The Killer Across the Table: Unlocking the Secrets of Serial Killers and Predators with the FBI’s Original Mindhunter. Mark Olshaker
And I found there is a peace that comes with that.”
It was not all Rosemarie had to contend with. Seven months after the murder, her beloved father died of cancer. He had adored his granddaughter and never stopped grieving for her.
Rosemarie went to the court hearing when McGowan pled guilty. She felt she had to be there for Joan. Genevieve McGowan was there, too. “When I walked into the courtroom, she gave me the coldest stare I have ever experienced in my life. It was the first time I had ever seen her.”
Rosemarie would not have minded if McGowan had stood trial so that the truth would have come out and nothing would have been held back, including the details of what had happened to Joan. But as often happens, other types of details began filtering back to her. One of the most appalling was when she heard through a friend that Genevieve had told an acquaintance from church that she hated Rosemarie, because if it hadn’t been for her, Joe wouldn’t have killed Joan and gone to prison.
And then there were the persistent challenges from her own body. The first inkling, when she stopped to think about it, had come years earlier, when she was a nineteen-year-old in New York. One day she was running for a bus. Suddenly her leg felt tense and then gave out on her. She didn’t know what it was, but it didn’t recur, and she didn’t think much about the incident.
A few years later, when she was pregnant with Marie, she was feeling exceptionally tired and knew it wasn’t the normal fatigue of pregnancy.
She tried to work out her own strategies and coping mechanisms for dealing with her unknown affliction. “I had to develop my own strength through focus and determination.”
When Joan was born, the tiredness became more pronounced and she was forced to hire help, which she kept until the baby was six weeks old. The ongoing symptoms were vague and fluctuating, and seemed to affect various regions of her body. “It got worse as the day went on and was worst in the late afternoon. I knew I had something.” The one common denominator was the extreme fatigue and the knowledge that she had a limited amount of energy on any given day, and if she used it up, there would be consequences going forward.
She went to doctors, but they couldn’t find anything. Or they told her it was a physical manifestation of postpartum depression. Or it was a virus and she would get over it. But she didn’t get over it, and “if I didn’t rest, I would pick up infections regularly.”
It wasn’t until a year after Joan’s death that Rosemarie finally got an accurate diagnosis. She checked into Mount Sinai Hospital in New York and submitted to an extensive battery of tests. A neurologist there concluded that she was suffering from myasthenia gravis, a neuromuscular disease caused by the breakdown in normal communication between nerves and muscles. It is an autoimmune disorder that can be related to thymus gland abnormalities, with minimal or no relationship to one’s genetic background. There was and is no cure, and treatment centers on trying to alleviate symptoms that, in addition to the severe fatigue and weakness, can involve drooping eyelids, double vision, slurred speech, difficulty chewing and swallowing, and even trouble breathing.
“They told me every case of MG is different. If I pace myself and stay organized, it’s a little better,” she says, but adds, “I do take risks, and that is when I get the most joy out of life. In fact, I think it makes me appreciate moments of joy so much more because this condition makes the experiences so pointed.”
After a miscarriage, two of those joys occurred in 1980 and 1982, when Michael and John were born. Frankie and Marie were already in their teens, so for Rosemarie and Frank, it was like having a second generation of children.
But the joy would not last. Frank lost his job, and their marriage started to fail. “Even though he found another good job, he was lashing out at us more,” Rosemarie says. “And when John was eight, I witnessed inappropriate touching and other gestures.” Throughout all the trials, Rosemarie was sustained by her religious beliefs and devotion. “In my faith,” she commented, “God was always my psychiatrist. After what happened to Joan, I asked Him to help me choose a life without animosity, and instead, a life advocating for prevention, protection and justice.”
In the early 1990s, around the time Michael was eleven and John was nine, Frank moved downstairs. Rosemarie knew it was just the next step on a road that led in only one direction. “I was going to go for a divorce in 1993—on September 7, Joan’s birthday,” she related.
Then they received a telephone call that changed her life yet again. It came on July 26 of that year, from Deputy Chief of Detectives Ed Denning from the Bergen County prosecutor’s office. He said that Joseph McGowan was coming up for parole. This was a shock, because Rosemarie had not been informed that six years could be cut for good behavior and work credit. He had been turned down in 1987, the first time he’d been eligible, but his chances looked better this time since he’d served more than his minimum sentence.
It had been twenty years since the murder, and Rosemarie wanted to bring Joan back into the public consciousness. “It wasn’t about dwelling on the grief but being a squeaky wheel to fight to keep her killer in prison and trying to make sure he wouldn’t be up for parole every few years. I thought starting a movement of the people would help us all.”
The mother of a former Tappan Zee High cheerleader called Rosemarie to say her daughter felt she had been stalked by McGowan back in school and would be “petrified if he came out.”
Rosemarie knew she’d have to fight to keep him behind bars and began by working with local and county officials, district representatives and the community to organize a vigil on September 30, 1993, at Veterans Park in Hillsdale. More than a thousand supporters attended. “My divorce plans had to change according to the advice that I sought from an attorney,” she explains. “The focus had to be on the fight to keep McGowan in, and that couldn’t be complicated by the divorce.”
And she had two overwhelming reasons to keep him behind bars: to make the punishment at least in some sense commensurate with the enormity of the crime; and to make sure no other young child suffered at McGowan’s hands as Joan had. If there were to be any meaning to Joan’s death, any meaning to her disappearing on Holy Thursday and being found on Easter Sunday, Rosemarie understood, she would have to do something herself. “The message of hope was clear. It would be the movement for child protection and helping society inspired by Joan, Holy Thursday, and Good Friday.” It was as if God, who had ordained free will to mankind and therefore had to suffer the deaths of little children at the hands of those who would forsake His values, was giving her a message.
“I realized then that this is the work I’m supposed to do. And I saw it as getting closer to Joan’s spirit. That’s when the movement started. I didn’t get positive support from my family—instead quite the opposite when family members verbally assaulted me, actually threatened me with physical force, and sent harassing mail. In the late 1990s, Michael and John would become involved, but before that, I was pretty much on my own.”
She began speaking out. She began organizing. She spearheaded a nine-month campaign to make the public aware of the danger of child predators and the reasons that they should be kept in prison. The parole board listened and once again turned down McGowan’s request. Just as important, it reviewed his case and had him transferred to the maximum security facility in Trenton, where the warden felt he should have been to begin with. Additionally, the board imposed a future eligibility term (FET) of twenty years before his next hearing. With good behavior and work credits, this would be reduced to twelve years, making him once again eligible in 2005.
And Rosemarie did not just let matters stand once McGowan’s 1993 parole request was denied. She began a grassroots movement, organizing parents and other interested parties in rallying and petitioning for justice for child victims. She wrote; she called; she appeared on television and radio and sat for interviews. Wherever she went, she handed out little green bows, Joan’s favorite color.
It took three years of essentially full-time advocacy. Then, on April 3, 1997, Governor Christine Todd Whitman signed what became known as Joan’s Law. Wearing a green bow on her lapel in memory of Joan, Governor Whitman sat in bright sunshine outside the Bergen County jail. Rosemarie,