GALAX — Death loomed early for Logan Bowman, who weighed just 3 pounds, 15 ounces at birth.
The premature infant’s father, Wayne Bowman, remembers holding his son in the palm of his hand and dressing him in clothes from a Cabbage Patch doll.
“I called him my little miracle baby,” Bowman said.
Seven years later, Bowman is hoping for another miracle.
Logan has been missing for a year. Repeated searches have turned up nothing. But his father still clings to the hope that, somewhere and somehow, Logan is safe.
“As long as they don’t show you a body, you’ve got to keep it in the back of your mind that boy is still alive,” Bowman said.
Authorities are not so optimistic. They have filed murder charges against Logan’s mother, Cynthia Lee Davis, and her boyfriend, Dennis Schermerhorn, the two people who reportedly last saw the 5-year-old in their mobile home on the outskirts of Galax.
Davis told authorities that on Jan. 8, 2003, Schermerhorn took her son after he suffered hot water burns and left him in the care of relatives, according to earlier testimony. But Davis waited until Jan. 26 to report Logan missing. By then, Schermerhorn was telling police that it was Davis who had left with the boy and returned without him.
Hampered by confusion and delay, investigators started cold down a trail that will soon lead to a Grayson County courtroom.
Trials for Schermerhorn and Davis, scheduled for Feb. 13 and March 18 respectively, will raise a question rarely posed in a Virginia courtroom: Can someone be convicted of murder when there is no direct evidence – a corpse – that a murder was committed?
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It can be an autopsy photograph of a bullet-riddled body. Or the chilling testimony of an eyewitness. Or perhaps a confession from the killer. In most murder trials, one thing is obvious. Someone died.
But proving what is a given in most cases could be the greatest challenge for Grayson County Commonwealth’s Attorney J.D. Bolt in the upcoming trials for Davis and Schermerhorn, according to interviews with lawyers, prosecutors and law professors.
Under Virginia law, every conviction requires proof of corpus delicti, the Latin term for body of a crime.
Corpus delicti is essentially proof of a criminal act, whether it’s the body of a murdered man, the signature on a forged check, or the charred remains of a house burned down.
But prosecutors need not show a corpse to prove corpus delicti in murder cases, courts in Virginia and elsewhere have ruled, as long as they establish through convincing circumstantial evidence that a person was killed.
“A jury may properly take into account the unlikelihood that a person would disappear voluntarily, the disappearance being circumstantial evidence entitled to the same weight as bloodstains and concealment of evidence,” the Virginia Supreme Court ruled in the case of Stephen Epperly.
Epperly was found guilty in 1980 and sentenced to life in prison for murdering a Radford University student whose body was never found. It was the state’s first murder conviction in which there was no body, no eyewitness and no confession.
Still, the lack of a body makes the prosecutor’s job much tougher.
“It adds an additional level of practical difficulty,” said Anne Coughlin, a professor of law at the University of Virginia. “The prosecution is going to have the burden of presenting evidence that explains the absence of a body, as well as going on to establish that the accused committed the murder.”
Just because someone is missing, jurors might think, doesn’t mean he or she is dead.
“How many people wrote off Tom Hanks in ‘Castaway’?” Salem Commonwealth’s Attorney Fred King said. “That’s obviously a Hollywood version, but there are many cases in which people drop out of sight for a number of reasons.”
The key for prosecutors is to find enough circumstantial evidence to prove murder in the absence of a body, said Everett Shockley, a Pulaski County attorney who prosecuted Epperly.
In Epperly’s case, Shockley called witnesses to testify that the victim, Gina Hall, was a shy woman unlikely to accompany the defendant to a Claytor Lake cabin where prosecutors said she was beaten to death after refusing to have sex. And it was equally unlikely, family members testified, that Hall would just disappear and cut off all contact with her loved ones.
The case was bolstered further by the discovery of Hall’s bloody clothes. And when a tracking dog led police from Hall’s car to the doorstep of Epperly’s home two miles away, the defendant infamously remarked: “That’s a damn good dog.”
Even with that evidence, Shockley was confronted with a dilemma that all prosecutors face in murder cases with no bodies.
What if he took the case to trial only to get an acquittal or a light sentence, and then Hall’s body was later discovered along with other crime-scene evidence that strengthened the case against Epperly? Double jeopardy would prevent a second trial.
“That’s always a risk,” Shockley said.
A young commonwealth’s attorney at the time, Shockley was advised by other prosecutors to wait and see if his case got stronger. But he worried about the evidence in hand getting weaker.
“It’s a balancing test,” he said. “I was very concerned because I knew I had at least 30 witnesses that could be scattered to the wind if I waited for the body to be recovered, and their recollection wouldn’t be too hot.”
The calculated risk paid off. More than two decades later, the location of Hall’s body remains a mystery. And Epperly is still in prison.
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Why would a mother want to kill her own child?
It’s a question that prosecutors need not answer in the case of Cynthia Lee Davis.
After first charging Davis with child neglect in the disappearance of Logan Bowman, Grayson County Commonwealth’s Attorney J.D. Bolt obtained an indictment in July that also accuses her of felony murder.
Unlike first-degree murder, which includes malice and premeditation, felony murder only requires proof that someone committed a felony that resulted in an unintended death. An example is selling drugs that later cause a fatal overdose. Felony murder is punishable by five to 40 years in prison.
Bolt declined to comment on the case earlier this week; defense attorneys for Davis and Schermerhorn could not be reached.
Coughlin, the UVa law professor, said the felony murder charge makes Bolt’s job a little easier by allowing him to argue that Davis had a hand in her son’s death simply by letting him remain missing for three weeks without seeking help.
“It eases some of their burden, but by no means does it solve the core problem” of not having a body, Coughlin said.
In addition to felony murder, Davis and Schermerhorn each face two child neglect charges, one involving the hot water burns that Logan reportedly suffered shortly before he went missing, and the second involving their inaction following his disappearance.
Equating a missing person to a murdered one is easier, legal experts said, when the victim is too young to effectively plan and carry out a voluntary disappearance.
“When a child disappears, that’s a completely different set of circumstances,” Coughlin said. “Because some human being has an obligation to protect that child and preserve his life and well-being. This is not a case where you can say the boy just up and left.”
While Davis and Schermerhorn reportedly made no confessions, prosecutors are likely to question why they waited three weeks before reporting Logan missing. “I would certainly think the prosecution would try to make a lot of headway off of that fact,” Shockley said.
The question, however, is what additional evidence Bolt has to support a felony murder charge. When Davis and Schermerhorn were indicted last July, Grayson County Sheriff Jerry Wilson said there had been no major breaks in the case, just a decision to seek a more serious charge.
The most detailed public account of the case emerged from a preliminary hearing in April. Although the hearing was fraught with unanswered questions and conflicting stories told by Davis and Schermerhorn to authorities, a judge ruled that the evidence was sufficient to support neglect charges.
However challenging such cases might be, prosecutors should not be prohibited from seeking a murder charge when there is no body recovered, courts have held.
In affirming the conviction of cult leader Charles Manson in the case of one of his victims whose body was never found, the California Court of Appeals put it this way: “The fact that a murderer may successfully dispose of the body of the victim does not entitle him to an acquittal. That is one form of success for which society has no reward.”
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Christmas Day 2002 was the last time Wayne Bowman saw his son.
Although Logan weighed just 30 pounds, the 5-year-old pushing 6 seemed as healthy and active that day as he had always been.
After unwrapping his gifts in Bowman’s Carroll County home, Logan hardly had time to play with the toys before his father drove him across town to the trailer where Davis and Schermerhorn were living. Davis had custody of Logan, with Bowman allowed to have the boy for weekends and holidays.
The following Friday, when Bowman would have picked his son up for the weekend, Davis called and left a message saying the boy was sick, Bowman said during a recent interview in his home.
A week after that, Bowman showed up at the trailer to find a note on the door. Logan was still sick, the note said, and Davis had taken him to pick up some medicine.
Repeated calls to the trailer went unreturned. Countless knocks on the door went unanswered. Finally, Bowman confronted Davis Jan. 26 at a friend’s home. “I was getting a little upset,” Bowman said.
It was only then, he said, that she admitted to not having seen Logan since Jan. 8. According to earlier testimony, Davis said she thought Schermerhorn had taken the boy to a relative’s home, and from there he wound up in his father’s care.
Bowman angrily rejected that explanation and threatened to call police. Davis then reported her son missing. Within hours, she and Schermerhorn were in jail on neglect charges and authorities were searching for Logan.
In the year since, Bowman has kept his son’s room in the same condition it was when he last slept there. He has also held on to Logan’s Christmas presents, some of them still in their boxes.
“You hope and pray that he’ll come back so that he can have it,” Bowman said.
As hard as it’s been to hope that Logan is alive while also preparing mentally for news that he is dead, Bowman has done something else that many people would have a more difficult time doing.
A deeply religious man, he has already forgiven Davis and Schermerhorn for whatever they did to his son.
“I have to,” he said. “If Logan’s gone to heaven, then some day if God forgives me for what I’ve done in life, he’ll give him back to me.”
For now, Bowman hopes the upcoming trials might offer some clue of his son’s fate. If not, he will be forced to wait for the day, if it ever arrives, when authorities come to say that a body has been found.
“If we had to bury him, at least I’d know where he’s at,” Bowman said. “Right now, I don’t know where he’s at.”
With a grave site to go to, Bowman would finally be able to fully grieve Logan’s death – a death as premature as his birth.