Flynn’s Weekly Detective Fiction. Vol. 25, No. 2, August 13, 1927

Bowers was born in Baltimore, and had every advantage as a youth. He was one of these precocious youngsters whose brains never seem to have to go through the slow processes of the average child student. At sixteen he went to Berlin, and although he was not a matriculated student, he had already decided that he wanted to be a physician, and therefore made medicine his chief study.

He seems to have been considered peculiar by his teachers, who thought that he had promise, but that he was too easily led into the pursuit of pleasure. How long he stayed there is doubtful. About 1859 he returned to America and was caught in the vortex of the Civil War. He did not achieve distinction and made few friends.

In 1865, just after the war was over, Bowers went to Chicago, settled, and seems to have had something to do with a patent medicine firm.

He married Miss Fannie Hammet, who had some money of her own and carried a life insurance policy.

Mrs. Bowers seems to have dropped hints to several people that her husband was a fiend in human shape, and that she was mortally afraid of him, but he was one of those men whose good manners, thoughtfulness for their wives and social graces made a favorable impression on many people.

Women were apt to think that the pale, furtive and sour looking Mrs. Bowers was enough to try the spirit of any man. Her friends told a different story, and when she died, very suddenly, and without any attendant save her husband, there were a good many murmurs.

However, no investigation of the death was made, despite the amount of talk that there was about it.

Beautiful, Talented and Good

Soon after the death of his first wife, Bowers happened to be in Brooklyn on a visit, and there he met again a very clever actress who had been his patient in Chicago. She was Thresa Shirk, beautiful, talented, and good.

His fine manners had always attracted her, and she listened sympathetically to his account of a marriage “entered into too young for true congeniality,” a legend which his “patients” in the windy city had believed.

“Dr.” Bowers and Thresa Shirk were married in Brooklyn, and they then went to San Francisco, as Bowers was really not very well, and it was thought that the climate of the Pacific coast would do him good. His new wife was also very fond of California, and glad to go there. This was in 1874.

As in Chicago, the doctor soon had a good many patients who thought that his wife did not appreciate him; they found her quiet and dull of appearance, and, though different from his first wife, she showed no fear of him, but she did show resentment.

She was a high spirited, proud woman, who disdained to discuss her domestic affairs with any one, but there was the shadow of a tragedy on her beautiful face.

She carried a life insurance policy, though not for a very large sum; a fact on which her husband sometimes laughingly joked with her, or, rather, at her, for on such occasions she turned and looked him in the eye as though defying him.

All this did not escape the attention of friends of Thresa Shirk Bowers, and when she died at the Palace Hotel, on January 29, 1881, the clamor was a good deal worse than it had been about the unfortunate Fannie Hammet.

By that time, however, Bowers had important friends, people who knew him as one of the few men in the western metropolis of the time who had cosmopolitan culture and the easy, graceful manners of an assured social position. They knew him to be extremely clever and popular.

It is easy to construct the scene and to see that the few who actively suspected him of having a hand in his second wife’s mysterious death were unable to do anything about it.

Among the patients who had become part of the doctor’s clientele was a divorced woman named Cecelia Benhayon Levy, a very beautiful woman, who had the reputation of being “gay,” if not worse, although she contrived to keep a certain social standing. She had a brother Henry Benhayon, who was a traveling salesman, and a child by her divorced husband, named Tillie.

His Wives Are Slaves!

The popular doctor had been seen at a good many Bohemian resorts for months before Thresa Shirk died, and less than six months after he had buried her he married Cecelia Benhayon Levy, against the vehement protests of her mother, who had heard stories about the doctor’s other waves’ lives and deaths, which did not soothe her.

Mrs. Levy, however, was as infatuated with her husband — for a time — as his other wives had been, and she cheerfully forsook the company of her relatives, making it clear that she did not care what their opinion of her husband was.

Bowers sanctimoniously pretended to be sorry to “have been the innocent cause of this dissension,” but among his cronies he blatantly preened himself on his ability to “make my wives slaves.”