Crown wants sex offender locked up for life; relieved victim feels ‘like a strong woman’

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This article was published 13/07/2017 (2759 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A Winnipeg woman who suffered a vicious sexual assault in the North End four years ago says she now feels strong knowing the man who attacked her is likely headed to prison for a long time.

“I feel like I protected a lot of other women,” she said Thursday after a judge convicted 53-year-old Douglas Bowman on two counts each of sexual assault with a weapon and uttering threats, for preying on sex workers.

The Crown wants Bowman locked up for the rest of his life and is expected to ask the court to have him designated as a dangerous offender after proving he targeted sex workers and may have lashed out violently against more than 100 of them in the city over the past 26 years.

Court of Queen’s Bench Justice Joan McKelvey found Bowman guilty of attacks against two women. A third who came forward was too unfocused to give reliable evidence that met the legal standard, the judge said, but added she believed all three women were sexually assaulted with a weapon and threatened with death.

It was “probable,” that Bowman was responsible for all three of the attacks before the court, not just the two for which he was convicted, McKelvey said in her decision, delivered Thursday following Bowman’s trial several weeks ago.

“The discreditable acts engaged in by Bowman were committed for the purposes of satisfying an animus as against sex trade workers and in order to secure sexual gratification by violent, threatening and controlling conduct,” McKelvey’s written decision states.

The report of the vicious April 2013 sexual assault against a then-20-year-old woman led police to uncover previous attacks that had been reported to outreach agencies three years earlier. Each case was so similar — “in some aspects, strikingly so” — the judge said, that investigators eventually focused on a single suspect and arrested Bowman in 2014.

Each of the women who came forward were crack cocaine addicts working on the streets. Each was petite, with olive skin and long hair — Bowman’s type, he later told police. Once in the attacker’s van, each of the women was grabbed by the hair, threatened with death and held at knifepoint or with some other sharp object while they were being sexually assaulted. Each of the women described their attacker as an obese, foul-smelling man in his 40s or 50s and they picked Bowman out of a photo lineup.

In his police interview — which McKelvey acknowledged consisted of many leading questions — Bowman first said he’d been with 40 sex workers. He later changed that number to between 200 to 300 and admitted to pulling out a knife and using violence about half the time. He said he didn’t treat his wife that way because he didn’t want to hurt her.

One of the victims reported the attacker 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 and reported the Jan. 24, 2010 incident to Mount Carmel Clinic’s Sage House program.

The victims can’t be identified under a publication ban.

By the time the 20-year-old woman was attacked four years ago, Bowman’s violent behaviour had escalated. He repeatedly assaulted her, threatened to kill her if she didn’t stop screaming and used her own pepper spray against her before he threw her out of his van, telling her “slutty girls all deserve this,” court heard.

She had to be treated in hospital and underwent a sexual-assault examination afterward. When she went to the police and picked out Bowman’s photo, she told investigators she was “100 per cent sure” he was her attacker.

“I feel like I did the right thing. He’s a really bad man,” she said outside the courtroom Thursday, after hearing the judge describe her as a believable and forthright witness.

“I feel like a strong woman.”

The Crown’s request to have Bowman considered a dangerous offender will be argued in court at a later date.

 

katie.may@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @thatkatiemay