Part 4 of Homicide, a five-part true crime series by reporter Grant LaFleche. Follow the case from the fatal gunshot to the forensic investigation to the interrogation.
This series was originally published in the St. Catharines Standard in 2006.
The room is cramped. Tight. Standing in the centre you can stretch your arms and almost touch the walls.
The air is stale. Stuffy. The walls are a grimy, pale yellow. Neglected. They’re desperate for a new paint job. But no one can be bothered to lift a brush.
It’s warm. Too warm to be comfortable. There’s the small brown table with the aluminum legs. Two chairs. They don’t match. A video camera bolted into the wall above the door.
Nothing else.
It can keep you on edge. That’s what interrogation rooms are for. To skew things just enough to make you feel off. Out of place. Like a reflection in a funhouse mirror.
It’s the last place anyone who knew Matthew Bowden figured he would end up. Not someone like him. Smart. Gifted. Clean-cut. He came from a good home. Good parents. Upstanding family. Well-liked. If you were looking for a bad seed in Dunnville, you’d look anywhere but at the Bowdens.
Matthew grew up collecting bubble-gum cards and comic books. He did well in sports. Often went fishing with his father. He’d held down a part-time job since he was 11.
Not exactly the profile of a criminal.
Yet here he is. June 14, 1999. Niagara Regional Police headquarters in St. Catharines. In a cramped interrogation room.
The lousy house on McGrail Avenue in Niagara Falls was rented in his name. The same house where rows of pot were growing.
They charged Bowden with production of a controlled substance.
He was treated like anyone dumb enough to end up in cuffs. His photo was taken. His mug.
Turn to the left.
Turn to the right.
His hands were rolled over the scanner with the neon orange light.
Each fingertip.
Side of his hands.
Palms.
For the first time in his 20 short years, Bowden has an arrest record.
A cop is asking him questions. Lots of questions. But not about the pot. Not really.
The cop is more interested in Paul Campagna. American. Illegal resident of Niagara Falls. Non-practising ophthalmologist. Drug dealer. Corpse.
Compared to lanky Matt Bowden, the cop asking the questions is a titan. Detective Brent Symonds. Six-foot-two-inches of broad-shouldered, stern-faced, square-jawed Detective Brent Symonds.
Twenty-one years now he’s been wearing a badge and carrying a gun. He’s investigated more murders than Bowden’s had birthdays.
Bowden’s a smart kid. He knows his rights.
“I want to talk to my lawyers.”
When Bowden’s done with his lawyers, he has a story for Symonds.
Bowden started smoking pot in college. Got the bright idea to grow his own. So he bought some plants from a local dealer. Planted them in the bush in Dunnville. They never did grow.
Then he got the call. The call that changed everything. That ruined everything. If only he hadn’t bought those plants.
If only.
The call was from a guy going by the name of John. The dealer’s boss.
“He had no business selling you those plants, “ he said. “I want them back.”
Bowden tried to give them back, but John - or Paul Joseph Campagna, as his birth certificate said - wasn’t happy. The roots were damaged. The plants were no good to him anymore.
“You owe $3,000 for those plants, or you can work off your debt, “ Campagna said.
Bowden is a smart kid. His teachers all say so. He excelled in school, especially at math. A wizard with computers. No one could say otherwise.
But there are different kinds of smart. There’s book smart. There’s street smart.
Bowden is book smart.
He agrees to work off the debt.
In the interrogation room, Bowden tells his sad tale. Elsewhere in the building, Detective Joe Matthews is looking into the McGrail Avenue phone records. They’re odd. The phone was never actually answered. Left to ring off the hook. Then someone pressed *69 to see who had called.
Detectives use the records to track down Bowden’s friends. Some are reluctant to talk. A few are nervous. But what they do say echoes parts of Bowden’s story.
Campagna was using Bowden. Not treating him well. When a pot buyer hadn’t paid up, Campagna threatened to break Bowden’s legs just to show the buyer he meant business.
He once sent Bowden to deliver drugs to Toronto, but didn’t give him enough money for a bus ticket back to Niagara Falls.
He was Campagna’s bitch, they told police.
But something else is coming out of these interviews. Something Bowden didn’t tell Symonds.
In the last few months, Bowden was becoming scared. Real scared. Campagna was making threats against Bowden’s family.
Bowden started asking around. Asking for a favour. A big one. The kind of favour you can only get from a close friend. The kind of friend that would throw himself in front of a bus for you.
He needed a “piece.” Something to protect himself. To protect his family.
As police are questioning Bowden’s friends, deep in the labyrinth of NRP headquarters, Granton’s work pays off.
He lifted fingerprints from receipts found in the McGrail Avenue house. From beer cans. From a library card with instructions on how to build a silencer.
The prints match those of Matthew Bowden.
June 16, 1999. Niagara Regional Police headquarters. St. Catharines. Bowden is back in the hot seat.
Symonds starts asking specific questions about the evidence at the house.
The missing piece of carpet? Don’t know, Bowden says. He went to the house on May 29. He was out of town at a party the night before. When he got back he found a section of the carpet cut out. There were newspapers on it. Maybe someone threw up on them? Looked like it. Anyway, he tossed the papers out.
The diesel purchases? For a U-Haul he rented to move the marijuana plants.
The packing tape? Used when moving the plants.
Symonds asks point blank about Campagna’s death.
“Do you have any knowledge of Mr. Campagna’s death?”
“No.”
“Did you see anyone or help anyone move Mr. Campagna’s body?”
“No.”
The how-to notes for a silencer. Why would you need to build one, Symonds asks.
No answer.
Bowden is confronted with the fingerprints found in the McGrail Avenue house. Can he explain that?
No answer.
Bowden’s released from custody. If he prays this is finally over, no one is listening.
Either that, or the answer is no.
Up north in Orillia, in an Ontario Provincial Police lab, a black plastic sheet is being tested. Specifically, the duct tape stuck to the sheet. They were wrapped around Campagna’s body before it was thrown into the quarry.
Common sense says any evidence would have been washed away after soaking in the water for days. There would be nothing for police to find.
Thing is, the laws of science don’t care about common sense.
Fingerprints just don’t get washed away from tape soaking in water. No matter how much someone might want them to. They stick.
The tape was wrapped around that body in the house at McGrail Avenue. It was hot as hell in there. It was hard, sweaty work.
In a place like that, the oils on the human skin are absorbed right into some materials. Stuff like duct tape will drink up those oils like an unrepentant alcoholic at happy hour.
It takes more than a few days in the water to wash out prints like that.
The prints found all over the tape match those of Matthew Bowden.
Detective Mark Lightfoot is done asking questions. He sends officers to pick up Bowden on the charge of first-degree murder.
Dec. 15, 2000. Superior Court of Justice. St. Catharines.
It really is over now. All of Bowden’s lies, his damn lies, were undone by the fingerprints.
He’s done trying to cover it up. There’s no point. Not anymore.
The police have him.
He arrives in court with high-profile talent. Defence attorney George Walker.
Walker is armed with statements from Bowden’s teachers. The file is thicker than a Toronto phone book. They all say the same thing.
They were shocked to hear that Bowden is accused of murder. They all knew him to be smart. Kind. Popular. Athletic yet bookish. The type of student every teacher wants.
These teachers are never called to testify. There’s no need. Bowden confesses to it all in court.
Campagna’s pot plants. The threats. How he got a couple of friends to get him the sawed-off .22 rifle.
He tells the judge about that May morning in that lousy house. About how he had death in his eye. About the call Campagna was going to make and how he came down on Campagna like an executioner’s axe.
He spills his guts. Tells them everything. About how he looked around the living room and found just about everything he needed. The plastic sheets. The canvas bag. The tape.
He says he renewed his driver’s licence so he could rent the U-Haul he and his buddy used to take the body to the quarry and dump it.
He tells them he tossed the rifle into Lake Erie off the Port Maitland pier.
He turns to face Campagna’s estranged brother and sister seated in the gallery. He says he wants to show remorse for what he’d done.
Then he turns to his parents and uncle. “I’d like to try to apologize for all the unfairness I’ve caused you. I’m sorry and I love you.”
He pleads guilty. Second-degree murder. A life sentence. No chance of parole for 10 years.
Hard time.
Paul Campagna. Matt Bowden. They could have been a couple of a regular Joes.
Could have.
One is dead. He could have been anything. He was a doctor. He had brains to spare. Instead he became a nickel-and-dime drug dealer. He was going to sell pot to pay for an Oxford University law degree.
What he got was a hot bullet.
The other one fired that bullet for his freedom. He wasn’t going to be a slave. Not another day. Not another minute.
Bowden could have been anything he wanted. Computer programmer. Businessman. He had talent to spare.
Instead Bowden became a monkey boy for a bully he believed was a feared and known criminal among feared and known criminals.
Bowden killed for his freedom. Now he sits in a maximum security cell. At Millhaven. Caged with the worst of the worst.
Five years he’s been in prison. Another five to go at least.
But for Bowden there might still be a chance. If he studies. If he can build a new future. There might still be a tomorrow for him.
There might just be.
***
THE CONFESSION OF MATTHEW BOWDEN
Matthew Bowden, serving a life sentence, turned down a request for an interview with Osprey News through a spokeswoman with Corrections Canada. Bowden spoke publicly about the case only once on Dec. 8, 2000, when he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder.
Here are excerpts from the statement he read before Justice Paul Forestell.
“On or about June of 1998 I purchased some marijuana plants from an associate of the deceased and planted them in the bush in Dunnville, Ont. ... sometime thereafter I received a call from the deceased and he said that his associate had no right to sell me the plants and wanted them back ... I gave the plants back to him and he later told me that the plants died because the roots were damaged and he wanted $3,000 cash or I could work the debt off ...
The deceased became unhappy with me because he said that I wasn’t around enough and wasn’t doing enough chores to work the debt off and he demanded that I raise $2,000 for him, which I raised from friends.
... We took the equipment for the grow operation from his Orchard Avenue residence to the McGrail Avenue residence ...
The McGrail Avenue residence had very little furniture, no kitchen appliances and little or no food and I had to constantly borrow money from my friends or sell some of my personal items to raise money ...
The deceased had threatened to have my brother and parents assaulted/killed if I left. I felt trapped ...
Eventually, in mid-May two of my friends, at my request, brought me a .22-calibre rifle with ammunition ...
On the day of the shooting ... the deceased and I were at the McGrail Avenue residence, I had the .22 rifle in a bag. I told the deceased I wanted to move home...
The deceased became visibly excited and upset and yelled at me that I wasn’t going anywhere, that he said he wanted $5,000 now and more money later ... and if he couldn’t get to school it was because of me... I said I’m going home, he said he would kill my brother and he knew someone in Buffalo, N.Y., that he would call to look after it.
He picked up the phone and I took the rifle out of the bag and pointed it at him and told him to put the phone down. The deceased turned toward me, I thought he was coming towards me. I raised the rifle to shoot him and as I shot he had turned away from me.
I shot him once in the head, behind and about the top of the deceased’s right ear from a distance of approximately five feet ...
I called a friend and he assisted me in wrapping the deceased’s body in materials found in the McGrail Avenue residence and we placed it into a U-Haul van that I had rented and we drove to a quarry in Wainfleet, Ont., where we dropped the body into the water ... The .22-calibre rifle I obtained ... was thrown into Lake Erie off of the Port Maitland pier.
‘HE KILLED MY BROTHER’
Paul Campagna never forgot anything. Ever. Whatever entered his brain never left.
“I used to try and trip him up. To test him, “ says his younger brother John Campagna. “But it never worked. I am telling you, Paul was the smartest, brightest man you would ever meet.”
Growing up in Buffalo as one of five children, Paul Campagna excelled at school.
John credits Paul, who did a semester at Ridley College in St. Catharines in the mid-1960s, with keeping him in school.
Paul’s grades earned him a seat at the Ivy League Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. He even did a few semesters at Oxford.
But while Paul earned a medical degree like his brother John and sister Ida, he never became a practising doctor.
“He started in pediatrics but changed to study to be an ophthalmologist, “ John says. “I don’t know why he never got licensed.”
By 1983, Paul rarely talked to his family.
By 1987, he had been arrested for possession of marijuana.
“Paul had his own ideas about marijuana, “ John says. “He felt that if it relieved someone’s suffering, there was no reason why they shouldn’t have it.”
John says to the best of his knowledge Paul had intended to return to Oxford to study international law. He is unable to say why Paul decided to live illegally in Canada, or start a marijuana growing operation.
After Paul’s murder, the Campagna clan attended the court hearings in St. Catharines. The affair was painful for the family, and his mother suffered the most.
“It killed her. It literally killed her. She had just had a serious heart operation and was in poor health (when Paul died), “ John says. “After Paul was killed she sort of lost interest in everything. She died shortly afterwards.”
To this day, John and his family are dismayed their brother’s killer received what they consider a light sentence life with the possibility of parole in 10 years.
“Here in the U.S. Bowden would have been sent away for 25 years or the death penalty. Even for second-degree murder, “ John says. “This guy is going to get out of a prison still a young man and will have his second chance. Paul doesn’t get that chance.”
John doesn’t buy into Bowden’s story that Paul bullied him to the point of murder. He cannot see how his 5-foot-6, 187-pound brother, who suffered chronic back pain from a car accident, could frighten the taller, fitter and younger Matt Bowden. He thinks there is another explanation.
In an interview with police after he was arrested, Bowden said his share of the marijuana could have been as much as $20,000.
“He killed my brother for money. He wanted to sell the marijuana for himself. His story doesn’t make sense. If he was that scared he could have gone to the police, “ John says. “Anyone else would have just got out of a situation like that.”
Paul Campagna’s family makes no excuses for his behaviour. But whatever he did, they say, he didn’t deserve a bullet.
“I would like to say I forgive Mr. Bowden. I really would like to say that, “ John says. “But I can’t. Not yet. Maybe not ever.”
