Boy Scout Terry Bowers Murdered at Camp: Loved Ones Still Looking for Answers 50 Years Later
 |
| Terrence Bowers |
To
become so obsessed with a topic that a person would spend 50 years of life investigating
it – only to hit dead ends – is a stubbornly hopeful dedication that many will
never experience. Even after decades have passed, Lorraine Placido has not
given up hope of catching her neighbor, Terrence (Terry) Bowers’, killer. In an
attempt to explain her continued fascination with Terry Bowers’ unsolved
homicide, Placido said “I just could not imagine losing a child and then never
having resolution or justice or knowing exactly what happened." While it
is difficult to fathom the possibility of losing a loved one to a homicide, the
reality is that authorities have failed to find justice for many families and
friends whose lives have been changed forever by the murder of a loved one. According
to the FBI Uniform Crime report, today, on average, 40% of homicides go
unsolved. In 1965, detectives solved 90% of homicide cases.
The
unresolved nature of Terry Bowers’ death may be why Placido has not been able
to let go of her investigation, but to some, the most disturbing aspect of
Terry’s death may be that he was in an area where he should have been safe. When
a child goes on a camping trip with a boy scout troop, most parents do not feel
the need to wonder if their child will return alive. However, a Boy Scouts
camping trip is where, in 1970, one boy awoke to find Terrence Bowers’ body,
before running to the instructors’ tent, screaming that Terry was covered in blood.
Terry Bowers was 11 years old when he was killed in Chester county Pennsylvania,
on the grounds of a Catholic church, surrounded by other children and
instructors who never heard a sound as he was stabbed to death through his
sleeping bag.
There
are many unsolved homicides in Pennsylvania, but Terry Bowers’ is one that is
shocking both due to his young age and due to the fact that there were never
any concrete leads in the case. Police Believe the murder weapon to be a “Boy Scout
knife or an ordinary pocket knife with a three-inch blade.” The Boy Scouts of
America state that a knife with a four to five-inch blade is the largest that
is necessary for most camping tasks. The knife that ended Terry’s knife may
have been routinely used for nothing more than simple camping tasks. Investigators
drained the pond where the boy scouts were staying and swept the church grounds
with metal detectors, but the knife used to kill Terry Bowers was never found. Each
boy scout took a polygraph test to determine if he knew anything about Terry’s
death, but none were suspected of the murder. With no leads on the case and no
suspects, the police could not make a conviction in the case, and those who knew
Terry Bowers were left to wonder if they would ever find closure.
 |
| Newspaper coverage of Terry Bowers' viewing |
Since the day over 50 years ago when boy scout instructors woke to find Terry murdered in a nearby tent under their supervision, those who knew Terry have not stopped looking for answers. Terry’s death left many to wonder how he could be seen lively as ever, walking down the road in his camping uniform one moment, and “laid out in a dark blue suit,” at his viewing in the next. In 2017, both Terry’s family and the Boy Scouts’ Chester County Council each offered a $25,000 reward for information leading to an arrest in the case, and the Bowers’ neighbor, Lorraine Placido still wondered how a family could go on with no closure in their son’s murder investigation. The attempts to find Terry’s murderer – so many years after the crime – show that time does not soothe wounds when there are still so many unanswered questions.
To learn more about statistics on unsolved homicides:
For more information on appropriate lengths of Boy Scout knives:
To learn more about Terry Bowers’ murder:
https://6abc.com/news/47-years-later-boy-scouts-death-remains-a-mystery/1917203/
What I find most interesting about this story is how it was not the family who continued searching for their child’s murderer but their neighbor. Your post intrigued me to look for more information regarding the murder. I found police attempted to question a suspect who checked all of the boxes in terms of suspect for this case, but they came to a dead end when they found he could not answer questions about the case that only the real killer would have known. You summarized this idea perfectly with the opening sentence of your post. It is a “stubbornly hopeful dedication” to spend 50 years of your life searching for answers and never finding them. The horrors of this story lead me to think how this must have traumatized the young boy scout who discovered Terry Bowers’ body the next morning. Did other young boy scouts continue to go on trips with this experience in the back of their minds? How did this event—experiencing such vivid death in their youthful years—change the course of their lives?
ReplyDeleteI find it widely interesting that not the parents took to continue the search but just a friendly neighbor did. I found it quite intriguing that in 1965 detectives solved almost 90% of cases and today 40% of homicides go unsolved. That is remarkable that in a time where technology was not as advanced they were able to solve so many cases but today is where it lacks. Does that say something about how much we care today as apposed to then? Or have killers adapted with technology and have had to get smarter to commit these types of crime? This reminds me of the murder of Bobby Dunbar almost around the same time who was a child murdered and the family never got closure. Its amazing how many of these child murders have gone unsolved.
ReplyDelete