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.
The storm of the century
Now one would think that being stranded during a horrific storm like Hurricane Katrina would be difficult on a new relationship. For Zack and Addie though, it was their own little paradise. The French Quarter did not flood like the other areas of the city. They were blissfully unaware of the damage and tragedy that was just outside their door.
The devastation was severe, over 1800 lives lost. Over 800,000 housing units were damaged or destroyed. Over 60,000 people had to be rescued. The storm gained steam so quickly and winds were so strong that it completely overcame the levees the city had in place for flooding, some being wiped out completely. Although half the city was above sea level, the average elevation of New Orleans sits 6 ft below sea level.
Because those levees failed or were destroyed, 80% of the city was submerged. Most of the flooding was 10 feet deep, in some areas deeper and took weeks to recede. There was looting, a significant increase in violent crime, and people doing whatever they could to survive. It was said that if you went out in the city during that time, you had to be in a group- it was too dangerous to go anywhere alone.
Although post-Katrina was sort of post-apocalyptic, the photos of the city after the storm and evacuations looked like something out of the Walking Dead, Zack and Addie enjoyed not having real responsibilities, “camping out”, rescuing stray cats, fixing drinks for people in the streets, and they actually received a lot of media attention for being “storm holdouts”. Their picture was even in the New York Times. Addie also received media attention for flashing cops as they drove by on patrol to ensure the police would continue coming back to check on their area.
Even as they were having a great time, their mental state continued to deteriorate. Addie had stopped taking her lithium for her bipolar disorder. Lack of money and access to medication put a stop to that, and it appears she never got back on it. They began taking friends into their apartment, and the friends noticed how quickly they had fallen in love, even though they had only met two months before. So Zack and Addie are probably having the best time of their lives, and Zack’s estranged wife and kids are somewhere out there. There are no reports that Zack appeared worried for his family or made any efforts to contact them.
Lana and the children had been staying in a shelter in New Orleans and then were evacuated to Sugarland, Texas. During this time, Zack didn’t communicate with her and the kids at all and obviously offered no support; Lana actually thought he died during the storm because he didn’t answer any messages. She had been struggling to provide for herself and the kids by waiting tables at Applebee’s in Texas. When they returned to New Orleans and life there started getting back to normal, Lana was obviously extremely pissed that Zack had basically abandoned them. She demanded he start paying child support, and that they make arrangements for him to have the kids every two weeks.
The Honeymoon Is Over
According to friends, Addie wanted to be with Zack, but she didn’t want any part of his domestic life or responsibilities. She never agreed to meet Lana and would not allow the kids to be in her apartment when Zack had them, so he rented a hotel room the weekends he had them. Zack got a second job delivering groceries and was still bartending, and Addie was bartending at a jazz club called the Spotted Cat. By 2006, they were often going on drinking and drug benders. Addie’s violent moods were getting worse, and they were constantly breaking up and getting back together. It was not a happy life. They were also getting into trouble during this time.
Addie was arrested after pulling a gun on a man at a French Quarter corner early in the morning. According to the police report, Hall pointed a “blue steel” handgun at the man and said, “What the fuck is wrong with you?” As the man called the police, Hall ran to her apartment, where officers found her changed out of blue jeans and T-shirt and into a nightgown. At the apartment, officers found the gun, along with a bag of what police believed to be marijuana and two pipes. The man identified Hall as the woman who pulled a gun on him, according to the police reports.Addie was booked on charges of aggravated assault with a firearm, first offense possession of marijuana, and possession of drug paraphernalia.
About a month later, police were called to the same apartment, responding to a call about a disturbance. They found Zack Bowen on the stoop of the apartment. Upon spotting the officers, Bowen got up and dropped an object that turned out to be a clear plastic bag of marijuana. He was booked with first offense possession of marijuana.They were also getting more heavily into drugs, eventually using about $400 worth of cocaine every week. Around this time, Addie was evicted from the apartment they’d been living in.
Even though they had been on the rocks for quite some time, they rented an apartment together in early October 2006. This was located at 826 Rampart Street above the Voodoo Temple. Addie thought that a change of scenery could salvage the relationship but quickly had second thoughts. According to landlord Leo Watermeier, the couple appeared happy when they initially rented the apartment telling him they’d fallen in love the night Hurricane Katrina struck.
On Oct. 5th, during a dispute over which of their names would appear on the lease, Hall told Watermeier she intended to kick Bowen out of the apartment, after finding out that he had cheated on her, Watermeier said.“I caught him cheating on me, and I am kicking him out of this apartment,” she told Watermeier. She wanted to have Zack’s name taken off the lease, so that she could legally have him removed from the apartment. Addie had just learned that Zack had been seeing a man who was a real estate agent behind her back, and she was furious. Addie was very careful not to let people in too closely, and this was such a betrayal to her. She was not going to stand for it.
Bowen did not take the news well, Watermeier said.“He said, ‘Did you just let her sign a lease alone? Because I’m screwed. I’m totally messed up now. She’s trying to kick me out of our apartment,’ ” Watermeier said.
Watermeier told the couple to work through their differences and get back to him. When he didn’t see Addie again after that, he assumed they’d worked things out, but he wasn’t the only person not to see Addie again. Addie also “disappeared permanently” from her job at the Spotted Cat around this time. After Addie’s disappearance, Zack told friends and coworkers that Addie had moved back to NC. He appeared devastated that she had left him. For 2 weeks, he went on about his business, working and partying. He had taken the last of his money, $1500, and spent every last dollar he had on “good booze, good drugs and good strippers.”
And then at 8:30 pm on October 17, 2006, he committed suicide by jumping off the rooftop of Omni Hotel. Hotel video footage caught Zack’s last moments. He had looked over the railing, taken his last drink and thrown himself over the edge to his death.
When detectives arrived and found the note in his pocket, it was so much more than Zack’s own suicide. The note that began “this was not accidental..” went on to say “I had to take my own life to pay for the life I took.” It went on to direct police to visit the apartment on Rampart St. where they would find his dismembered girlfriend’s body parts in the kitchen – in the oven, the refrigerator, and on the stove; along with a full written and signed confession.
When they walked in, they found beer cans and moving boxes everywhere in the messy apartment and messages spray-painted all over the walls that said “Call my wife”, “I’m a total failure”, “Look in the oven”, “I love her”, and “Please help me stop the pain.”
There was also a spray-painted arrow pointing toward the oven. This is where detectives found Addie’s burnt legs crammed into a disposable turkey pan. Inside of two pots on the stove they found more; on the front burner was Addie’s head, on the back burner her feet and hands. In the refrigerator they found her torso in a garbage bag.
They also found his written confession in Addie’s journal scrawled across 8 pages, providing a graphically detailed accounting of the slaying. He started the note formally, giving his full name, social security and driver’s license numbers, as well as his date of birth.
“Today is Monday 16 October 2 a.m. I killed her at 1 a.m. Thursday 5 October,” Bowen wrote. “I very calmly strangled her. It was very quick.”
What Bowen did after he killed Hall was anything but quick. He claimed in his note to have sexually violated the body several times, eventually passing out in a drunken stupor on the futon next to his girlfriend’s corpse. The next day, he got up, turned his thermostat to 60 degrees, and went to work. On Oct. 9, according to his letter, Bowen came home from work and began to dismember Hall’s body in the bathroom with a handsaw and a knife.
“Halfway through the task, I stopped and thought about what I was doing,” he wrote to the police in his girlfriend’s journal. “The decision to halt the first idea and move to Plan B (the crime scene you are now in) came after a while. I scared myself not only by the action of calmly strangling the woman I’ve loved for one and a half years … but by my entire lack of remorse. I’ve known forever how horrible a person I am (ask anyone) …”
Zack explained that his intention was to cook the body to “ease the separation” and dispose of it all in various locations later. He ended the letter with a list of his “failures — school, jobs, military, marriage, parenthood, morals, love.”
“Every last one of these I failed at,” he wrote. “Hence the 28 cigarette burns” — 13 on each arm two on his chest — one for each year of my existance (sic).”
His wife, Lana, received his cremated remains.
This is a tragic story. The combination of mental illness going untreated, the damage that drugs and alcohol can have on an already unstable situation, and domestic abuse on both sides of a relationship all combined to come to a tragic end. Zack and Addie were two people who had their own inner demons that they unfortunately could not escape. I wonder how different things could have been if they’d had access to mental health treatments and been surrounded by people who could have helped them find a new path.
Either way, Addie Hall was murdered by someone she loved and that is never ok. If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic abuse, you can call the National Hotline in the US at 1-800-799-7233 or by visiting their website at www.thehotline.org with 24/7 online chat support.
