Doctor accused of poisoning wife was ‘calling himself a widower’ days before her death

A doctor accused of fatally poisoning his wife was calling himself a widower days before she died, according to a newly-released search warrant.

Dr Connor Bowman was charged in January with one count of first-degree murder and one count of second-degree murder with intent.

Dr Bowman searched “is widow gender neutral” online two days before his wife Betty died in a Minnesota hospital after a sudden illness last August, according to the search warrant obtained by NBC News. She died on 20 August, 2023.

"These searches, and other conversations identified so far appeared consistent with the statements provided by witnesses during the investigation, that Connor was identifying himself as a widower, even before Betty died," Rochester Police Detective Alex Kendrick wrote.

The warrant, filed on Tuesday, revealed that investigators have also asked the company behind the dating app, Bumble, for access to Dr Bowman’s account history. The doctor had apparently identified himself as a widower on his dating profile.

Police spoke to several “female witnesses”, ABC6 News reported. One woman, who matched with the doctor on 2 September 2023, asked if he was OK flirting with people as a widower.

“Connor responded saying it was a fair question but that he was okay being with a new person, that he knew what he wanted in life, and that Betty would have wanted him to move on to be happy,” the warrant reads.

He told another woman on the app that his wife had died a year earlier from an overdose of morphine while “on comfort care”, the warrant reads.

He also told one woman that he had received a “large life insurance payout”, which she thought “strange”.

The new details come after previous documents showed the murder suspect looked up how to delete Amazon data and the substance “oil of wintergreen”, to see how toxic it could be.

Betty, a pharmacist at Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, had symptoms similar to food poisoning when she was admitted to hospital last August, but her “condition deteriorated rapidly” and she experienced cardiac issues, fluid in her lungs and organ failure.

Her husband repeatedly claimed she had died from a rare illness called hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis, or HLH. But hospital tests came back inconclusive for HLH.

Mr Bowman, a former resident also at the Mayo Clinic, whose training ended in early October, had allegedly tried to stop an autopsy on his wife’s body from going ahead.

He demanded she be cremated immediately, claiming her death was natural and that she “did not want to be a cadaver,” according to a criminal complaint obtained by KAAL.

Despite Dr Bowman’s demands, the medical examiner’s office stopped the cremation due to the suspicious circumstances and found that Ms Bowman had died from the toxic effects of the gout drug colchicine, something she had not been prescribed.

Mr Bowman was allegedly found to have been researching colchicine and how much it would take to kill someone with it.