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Joe Owens

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Joe owens

Joe Owens

Real Name: Joseph Lynn Owens
Aliases: Joe
Wanted For: Murder
Missing Since: September 7, 1989

Gladys owens

Gladys Owens

Case[]

Details: Seventy-year-old Joe Owens of West Seattle, Washington, is wanted for the murder of his seventy-eight-year-old wife, Gladys. At 7:15am on September 7, 1989, Joe called his and Gladys’ nephew, Arden Bradshaw, an attorney in Wichita, Kansas. He told Arden that he was going to be “gone” and had some things he wanted Arden to take care of, such as his house and car.
Arden immediately asked Joe why he needed him to take care of these things. Joe said that he was going to be “gone for good.” Arden asked him what he meant. He responded, “Well, this is my last day alive.” Arden asked him what he meant by that. He explained that he was going to end his life. He claimed that he had been diagnosed with incurable prostate cancer. He had not told anyone in the family because he did not want them to know about it.
Arden became concerned that Joe was actually going to commit suicide. He said, “Joe, let’s stop this right now,” and told him that he would get a flight to Seattle as soon as possible. He told Joe that they should sit down and talk about this before he did anything. Joe responded, “No, I’m at the end of the line, and I’m going to do this.”
Arden then asked Joe what Gladys thought about his plans. Joe said, “That’s the other thing I need to talk to you about, Arden. Gladys is gone. She passed away last March.” He said he had come home and found her dead on the bedroom floor from an overdose of barbiturates. He said there were several pill bottles around her. He claimed that she had committed suicide.
Joe said he thought the family would be humiliated by Gladys’ suicide, so he had kept it a secret. He had buried her quietly on family land in Mount Si, Washington, about thirty miles east of Seattle. He said he planned to go to the same place to take his own life and adamantly refused Arden’s offer to fly immediately to Seattle. The two then said goodbye and said that they loved each other.
After Arden notified the Seattle police, two detectives – Richard Steiner and Gene Ramirez – investigated. Detective Steiner says that when they walked into the Owens’ home, they fully expected to find Joe dead someplace inside. They covered every inch of the house but found no sign of Joe or Gladys.
Five days later, Joe’s pickup truck surfaced at a North Bend masonry yard, one mile from Mount Si – the same place where he allegedly planned to kill himself. The yard’s owner told police that he sold Joe a shovel on September 7. His secretary said that she had given Joe a ride to Mount Si in Joe’s pickup truck, which he had told her to keep. During the ride, she asked him how long he would be up there. He told her, “Indefinitely.” After she dropped him off, she saw him walking up the Mount Si trail.
Police brought in five bloodhounds, one at a time, to the last place Joe was sighted. Each dog was sent up the trail separately with the scent from Joe’s clothes. They all went approximately the same distance, made a circle, and then returned to the main road where police were stationed. At that point, the police felt it was “inconceivable” that Joe had gone any further up the trail. It appeared that he had not committed suicide, but the police had no idea what had happened to him.
Joe’s case was a puzzling one. In many ways, he appeared to be the model of a grieving husband, determined to reunite with his wife of fifty years by taking his own life. But when the police began to look more closely, another image emerged. The disappearance of Joe and Gladys began to take on the bizarre plot twists of an Alfred Hitchcock film.
At seventy years old, Joe was comfortably retired and in good health, except for a hearing problem. No one knew exactly how much money he made in his real estate business, but they thought it was a bundle. In retirement, he became obsessed with gardening. He was nine years younger than Gladys and spent nearly all his time in the backyard. Gladys spent her time traveling to young pupils’ homes to teach piano lessons. Joe and Gladys lived frugally. But, by all accounts, the two led very separate lives. Often, he would even ignore her while gardening.
Gladys’ brother-in-law, A.L. Bradshaw, thinks that over the years, she worked hard to please Joe and was very serious about making a life with him. A.L. believes that the couple’s relationship deteriorated and eventually got to the point where she went her way, and he went his way. A.L. thinks that they had a strange and strained relationship.
Despite Joe’s considerable fortune, the piano lessons provided Gladys with her only spending money. She was extremely popular, both with her students and their parents. One of the parents, Gayle Dunham, remembers that Gladys was a very sweet, gentle old lady. She says that Gladys was “your typical piano teacher you would have thought your grandmother had back in the 1920s.” She remembers Gladys always had some rouge on her cheek. She says Gladys always smiled with the children and never raised her voice.
Gayle says that Gladys cared about whether she could make it to the lessons due to things like the weather. She cared about how the children played. And she always rewarded them after their lessons. Gayle says it was a very favorable relationship with the parents and Gladys. At 4pm on Tuesday, March 14, 1989, Gladys gave a regularly scheduled piano lesson to Gayle’s daughter, Katie.
The next day, Tammy Decker, whose daughter also took lessons from Gladys, received a phone call from Joe. He said Gladys wanted him to call her students and let them know that she would not be teaching for a while because she had to return to Kansas to care for her aging mother. Because Gladys did indeed have a 100-year-old mother in Kansas, Joe’s story seemed plausible. When neighbors asked about her, he told the same story.
About a week later, Joe called Tammy again and said that Gladys was “tied up” trying to find three eight-hour duty nurses to watch her mother. Tammy thought it was totally believable. She thought it was strange that he kept calling her, but she did not think much about it until the weeks turned into two or three months without a word from Gladys herself.
During the spring months, while Joe told everyone Gladys was away in Kansas, he busied himself with garden projects in the backyard as usual. All the projects were in full view of his neighbors. One neighbor, Joan Petrasek, says he was digging in the morning and at night. She says that the holes he dug were not ordinary; they were too deep for one thing.
Joe told Joan that he needed to get all the soil out of the ground and sift it because there were too many rocks. She says it was hard to understand why he was doing that. But, at the time, she was not too concerned. She says she just shrugged her shoulders and said, “That’s just Joe’s way.”
Soon, Joan noticed that one of Joe’s backyard projects – a compost box – had been dug to an unusual depth. She told him he did not need that deep of a hole for a compost box. He said he wanted all of the leaves from her trees and their other neighbor’s trees. He said that is why he made the box so big.
Joe also asked Joan to take a picture of him in the compost box so that he could send it to Gladys. Joan says she got a copy of the picture because he wanted two. A week later, he asked for the negatives. That summer, another neighbor noticed that Joe was selling household goods. He also took several truckloads to a garbage dump.
After Gladys had been gone for three months, Tammy called Joe to ask for a refund on lessons her daughter had never received. He was infuriated by the request. He claimed that he had records that showed that Tammy had not pre-paid for the lessons. He demanded she show him records that indicate prepayment. He also told her that he would come to her house, bring his records, and show them to her. Then, they would compare their records. She said that was fine.
A few days later, Joe came to Tammy’s house and voluntarily wrote her a refund check. She could not understand his change of attitude. He had also changed his story about Gladys. He said she had gone to an arthritis clinic in Canada. That same day, he paid a visit to Gayle to give her a refund. He told her a very different story: Gladys was out on the backroads of Kansas buying antique nickelodeons with her mother, who was much improved.
Gayle asked Joe when Gladys would return to Seattle and resume her piano lessons. He said she would return to the area at some point but would not continue her lessons. His attitude then changed suddenly. He began to rant and rave. He angrily told Gayle that Gladys could not even drive her car, let alone do piano lessons. Gayle says that he hated Glady’s music lessons and piano playing. She could tell that he had a hatred for Gladys.
When Tammy and Gayle compared notes, they found that Joe’s stories were wildly contradictory. They were worried about Gladys but did not know what to do. As it turned out, Joe had told yet another story about Gladys’ whereabouts to her Kansas relatives. He said that she was in Vancouver, British Columbia, studying music. Around the same time, Joe was busy having concrete poured in the middle of his backyard. His neighbors thought it was an odd spot for a patio, but his yard projects had never been exactly typical.
Finally, Tammy and Gayle decided to call the Seattle police to report Gladys missing. Detective Ramirez says that Tammy and Gayle were critical to the investigation. They were the first to report Gladys’ disappearance to the police, and their call initiated the investigation. A Seattle police investigator from the missing persons unit took a report. The following morning, September 6, 1989, he confronted Joe at his home.
The investigator told Joe that he had received a report that Gladys was missing. Joe told him that she was not missing. He then said that he had a contractor in his backyard and had “other things to do.” He told the investigator to either come back or call the next day. He would then give him the phone number to contact Gladys. He said she was in British Columbia and was okay. He claimed he did not have the phone number at hand.
Within hours of the officer’s visit, Joe called Arden with the story of Gladys’ suicide and his own plan to kill himself. When the police went to Joe’s house, they noticed something peculiar. All photographs of Joe, as well as his financial records, were missing. It appeared that Gladys’ disappearance might have involved foul play. Had Joe killed her? If so, what had he done with the body? The police thought his backyard seemed like a good place to start looking.
Joe’s neighbors pointed out the places they felt Gladys’ body might be hidden. On September 14, a demolition crew was brought in to uproot the oddly placed concrete patio. When the slab was raised, the crew began to dig. Finally, they reached a depth of seven feet. Nothing was there except dirt. Detective Ramirez says that by that point, they were about ready to leave the property. They had done what they could, but there was no body found.
At that point, the police decided to check one last place: the compost box. Joe had been seen several times in and around it. He had also commented to neighbors about “how nice” it was. They felt he was “in love” with it. The police began to dig inside the box. After they lifted a false floor placed inside, they found Gladys’ body.
Once Gladys’ body was removed from the compost box, it was discovered that her head had been wrapped with a towel and duct tape. There was also tape and another towel around her stomach. Her body was then taken to the medical examiner’s office, where an autopsy was performed. The autopsy revealed that she had been shot in the back of the head with a .22 caliber handgun. The wound was not self-inflicted.
Joe was known to own a .22 caliber gun. Police searched the house but found only a box for the gun. Then, they found something unusual in Gladys’ bedroom. Although the sheets had been changed, one pillowcase remained – with blood spattered on the back. The door to the bedroom had been meticulously scrubbed. But police found minute amounts of blood in the door’s crevices.
The evidence led the police to theorize that Joe killed Gladys while she was sleeping one night in mid-March 1989. They believe he carried her body through the narrow hallway and down the stairs, leaving blood on the door. Then, he buried her in the compost box. Detective Steiner believes that her death was premeditated. He believes Joe planned it at least a year or so in advance. He notes that Joe was seen digging a hole in the compost area in January, when the ground was virtually frozen.
Arden says that, as a family member, he is outraged at what happened and wants Joe apprehended. He notes that we live by a system of laws. He hopes that those laws are enforced in this case. He feels that people like Joe need to know that.
Joe has been charged with first-degree murder. Only two photographs of him have been found: his driver’s license photo and a snapshot left behind in the house. He wears glasses and has hearing aids in both ears. Authorities believe that he could have liquidated as much as $1 million in the months before Gladys’ murder.
Joe is from Texas and has relatives in Kansas. He has been known to travel frequently to Canada, particularly Alberta. He has business holdings in Vancouver, British Columbia, and Alaska and presumably would have access to cash in those areas. Authorities believe he is living under an assumed name somewhere in North America.
Extra Notes:

  • This case first aired on the February 21, 1990 episode.
  • It was excluded from the FilmRise release of the Robert Stack episodes.
  • For reasons unknown, it was categorized as “Unexplained Death” instead of “Wanted.”
  • Some sources say that the Owens’ neighbors reported Gladys missing, that they were the last people to see her alive, that Joe left the truck at the masonry yard, that he was seen in West Seattle after he abandoned his truck, that he was last seen on September 9, and that he told a local jeweler that Gladys had died of a heart attack.

Results: Solved - On March 11, 1990, just a few weeks after this story aired, two hikers were walking on the Mount Si trail, about a quarter-mile from Mount Si Road, when they found a human backbone. They immediately contacted the police. Officers searched the area and found more bones, clothing, a hearing aid, glasses, and a gun. It was soon determined that the bones and other items were Joe’s. His identity was confirmed through dental records.
Joe’s remains were found only a few miles from where he was last seen and farther up the mountain from where the tracking dogs had once picked up his scent. An autopsy determined that he had committed suicide by shooting himself in the head, most likely with the gun found next to his remains. The Seattle police have now closed the file on Gladys’ murder and Joe’s disappearance.
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