New Orleans – New Orleans is a city fascinated with the macabre.
Carriage drivers regale French Quarter tourists nightly with phantasmagoric tales of black magic, debauchery and murder.
Visitors stroll around the legendary cemeteries, known as “Cities of the Dead,” and enjoy picnic lunches amid grand but crumbling tombs that look like something from the fevered mind of Edgar Allan Poe.
In recent days, New Orleans has been riveted by an all-too-true tale of tragedy: A man chopped up his girlfriend and cooked her head and legs in a French Quarter garret above a voodoo temple this month before leaping to his death.
It is one of the ghastliest cases ever in a city drawn to the morbid.
In just about any other city, the spot where such horror took place might lie empty for years, regarded as cursed. But Midge Jones, a cemetery guide and enthusiast of the 19th-century voodoo queen Marie Laveau, said he has already inquired about renting the one-bedroom 1829 apartment, still cordoned off as a crime scene.
“As long as it is cleaned up and painted, and (has) a new gas stove, I’ve got no problem with it,” the 64-year-old said.
According to police, Zackery Bowen, 28, strangled and dismembered 30-year-old Adriane “Addie” Hall on Oct. 5. Eleven days later, Bowen jumped to his death from a hotel roof with a suicide note in his pocket telling police about the killing. Police found Hall’s charred head in a pot, her arms and legs in the oven and her torso in the refrigerator.
For days, French Quarter residents have seemed unable to talk of anything else, in large part because the couple were so familiar.
They partied on Mardi Gras, drank at the best watering holes and knew every colorful character in the Quarter.
“Everybody seems to have known them one way or another,” said Amy O’Neal, while tending bar at a nightspot that sells absinthe and Transylvanian wine. “Everybody knows your business. The French Quarter is a small place.”
Bowen and Hall apparently got together the night Hurricane Katrina hit in August 2005, when Hall gave Bowen refuge in her French Quarter apartment. They defied the mayor’s order to evacuate, and fell in love. Bowen delivered groceries and meals by bicycle; Hall was described by friends as a poet and dancer, and worked in bars.
There is no suggestion the slaying had anything to do with voodoo. But some guides are already dropping the story into their yarns.
