No Easy, Early Out For Murderer

Murder is nothing more complex than the theft of a life. It is an extraordinary crime that cannot be minimized because it is the ultimate criminal act. It involves a stolen item that can never be returned or retrieved and is recalled only by prosecutors, next of kin or the person who committed the crime.

“Bowser,” the woman said, her voice like a transcript. “Edgar Bowser. He killed my son.”

“What was your son’s name?”

“Lonchiadis,” she said, spelling the last name. “James.”

“How old was he?”

“28.”

“How old was Bowser?”

“16.”

“When was your son killed?”

“March 5, 1975.”

“What did your son do?”

“He was a policeman.”

The mother of the dead man is Irene Humiston. She is 72, and she was describing what it is like to rummage through a blur of bad memories to prepare for a Parole Board hearing where Edgar Bowser will seek to convince the state that he ought to be released from prison, where he has been for the past two decades, since he was found guilty of murder.

That act - homicide - has been a constant headline this week because of Andrew Cunanan, who was turned into a media legend after he shot a rich dressmaker on the steps of his Miami Beach mansion. But Cunanan actually appears to be nothing more than a pathetic, deranged degenerate, desperate enough, dumb enough and suicidal enough to kill for cars and cash. He was not some genius chameleon capable of vanishing upon whim, but he dominated our attention in a summer when his only competition was news out of Wall Street, Mars or Hong Kong.

Yet murder endures as an object of public interest because it is so final. And most murderers, because they are novices, almost always display some colossal incompetence or error allowing investigators to catch them, which is different than convicting them. Unpunished murders always outnumber the unsolved.

Now, 22 years after Edgar Bowser shot James Lonchiadis to death outside a Shrewsbury, Mass., garage at 11:30 p.m. on March 5, 1975, the inmate seeks freedom. And, as she has done before, Irene Humiston summons her strength, as well as her memory, to fight the killer’s petition for parole.

“You have to be ready with your story,” she explained. “And it’s been so long that you have to go back over it all again in your mind. To remember. “Bowser came up from Rhode Island to steal a car that night,” she continued. “He was with his brother-in-law and his sister. That’s what they did: steal cars. And they wanted a Corvette.

“Jimmy had been on the police nine months. He was working 4 to midnight. Bowser saw a Corvette parked along Route 9. When he got out to steal it, his brother-in-law handed him a .45 and told him to use it. The brother-in-law is still in jail, charged with the same thing: murdering my son.

“Jimmy came along and saw them. He stopped to investigate, and Bowser shot him. He died at the hospital before we got there.

“He was married. He just bought a house in Shrewsbury five months before he was killed. My daughter-in-law still lives there, same house. She never remarried. ‘She and Jimmy had two children. My grandson, James, is 28. He, too, is a policeman in Shrewsbury today. My granddaughter Maureen has two children.”

James and Maureen, she said, “never got to know their father because of Bowser, so you can see I cannot forget about this. He murdered my son. He took the life of another human being. There’s nothing worse a person can do, and he must stay punished.”

Late last week, a hearing scheduled for Monday was postponed until fall. When it occurs, Irene Humiston will be present to testify that you don’t have to be part of some huge headline to suffer from the eternal effects of the worst crime that can ever be construed or committed.

“Bowser is alive,” she pointed out. “He has a girlfriend and a college degree since he killed my son.

“So I will tell them this,” Irene Humiston declared, “Bowser got life, all right. He got a wonderful life. Something he took from Jimmy.”

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