Serial killers often manifest their murderous tendencies early on. Stories abound of how an adolescent history of torturing and killing small animals is an early indicator of a troubled youth who may well end up becoming a serial killer. But Anne Rowland Corley skipped that intermediate step. At age twelve, she went straight for the gusto and allegedly murdered her father. Not that she was ever convicted or even tried for that offense.
Roger Rowland was the well-heeled heir to a pioneering Arizona copper-mining fortune who carried on a family tradition of hands-on involvement in the mining industry by moving his young family – a wife, Anita, and two daughters, Patricia and Anne – to Bisbee, Arizona, where he oversaw one of the family holdings.
Patty, the older of the two and developmentally disabled, died at age thirteen in what the Cochise County coroner’s report declared “an accidental fall” in the family home. A few days later, Roger Rowland was dead as well, as a result of what was officially termed “a self-inflicted gunshot wound.”
That double family tragedy was made worse when, prior to her father’s funeral, Rowland’s younger daughter, Anne, rocked the official boat by insisting that she had shot her father because he had been molesting her sister. The molestation allegations were never substantiated. Instead, twelve-year-old Anne Rowland was shipped off to a private mental institution in Phoenix, Arizona, where she remained for more than a decade.
While hospitalized, Anne Rowland came under the care of Dr. Milton Corley. She was released shortly after her mother’s death, and, at age twenty-four, she married Dr. Corley. She remained with him until his death seven years later. Corley suffered from colon cancer but he, like Anne Rowland Corley’s father, died of what was subsequently ruled to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Dr. Myra Collins, a longtime friend and colleague of Milton Corley, says that even at the time she doubted Corley would have taken his own life, but no one was interested in hearing what she had to say. They still aren’t.
”By that time Anne was the sole heir to her father’s fortune,” Dr. Collins stated. “She also picked up a nice piece of change when Milton died. She had the financial resources to hire high-powered attorneys and to get away with murder, which I continue to believe to this day is exactly what she did.”
When asked if she thought Anne Rowland Corley was responsible for her father’s death years earlier, Dr. Collins replied, “Anne always claimed she was the one who killed him. No amount of so-called treatment ever made her retract that statement. She was a smart, beautiful, and utterly ruthless young woman. I never had any reason to doubt what she said.”
After Milton Corley’s death, his widow lived a shadowy, vagabond lifestyle, never staying long in any one place. Her bills were sent to Scottsdale-area attorney Ralph Ames, who handled her finances and paid the bills as they came in, leaving her free to come and go as she wished.
People who had dealings with her during the next ten years said she looked like a movie star, drove a series of bright red Porsches, and stayed only in first-class hotels. It is also thought that she left behind a trail of murder.
Her victims were most likely people free on bail and awaiting trial in cases of suspected child abuse. Local law enforcement agencies, freed of the necessity of trying, convicting, and incarcerating yet another pedophile, were usually happy to close the books on those cases after only cursory investigations.
After Anne Rowland Corley’s death, there is some sketchy evidence that her widowed husband and her longtime attorney contacted several jurisdictions around the country, quietly closing several of those far-flung cases.
In one of them, Jake Morris, a forty-six-year-old drifter suspected of kidnapping and raping a six-year-old girl, was shot dead in Bangor, Maine. In another, twenty-three-year-old Lawrence Kenneth Addison, suspected of luring and molesting numerous children who lived near his parents’ home in Red Bluff, California, disappeared on a sunny Friday afternoon. His body was found two days later at a deserted I-5 rest area.
In both of those cases, witnesses mentioned something about a stranger – a good-looking woman – who was seen talking to both victims shortly before their deaths, but no one ever bothered to track her down. She was never thought to be a viable subject. Since there was no communication between the two affected jurisdictions, no one ever made the connection or noticed the similarities.
”That doesn’t surprise me,” Dr. Collins says. “There are plenty of male chauvinist homicide detectives out there who don’t believe women are smart enough or tough enough to be killers.”
Both Anne Rowland Corley’s widower and her long-term attorney refused to respond to repeated requests for interviews in conjunction with this story. Perhaps the possibility of a series of wrongful-death suits contributed to their reticence.
Anne Rowland Corley usually dispatched her victims with a single bullet to the head. She believed in being up close and personal with her victims. Once her identity was established, some local police investigators in those far-flung cases admitted that she had befriended officers in both locations as a way of gaining information and access to her intended victims. She did so by claiming to be writing a book on convicted child molesters, although no such manuscript has ever surfaced.
Her use of subterfuge may well account for the ongoing conspiracy of silence on the part of many police agencies involved. Although there are no doubt other cases to which Anne Rowland Corley was connected, it has been impossible to track down any additional ones in which she was directly involved. Only a diligent search of public records finally uncovered the list of acknowledged victims that accompanies this story. It’s likely there are other victims whose cases remain unsolved.
Six years ago, as a homicide detective for Seattle PD, J.P. Beaumont was investigating the abuse and death of a five-year-old child, Angela Barstogi. Suspects in that case included the child’s mother, Suzanne Barstogi, and the mother’s spiritual adviser, Michael Brodie, a dictatorial, self-styled religious leader whose followers in a sect called Faith Tabernacle did whatever he required of them.
Like his counterparts in Bangor, Maine, and Red Bluff, California, Detective Beaumont found himself befriended by a disturbingly beautiful woman who expressed an interest in the case. Shortly thereafter, the two prime suspects were found shot to death in a Seattle-area church. A day later, a man who turned out to be the real killer in the Angela Barstogi homicide investigation was also found murdered. Hours later, Anne Rowland Corley herself was shot dead.
”This was clearly a woman who felt violated and betrayed by the very people who should have protected her,” says August Benson, professor of criminal psychology at the University of Colorado. “When the people who should have offered protection failed her, Anne Rowland Corley took matters into her own hands.”
Joanna paused in her reading and glanced at the accompanying photo and the sidebar. The Anne Rowland Corley pictured in a posed black-and-white portrait was a lovely young woman with long dark hair and a reserved smile.
No wonder cops talked to her, Joanna thought. And no wonder J.P. Beaumont fell so hard.
Joanna was about to return to her reading when the phone rang. “Sheriff Brady?” Tica Romero, the day-shift dispatcher, asked.
“Yes. What’s up?”
“We’ve got a situation unfolding just west of Miracle Valley, out by Palominas. An unidentified intruder walked up to what he thought was an unoccupied house. He broke in and stole some food from the kitchen of Paul and Billyann Lozier’s place on River Trail Road. Then he went out to a corral, saddled up one of their horses, and took off. Billyann’s mother, Alma Wingate, was in an upstairs bedroom and saw the whole thing. Unfortunately, she didn’t have a phone with her at the time and couldn’t call 911 until after he left.”