Who was Elaine Parent?

There is little doubt that Elaine Parent was primarily a con artist who may have murdered out of necessity. It is sometimes said that she did not profit to a great degree from her crimes, but she apparently made enough to provide for her basic needs and travel extensively. Investigators believe that in addition to the United States and the United Kingdom, she may have traveled to France, Turkey, South Africa, Australia, Jamaica and Israel. And she apparently scored big from time to time. She netted about $40,000 from a jewel heist in the eighties and an unknown amount of money in another theft in London. She was suspected in an investment scheme that could have made her thousands more and won a judgment in a Florida restaurant accident for another undisclosed sum.

Could Elaine Parent alone have killed Beverly McGowan, mutilated the remains and moved them approximately 100 miles to the north of McGowan’s Pompano Beach condo?

ESDA tests by authorities on the writing pad found in McGowans’s condo place her at the scene. Parent’s motive could have been simply to steal McGowan’s identity. So it seems that she had motive and opportunity, but what about means? Parent was not a tiny woman (about five feet seven inches and 140 pounds) but she was never described as large or powerful either. Could she have moved McGowan’s body and performed the post-mortem mutilations?

Police and investigators initially suspected more than one person was involved. But this was because Parent disguised herself as both a woman that she looked nothing like (blonde with large breasts) and a male cross dresser. However, it seems the theory that Parent might have had an accomplice remained alive even after her death. The Palm Beach Post reported shortly after Parent’s suicide that authorities had, “long suspected that at least one person helped Parent kill McGowan”. Indeed Parent herself told Charlotte Cowan that she had a brother. Could this person have been an accomplice or just part of Parent’s scheme to get Cowan’s identity?

The precise cause of McGowan’s death was never determined due to decomposition of the body. One early newspaper account stated that according to Medical Examiner Fred Hobin, McGowan’s throat was slit and the mutilation performed afterward to conceal the identity of the victim. If McGowan indeed died from a slit throat, then Parent could have certainly committed the murder alone-but where?

There are no reports of blood inside the McGowan condo or her car. It was reported that Parent (posing as “Alice”) had a vehicle of her own. If so, what happened to it since she drove McGowan’s car to the Miami Airport? And if Parent used a rental car as she is known to have done in the past then it certainly would have shown traces of blood or other evidence if the crime had occurred there. Police certainly would have checked to see if a car was rented around the time that McGowan met “Alice” and there are no reports of any such vehicle.

Steve McGowan had his own theory about what happened to his sister. In 1996, he told the Stuart News that he believed Parent and several accomplices targeted Beverly because she was a bank employee. Presumably, their plan would be to win her confidence using Parent and then take her hostage and force her to help them get money from the bank somehow. Steve believed that the goodbye letter he received was written by Beverly under duress and the unknown criminals had already completed step one of their plan. But Steve believes that at some point things went bad and Beverly was killed because she knew the identity of those involved.

If Parent did act alone, there is a simpler albeit speculative explanation. Parent had broken up with her British lover “Miss X” shortly before she encountered Beverly McGowan. She was seething with rage as evidenced by the letters she wrote to “Miss X” during that general time period. It is possible that Parent simply met McGowan and initially only wanted to steal her identity. But, McGowan told friends that she had given Parent personal information such as credit card numbers and so forth. It could be that McGowan eventually became suspicious of Parent’s motives and challenged her, possibly even threatening to expose her to police.

Parent was angry but she may also have been frightened. Her relationship with “Miss X” afforded her financial as well as emotional stability. When the relationship ended, it marked a turning point in her life; a little over a year later she was living in a homeless shelter. One must consider the possibility that Elaine Parent, to avoid capture, killed Beverly McGowan in a fit of anger and frustration. She then mutilated her remains at an unknown location in the hope that the body would not be identified. Finally, she somehow transported the body (with or without help) to a location far from the Pompano Beach condo in an effort to further confuse investigators. The savagery of the crime could also have represented a conscious (or unconscious) expression of rage against “Miss X” with whom she enjoyed what may have been the seminal relationship of her unusual life.

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