Bowman Appeals Murder Charges in High Court

JEFFERSON CITY — Today the Missouri Supreme Court will hear an appeal by the man convicted of the 1977 murder a 16-year-old Brentwood girl.

Gregory Bowman, who was sentenced to death by a St. Louis County jury in October 2009, is appealing to the high court to throw out his first-degree murder charge, or at least grant him a new sentencing.

The young woman, Velda Rumfelt, was found June 6, 1977, near the intersection of Melrose Road and Manchester Road in Wildwood—an area that was then considered a remote part of St. Louis County. She had been strangled to death and, according to court documents, was recently involved in a sexual encounter.

Bowman was not a suspect in her death until three decades later, when DNA evidence linked him to Rumfelt's body. A few years after Rumfelt's death, he had been sentenced to two life sentences in Illinois for two unrelated murders in Belleville.

After a 1998 investigation by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch revealed that a law enforcement officer had withheld evidence from the prosecutor in the 1979 conviction, a judge ordered that Bowman receive a new trial, according to news reports.

Investigators in Illinois had contacted authorities in St. Louis County, wanting to know if there were unsolved murders that had occurred around the time of Rumfelt's death so they could see if Bowman's DNA had been collected into evidence.

While he was awaiting a retrial for the Belleville slayings, Bowman was free on bond in January 2007 when investigators announced that semen found on Rumfelt's clothing linked Bowman to her murder.

Bowman's attorneys will present arguments Wednesday to the state's high court that his right to privacy was violated when Illinois turned his DNA evidence over to St. Louis County without his consent, and they will also argue that the court who sentenced him to death could not prove that the evidence had not deteriorated over time.

The Missouri State Attorney General's office, which will defend the trial court's decision, argues that the trial court presented enough evidence to put away Bowman for murder, and that Bowman's rights were not violated because Missouri law enforcement officials obtained his DNA from Illinois police officers with a court order.

Maplewood-Brentwood Patch will bring you more on this story following today's oral arguments.