Was It Murder Or An Accident? -- Woman's Death Was A Mystery

LONDON - It all came down to whether Florence Jackson, unsteady on her feet at age 89, could have wandered off on her own one chilly English night in 1992, walked a quarter-mile down a dark country lane, then fallen into a river, where she drowned.

That was the initial explanation when her body was found the next morning outside the town of Winchelsea, southeast of London. But police poked around and came up with another theory: A second woman was there that night, posing as a loving relative but in fact carrying out a murderous plan to preserve an inheritance that the old woman's nursing-home fees were depleting.

Florence Jackson didn't fall, police said. She was pushed. Pushed by a piano teacher named Sheila Bowler, 63, who lived in the neighboring town of Rye, they say.

No one loves a good murder like the English, but these days, terrorism and stickups gone wrong are the more common variety. So the tale of Sheila Bowler, with characters and claims of hidden passions fit for an Agatha Christie mystery, seized the national imagination.

Through it all, Bowler cast herself as an innocent woman being ground up by a legal system that is supposed to protect people like her. "I could not believe it. I felt quite sick," she told the Times newspaper, recalling the day police came to her home to arrest her. "They interrogated me and that was dreadful, absolutely dreadful."

Last week, at the Old Bailey courthouse in London, scene of

countless murder trials, the tale came to a climax when a jury came before a judge after six hours of deliberation and pronounced the defendant . . .

But that, of course, would be giving away the ending.

If Bowler did commit a murder, she had adequate time to plot it. For years, she had been visiting Jackson, an aging aunt of her husband. One day in May 1992, Bowler drove to a nursing home to pick up the woman, with the aim, Bowler later would say, of taking her to Bowler's home for a few days' stay.

By Bowler's account, a steering problem occurred as she drove down a steep hill on a country lane, and she pulled over to check it. She got out and found one tire was partly flat. So she left the older woman in the car and walked to a cottage to call for roadside service.

When she returned, she said, the woman was gone. Police were called. The next morning, they found Jackson's body in the Brede River by a bridge about 500 yards down the lane from where the car had stopped.

Before long, detectives were questioning whether this was an accident. Why would the old woman have gone off alone, and how could she have made it so far?

And hadn't Bowler behaved rather oddly? She suggested searchers stay away from the river, claiming there was no chance Jackson was there, which officers took as an effort to conceal the body. She had shown no sorrow when told of the death.

And there was the old woman's will. She had left her small apartment to Bowler. Yet before her death, with nursing-home fees piling up, a possible sale of the apartment loomed.

At the June 1993 trial, prosecutors said Bowler had driven the woman to the bridge and pushed her into the water. They presented no physical or eyewitness evidence, but cited opportunity, motive and circumstantial evidence, such as testimony that there was no food in the house the woman supposedly was being taken to. A jury found Bowler guilty, and she was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Appeals were filed. A British television show called "Trial and Error," which specializes in alleged miscarriages of justice, produced two programs about her. Last July a judge granted a retrial on grounds of new evidence, mostly developed by the TV show, and Bowler was set free on bail after four years in jail.

The new evidence had to do with Jackson's mobility. In a four-week trial in London, the defense brought in expert witnesses to testify about such things as the likely condition of her leg muscles and the agility of other people of her age and condition. The goal was to show that she might have walked to the bridge on her own.

It worked. The jury returned a not-guilty verdict. Bowler walked out of the courtroom with more than five years of legal nightmare behind her. Some jurors waited outside the courthouse, giving her friendly waves.

Did she make any mistakes in how she handled herself during the investigation? No, she said, but she had some advice: "Don't take an old lady in a car at night. . . . If you must do this, have a mobile phone."