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

It was in 1881 that Mrs. Levy married Bowers, and it was only two years until she, also, began to have the sullen look of those other women who had borne the name of Mrs. Bowers.

Shortly after this she was beginning to fight against her husband taking out a life insurance policy on her, but in the end she capitulated, and secured various policies, one of which was for five thousand dollars from the American Legion of Honor, others bringing the sum total up to seventeen thousand.

The doctor, about 1884, again became an habitué of Bohemian resorts, and was just a little bit “tougher” than he had ever seemed before. In July, 1885, Mrs. Bowers began to suffer from a strange malady. Her face, head and body began to swell.

Six Investigators

Her mother, alarmed at the reports about her daughter, went to see her, and could hardly believe that the bloated creature who could hardly move for her unnatural bulk, was her beautiful Cecelia, who had been a heart breaker among men.

Bowers attended his wife, and announced that she was suffering from an abscess on the liver. She certainly suffered. Convulsions frequently shook her. She complained bitterly, in her lucid moments, though of what no one exactly knew.

The conduct of the “doctor” was criticized, for he often left his dying wife alone, while he was seen in cafés and other places of recreation and amusement.

In October of 1885 a stranger went to the offices of the American Legion of Honor and hinted that an insurance policy which had been taken out in that fraternity was held by a certain person, and that the person whom it concerned would die shortly, “very strangely.”

This man left the office of the Legion before his name could be secured, and he was never identified. Another mysterious stranger entered the coroner’s office on November the 2nd, and announced that Mrs. J. Milton Bowers had just died at the Arcade House, 930 Market Street, and that it would be well to look into the matter.

This man was never identified, either, and the descriptions of himself and his insinuating partner were found not to fit anybody who was known in the town at all. This part of the case was never cleared.

It was surmised that these men were enemies of the doctor, who had a great many queer “friends,” but that is all it is, a surmise.

Dr. O’Donnell, the coroner, went at once to the Arcade House and found Bowers alone with the dead woman. When the coroner told the doctor of the strange visit of the man who had made the insinuations, the doctor did not even seem to be listening.

He merely said that he had decided to have the funeral on the following afternoon, and that if there was to be any investigation, Dr. O’Donnell had better hurry up and attend to it so that the services would not be interfered with — and the coroner, being human, was angry.

He saw to it that six physicians should make the autopsy, and that Bowers should be made as uncomfortable as possible.

The six investigators of Mrs. Bowers’s death gave it as their united opinion that she had not died from an abscess of the liver.

Other physicians were called in, who thought that the symptoms of the illness which had carried off the unfortunate woman were those of phosphorous poisoning.

Charged With Murder

The funeral was postponed, greatly to the “doctor’s” annoyance, and the dead woman’s stomach was taken out and subjected to further tests, which disclosed some evidences of phosphorous poison.

The examining physicians and police contended that Bowers had received many samples of this poison from manufacturing chemists, but when his office was searched, no trace of these samples was found. He claimed that, having no use for them, he threw them out.

On November 4th, a coroner’s jury found that Cecelia Benhayon Levy Bowers had come to her death through phosphorous poison, and her husband, J. Milton Bowers, was arrested, charged with administering it to her.

This charge was largely brought about through the testimony of Mrs. Bowers’s mother, Mrs. Benhayon, who stated that when she first saw her daughter after the long estrangement it was her opinion that the young woman was dying, but that Rowers stated that she was, on the contrary, getting better, and that he would soon take her for “a nice, long trip in the country.”

Thus reassured, the mother waited for the evidences of better health in her daughter, but as the days went by, and there was no improvement, she had insisted that another physician be called in, but Bowers had strenuously opposed this, until forced to call Dr. W. H. Bruner.

A month going by, with Mrs. Bowers getting worse and not better, Mrs. Benhayon had called in Dr. Martin, of Oakland, who had not succeeded in easing the suffering woman any.

Sentenced to Be Hanged

However, about this time her skin had taken on a beautiful, pearly appearance, and Mrs. Benhayon, now greatly disturbed, asked Dr. Martin if it could be that Bowers was poisoning his wife with arsenic.