March 12, 1998: Brandy Orman of Springdale, Arkansas tells employees at a Wal-Mart store she has just escaped from a trailer where she had been held by fugitive Lonnie Cowan since March 7.
Her big mistake was repeating this lie to the police. Her first mistake was getting involved with Cowan in the first place. In March 1997, he was given three years of probation for domestic battery on her.
Lonnie Dale Cowan was ten years her senior.
According to NewsBank, the abstract of the article by Michelle Bradford below appeared on page B1. According to a later report, although only a teenager, Orman was a mother of two. As far as I am able to ascertain, Cowan wasn’t the father of either of her offspring.
Cowan had been serving time for a misdemeanor; he was said to have escaped from a work program. (Newspapers often use this kind of dramatic language; a report may claim a prisoner escaped from an open prison, meaning he walked out of the gate).
On March 10, Cowan murdered William Hamilton by bludgeoning him with a foundation block. Orman led the authorities to Hamilton’s naked body in a dry creek bed. This led to her being charged with murder as well. Capital murder!
Orman said initially that Cowan had told her he’d been released, and that he had raped her twice. Later, she admitted the sex was consensual.
At one point, she was accused of putting Cowan up to the murder. Although she claimed to have been with him since March 7, phone records indicated they met up only on March 10, the day of the murder.
After his arrest, Cowan was charged with capital murder, kidnapping and rape, but when the truth came out, the kidnapping and rape charges were dropped.
On December 1, by which time she was 20 years old, it was reported that Brandy Marie Orman was pregnant again and expecting anytime soon. The baby appears to have been Cowan’s.
On April 6, 1999, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (NewsBank) reported that Orman was borderline retarded. Why am I not surprised?
On July 15. 1999, the same paper reported that this poor, stupid girl, by now a mother of three, had pleaded guilty to reduced charges that led to an eight year sentence.
Previously, it was reported that Cowan had pleaded guilty to murder in return for a life sentence.
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