In October 1990, about three months after the murder of Beverly McGowan, investigators were still baffled. They believed two suspects had crossed the ocean to London and then either disappeared or somehow made their way back to the United States undetected. McGowan’s red Volkswagen Fox was discovered at the Miami Airport but yielded little information. Similarly, the abandoned rental car in London was carefully scrutinized but no fingerprints were found.

Then, investigators developed a new theory. On July 15th, Lawrencia “Bambi” Bembenek escaped from a Wisconsin Prison where she was serving a life term for murdering her husband’s ex-wife. Bembenek, who had gained folk-hero status following her 1981 conviction, went on the run with her fiancé, Dominick Gugliatto. Authorities felt that Bembenek, who was a former Playboy Club waitress, looked very much like the buxom blonde using the name “Alice” who had used McGowan’s credit cards to buy clothes and other items on July 18th. They also believed that the cross-dressing “Sam” could well be Gugliatto and that the pair may have murdered McGowan for her identity.

But this lead fizzled after the pair was recaptured in October and investigators analyzed details from their time on the run. Bembenek escaped on July 15th, four days before McGowan’s body was found, and would have had plenty of time to get to Florida and commit the murder. But police soon realized that it could not have happened that way. On the 18th, the pair rented an apartment in Thunder Bay, Ontario. The earliest McGowan could have been murdered would have been late on the evening of the 17th. Since the body was found on the 19th and showed signs of decomposition, the 18th probably would have been the latest that the murder could have happened. On Friday, October 19th, with the timeline working against them, Police conceded to the media that Bembenek and Gugliatto were no longer considered suspects. The investigation had again hit a dead end.

Nearly six long years passed with few leads. One of the few investigators keeping the flame burning was Nora Pfeiffer, a Florida State Attorney’s Investigator for the 19th Circuit. Pfeiffer kept returning to one of the few clues investigators had at their disposal: the passenger list for flight 292 from Miami to London’s Heathrow Airport. She had two suspects, “Sam” and “Alice”, a male cross-dresser and buxom blonde respectively. And though “Sam” used Beverly McGowan’s ID at Heathrow, there was no one suspicious using that name or the names “Sam” or “Alice” among the 248 passengers.

    Hodgkinson Passport

Pfeiffer enlisted the help of the State Department and finally in January, 1996 a new lead developed. Agent Robert O’Bannon discovered that a woman named Elaine Parent, whose name was found in a computer from a previous arrest, was using the aliases Sylvia Ann Hodgkinson and Charlotte Rae Cowan. It turns out that Hodgkinson, a British citizen, was listed as one of the passengers on flight 292. Investigators didn’t know quite what to make of this new information, but they needed to trace the three names. Authorities in London were again notified and asked to investigate Hodgkinson, while agencies in the United States handled the other two leads.

Things really began to develop for investigators when they discovered that a woman using the name Charlotte Rae Cowan was arrested for auto theft in May of 1991 in Miami after failing to return a rental car. The woman had three IDs: Charlotte Cowan, Elaine Parent and Sylvia Ann Hodgkinson. She was traveling with two dogs, several wigs and carrying a diary. After staying in jail overnight, the woman posted bail and was released the following day.

When investigators checked the name Elaine Parent, they found that she was a known criminal. Parent was arrested for shoplifting in Fort Lauderdale in 1976 and fingerprinted. When the fingerprints of Parent were compared to the woman arrested in 1991 who called herself Charlotte Cowan, a match was confirmed. Finally after six long years, investigators knew the real name of their prime suspect: Elaine Antoinette Parent.

 Lincoln HS

Elaine Parent was born August 4, 1942 in the Bronx in New York as the only child of an American father and a French-Canadian mother. At some point, the family moved to the Midwest where Elaine graduated from Lincoln Community High School in Lincoln, Illinois in 1960. This writer contacted a classmate of Parent’s from Lincoln who stated that her family made the move to Illinois just a year or so before she graduated. He also remembered that she dressed well and her father may have worked at a local firm called Cutler and Hammer. His information jibes nicely with what is known about Parent.

At the age of 22, she applied for her social security card in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. On the application, she listed her birth name as “Elaine Victoria Anne Parent” and signed the document “Elaine Victoria Parent”, the same name used on her High School Commencement program. However, her name was always given as “Elaine Antoinette Parent” in documents from the seventies onward. This anomaly apparently has an innocent explanation; Parent simply shortened “Victoria Anne” to “Antoinette”. Years later she would use “Victoria” again in the form of her alias “Victoria Dark”, one of more than twenty she was known to have used.

   Social Security Application

Anyone reconstructing Parent’s life is immediately struck by how little is really known about her. Especially intriguing is the period from 1964, when she was in Wisconsin, to 1972 when Parent first appeared in Florida working as a Real Estate Agent. Virtually nothing is known about her activities during these missing years. What is known is that Parent, who was a lesbian or at least bisexual, eventually became a consummate con artist and master of disguise. Her criminal career began with her shoplifting arrest but it is not known for certain when she graduated from petty theft to felony.

She practiced the art of “Infant Identity”, which is searching for a deceased child with approximately the same birth date as herself and stealing the name and personal information in order to acquire identification papers. Her strategy for survival seems to have been a combination of identity theft, jewel theft (there are two suspected incidents), petty scams, insurance scams and occasional employment.

What really concerns authorities is that they don’t know how she acquired most of her identities and they fear that more women may have suffered the same fate as Beverly McGowan. However, the full extent of the secretive Parent’s criminal history may never be known.

Next: Chapter 4-Charlotte Rae Cowan

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