Connor Bowman, the former Mayo Clinic doctor who’s accused of fatally poisoning his wife, allegedly Googled “is widow gender neutral” just days before his wife’s murder, search warrants revealed this week.
The affidavit, obtained by The Daily Beast, also accused Bowman, 32, of adding “widower” to his Bumble dating profile within weeks of his wife’s death, using it to strike up conversations with matches where he allegedly lied about the nature and timing of Betty Bowman’s death.
Bowman’s Google search about the word widow came on Aug. 18, two days before Betty—a 32-year-old operating room pharmacist at Mayo—died in a Minnesota hospital after fighting for her life over the course of four days.
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Connor was the first to claim that his wife, who was suffering from severe gastrointestinal distress and dehydration in her final days, was battling hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis (HLH), an infection in which white blood cells damage organs. That was listed as the cause of her death on her obituary, but authorities later determined she’d actually been poisoned by her doctor hubby—given a fatal dose of colchicine, used to treat gout, that wrecked her insides and claimed her life.
Once Betty died, police said Bowman rushed to have her cremated. That procedure was halted after a medical examiner learned from an unnamed source that the Bowmans “were having marital issues and were talking about a divorce following infidelity and a deteriorating relationship,” an arrest affidavit said.
Betty Bowman.
GoFundMeBowman was arrested in October and charged with first-degree murder, but not before he spent over a month in the dating scene on the Bumble app, the warrant claimed. It said Bowman actively messaged with women, discussed his status as a widow, and claimed Betty would have wanted him to move on.
To one match, Bowman allegedly claimed his wife died from an overdose on morphine while she was under care at a hospital. He allegedly told another that Betty died from listeria poisoning earlier in the summer. Both women confronted him once they learned the true date of Betty’s death was mere weeks ago, the warrant said.
When asked by a woman on Bumble if he was comfortable being on a dating app so soon after his wife’s passing, the affidavit said Bowman responded that “it was a fair question” but that he “was OK being with a new person, that he knew what he wanted in life, and that Betty would have wanted him to move on to be happy.” That same woman said she found it weird that Bowman discussed how he used an insurance payout from Betty’s death to pay off student loans.
Those details appear to add to the increasingly-grim outlook Bowman faces if his case goes to trial. Cops say they’ve already uncovered proof he purchased colchicine and sodium nitrate online and tried to erase the purchase history from a digital account.
They also claim they have proof he made other suspicious internet searches prior to Betty’s death, like “delete Amazon data police” and a search for data that’d provide lethal poisoning doses for a person “weighing approximately 120 pounds,” the approximate weight of Betty. Police added that the drug he most frequently searched for information on was colchicine, and that he once clicked on a news article headlined, “Internet browsing history: Can it be used in court?”
Police said previously that Betty may have been poisoned by a smoothie served to her by Bowman. She’d reportedly texted another man that “she was sick and could not sleep at all because she felt so ill” in her final week alive, adding “that she thought it was a drink she had received that caused her illness because it was mixed in a large smoothie.”
A witness in the case, Sonya Rose Johnson, told police that it was out of character for Bowman to make his wife a smoothie because he “never made anything for anybody.” She claimed that Betty told her that she joked that Bowman was trying to poison her and that she didn’t finish the smoothie, which tasted “bitter and salty, not like a smoothie would be expected to taste,” the warrant said.
Bowman remains in custody on a $2 million bail in Minnesota, awaiting trial.
One of Betty’s friends, Mary Bartlett, told The Daily Beast last year that “what happened to Betty was horrific, and we hope justice prevails.”
“She was truly a one-of-a-kind individual,” Sarah Leeser, a friend who set up a GoFundMe for the family. “So intelligent and caring and lived life to the fullest.”
