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Archive for October, 2011

LAKE ARROWHEAD, Calif. – The California Highway Patrol says a group of junior high school students have been burned by fluids spewing from a burst radiator hose on a school bus.

Patrol Officer Jason Holtsberger says eight or nine injured students were taken to hospitals for treatment of burns. He says the radiator hose came loose.

The Riverside Press-Enterprise (http://bit.ly/vPOt9G) reports that the students have burned feet, but Holtsberger was unable to confirm that report.

The bus was carrying 50 students when it overheated on State Route 18 in the San Bernardino Mountains. The Rim of the World School District bus was heading for Mary Putnam Henck Intermediate School in Lake Arrowhead.

Assistant principal Tad Smith didn’t immediately return a message.

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Information from: The Press-Enterprise, http://www.pe.com

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DENVER – The nation’s only statewide tax vote on the November ballot asks Colorado voters whether they want to temporarily raise taxes to generate $ 3 billion for classrooms and colleges — a proposal that has stirred fierce opposition because of the stagnant economy.

The vote could serve as a test of voters’ mood on tax increases and their frustration after endless rounds of education cuts in Colorado.

“If it should pass, it think it will get a fair amount of attention because no one is expecting anything with the words `tax increase’ to pass,” said Norman Provizer, a political science professor at Metropolitan State College of Denver.

Opponents, including the entire Republican delegation in Colorado’s Legislature, insist tax hikes will cost jobs and won’t by themselves help schools. Some Democratic leaders, including Gov. John Hickenlooper, have declined to publicly endorse the proposal, saying they see little appetite for a tax hike.

Even some supporters are skeptical.

“I doubt it will pass,” Valerie Walker said after dropping off her ballot in downtown Denver. While she voted for the initiative, she said, “I just think people can’t afford having additional money coming out of their pockets right now.”

The money raised by Proposition 103 would help fill the void from education cuts that were induced by the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, a voter-approved initiative that strictly limits taxes and spending.

The measure would raise individual and corporate tax rates from 4.63 percent to 5 percent and Colorado’s sales and use tax rate from 2.9 percent to 3 percent. The rates would be in effect from 2012 through 2016, with an estimated $ 2.9 billion in new revenue during that time going to K-12 schools and public colleges.

A married couple with a combined household income of $ 125,000 would pay about $ 315 more annually in income taxes, nonpartisan legislative economists estimate. Sales taxes on a $ 5,000 purchase would increase from $ 145 to $ 150.

While nearly 619,000 of Colorado’s 3.2 million registered voters have cast ballots in the mostly mail-in election, Provizer cautioned against drawing broad conclusions from what has been a relatively low-profile campaign.

Proposition 103′s supporters have raised $ 420,000, its opponents roughly $ 22,000 — figures that pale in comparison to the millions generated by past attempts to generate or keep more state revenue under the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, often referred to as TABOR.

Funding for K-12 education in Colorado totals $ 2.8 billion, or nearly 40 percent of the budget. As in other states, though, Colorado schools have seen hundreds of millions of dollars in cuts. This year, lawmakers slashed more than $ 200 million from K-12 funding. More cuts are expected in 2012. The higher education budget was reduced this year by $ 125 million and stands at about $ 624 million.

Denver parent Phillip Garcia says Proposition 103 is worth it.

The 29-year-old nightclub promoter says his fourth-grade daughter’s school has overcrowded classrooms, its teachers frazzled by the increased workload.

“I know the economy’s bad, but if there’s one thing worth spending money on, it’s education,” Garcia said.

The state Democratic Party’s lukewarm support for the tax hike — petitioned onto the ballot by a Democratic lawmaker — has exasperated supporters. Hickenlooper, who took office in January, said he promised voters he would not back any initiative to raise taxes during his first year.

“It does frustrate me that people in leadership positions are sitting silent,” said John Creighton, father of three public school students and president of the St. Vrain Valley School Board in Longmont.

He said his district already asks parents to help pay for advanced classes and extracurricular activities and that further cuts would harm basic classroom teaching.

“Everyone’s looking for that perfect moment to do things, and the truth is there is no perfect moment,” Creighton said.

Still other supporters argue the bad economy is a reason to vote for the tax hike.

“Who knows, this (economy) can be going on for five, 10, 15 years,” said Don Schumacher, a physical therapist in Denver who voted for Proposition 103. “I think we owe it to the citizens to provide what we can as taxpayers.”

Tony Gagliardi, state director of the National Federation of Independent Business, which represents small business owners, said a tax increase now will force employers to hire fewer people at a time when state unemployment is 8.3 percent.

“When the costs go up, the way (businesses) control those costs is they either don’t hire or they reduce their workforce,” he said.

One of them is Roger Newell, general manager and operator of A Roadrunner Appliance Service in the Denver suburb of Castle Rock.

“I have a problem with government saying we need more money and we’ll raise taxes, but everyone in the private sector is having to cut back to survive,” Newell said.

Other states that have recently asked voters for tax raises for education have had mixed results.

Last year, Oregon passed two measures — one that raised certain income taxes and another that raised corporate and business taxes — to funnel money to education, health and public safety. In Washington, voters rejected a new income tax on high-wage earners for health and education funding.

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Ivan Moreno can be reached on Twitter: http://twitter.com/IvanJournalist

Kristen Wyatt can be reached on Twitter: http://twiter.com/APkristenwyatt

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MINNEAPOLIS – Dozens of states intend to apply for waivers that would free their schools from a federal requirement that they set aside hundreds of millions of dollars a year for after-school tutoring, a program many researchers say has been ineffective.

The 2002 No Child Left Behind law requires school districts that repeatedly fail to meet its benchmarks to set aside federal money to pay for outside tutors. But studies released in the past five years have found mixed results, at best, from the program.

They say it has suffered from participation rates as low as 20 percent, uneven quality among tutors, a lack of coordination between tutors and teachers, poor oversight by the states and a prohibition against giving the lowest achieving students priority. Also, they say, there has been no connection between students’ success and tutors’ paychecks.

“We are spending millions of dollars a year, and we are not seeing any measurable results for students,” said Matthew Mohs, who oversees the St. Paul Public Schools’ tutoring program, which set aside about $ 4.5 million for tutoring this school year.

However, the program’s defenders argue it gives poor children access to the same resources as their wealthier classmates and that picking a tutor gives parents an important choice in their child’s education.

Patricia Burch, an education professor at the University of Southern California, studied tutoring programs in Austin, Chicago, Dallas, Milwaukee and Minneapolis and found the programs haven’t worked because of design flaws.

States have the authority to approve tutoring companies and monitor their performance, but oversight varies because there’s no federal money for it. And, Burch said, schools aren’t permitted to steer students to the best tutors on the state’s list so parents often base their decisions on the companies’ marketing.

“It’s not necessarily that the idea is that bad, it’s just not designed well,” Burch said.

John Nunnery, executive director of the Center for Educational Partnerships at Old Dominion University, analyzed multiple studies on the tutoring program’s impact on the math and reading scores of about 140,000 students in 17 states. He concluded the program had “negligible” effects.

It can create more financial problems for struggling schools. Failing districts must set aside about 20 percent of their federal education money for poor students for tutoring. In districts where few students sign up, the money goes unspent even as other parts of the budget are slashed. In urban districts, where more students tend to use the program, there’s often not enough money to provide enough tutoring — Burch’s research puts it at 40 hours per student, per year — to matter.

“The bottom line is we need performance-based contracts if we are going to have outside contracts,” Burch said. She said several states and districts were considering them.

Steven Pines, executive director of the Education Industry Association, the trade group for private tutoring companies, estimated $ 650 million in federal money was spent on tutoring last year for about 600,000 students. His group supports reforms at the state and federal levels, but he said eliminating the program altogether would be unfair to the students it serves.

“I understand states and districts are looking for some breathing room financially, but that doesn’t mean they should throw poor kids who are low-income and trapped in struggling schools under the bus,” said Pines, whose group is part of a lobbying effort to save the program.

Pines called the research on it “a mixed bag” and said it has been successful in places that have invested in stricter oversight, including Florida and the Chicago Public Schools.

For some, the program isn’t only about test scores. DeLisa Shearod’s 8-year-old grandson has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and a mild form of autism. She credited his tutor with helping him pass the second grade.

“They have the patience of Job, I’ll tell you that,” said Shearod, who’s raising her grandson in St. Paul. “His behavior problems aren’t a problem anymore; now he does his homework.”

It’s not clear how the program will fare in Congress’ ongoing overhaul of No Child Left Behind. The Senate version of the bill scraps the program, and Rep. John Kline, R-Minn, the chairman of the House education committee, was ambivalent about it in an interview. “It works well in some places and not in others,” he said.

Because Congress has been slow to overhaul No Child Left Behind — which both parties agree should be updated — Education Secretary Arne Duncan announced in September that states would be able to get waivers, including for tutoring if they agree to certain reforms favored by the administration.

The department’s own recent research into the program’s effectiveness in five large school districts found small benefits in some districts but no effect in others, said Carmel Martin, assistant secretary for Planning, Evaluation and Policy Development.

“We think it can be effective for some students in some cases, but it doesn’t make sense to require every school that misses targets to do the same thing,” Martin said in an email.

Thirty-seven states and the District of Columbia have notified the Department of Education they intend to apply for a waiver, with 17 states saying they would apply by the Nov. 14 deadline for the first round. A second deadline has been set for mid-February.

Minnesota plans to apply for a waiver. Minnesota schools set aside $ 16 million last school year for tutoring, although the state Education Department had no estimate for how much was actually spent.

Minnesota Education Commissioner Brenda Cassellius and some other school leaders say the money would be better spent by districts on programs that more closely support their curriculum, including in-school tutoring and summer school.

States that receive first-round waivers could halt the program in the 2012-2013 school year.

Jack Jennings, president of the independent nonprofit Center on Education Policy, predicted that would be a priority for them. A federal mandate that often leaves education money unspent “doesn’t make sense right now while teachers are being laid off,” he said.

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JUBA – South Sudan said on Wednesday its schools will start teaching English, phasing out Arabic that had been used as a tool to spread Islamic law and Arab heritage by former civil war foe Khartoum.

The mainly Muslim north imposed Islamic law and Arabic on the south, which seceded in July to become the world’s newest nation, and where most follow Christian and traditional beliefs.

The language move is symbolic of the nation’s vision of closer integration with African neighbors, said Samson Wattara, an associate professor in political science at Juba University.

“The switch will not be automatic and will probably be problematic but South Sudanese want to look southwards,” Wattara told Reuters.

“This is a departure from the arabisation doctrine which was consistently opposed by different rebellions,” he said.

South Sudan’s government passed a bill making English mandatory for teaching in primary and secondary schools, Information Minister Barnaba Marial Benjamin told reporters.

“Under the Khartoum government subjects were universally taught in Arabic. We will teach our national languages at pre-school and for the rest, the instructions in mathematics or science will all be in English,” he said.

South Sudan has dozens of local languages and dialects, but the most commonly spoken languages are English and Arabic.

Benjamin said the country is training 7,000 new teachers to help launch the new syllabus, to give students easier access to universities in east Africa. Secondary school students will continue to sit exams in Arabic for the next three years.

South Sudan’s independence vote, agreed under a 2005 peace deal, ended decades of civil war with the north over religion, oil, ethnicity and ideology.

North and South Sudan yet have to settle a range of disputes such as sharing oil revenues and other assets and find a solution for the disputed border region of Abyei.

(Reporting by Hereward Holland; Editing by Louise Ireland)

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TOLEDO, Ohio – A man accused of snatching a teenager on her way home from school in 1967 and holding her captive for days in his basement before killing her was convicted Friday of murder and sentenced to life in prison.

Robert Bowman, once a successful businessman, was found guilty of the death of 14-year-old Eileen Adams in his second trial in a case that had stumped investigators for more than four decades even after his ex-wife told police she saw the girl alive and “hanging like Jesus” in their basement.

Bowman, 75, addressed Lucas County Common Pleas Judge Gene Zmuda moments before the judge sentenced him and after hearing the victim’s sister describe how Adams’ death emotionally tore the family apart.

“I recognize the pain and suffering I’ve just heard,” Bowman said. But “I’m not responsible for that. I feel no remorse.”

The teenager was sexually assaulted, tied up and a nail was driven into the back of her head before her body was dumped in southern Michigan, prosecutors said. The high school freshman was either strangled or died from a blow to the head that cracked her skull.

Adams’ sister Maggie Kirschman was 8 when Adams went missing about a week before Christmas.

“We all waited for a Christmas miracle waiting for Eileen to come home,” she told the judge.

She said there was “no forgetting” for her and her six other siblings, two of whom have died. Her parents also died in recent years.

Her sister’s death led her father to drink and her mother to pray, she said.

“Mom and Dad became strangers to the rest of us,” Kirschman said.

She said the family knew Bowman was responsible in the early 1980s after his ex-wife came forward.

“It was as if there was nothing we could do. It made us all sick,” she added.

Bowman disappeared in the 1980s into a life on the streets in Florida and California.

Detectives first tried to link him to the slaying in the early `80s, but they didn’t have enough evidence to bring charges until a cold case squad reopened the investigation five years ago. New DNA evidence connected Bowman with the killing, and police arrested him near Palm Springs, Calif., in 2008.

Another jury in August failed to reach a verdict in the case, which forced the retrial.

Bowman’s former wife was a key witness in both trials, testifying that she found Adams naked in their fruit cellar after the girl disappeared just before Christmas in 1967.

Margaret Bowman said she was hanging laundry when she thought she heard rats in the cellar. She said she opened a wooden door and saw a girl with her arms outstretched and bound, “hanging like Jesus.”

She said she ran upstairs and that her husband confronted her, saying he now had to kill the girl. He also threatened to kill his wife and their newborn daughter if she told anyone, she said.

That same night, she testified, Bowman made her go with him as he dumped the body just north of Toledo, across the state line in Michigan.

Robert Bowman, who took the witness stand after not testifying at his first trial, accused his ex-wife of lying and said investigators manufactured evidence against him.

He denied any involvement in the killing.

“That isn’t something I would do,” he said.

Outside the courtroom, assistant county prosecutor Chris Anderson suggested that Bowman’s testimony hurt his defense.

Anderson said the differences in the second trial was that jurors heard more details about Bowman’s life as a hustler who moved around the country and saw how he toyed with detectives when he took the stand.

“You could see what type of person he was,” Anderson said.

During the trial, defense attorney Peter Rost tried to cast doubt on Margaret Bowman’s account. He said that she waited 14 years to tell her story to police and that she stayed with Bowman for over a decade, moving with him to three different states before leaving when his business failed.

Even after she went to detectives in 1981, they still didn’t charge Bowman. Rost also said that the DNA evidence did not conclusively point to Bowman.

Bowman had owned a construction company in Ohio and later a business that made high-end purses in Florida and sold its handbags in Nieman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue stores.

But when police detectives tracked him down in Florida in 1982, he was living in an abandoned restaurant, wearing a tattered shirt and jeans and a scruffy beard.

Hanging from the restaurant ceiling were three dolls, some with their feet bound with string. A nail had been driven into the head of two dolls — eerily similar to how a hunter had found the body of Adams.

Bowman talked with police, but he then dropped out of sight.

Nearly three more decades passed when Eileen Adams’ ailing father had a chance meeting with an off-duty police officer and asked him to take another look at the killing. Her father died two years later, three weeks after Bowman was arrested.

Cold case investigators in 2006 discovered that DNA evidence from semen on the victim’s thermal underwear linked Bowman to the crime, they said. Police soon after charged Bowman even though they had no idea where he was living or even if he was still alive.

He was profiled on the “America’s Most Wanted” and police in southern California arrested him when he was spotted riding a bicycle. His attorney said he had been living under a tarp in the desert.

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GREENVILLE, S.C. – A gunman who authorities said fired on a South Carolina police officer checking on a suspicious license plate and caused 10 schools to go on lockdown was arrested Friday.

Patrick Dean Lowrance was found in a Greenville apartment. He was shot in the shoulder when the officer fired back and was taken to the hospital for treatment, Greenville County deputies said.

The shooting happened around 10 a.m. at a different apartment complex, Greenville police spokeswoman Alia Urps said.

After being shot, the suspect ran into nearby woods. Several dozen officers who happened to be in a training session nearby rushed to help search, along with teams of dogs, authorities said.

The search went on for more than three hours before investigators determined Lowrance got someone to pick him up. The schools reopened their doors before dismissal.

Authorities did not say what hospital Lowrance was taken to. They did not know if he had an attorney.

The shooting happened after an officer checking license plates in a hotel parking lot found that a plate on a GMC Yukon was listed for a Honda, Urps said. When the officer went inside the hotel to inquire about the driver, the suspect drove off in the SUV.

The officer got into her patrol car and tried to pull the suspect over on Interstate 85, but he sped up, and she abandoned the chase, Urps said.

“We do not pursue for minor traffic infractions, and at that point, that’s all that we had,” she said.

Another officer found the vehicle in an apartment parking lot, and as she approached the building, the suspect shot at her, police said.

The SUV was stolen in a carjacking three weeks ago in a motel parking lot in Spartanburg, a city about 30 miles east, police said.

Lowrance, 25, was wanted on four counts of attempted murder and other charges after he tried to rob a fast-food restaurant in Greenville last Sunday, authorities said.

Investigators said Lowrance came into the restaurant after closing time and demanded three workers to open the safe. The employees told him only the manager had the combination and she was outside.

The gunman forced the workers outside, where the manager was in her car, trying to drive off. The suspect fired at the car, then demanded that the employees go back inside. But they told him the door locked behind them automatically and Lowrance fired his gun again at them as they ran away. No one was injured, authorities said.

After Friday’s shooting, four public schools, three private schools, two colleges and a special education center were placed on lockdown.

Schools were locked down in several directions because officers weren’t sure where the suspect went.

“This is not around the corner from a school. I don’t want to give you that impression. This is several miles from any of our schools,” Oby Lyles, spokesman for Greenville County school district, told The Associated Press. “Everybody’s fine.”

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TOLEDO, Ohio – A man accused of snatching an Ohio teenager on her way home from school in 1967 and holding her captive for days in his basement before killing her was convicted Friday of murder and sentenced to life in prison.

Robert Bowman, once a successful businessman, was found guilty of the death of 14-year-old Eileen Adams in his second trial, a case that had stumped investigators for more than four decades even after his ex-wife told police she saw the girl alive and “hanging like Jesus” in their basement.

Bowman, 75, addressed Lucas County Common Pleas Judge Gene Zmuda moments before the judge sentenced him and after hearing the victim’s sister describe how Adams’ death emotionally tore the family apart.

“I recognize the pain and suffering I’ve just heard,” Bowman said. But “I’m not responsible for that. I feel no remorse.”

The teenager was sexually assaulted, tied up and a nail was driven into the back of her head before her body was dumped in southern Michigan, prosecutors said. The high school freshman was either strangled or died from a blow to the head that cracked her skull.

Adams’ sister Maggie Kirschman was 8 when Adams went missing about a week before Christmas.

“We all waited for a Christmas miracle waiting for Eileen to come home,” she told the judge.

She said there was “no forgetting” for her and her six other siblings, two of whom have died. Her parents also died in recent years.

Her sister’s death led her father to drink and her mother to pray, she said.

“Mom and Dad became strangers to the rest of us,” Kirschman said.

She said the family knew Bowman was responsible in the early 1980s after his ex-wife came forward.

“It was as if there was nothing we could do. It made us all sick,” she added.

Bowman disappeared in the 1980s into a life on the streets in Florida and California.

Detectives first tried to link him to the slaying in the early `80s, but they didn’t have enough evidence to bring charges until a cold case squad reopened the investigation five years ago. New DNA evidence connected Bowman with the killing, and police arrested him near Palm Springs, Calif., in 2008.

Another jury in August failed to reach a verdict in the case, which forced the retrial.

Bowman’s former wife was a key witness in both trials, testifying that she found Adams naked in their fruit cellar after the girl disappeared just before Christmas in 1967.

Margaret Bowman said she was hanging laundry when she thought she heard rats in the cellar. She said she opened a wooden door and saw a girl with her arms outstretched and bound, “hanging like Jesus.”

She said she ran upstairs and that her husband confronted her, saying he now had to kill the girl. He also threatened to kill his wife and their newborn daughter if she told anyone, she said.

That same night, she testified, Bowman made her go with him as he dumped the body just north of Toledo, across the state line in Michigan.

Robert Bowman, who took the witness stand after not testifying at his first trial, accused his ex-wife of lying and said investigators manufactured evidence against him.

He denied any involvement in the killing.

“That isn’t something I would do,” he said.

Outside the courtroom, assistant county prosecutor Chris Anderson suggested that Bowman’s testimony hurt his defense.

Anderson said the differences in the second trial was that jurors heard more details about Bowman’s life as a hustler who moved around the country and saw how he toyed with detectives when he took the stand.

“You could see what type of person he was,” Anderson said.

During the trial, defense attorney Peter Rost tried to cast doubt on Margaret Bowman’s account. He said that she waited 14 years to tell her story to police and that she stayed with Bowman for over a decade, moving with him to three different states before leaving when his business failed.

Even after she went to detectives in 1981, they still didn’t charge Bowman. Rost also said that the DNA evidence did not conclusively point to Bowman.

Bowman had owned a construction company in Ohio and later a business that made high-end purses in Florida and sold its handbags in Nieman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue stores.

But when police detectives tracked him down in Florida in 1982, he was living in an abandoned restaurant, wearing a tattered shirt and jeans and a scruffy beard.

Hanging from the restaurant ceiling were three dolls, some with their feet bound with string. A nail had been driven into the head of two dolls — eerily similar to how a hunter had found the body of Adams.

Bowman talked with police, but he then dropped out of sight.

Nearly three more decades passed when Eileen Adams’ ailing father had a chance meeting with an off-duty police officer and asked him to take another look at the killing. Her father died two years later, three weeks after Bowman was arrested.

Cold case investigators in 2006 discovered that DNA evidence from semen on the victim’s thermal underwear linked Bowman to the crime, they said. Police soon after charged Bowman even though they had no idea where he was living or even if he was still alive.

He was profiled on the “America’s Most Wanted” and police in southern California arrested him when he was spotted riding a bicycle. His attorney said he had been living under a tarp in the desert.

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TOLEDO, Ohio – A man accused of snatching an Ohio teenager on her way home from school in 1967 and holding her captive for days in his basement before killing her was convicted Friday of murder and sentenced to life in prison.

Robert Bowman, once a successful businessman, was found guilty of the death of 14-year-old Eileen Adams in his second trial, a case that had stumped investigators for more than four decades even after his ex-wife told police she saw the girl alive and “hanging like Jesus” in their basement.

Bowman, 75, addressed Lucas County Common Pleas Judge Gene Zmuda moments before the judge sentenced him and after hearing the victim’s sister describe how Adams’ death emotionally tore the family apart.

“I recognize the pain and suffering I’ve just heard,” Bowman said. But “I’m not responsible for that. I feel no remorse.”

The teenager was sexually assaulted, tied up and a nail was driven into the back of her head before her body was dumped in southern Michigan, prosecutors said. The high school freshman was either strangled or died from a blow to the head that cracked her skull.

Adams’ sister Maggie Kirschman was 8 when Adams went missing about a week before Christmas.

“We all waited for a Christmas miracle waiting for Eileen to come home,” she told the judge.

She said there was “no forgetting” for her and her six other siblings, two of whom have died. Her parents also died in recent years.

Her sister’s death led her father to drink and her mother to pray, she said.

“Mom and Dad became strangers to the rest of us,” Kirschman said.

She said the family knew Bowman was responsible in the early 1980s after his ex-wife came forward.

“It was as if there was nothing we could do. It made us all sick,” she added.

Bowman disappeared in the 1980s into a life on the streets in Florida and California.

Detectives first tried to link him to the slaying in the early `80s, but they didn’t have enough evidence to bring charges until a cold case squad reopened the investigation five years ago. New DNA evidence connected Bowman with the killing, and police arrested him near Palm Springs, Calif., in 2008.

Another jury in August failed to reach a verdict in the case, which forced the retrial.

Bowman’s former wife was a key witness in both trials, testifying that she found Adams naked in their fruit cellar after the girl disappeared just before Christmas in 1967.

Margaret Bowman said she was hanging laundry when she thought she heard rats in the cellar. She said she opened a wooden door and saw a girl with her arms outstretched and bound, “hanging like Jesus.”

She said she ran upstairs and that her husband confronted her, saying he now had to kill the girl. He also threatened to kill his wife and their newborn daughter if she told anyone, she said.

That same night, she testified, Bowman made her go with him as he dumped the body just north of Toledo, across the state line in Michigan.

Robert Bowman, who took the witness stand after not testifying at his first trial, accused his ex-wife of lying and said investigators manufactured evidence against him.

He denied any involvement in the killing.

“That isn’t something I would do,” he said.

Outside the courtroom, assistant county prosecutor Chris Anderson suggested that Bowman’s testimony hurt his defense.

Anderson said the differences in the second trial was that jurors heard more details about Bowman’s life as a hustler who moved around the country and saw how he toyed with detectives when he took the stand.

“You could see what type of person he was,” Anderson said.

During the trial, defense attorney Peter Rost tried to cast doubt on Margaret Bowman’s account. He said that she waited 14 years to tell her story to police and that she stayed with Bowman for over a decade, moving with him to three different states before leaving when his business failed.

Even after she went to detectives in 1981, they still didn’t charge Bowman. Rost also said that the DNA evidence did not conclusively point to Bowman.

Bowman had owned a construction company in Ohio and later a business that made high-end purses in Florida and sold its handbags in Nieman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue stores.

But when police detectives tracked him down in Florida in 1982, he was living in an abandoned restaurant, wearing a tattered shirt and jeans and a scruffy beard.

Hanging from the restaurant ceiling were three dolls, some with their feet bound with string. A nail had been driven into the head of two dolls — eerily similar to how a hunter had found the body of Adams.

Bowman talked with police, but he then dropped out of sight.

Nearly three more decades passed when Eileen Adams’ ailing father had a chance meeting with an off-duty police officer and asked him to take another look at the killing. Her father died two years later, three weeks after Bowman was arrested.

Cold case investigators in 2006 discovered that DNA evidence from semen on the victim’s thermal underwear linked Bowman to the crime, they said. Police soon after charged Bowman even though they had no idea where he was living or even if he was still alive.

He was profiled on the “America’s Most Wanted” and police in southern California arrested him when he was spotted riding a bicycle. His attorney said he had been living under a tarp in the desert.

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LITTLETON, New Hampshire – The University of New Hampshire and its faculty reached an impasse in salary negotiations on Thursday for the second time in a year, as the school struggles to cope with a steep cut in state funding.

The university and a union representing its 630 tenured and tenure-track professors will now go to mediation in an effort to agree on a new four-year contract, officials said.

A previous one-year contract expired June 30, but faculty members have been working its terms during negotiations.

The school’s administration has offered a 7.9 percent salary increase over four years and seeks higher faculty contributions to health insurance and retirement plans.

The union wants raises of 16 percent over four years. State law bars professors from striking.

Deanna Wood, a reference librarian and president of the faculty union, said many faculty members may opt not to accept the contract that has been offered.

“The higher benefit costs outstrip the rise in salary,” she said.

Candace Corvey, the university’s chief negotiator, blamed the union for the impasse, saying in a statement it was “extremely difficult to find any basis in fairness or economic reality to justify their position.”

New Hampshire’s Republican-controlled state legislature cut state funding to the school by nearly 50 percent, or $ 33 million, last year.

The state ranks 50th in the nation in per capita funding for state education, according to the university.

Faculty and the university are also at odds over a clause in the current contract that says professors may be fired for “moral delinquency of a grave order.”

The administration attempted to use the clause to fire Edward Larkin, a professor of German who pleaded guilty to indecent exposure following an incident in a supermarket parking lot.

The union appealed on Larkin’s behalf, and an arbitrator ruled the class B misdemeanor was not sufficiently “grave” to trigger his termination and instead decided Larkin should be suspended for a semester without pay.

(Editing by Ellen Wulfhorst and Jerry Norton)

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ST. PAUL, Minn. – Republican presidential candidates Michele Bachmann criticized a directive by President Barack Obama to ease student loan debt as an “abuse of power” that will give people incentive to dodge debt.

The candidates reacted Thursday to a decision Obama announced a day earlier to cap required payments for some college loan borrowers at a lower percentage of their income and forgive payments for others after 20 years. He used executive authority to accelerate a law that wasn’t supposed to go into effect until 2014.

“I believe it is abuse of power from the executive to impose via an executive order a wholesale change in the student loan,” Bachmann, a Minnesota congresswoman, said during an education forum in New York put on by The College Board and News Corp.

Appearing by satellite from Minneapolis where she was hosting a fundraiser later Thursday, Bachmann said that the loan breaks could push costs onto other taxpayers.

Bachmann said the change creates a “moral hazard” when it comes to student debt.

“There is a morality in keeping our financial promises, and I don’t think we should push that off onto the taxpayer,” she said. “The individual needs to repay and be responsible for repaying their student loan debt.”

Another GOP candidate, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, also took a dim view of Obama’s action, calling it a “Ponzi scheme.”

Gingrich said at the education forum that private loans should be reprivatized before the president “bankrupts the entire country by promising to every young person you will not have to pay your student loan as a student. However you will later have to pay off the national debt as a taxpayer.”

Obama’s plan will accelerate a measure passed by Congress that reduces the maximum required payment on student loans from 15 percent of discretionary income annually to 10 percent. The plan goes into effect in 2012, instead of 2014. In addition, the White House says the outstanding loan amount would be forgiven after 20 years, instead of 25. About 1.6 million borrowers could be affected.

The administration says the plan won’t cost taxpayers anything and could actually save as much as $ 2 billion. Borrowers would be allowed to consolidate a direct loan from the government with one issued under the Federal Family Education Loan Program. The savings come from no longer having to a pay subsidy to the lender, the administration says.

Obama said on Wednesday that the plan will help boost the economy. Debt-saddled graduates will have more money to spend on things like buying homes, he said. Student loans are the No. 2 source of household debt. Total student debt now exceeds $ 1 trillion and the average indebtedness is rising.

Changes approved by Congress last year moved student loans to direct lending by eliminating banks as the middlemen. Before that, borrowers could get loans directly from the government or from the Federal Family Education Loan Program; the latter were issued by private lenders but basically insured by the government. The law was passed along with the health care overhaul with the anticipation that it could save about $ 60 billion over a decade.

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Associated Press Education Writer Kimberly Hefling in Washington contributed to this report.

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