was “posed with the question of how to dispose of the corpse,” he wrote.

He continued that he passed out after drinking, went to work at Matassa’s, all day long devising a plan that involved cooking her body.

It was during the days of methodically dismembering her body that Bowen said he decided to kill himself after one final blowout — “spend(ing) the $1,500 I had being happy until I killed myself...So that’s what I did: good food, good drugs, good strippers, good friends and any loose ends I may have had...And had a fantastic time living out my days.”

Voodoo Priestess Miriam Chamani, who runs the center, said she last saw Bowen Saturday morning as he was walking back into the apartment.

Last Sunday, Bowen appeared “all jolly,” Preilloux said, as he quaffed beer and shot Irish whiskey at Buffa’s.

“He was (in) a great mood, best mood I’ve ever seen him in,” she said.

Calabaza quoted him saying he would take a “much-needed vacation” — to Cozumel or some other island resort.

Two nights before Bowen lept to his death, Kalabaza recalled telling Bowen:

“Just think, tomorrow night, you’ll be in paradise.”

Steve Ritea can be reached at sritea@timespicayune.com or by calling (504) 826-3396. Trymaine Lee can be reached at tlee@timespicayune.com or by calling (504) 826-3301. Staff writer Laura Maggi contributed to this report.