At around 8:30 PM on October 17, 2006, police were dispatched to the Omni Royal, a 4 star hotel in the French Quarter of New Orleans. There, they found the body of a 28 year old man who had apparently jumped from the rooftop bar of the hotel and fell to his death on the parking garage rooftop below. As police began to investigate, a note inside a ziploc bag was found in the man’s back pocket. It read in part “This is not accidental.” The police did also find military dog tags in the man’s pocket which identified him as Zackery Bowen. What police did not know at the time was that Zack’s girlfriend Addie Hall had not been heard from in almost 2 weeks.
Zack Bowen and Addie Hall
What exactly had happened to Zack, and where was Addie?
Now let’s go back… back to the beginning…
Who was Zack Bowen?
Zackery Bowen was a California native who was described as shy but loved to joke around and listen to metal music. His parents divorced when he was a teenager, and after that he lived with his mother, but right before he turned 18, he took a long road trip across several states to visit “party places” with his father. They ended up in New Orleans for their last stop, and Zack knew he’d found his home. He decided to drop out of school and live there permanently with his father.
He began bartending in the French Quarter and met 28 year-old Lana Shupack, who worked as an exotic dancer in Dallas, TX but frequently traveled around to dance at other clubs. She was in New Orleans on vacation with her friends and met Zack out on her first night. When she went back to Texas, Zack kept pursuing a relationship with her, and she eventually moved to New Orleans. Zack hadn’t exactly been honest in this relationship though. Lana was not aware that Zack was only 18 years old at the time. When she found out his true age, she was very upset, but it was too late, she was pregnant with his child.
Zack wasn’t particularly happy about becoming a father, but he decided to stay and be responsible for the child. Lana was frustrated with his immaturity and didn’t even tell him that their son had been born until a few weeks later. As soon as Zack saw his son, Jaxon, everything changed, and he wanted to be the best father he could be and have a real relationship with Lana. He worked multiple bartending jobs to support them, and he moved them into an apartment in Uptown New Orleans, which is a very nice, charming area that has a small town feel and is close to the nice universities.
In October 1998, when their son was about a year old, Lana and Zack were married in a beautiful wedding in Jackson Square, with tourists looking on. Shortly before the wedding, they found out they were expecting a second child. Their daughter, Lily, was born on June 12, 1999, and this prompted Zack to work harder at being able to provide for his family. The next year, he got his GED, and following in his brother and grandfather’s footsteps, he enlisted in the army for an eight year term. He was known by military friends as someone with a bright personality who was very respected, loved to play guitar and drums, and sling drinks for his army buddies.
As time went on, he served tougher tours where he faced a lot of horrors, his bright personality started to fade out. In the summer of 2001, he went home to New Orleans to recover from a toe surgery and during that time he completed the necessary paperwork to get his family to go live with him on base in Germany.
When they moved to Germany, Lana had a hard time adjusting and finding friends. Her life as an exotic dancer had been revealed when she sent Zack pictures, and he showed them to his military buddies. Those buddies told their wives about Lana’s work and unfortunately the other wives didn’t take very kindly to her. Despite this, life was going really well for them. The kids were enjoying going to school in Germany, and they got to do a lot of traveling in Europe as a family.
In 2002, Zack was deployed to fight in the war in Iraq following the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
On July 28, 2003, Zack was promoted to sergeant, but received bad news that Lana had been diagnosed with Hepatitis C and was so sick that she could no longer take care of herself or the kids. The army denied his request to stay on base and care for her, so he stayed in Baghdad where he kept going deeper and deeper into depression from dealing with the loss of best friends in his company and his wife’s illness.
When he finally got back to his family on base in 2003, Lana noticed he was completely different – instead of happy-go-lucky, he was quiet and distant. Lana eventually recovered, but Zack was jaded from the war in Baghdad and no longer wanted to be a part of the military. He had been purposefully failing PT tests and was dishonorably discharged, but he lied to his family about it. The dishonorable discharge disqualified him from receiving education benefits following his service.
When Lana found out he had been lying, she was furious. The whole point of him being in the army was to provide a better life for their family. In 2004, Lana was unable to continue living with a man she no longer knew – so she filed for divorce. They both moved back to New Orleans together, but Lana wasn’t interested in reconciling the relationship. They had not officially divorced yet, and she says she only let him move in with her as a living arrangement to make it easier for the kids.
Between jobs, Zack stayed at home with the kids while Lana worked. In 2005, Zack began bartending again at a place called Hog’s Bar (hole in the wall bar). This is where he met Addie Hall.
Who Was Addie Hall?
Addie was a free-spirit; a dancer, a seamstress, and a poet, and Zach was immediately drawn to her. However, she was not at all interested in him at first. Addie Hall was not a native of New Orleans either. She was born in North Carolina and raised by her Vietnam veteran father and stay at home mother. She dropped out of high school to travel around the country for a while, but then went back to North Carolina to teach salsa and ballroom dancing.
In 2002, she moved to New Orleans where she quickly made friends. She was described as a hard-worker who worked multiple jobs to make ends meet and was incredibly smart and creative. She loved fashion and poetry and had a great dark sense of humor. She was described by people that worked with her as a take-charge kind of woman. She was a favorite bartender of patrons at the local watering holes and was not afraid to be wholly herself.
Unfortunately, Addie had a dark side and became very abusive when she drank heavily and had times when she would become extremely moody and confrontational. This dark side intensified when she started spending time with drug dealers and added more drugs into the mix.
Interestingly enough, in the documentary about this case, Margaret Sanchez was a close friend of Addie’s. They worked together and according to Margaret, they were best friends. You may remember Margaret from the murder of Jaren Lockhart. Margaret and her boyfriend at the time murdered and dismembered Jaren Lockhart in June of 2012. It’s kind of eerie seeing her in this documentary doing interviews about the murder of someone she knows, knowing that only a few years later she would murder someone herself.
Margaret said that Addie had disclosed to her that she had been sexually abused as a child, and the cycle continued with Addie as it so often does with victims of abuse. She said that Addie would continually be drawn to men that were abusive and did not treat her the way that she deserved to be treated. Friends described her as having a “frightening mean streak” when she drank, and she was kind of a loose cannon. She seemed to enjoy a certain amount of attention from patrons at the bars where she worked, but coworkers said she would get very angry to the point of assaulting patrons if they looked too long or tried to touch her. Nevertheless, coworkers and friends described it as overly aggressive at times.
Zack flirted with Addie for weeks before she finally began warming up to him. In July 2005, Zack and Addie officially began dating. Zack told his mom, Lori, that he had found his soulmate, and they were completely in the honeymoon phase of their relationship. It was only the next month that Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. Lana wanted Zack to stay with her and the kids, but he couldn’t leave Addie. He told Lana “they would be fine” and stayed in Addie’s apartment to ride out the storm.
