Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, November 24, 1994 TAG: 9411260023
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: HOLIDAY
SOURCE: MICHAEL STOWE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Before retiring as police chief in 1992, Dorsey Huffman Jr. enforced laws in Clifton Forge for nearly 38 years. He'd never heard of Gary Ray Bowles until this spring, when a nationwide manhunt began for the man police say has confessed to murdering six gay men from Maryland to Florida.
This week, almost every time Huffman picks up a newspaper, turns on the radio or switches on the television, he's met with the same phrase: "Bowles, 32, a native of Clifton Forge ... "
Not just locally either. The city of 5,000 nestled at the foot of the Allegheny Mountains was mentioned on the front page of Wednesday's Washington Post and was one of the lead stories on ABC's radio news. The Associated Press also sent out a story on its national wire.
Huffman, now the city's vice mayor, and several other residents don't dispute that Bowles might have been born there. But no one can recall him or his family ever actually having lived in Clifton Forge.
"I think [the media] are kind of blowing it out of proportion," Huffman said. "I kind of resent it in a way. It's just like he left town last week."
At the request of police in South Carolina, Clifton Forge Sheriff Russell Smith spent nearly two full days in August trying to find any ties Bowles had to Clifton Forge.
He came up empty.
"I don't think this guy ever lived here," the sheriff said. "I've been around here all my life and I've never heard of him."
Smith didn't rely solely on memory. He checked the records of all the local school systems and Bowles' name was nowhere. Ditto for real estate records at the county courthouse.
"I've talked to 50 or 60 people and nobody ever heard of him," he said. "He has absolutely no relatives here that I know of."
No one knows for sure how or when Bowles' birthplace was listed on police records as Clifton Forge, but Huffman and Smith share the same theory.
Both figure that he was born at an old hospital in Clifton Forge that was run by the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad.
"A train could have come through here ... and this just happened to be where he was born," Smith said.
Smith said it also wasn't uncommon for folks from West Virginia and other outlying areas to use the hospital, which closed in the mid-1970s.
Susie Newberry, who runs the Virginian Taxi Cab Co. in Clifton Forge, said she was shocked to hear on the news that a suspected murderer was from Clifton Forge.
"I just couldn't understand it," she said. "Being in the taxi business, we know a lot of people ... and no one I've talked to knows who he is."
Bowles is accused of targeting older men in bars; shooting, strangling or savagely beating them; then mutilating or defiling their corpses and disappearing with their bodies.
Mary Morgan, the owner of a barber shop in nearby Covington, said her customers are dumbfounded about Bowles' reported local connections.
"No one seems to know who he is," she said.
by CNB