A South Carolina man accused of raping two teenage girls and then a third while out on bond has been released after serving less than a year and a half behind bars.
Bowen Turner, now 21, got a sweetheart plea deal in early 2022 that sparked outrage for its leniency—the well-connected Turner got five years probation and pleaded guilty to a single charge of first-degree assault and battery.
That came after he violated the terms of his house arrest agreement dozens of times to visit friends, go golfing, and eat at a restaurant, among other things, according to court documents. The son of an investigator for a local prosecutor, he wasn’t locked up until July 2022, after an arrest for disorderly conduct saw his probation finally revoked.
ADVERTISEMENT
After serving 16 months, he was released Wednesday—the birthday of the father of one of his victims, and the day after the two-year anniversary of that same victim’s death. Dallas Stoller, the second teenager to accuse Turner of rape, died from a self-inflicted injury in 2021 after alleged bullying that stemmed from her coming forward. The sexual assault charge against Turner was dismissed in light of her death.
The timing of Turner’s release is a gut punch for the family.
“I think it makes it 1,000 times worse,” Dallas’ sister, Brette Tabatabai, told Live 5 News last month after Turner’s release date was set. “It’s a really hard time. It’s a time that we’re grieving. It’s a time that brings up that day, that phone call that I got, the time I’m laying on the ground trying to breathe hearing those words that my sister is gone.”
Stoller’s family has said she was found unconscious and covered in bruises after the 2018 rape, which came after Turner had been accused of raping another teen just months earlier.
“One of her eyes was completely bloodshot from strangulation,” Tabatabai said in an earlier interview with FITS News. “Her neck was completely black and blue from being strangled.”
After being arrested and charged in her case, Turner was released on bond and allegedly went on to rape a third teenager, a pastor’s 16-year-old daughter.
Chloe Bess said on the Murdaugh Murders podcast that she was at a party in June 2019 and had gone outside to call a friend when Turner followed her out and stood nearby, making her “uncomfortable.”
“I remember him coming out, and I was asking my friend to come pick me up, or when she was coming back,” Bess said. “The phone conversation ends, and I just remember him pulling me into a tree line, there’s a truck parked there and we go behind the truck. The next thing I know I’m on the ground. And he’s a lot bigger than me, I only weigh 115 pounds, I’m really tiny,” she said.
“I wanted to kick and scream, but I couldn’t move, I didn’t know what to do,” she said.
Prosecutor David Miller, the prosecutor behind Turner’s cushy plea deal, is now seeking to become a circuit court judge, and Dallas Stoller’s family is making a point of letting South Carolinians know what they’d be getting with Miller on the bench.
“If you’re going in front of him, if there’s not something in it for him, you’re going to more than likely find yourself on the bad end of the deal,” Dallas’ father, Karl Stoller, told Live 5 News this month, saying Miller showed a “general lack of interest” in his daughter’s case “from the very beginning.”
“This has never been and will never be completely about Dallas,” Stoller said. “This has opened my eyes to a whole set of problems we have in our state, maybe nationwide, with the way victims are handled. Let’s not run out of gas on that.”
On the day Turner was released—with orders to complete one year of community service and meet with a supervision officer each week—Stoller paid tribute to his daughter on social media. Alongside a portrait of her, he shared a brief text that included the lines, “I say I miss you all the time but really that just doesn’t quite cover it.”
