Letter near dead 18-year-old leads to accused killer, FL cops say. Man sentenced

The burned body of an 18-year-old woman was found in a field with a pile of items used to light her body on fire — including a letter that identified her accused killer, Florida authorities said.

John Leonard Bowen, 49, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and tampering with evidence, and a judge sentenced him to life in prison following the death of Coyoete Kathren Cheyenne Turner in September 2023, the Columbia County Sheriff’s Office announced June 12.

Bowen’s attorney declined to comment to McClatchy News on June 13.

Bowen, a convicted sex offender, was in a relationship with Turner’s aunt, a spokesperson for the sheriff’s office told McClatchy News. Turner used to live with her aunt and Bowen, who was convicted of sex crimes against a child in 1994, according to an arrest report and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

Deputies said they received a call from a citizen about a body in a peanut field on Sept. 3, 2023, and they found the remains of a young woman who had been burned, making it hard to identify her, McClatchy News previously reported.

She didn’t have any obvious wounds pointing to how she had died, but she had bruising on her face and burns on the upper half of her body, deputies with the Columbia County Sheriff’s Office wrote in an arrest report.

Deputies said they found burned garbage underneath the woman that had been used to light the fire, including a coloring book, a package of diapers and a bag of trash.

But they also found a letter and an envelope, according to the sheriff’s office.

Investigators went to the address on the envelope and learned Bowen, then 47, was living there but hadn’t updated his sex offender registration with his current address, deputies said. They told him to come to the station to update his registration soon, according to the report.

As investigators worked to identify the victim, the sheriff’s office posted on Facebook about the discovery of an unidentified body, prompting Turner’s mother to call law enforcement, according to deputies.

She told investigators she hadn’t heard from her daughter in 24 hours, deputies said.

Fingerprints confirmed the victim was the missing 18-year-old, according to the report.

When Bowen went to the sheriff’s office Sept. 7 to update his sex offender registration, he confirmed to law enforcement he had falsified his address, and he was arrested in connection with violating his registration requirements, deputies said.

Investigators said they asked him about Turner as well, and he changed his story before eventually telling them he was there when she died. But he tried to implicate others, saying someone else got behind the wheel of his car and ran her over, according to the report.

From his statements, investigators said they pieced together that Bowen struck Turner with his car, and while she was unconscious, he choked her and engaged in sex acts with her body.

Then to conceal what happened, he tried to light her body on fire using items from his car, including the key piece of mail, deputies said.

He was seen on surveillance footage at a nearby gas station shortly before 2 a.m. changing his clothes in his car before going inside the convenience store, according to investigators.

The medical examiner concluded Turner’s cause of death was trauma, according to the report.

“How can I trust people when it’s our friends and families that done this to our family?” Turner’s mother, Eleanor Houston, told WJAX in November 2023.

She told WTLV her daughter loved everyone and “wanted to have a beautiful life.”

Columbia County is in north Florida on the border of Georgia.

This story was originally published June 13, 2025 at 10:24 AM with the headline "Letter near dead 18-year-old leads to accused killer, FL cops say. Man sentenced."