Confidential File

Has Anyone Seen Tommy Bowman?

Today marks an anniversary that won’t be celebrated in a Redondo Beach home.

But I promised an anguished father that I wouldn’t let you forget it.

Two
years ago today, 8-year-old Tommy Bowman ran down a mountain trail and
vanished behind a curtain of secrecy which still defies all
investigation.

Yesterday, Tommy’s dad called me. 

"I
hate to be a bore," Eldon Bowman began hesitantly. "But I thought maybe
you’d write something about Tommy. I just can’t believe that it’s all
over and done with. I just know that someone, somewhere has to know
something.

"Somebody has to know where my boy is," he added with emphasis.

I asked Eldon Bowman if even after two years of silence he still believes that Tommy lives.

"It would be so much easier to believe otherwise," he answered weakly. "But I do believe he’s alive."

"I just can’t believe anything else."

Eldon Bowman recalled for me the circumstances surrounding his son’s disappearance.

The boy and his playmates, accompanied by the elder Bowman, were hiking in the hills above Altadena.

With the other kids hot on his heels, Tommy dashed down a brush-shrouded trail, rounded a corner and he was gone.

"What’s
it all mean?" Eldon Bowman asked me hopelessly. "What happened? It’s
awfully hard to believe that somebody can disappear like Tommy did and
never be seen again.

"My wife and I have tried to figure it out.
We’ve tried to feel what Tommy must have felt. You see, some strange
things happened that day.

"Tommy had been to the dentist
earlier. He had his teeth worked on that very day and the dentist had
given him Novocain. Later, a doctor told us that some people aresupersensitive to Novocain and maybe it caused Tommy’s mind to go blank."

Two months after the boy’s disappearance the Bowman family received a brief note in an envelope with an Oklahoma postmark.

It told the distraught parents that their son was alive and well.

"You often wonder if whoever wrote it actually knew anything about Tommy, or …"

His voice fell away.

I asked Tommy’s father if, perhaps, some woman with a frustrated maternal complex might have taken Tommy.

"Yes, that entered our mind," he said. "Someone wanted a child and took our.

"It might even be someone who’s been very good to our boy," he added and his voice brightened.

Tommy would have been 10 last Jan. 6. His two brothers and a sister would have helped him fete the occasion.

"It’s things like that, his birthday, which bring the pain back," Eldon Bowman told me.

"We don’t sit around and mope all day. You can’t when you’ve got other children.

"But things like his birthday…"

Again the voice was lost to emotion.

"I don’t know what a person can do," he continued at last, "except maybe keep talking about Tommy.

"That’s why I thought you might write something about it, Mr. Coates.

"Maybe somebody will see it and we’ll get our Tommy back."

[Note: Two years ago, evidence led police to suspect serial killer Mack Ray Edwards in the disappearance of Tommy Bowman.]