Woman fights for justice for sister murdered in ’78
Killer on death row after DNA evidence is a match
Tempe police had no idea who killed the college senior inside her apartment in the early morning hours of Jan. 7, 1978.
Deana Lynne Bowdoin, 21, had dinner with her parents the evening before.
Her parents asked her to spend the night at home. Bowdoin decided her apartment was the better option because she had to be at her part-time job at a law firm the next day.
After dinner, she met a friend at a nearby bar. Bowdoin was last seen alive when leaving to drive to her apartment at 12:30 a.m.
At 2 a.m., Bowdoin’s boyfriend found the marketing major dead inside her bedroom. She had a belt around her neck, her right wrist had indentations and her clothing was disheveled.
The murder of a female student shocked the Arizona State University community, and investigators were stymied.
“We haven’t got anything going for us. I wish we did,” Tempe police Sgt. Jerry Warren told The Arizona Republic a few days after the murder.
Police said they didn’t know the killer’s motive. Family and friends said
Bowdoin was loved by many and had no enemies.
Her boyfriend became a suspect, but then the police moved on. Days after the student’s murder, a serial killer attacked female college students in Florida. Police wondered if that killer — later identified as Ted Bundy — was the person behind Bowdoin’s death, according to her sister.
In another case, two days before Bowdoin’s death, a Maricopa County Superior Court judge had ruled a former ASU student was “not guilty by reason of insanity” for attacking a woman.
At that time, and in other cases later, the man’s lawyers stated in court records that he had severe mental health issues.
However, he did not receive supervision after his release from a hospital in the first days of 1978.
Ten months after Bowdoin’s death, that same man was sentenced for attacking another woman in Tempe. Six years later, he raped a Northern Arizona University student while he was under supervision and was sentenced to life in prison for the woman’s sexual assault.
It took more than 20 years before detectives would suspect the man — who had been living across the street from Bowdoin at the time — of her murder. Advancements in DNA technology helped with the discovery.
Clarence Wayne Dixon is now one of 21 Arizona death row inmates who have exhausted all of their appeals.
The state has not executed an inmate since 2014 because of a lack of access to lethal drugs and lawsuits over protocols. According to court records, Dixon is one of two inmates Arizona hopes to execute first once capital punishment resumes.
As the years have passed, Leslie Bowdoin James has not stopped advocating for her little sister and Dixon’s other victims. James was 23 when her sister was murdered.
She is the only surviving member of her and Bowdoin’s immediate family.
The pain of losing a loved one to murder will never go away, she said.
“It is always there. Your life will change,” James said. “People use that word ‘closure’ a lot. Nah. It’s way overused. There’s never a closure.”
The scene: Several attacks near ASU campus
Bowdoin lived in an area just east of ASU’s campus popular among students because of the large number of apartment complexes close to each other and their numerous social events. The area was known as “Sin City.”
“The nickname caught on in the early 1960s when an apartment advertised single-city living and someone crossed out the ‘gle’ of single,” a report by The Republic stated.
Within a week of Bowdoin’s murder, another female student was attacked with a knife, and other sexual crimes against women were reported in the area.
Many female students took steps to protect themselves by making sure their doors were locked, carrying “chemical sprays” and buying handguns.
Janice Rowe, who lived in the area, told The Republic that month women were freaked out, and she was sleeping with a handgun near her side.
“I am not going out at night much without an escort,” she said in 1978. “I just wish they would catch the dude because I don’t like living in fear.”
Talk of Bowdoin’s murder continued for months. As people connected with ASU found out, they would call the sisters’ mother.
“I think it was just a shock for kids to come back from their winter break and a lot of them didn’t know,” James said in a recent interview with The Republic.
The neighborhood has changed since the late 1970s. Bowdoin’s apartment building at 1028 E Lemon St. has been replaced with luxury high-rise off-campus housing.
The pain and grief of not having Bowdoin around is still present for her relatives. Bowdoin would be celebrating her 65th birthday in July.
James said she was at her downtown Phoenix apartment when her phone rang. It was their dad. He asked her to come home.
“I said, ‘Why? I’m getting ready to go to work,’ ” James remembered. “He said, ‘Can you sit down?’ ”
When their father told James they had lost her sister, she asked how.
The Tempe Police Department woke up their parents in the middle of the night and told her dad over the phone about his daughter’s murder.
The family sat at their house and waited for police to come over with new information.
The sister: ‘There was so much for her to give’
The Bowdoin sisters grew up in the Valley. Their parents had met each other in high school and graduated from ASU. Their father, Harold “Dean,” worked at Honeywell and their mother, Beulah Ann, known as “Bobbie,” was a secondgrade teacher.
James said her sister worked hard for the things she achieved. Bowdoin went to Squaw Peak Elementary and graduated with honors from Camelback High School. She was a debutante for the
Phoenix Honors Cotillion in 1974. She placed as the first runner-up for the organization’s Debutante of the Year academic award.
Bowdoin exuded kindness. No matter who she met, she made the person an automatic friend, James said.
“Whether the person was elderly or whether they were little kids, she just seemed to be able to talk and relate to
them,” James said.
While at ASU, Bowdoin studied abroad and made many plans for her last semester and life after graduation. She was gifted at writing poetry.
“There was so much for her to give,” James said. “She just had such a promising future that I think she is an example of what young women can do, how much they can do when they aren’t given a lot but they work really, really hard.”
She was considering a career in law, international marketing or diplomacy after taking the LSAT and the Foreign Service Officers tests.
Her planner was filled with birthdays of loved ones, a road trip to Guaymas, Mexico, and noted an upcoming contest at the popular Sun Devil Disco Lounge.
The lounge was across from ASU at Apache Boulevard and Rural Road. In advertisements listed in The Republic in the late 1970s, it promised a “nightly merriment at the most exciting disco in the Valley” with a light show.
Bowdoin’s family and friends did not know of any previous contact between her and her killer, according to court records.
His federal public defender declined to be interviewed for this story.
The killer: A childhood filled with abuse
Dixon, a member of the Navajo Nation, grew up on the reservation. In a March 2020 petition to the U. S. Supreme Court, his attorneys said jurors never heard about their client’s childhood, which was filled with abuse and severe health problems.
Dixon’s father, Wilbur, grew up in a Native American boarding school after his own mother died. These boarding schools were created by the federal government to remove Indigenous children from their culture and assimilate them into “American” ways. Many children faced abuse or died.
Wilbur had a drug addiction and was abusive to his children and his wife, Ella. She was submissive and followed Wilbur’s lead in calling their son derogatory names, according to court records.
Dixon was born with inadequate oxygenation, which led to a congenital heart condition. His parents did not walk the several miles from the reservation to a hospital with Dixon, then 12, for his open-heart surgery. The child was
left to walk the journey to the hospital alone, court records show.
According to court records, he abused alcohol and drugs as a young adult. Dixon married in 1976. However, his issues with drug addiction and alcoholism continued and the marriage ended in divorce in 1978.
The system: A release from custody ‘failed so many of us’
In 1976, Dixon started classes at ASU. Signs of a mental illness led him to withdraw from the university a year later.
Dixon was charged for hitting a woman on the head with a pipe when he was 21, in 1977. According to court records, a police officer and the victim described Dixon as “confused, disoriented and irrational.”
Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Sandra Day O’Connor presided over his case. O’Connor would later go on to become a U.S. Supreme Court associate justice.
Dixon was seen by two psychiatrists, who determined he had schizophrenia and was unable to stand trial.
He was committed to Arizona State Hospital. When his competency was restored, O’Connor found him “not guilty by reason of insanity.”
He was released from the state hospital pending civil commitment proceedings. These types of civil proceedings may order a person to undergo mental health evaluations and treatment in an inpatient or outpatient facility.
For Dixon, the proceedings didn’t occur immediately, which meant he didn’t have supervision or treatment, according to court records.
Two days after O’Connor’s ruling, Bowdoin was killed. She died from strangulation and three stab wounds to the chest, according to the Maricopa County Medical Examiner’s Office.
In November 1978, Dixon was sentenced in Tempe Justice Court for burglary and assault with a deadly weapon. He had entered a woman’s apartment at 423 S. Mitchell Drive at night and assaulted her with a knife on Sept. 16 of that year, according to prosecutors. Dixon pleaded guilty.
He was sentenced to 14 to 15 years for the burglary charge and four to five years for the aggravated assault, according to the Department of Corrections. The sentences were to be served concurrently.
Dixon earned enough release credits after serving six years in custody. After being released in February 1985, he remained under supervision until August of that year.
James said the legal system “failed so
many of us” in 1978.
“I just hope that the system can now do what the law tells it to do,” she said.
In a 2006 interview with Phoenix magazine, his attorney Peter Balkan said he felt bad about Dixon being released from the hospital.
“Obviously, his being released that day was a terrible thing,” Balkan told the magazine.
The breakthrough: Using DNA to find a suspect
Like many law enforcement agencies, the Tempe Police Department works on cold cases. It has 45 open murder cases that it continues to pursue using scientific technologies. Currently, its oldest open case is from 1972.
Bowdoin’s family stayed in touch with the department over the years. Media reports about the murder dwindled and detectives on the case retired.
Tom Magazzeni was a detective for 27 years with the Tempe Police Department. The detective started working on homicide cases in 1994, and after a few years, he began looking into cold cases.
He told The Republic that he was glad the evidence in the case was preserved and in the right way. DNA technology has progressed throughout the years.
The department ran DNA evidence from Bowdoin’s case through a new nationwide database.
Magazzeni said it took a few years, but they were able to rule out Bowdoin’s boyfriend.
In 2001, Magazzeni received a call that the DNA evidence was a match with Dixon, who was in prison for raping a 20-year-old female Northern Arizona University student in 1985. He was convicted in 1986 and received seven consecutive life sentences.
According to court records, the woman was jogging when she saw Dixon standing near a hill and decided to turn and run away. However, Dixon grabbed her. She was able to survive and identify him for law enforcement.
At the time, Dixon had been out of prison for four months and was still under supervision.
Magazzeni determined Dixon was near Bowdoin’s apartment at the time of the murder and the department found a knife at the scene similar to the one used to assault the NAU student.
“Evidence was collected that led us to believe that he, and he alone, was responsible for the sexual assault and murder of Deana Bowdoin,” said Magazzeni, who retired in 2017.
Dixon pleaded not guilty on Jan. 30, 2003, at his arraignment hearing, 25 years after the murder.
According to a 2003 story in The Republic, Bowdoin’s murder was the oldest cold case at the time the Tempe police had solved by using DNA technology.
“(The Bowdoin family) had to wait through several generations of technological advancements in DNA testing to get to the point where they could identify without question Clarence Dixon in this case,” then-Sgt. Mike Horn said in 2008 a week after the conviction.
James said when a suspect was found and an indictment was filed she was touched by the actions of Tempe officers. Retired detectives who had helped with the case came to her parents’ house to deliver the news.
However, the sisters’ mother finally realized what her daughter had gone through when the detectives explained how they found the DNA evidence.
Dixon’s semen was found on Bowdoin’s underwear and body.
“It’s kind of like you go through the steps of grieving all over again,” James said. “In 1978, I think it’s self-preservation. You have in your mind that she didn’t suffer.”
Throughout the years, James developed bonds with the detectives who worked on her sister’s case.
Retired detective Joe Smith was her son’s Sunday school teacher at church. And James said Magazzeni had a tremendous impact on her life.
Magazzeni said detectives work to find those who are responsible and hold them accountable for heinous crimes.
“You see family members that never forget,” he said. “It’s hard for them to move on in life because they’ve had a loved one taken from them.”
For family members, talking about a loved one who was murdered can feel like a “wound that is scabbed over, that gets ripped off.”
“Leslie is the epitome of a good older sister,” Magazzeni said. “She has never forgotten Deana and she never will.”
Trial, appeals, hearings: No relief for Dixon
Dixon was convicted in 2008, 30 years after Bowdoin’s murder. He is one of five Native Americans on Arizona’s death row.
Maricopa County Superior Court records detail there were concerns about Dixon’s mental health before the trial.
When he had counsel, Dixon waived his rights to be evaluated for competency and have IQ testing. His public defender engaged in an investigation of Dixon’s social and mental health history and other lawyers looked into a possible insanity defense.
Before his trial, Dixon requested the murder charge be dismissed due to a statute of limitations expiring on Jan. 7,1983.
In the March petition to the Supreme Court, Dixon’s lawyer stated his mental health led to certain actions during the trial, including his demanding the court to dismiss his attorneys unless they filed a motion not to use the DNA evidence. He then continued by representing himself.
Dixon said the DNA sample taken by the Department of Corrections in 1995 shouldn’t be used in the trial because “because the NAU police were not a legal entity” when he was arrested for his sexual assault conviction.
His federal public defender argued in
the petition to the Supreme Court that the trial lawyers were aware Dixon’s belief was “purely delusion and lacked any basis in fact.” The DNA sample was not connected to his arrest in the sexual assault and Flagstaff police arrested him, not NAU police.
When Dixon represented himself, he cross-examined Bowdoin’s parents and her boyfriend.
Dixon’s sexual assault conviction for raping the NAU student was introduced as part of the evidence as he was tried for Bowdoin’s killing. The woman testified and Dixon cross-examined her, too, even though she was one of his victims.
In 2007, Dixon again requested the murder charge be dismissed. The court disagreed, citing case law.
“Even if the statute of limitations has expired on the predicate offense, a defendant may still be prosecuted for felony murder,” Judge Andrew Klein ruled. “Furthermore, there is no limitations period for homicide in Arizona.”
According to the Arizona Supreme Court’s opinion, Dixon made multiple allegations about problems during the trial, including accusing the prosecutor, Juan Martinez, of misconduct.
Martinez was fired from the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office on allegations that he retaliated against women who claimed he harassed them and was disbarred in 2020. Martinez claimed the agency had a vendetta against him, but he lost the appeal of his termination in October.
Dixon argued his conviction should be reversed due to the admission of the testimony by the NAU student after a charge claiming he raped Bowdoin was dropped by the prosecution.
He claimed this meant prosecutors couldn’t prove Bowdoin was raped by him and therefore, the woman’s testimony wasn’t required.
“Although the testifying medical examiner could not independently verify that Deana had been raped, he refused to rule out a sexual assault,” the opinion stated. “Rather, he affirmed that ‘rape can occur with no injuries.’”
Dixon and his attorneys have petitioned higher courts multiple times.
During the trial, Dixon was shackled with a stun belt and full-legged steel restraint. According to a petition to the U.S. Supreme Court, his attorney stated lower courts agreed there wasn’t “adequate legal justification” for the shackles and claimed Dixon was denied his rights to effective assistance of counsel.
In May 2020, the Supreme Court denied the petition to hear his case relating to Bowdoin’s murder.
Support networks: Killer’s victims stick together
The Arizona Victims’ Bill of Rights requires victims to be notified of every court proceeding, to be heard and make impact statements, and to participate in the criminal justice process.
James has attended every proceeding for her sister’s case in Maricopa County Superior Court, state appeals courts and the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
She was allowed to speak for her sister only once, through a victim’s impact statement, according to her July 2020 letter to Gov. Doug Ducey.
Colleen Clase, James’ attorney, said victims are entitled to be treated fairly with respect, dignity, and free of intimidation, harassment and abuse.
The family saw more than 10 judges oversee Bowdoin’s case over the five years of proceedings.
“I think judges have gotten a lot better with knowing about victims’ rights, about acknowledging that we or I was in the courtroom,” James said. “Some judges were good about it, and others weren’t.”
Dixon’s case has been reviewed by the Arizona Board of Executive Clemency because he was eligible for parole on his sexual assault conviction involving the NAU student. He became eligible for parole after 25 years for each of the life sentences. The board has denied him every time.
James has appeared at all of his 14 hearings in front of the board in order to represent her sister and other victims.
James said she felt taking time to attend every proceeding might make a difference and “alleviate some of that uncertainty.”
During his 13th hearing on Aug. 29, 2018, James spoke in person. Several victims and the Coconino County Attorney’s Office sent letters of opposition. Dixon chose to not call into that meeting, according to the board.
He stated in his application that he has completed multiple classes while in prison for anger management and substance abuse. Dixon did not provide release plans since he is not eligible for release.
James said she met Dixon’s sexual assault victim during Bowdoin’s trial. James explained to the clemency board what she told the woman when meeting her.
James asked the woman why, after 20 years, did she come back to Arizona to face Dixon when it wasn’t a requirement for her? ily.The woman told James she was doing it for Bowdoin and the sisters’ fam
Like the woman did for Bowdoin, James said she was standing in front of the board for the NAU student.
“I’m here and I’ll keep being here, as long as I need to for her,” James told the board.
The board denied giving Dixon parole that day due to multiple victims, convictions, probation violations and other reasons.
The commencement: ASU honors Bowdoin
Decades after her murder, the ASU community remembered the student with a bright future.
A distant, unknown relative of the sisters, who lived in Texas, reached out to the university after learning about Bowdoin’s murder as part of a class project.
The woman asked ASU if the university could honor Bowdoin, according to James.
In 2019, ASU’s W.P. Carey School of Business presented James with her sister’s diploma during its convocation.
Kay Faris, senior associate dean for students, said Bowdoin’s death was sudden and tragic. She said the school was honored to award the degree and is proud to have her as a graduate.
“We hope that celebrating her life and achievements at our spring 2019 Convocation and awarding Deana’s diploma to her sister provided some comfort to her family, and created a new memory all these years later about what a special light she truly was,” Faris said.
James didn’t know at the time that members of their extended family were watching her walk to the podium and across the stage, like many of the students, to accept her sister’s diploma.
“I didn’t know that one of my other cousins much younger than me was also graduating in that same class,” she told The Republic. “My phone started ringing, and it was my aunt.”
James said it meant so much to know their family was there.
“That was amazing that ASU would do that,” she said.
The wait: Dixon’s time on death row continues
Dixon’s sentencing was 13 years ago. Clase said one right that is at stake for victims like James is a prompt and final conclusion of the case after a conviction and sentence. That can seem unattainable in Arizona, she said.
“She is waiting for punishment to be imposed,” Clase said. “It is something that sadly didn’t happen during her parents’ lifetime.”
Bowdoin’s mother died a year after Dixon was convicted.
“When my mother passed in 2009, all she wanted was some final justice for Deana, and that people would always remember Deana,” James wrote in a July 2020 letter to the governor, “My father was never able to reconcile or accept what happened to Deana, even until he passed in 2018.”
James said her son, who died in 2018, was never able to meet his aunt.
James’ love for her parents and Bowdoin is why she writes letters to the governor, pleading with Ducey to ensure that his office “does its job to uphold our victims rights to justice, due process, and finality.”
C.J. Karamargin, a spokesperson for the governor, said Ducey has directed the Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Reentry to actively engage in work to resume executions.
“The governor cares about justice being delivered in these cases,” Karamargin said. “His heart goes out to the victims, and he has personally reviewed these cases.”
In letters in July and August, James offered to talk to the governor’s staff about her sister and the importance of getting justice.
“The times we are currently experiencing are unprecedented and uncertain, but there is nothing I can say that describes what not knowing whether there will ever be finality and justice for Deana means and feels like,” James wrote in August.
The Arizona Attorney General’s Office also has pushed for Ducey to carry out the sentences for those on death row. Attorney General Mark Brnovich has advocated for the state to purchase the necessary drug for lethal injection and find a compounding pharmacist.
Katie Conner, a spokesperson for the attorney general, said opponents of the death penalty have done a lot to delay the administration of justice for years while families like the Bowdoin’s continue to suffer in silence.
In March, corrections Director David
Shinn informed Brnovich that his department was ready to resume executions.
The Attorney General’s Office announced in April it filed a notice of intent to seek warrants of execution with the Arizona Supreme Court for Dixon and Frank Atwood.
Dixon’s attorney, Dale Baich, said in a statement that his client’s mental illness and disabilities should be considered. “In light of Clarence Dixon’s severe mental illness and debilitating physical disabilities, including blindness, it would be unconscionable for the State of Arizona to execute him,” Baich said.
Clase said closure is not the word many victims would use to describe what they are looking for since it doesn’t exist.
“Finality is so important to their healing and moving forward after going through the criminal justice process,” Clase said. “And what is likely probably the worst thing that has happened to them in their lives.”
Anyone with information on an open case in Tempe or other Valley law enforcement can provide a tip to the Silent Witness hotline by calling 480-WITNESS or submitting it online at Silent Witness.org.
“I just hope that the system can now do what the law tells it to do.”
Leslie Bowdoin James
Sister of Deana Lynne Bowdoin