Prisoner confesses to teen’s 1968 slaying
SEATTLE – A man who once sat on death row for killing two women has been charged in a third slaying, more than three decades after a pregnant 16-year-old’s husband came home to find her body riddled with stab wounds.
The 1968 slaying of Sandra Bowman is the oldest “cold case” ever solved in Washington state, said Dan Donohoe, spokesman for the King County prosecutor’s office.
In charging papers Thursday, a Seattle police detective who recently questioned John Dwight Canaday said the Walla Walla penitentiary prisoner sighed, held up his hands and declared, “Yes, I killed her,” when told he had left DNA at the scene.
Earlier this year, a forensic scientist at the state crime lab matched Canaday’s DNA to sperm found on Bowman’s body. His genetic profile was in the state’s DNA database because of two 1969 murder convictions.
According to court documents, Bowman was stabbed at least 57 times on Dec. 17, 1968. When her husband came home from work, he found her bloodied body face down on their bed, her hands tied behind her back.
Bowman, entering her second trimester, was wearing a green maternity dress. An autopsy showed the stab wounds punctured her lungs, diaphragm, spleen, stomach, heart and liver.
Canaday, 59, is already serving two life sentences.
He was 24 and working as a pipeman’s helper for the city water department when Bowman was killed.
In a June interview, Canaday told Detectives Gregg Mixsell and Mike Ciesynski that he “randomly knocked on her door” and “attacked her … I stabbed her,” Mixsell wrote in charging papers.
Canaday blamed the attack on a bitter divorce, “a lot of anger at myself and immaturity,” Mixsell wrote.
The prosecutor’s office contends Bowman’s slaying would qualify as aggravated murder under current state law, saying it was clear Bowman was pregnant and that the numerous stab wounds constituted deliberate cruelty.
But because the aggravated murder statute did not exist at the time she was killed, prosecutors charged Canaday with first-degree murder, which carries a maximum sentence of life in prison. He’s scheduled to be arraigned Wednesday.
In court documents, Deputy Prosecutor Timothy Bradshaw said killing Bowman “evidently emboldened” Canaday to attack other women, killing two of them.
On Jan. 4, 1969, Canaday knocked on 21-year-old Mary Bjornson’s door. He said he had car trouble, then pulled out a knife, tied her wrists with a rope, drove her to a park and strangled her.
Three weeks later, he raped and killed Lynne Tuski, 20, after finding her walking to her car outside a north Seattle department store. He dumped her body and burned her clothes in his parents’ fireplace, just as he’d done with Bjornson’s clothes.
Later that year, Canaday was sentenced to die for those two murders. He won a reprieve in 1972, when a U.S. Supreme Court ruling effectively struck down the death penalty in more than 30 states, including Washington.