Man accused of sexual assaults while wielding knife preyed on city’s sex workers Crown says

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This article was published 06/06/2017 (3406 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A 53-year-old man on trial for sexually assaulting three women at knifepoint made Winnipeg his “hunting ground” as he preyed on sex workers in the city, the Crown has argued.

The attacks were perpetrated over three years by a man who hated sex workers and used violence to feel in control, Crown attorney Geoffrey Bayly suggested.

“He doesn’t care about these other women. They don’t mean anything to him. They’re an it, not a who,” Bayly said during his closing arguments this week.

Douglas Bowman has pleaded not guilty to allegations he violently sexually assaulted and threatened to kill three women during incidents that date to January 2010. He awaits a verdict from Court of Queen’s Bench Justice Joan McKelvey, who is expected to deliver her decision Thursday.

The three women testified in court during Bowman’s trial and all three had picked him out of a photo lineup prior to his arrest.

In a case that turns on the identification of the suspect, defence lawyer Brett Gladstone asked the judge to consider the frailties of eye-witness evidence. He didn’t dispute the women may have been attacked, but argued the Crown had not proven his client was responsible. He questioned the women’s abilities to accurately identify their attacker and suggested they may have been influenced by the quality of the photo of Bowman shown to them by police.

Compared with the other photos shown to the victims, Bowman’s “stands in such stark contrast,” as though it were placed on a pedestal, Gladstone said in his closing arguments.

“The best analogy I’ve been able to come up with during the lifetime of this case is that it’s like the difference between watching television in the ’80s and ’90s, as opposed to watching television in the late 2010s. It’s clear, it’s crisp, it’s obvious the difference,” he said.

Bowman was charged in 2014 with three counts each of sexual assault with a weapon and uttering death threats after a Winnipeg Police Service investigation connected a reported sexual assault from April 2013 and two others that happened three years earlier.

Investigators suspected he was the john who prompted two of the victims to report “bad dates” with outreach agencies in January 2010. They warned of an obese, foul-smelling man in his 40s or 50s who had, in separate incidents, picked them up while they were working on the street in Winnipeg’s west end. Instead of paying them for sex acts they had agreed upon once they got in his van, the man allegedly grabbed them by the hair, pulled out a knife and asked them if they wanted to die as he forced sex acts on them.

One of the victims reported the man cut the back of her neck and said, “There, I’ll always be able to remember you by that,” before she escaped. The woman, who was 41 at the time, memorized the vehicle’s licence plate number and reported the Jan. 24, 2010, incident to Mount Carmel Clinic’s Sage House program.

It would be another three years — and an attack against a third woman — before police would search those “bad date” reports and use that plate number to lead them to a suspect.

The third assault happened April 1, 2013, when a 20-year-old woman had to be hospitalized after being attacked in the North End. A man pulled a knife on her when she got into the vehicle and repeatedly assaulted her, threatening to kill her if she didn’t stop screaming, court heard.

She said her attacker told her she and all the other “slutty girls” deserved what was happening to her. When she tried to pepper spray the man, he took the canister from her and wiped pepper spray in her eyes before throwing her out of the vehicle. Staff at the city’s Health Sciences Centre reported the incident to police after the woman underwent a sexual-assault examination.

In urging the judge to convict Bowman, the Crown pointed to portions of a videotaped statement the accused gave to police following his arrest in September 2014.

The accused first told police he had been with 40 sex workers over the past 26 years, but later changed that figure to between 200 to 300. He admitted having a knife and using violence in about half of those interactions, Bayly said.

Gladstone argued those admissions from his client were not reliable evidence.

katie.may@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @thatkatiemay