(upbeat music) - Hi, everyone, Steve Adubato.

We kick off the program with a terrific journalist, a compelling author.

He's Joe Strupp, an author of his second crime novel, "Death on St. Charles Street: Discovering My Family's Murderous Secret."

Good to see you, Joe.

- Thanks, for having me, always good to see you.

- You know, Joe, we've had you on before.

What was the last book that you came on to talk about?

- Yeah, that was my first true crime, "A Long Walk Home," which was about Carol Ann Farino, Columbia High School student in Maplewood, who was strangled to death.

Crime is still unsolved.

There we're actually a new effort to get to case reopened by the Essex County Prosecutor's Office and pressuring them for a while, filing requests, and we're not finished.

That was the first one, two years ago.

And then this one, "Death on St. Charles Street," it's also true crime, but in my own family, related to my great aunt and great uncle.

My great aunt was murdered by my great uncle.

In 1962, he also killed two other children and then himself, and it was a big family mystery for years.

And I started delving into it almost 20 years ago and uncovered a lot of interesting pieces that also included mental illness and how his own personal problems and demons took over.

But there's still mystery as to why he did it, because he was not a violent man, did not leave a suicide note.

And a lot of people were left with a lot of questions, and I think I get into a lot of the issues that I think helped answer some of them and let people make their own judgements as well.

- What triggered you to become interested in and then write about this horrific family murder?

- It really started about 20 years ago, I was at a family reunion.

My aunt was showing slides and home movies, and there was a woman in the pictures that I didn't know.

And sure enough, she was my grandmother's sister.

My grandmother was one of six, and this was a sister who obviously died back in 1962.

I had never heard of her.

When I asked what happened, they said, "Oh, yeah, she died before you were born."

And then my wife actually asked how, and my aunt said she was murdered.

Now, of course, that lights off the reporter part of my brain to say, "What?"

And I started looking into it little by little, and then a few years ago after I did the other true crime book, I started to really research, went out to Rapid City, South Dakota, which is where it happened, where my aunt is and where my grandmother's from.

And really dug into the people involved and was able to find a lot of people who knew the family, who knew the couple, and were involved, as well as my mother and her sisters, who were around at the time and had a lot of information.

- This is the Bowman family circa early 1950s.

Your aunt's in this picture, the murderous uncle's in the picture, and two of the kids.

- Yeah.

They had three children, Jack, Maurice, and Bruce.

Jack, the oldest, was actually away at college, the University of Minnesota.

So, he escaped the murder spree.

But the other two were only, I believe, 14 and 16.

They were shot both in their beds while they were sleeping, then he shot his wife and then himself.

They were all found dead the next morning by two guests who happened to be staying in the house in the basement who discovered the bodies.

And they also talked to me and gave me a lot of insight.

And he had had a long history of emotional problems, mental illness.

She had been an alcoholic, but a lot of it was very kept under the wraps.

- And he was John Bowman, John Bowman.

- John Bowman, his wife, Alberta.

She was my grandmother's sister.

- Why do you think it took so long, and also for your entrepreneurial reporting to find this out?

Did your family not talk about it?

- It really was never talked about.

I did not even know it occurred until this reunion about 20 years ago when they just happened to be showing photos.

And I said, "Oh, who's that?"

You know, the reporter, nosy reporter in me always wants to know things.

I'd always been interested in my family history, and this was my mother's side, my grandmother's side.

I really didn't know a lot about them.

My grandfather's side, I knew more about, so they were all from South Dakota, but never really stayed there.

So the history was kind of unknown.

It just came up one moment where I asked a question, and that led to more questions.

And they were very willing to talk to me, which I was surprised and grateful.

And then they started looking into the history of what occurred, newspaper clippings, and actually got some mental health records from my uncle who was suffering from all this depression and anxiety issues, and even tracked down the priest who gave them last rites and people who responded for the funeral home at the time.

A lot of recollections that were very vivid and very helpful.

But yeah, it was not something that was talked about.

Maybe the family didn't really want to go there.

In fact, two of my aunts were very helpful, said they hadn't really thought about it in 40, 50 years, but they were very helpful.

They were very grateful, I guess, to kind of get it off their chest and find out things they said after they read the book that they didn't even know about.

And for me, it was just more connection.

You know, I've covered crime and news, but never, luckily, my own family.

It has that kind of connection as my other book did coming from Maplewood where I lived for 20 years.

So that, I think, personal link is what made it interesting to me.

But yes, it had been very hidden away, and it really wasn't even in a lot of the background of South Dakota famous crimes, even though it was one of the biggest mass murders in their history, for whatever reason, it didn't really get a lot of coverage.

The family didn't really delve into it or want to talk about it.

But when I brought it up, they were very willing to be involved and help me out.

- What happened to John Bowman?

- John Bowman?

Well, John Bowman, the father, killed himself after he killed his wife and the two children.

The oldest son, they called Jack, actually lived on.

They had some trouble times himself.

He went on to finish school, he became an airline pilot for a while, but then he kind of went off the face of the earth and he actually was found dead in 2001 in California.

But his family brought him back and he's buried alongside his brothers and his mother and father in the same cemetery.

- We're talking to our longtime friend, a great journalist, Joe Strupp, "Death on St. Charles Street: Discovering My Family's Murderous Secret."

Joe, the book comes out.

What kind of reaction did you get from your family?

- I was a little nervous because... And my wife was also a little nervous, you know, do you want to be getting into this dirty laundry and, you know, exposing your family's foibles?

But they were all very helpful in researching and the general reaction has been good.

My aunt had a few questions about some things she said she didn't know about, and some other relatives, my cousin called it gripping.

A couple others who aren't even big true crime fans said they liked the history.

There's a lot of history at the time about South Dakota, about life in the '40s, the '50s, you know.

The dust bowl that hit America in the Depression really started in South Dakota as far back as the teens, the 1915, '16s.

And the family, my grandmother's family, was very poor.

They lived on a sharecropper ranch.

They were really living hand-to-mouth in many ways.

Six kids.

My grandmother and her sister, this same sister, actually had to go away to school when they were in junior high school.

They had to go away to live in another town in their own apartment at 14, 15 years old because they were not near a good school where the family was.

- Joe, how much does it bother you that after all this research, all this terrific reporting, the risk, if you will, of writing about a murderous, horrific event in your family, that there are still... How challenging is it for you?

How frustrating is it for you that there's still so many unanswered questions?

- I think that's just the nature of the beast, you know, that not everything is 100%.

You know, all we know is John Bowman had depression issues, anxiety issues.

He had been hospitalized several times.

He had been medicated.

I didn't really know about the medication at the time.

- [Steve] What?

- Yes.

- What year was this?

- 1962, July 29th.

- So mental health.

Treated, addressed, dealt with or not very differently in 1962?

- Somewhat, but not.

I also talked to medical experts, psychiatric experts, criminal experts who said, "Actually for the time, there was interesting diagnosis."

He was diagnosed, he was treated with medication, and was deemed to be okay.

But no, you can't... And even today, some of the experts were telling me, as good as it is today, you still don't always know.

You still can't always predict how someone will act.

That is, as you know, I'm sure for the research you've done, that it's a sliding scale, it's a hit-and-miss.

One person's depression is different from another, it's different from another's.

And the treatment you get depends on who you have as therapists, who you have for medication.

But he was getting treated as far back as 1951 at the Mayo Clinic a little bit and at the Yankton State Mental Hospital there in South Dakota.

And it was still a mystery of why he would do this violent act.

He was not violent.

All the research I found and medical reports on him showed he was a very quiet, more inverted man.

And he left no note, but it was clearly some kind of crime of passion at the time.

And he used a .22 caliber rifle that was in the house.

Big hunting area out there, as you would imagine.

He had gotten rifles for both two of his sons.

And it was believed one of those was the one he used because it was right at hand.

It's not like he went out, and bought a gun, and planned it ahead.

It happened to be there.

Now, would that have happened if the gun had not been there?

Who knows?

But there are a lot of unanswered questions.

Even though we do know who did it, the question, of course, is: Why?

- To shift gears, and by the way, the book is "Death on St. Charles Street: Discovering My Family's Murderous Secret."

Got a minute and a half left.

You know media better than most.

You've written about it, you've profiled some of our work over the years.

How optimistic are you about where media is, where we are going, and its connection to democracy in a minute or less?

- I'm always optimistic because if you're not, why are we here doing this business?

But I am very concerned, yes.

The media lately, and you know, thank you for mentioning that in my first book, "Killing Journalism," that there is a continued growth of corporate oversight, of consolidation of media, and, as my first book said, laziness, and greed, and getting the easy story.

And with social media, as you know, something goes out on social media, it's hard to unring that bell.

A lot of misinformation is out there, and that's what has to be fought.

I'm optimistic, but I'm probably equally or even more worried that we're going down a tough hole in many ways, and I hope it can get turned around.

But I'm fearful, but also optimistic.

- Last question on this show.

Is there a place for moving forward this kind of in-depth conversation?

By the way, check out our website, steveadubato.org.

It'll come up, the previous interview we did with Joe on his book, "Killing Journalism."

It's a tremendous book, it's in my library.

- Thank you.

- Under the Media and Journalism section, I refer to it consistently.

Is there a place for meaningful dialogue?

Where do we have to do it?

30 seconds or less.

On social media.

- No, so there has to be meaningful dialogue, and there is a lot of outlets.

That's one positive.

Podcasts, websites, discussions like this are crucial, but people have to know that media literacy has to be taught and has to be engaged by the consumer to know how to find the right outlets that you can trust, not just assume anything out there online or on the air is valid because they're all not.

You have to be discerning.

- Joe Strupp, a terrific journalist, a long-time friend of our series.

You'll see this on One-on-One and maybe some other platforms.

But primarily One-on-One, we're featuring a whole range of authors doing really important work.

Books still matter.

"Death on St. Charles Street: Discovering My Family's Murderous Secret."

Joe Strupp, also the author of "A Long Walk Home" and "The Crookedest Street."

Check Joe's book out.

Check out his website and all this stuff he's doing.

Hey, Joe, thanks buddy.

Good to see you.

- Thank you always, Steve.

Be well.

- You got it.

I'm Steve Adubato, that's Joe Strupp.

Stay with us, we'll be right back.

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