Metro

Man serving 20 to life confesses to beheading 1st common-law wife

A Manhattan man serving 20 to life for murdering his common-law wife has confessed to also killing his first common-law wife, cutting off her head and burying it in Riverside Park, prosecutors said today.

Philip Ward, 45, had long been a suspect in the 1989 murder of the pregnant Veronica Bowen, but was never charged with the crime until today, after he confessed while behind bars.

“After 18 years of being in prison for killing his second wife, what motivated him to confess now I don’t know,” said Ward’s lawyer Frank Rothman, but he is hoping the move will help him to have “some sort of relationship with his children.”

Ward and Bowen had met as teenagers in a group foster home, and they had two children together, prosecutors said. Domestic violence led her to leave the Riverside Drive apartment she shared with Ward and their kids, and her getting pregnant with another man’s child spurred Ward to plan her murder, court papers say.

On Feb. 1, 1989, he lured her up the roof of his building at W. 148 Street and Riverside Drive, where he had a pipe, a dagger, a kitchen knife, plastic bags and a change of clothes waiting, prosecutor Elizabeth Lederer said.

First he attacked Bowen with the pipe, and then used the dagger to stab her to death, Lederer said. Then he used the kitchen knife “to cut her head off,” Lederer said.

He washed up using the water tower on the roof, and got rid of their clothes in the plastic bags, Lederer said. He put her head into another bag, and “buried it in Riverside Park,” Lederer said.

Her body was discovered three weeks after the murder. The head was never found. Investigators scoured Ward’s apartment, but weren’t able to find any physical evidence, Lederer said.

Five years later, Ward was living with another woman named Sheila Jackson, and he shot her seven times after an argument. He also raped an 11-year-old girl who tried to come to Jackson’s defense, and shot her, officials said.

He pleaded guilty to second degree murder in that case. Court papers show he came clean about Bowen on Feb. 8, one day before the 23rd anniversary of her disappearance. Sources said she’d gone to Ward’s apartment to visit their kids.

Rothman said his client has been “extraordinarily cooperative” with investigators, including helping them to try to find Bowen’s head.

At the Ward family home on Riverside Drive, a young relative of the killer said, “We are not talking about this at all.”

Additional reporting by Laurel Babcock