She nearly stopped in her tracks.
He stared at her — she stared back.
The young woman beside him also stared, before he shoved her head down and their car took off.
That was 35 years ago — and the Pictou County woman can’t forget that day.
The woman, who asked that her name not be used, wonders if she had done or said something, Lynn Adel Oliver, missing from New Glasgow since back then, might have been found.
“The car is sketched in my mind. He’s looking straight at me and I’m looking dead at him, and she’s sitting,” the witness said in a recent interview.
“Me and her actually made eye contact.”
Then 22, Oliver had been missing for about a month. She was last seen on Aug. 25, 1979. There has been no trace of her for more than three decades.
She had been fearful of a man, Lewis Seward Bowden, who lived in her area.
And that’s the same man the witness believes she saw in the brown car with Oliver.
“First, I was stunned, then I was sick to my stomach,” said the witness. “I wanted … to get back home as quick as I could.”
Bowden wasn’t supposed to be around Oliver, but there he was, according to the witness, with her in his car at Albert and Marsh streets in New Glasgow.
By this time, police had been out looking everywhere for the mother, who family and friends have said would have never willingly spent so much time away from her young son.
When he laid eyes on the witness at the intersection, Bowden got very uncomfortable, the witness remembers.
“He was frantic, there was no two ways about it,” she said. “At this point, he knew I saw him and I saw her.”
The car drove off toward his mother’s place on Bowden Road, where Bowden lived with his ailing mother.
And that’s the last time the witness ever saw Oliver.
The witness eventually told a police investigator, who she said didn’t seem to take her story very seriously way back then.
But in the past number of years, things have changed; New Glasgow Regional Police Service opened up the cold case and are checking out numerous leads.
In 2007, the province announced a $50,000 reward for information leading to a conviction in Oliver’s disappearance. The award, under the Rewards for Major Unsolved Crimes Program, has since tripled to $150,000.
Before she vanished, Oliver told her mother she was afraid of Bowden, who lived in nearby Priestville.
The Pictou County witness had kept her information secret for years, because some family members warned her how dangerous Bowden could be.
According to a court records search, Bowden, now 56, is in custody awaiting two different trials — one is set for Tuesday in Halifax provincial court and involves charges of unlawful confinement, assault, uttering threats, theft, mischief and breaching probation.
Those charges stem from a Halifax incident in May 2013.
Bowden will also be in Dartmouth provincial court Oct. 21 on charges of assault with a weapon, assault, breaching probation and breaching a court order. Those counts are related to an alleged Dartmouth incident between April 30 and June 14 of this year.
His record includes convictions from 2007 to 2012 for various offences: aggravated assault, at last four counts of assault, possession of a weapon for a dangerous purpose, unlawfully being in a dwelling house, theft and breaching court orders.
In the 2007 offence he pleaded guilty to, police said he tortured his common-law wife in their Cole Harbour home. He tied the woman’s hands, and then a leg, to a bedpost, stuffed a towel in her mouth and beat her with a pipe. Bowden then stabbed her in the jaw and leg. The entire assault lasted several hours, with their 14-year-old son in the room. Bowden, who was high on crack cocaine, ordered the teen to clean up the blood.
In a separate crack-fuelled attack two days earlier, Bowden hit the woman with the butt of his rifle and smashed her face with a barbell.
Because of friends’ and family warnings, the witness left her sighting unreported.
But the fact that one voice remained silent hasn’t stopped others from speaking over the past 35 years. There are unconfirmed reports that Oliver was seen at the Bowden property after she was reported missing.
Sgt. Steve Chisholm, a New Glasgow police investigator, said last week he is aware of the witness’s reported sighting of Oliver, but he added that more evidence is required to corroborate her story.
“We need some stronger information,” Chisholm said, adding that there’s always the hope that someone who has seen something may come forward.
“She went missing in broad daylight in a fairly open area of the community on the west side of New Glasgow,” the investigator said of Oliver’s disappearance at 11:40 a.m. on Stellarton Road.
Oliver had just left her workplace, Quality Cleaners, and co-workers said she had seemed nervous that day.
“We try to remind people that we really believe that someone out there knows something that could be a key element in helping us solve this mystery,” said Chisholm.
The Bowden homestead is now gone, and someone else has purchased the property, said the witness. She often wonders if the rumours are true that Oliver may have been there, and that there is some sign of her left behind.
Unfortunately, sometimes small communities keep big secrets.
“We wish the mentality wasn’t like that,” said the officer.
But just one new piece of information could help the Oliver family — Lynn left behind her mother, who is now elderly, and a now grown-up son — have some peace, said Chisholm.
“I’m sure not a day goes by that they don’t think, ‘I wonder where Lynn’s at,’” the investigator said. “That’s the sad thing about cold cases.”
With Steve Bruce, court reporter