On March 20, 2014, S.B. contacted the Sheriff’s Department in Jackson County, Kansas, and said that her granddaughter, T.S., had been sexually abused by the girl’s great-uncle, 47-year-old Anthony Bowers.
Deputy Travis Spiker responded and interviewed the girl, who was 6 years old. She and her mother and little sister lived with Bowers in his house in the small town of Soldier. She said that Bowers tried to touch her “girly parts” and tried to get her to “lick his boy parts.”
She said the abuse happened at night, when Bowers entered her room under the guise of watching some pet sugar gliders that were also in the room. (Sugar gliders are small nocturnal marsupials native to Australia.)
The next day, T.S. and her grandmother went to the LifeHouse Child Advocacy Center in Topeka, where Jill Shehi-Chapman, a forensic interviewer, interviewed the girl.
T.S. said in the interview that Bowers had touched and licked her “girly parts” and put his finger inside her. She said he had made her touch his penis. She also said that Bowers had placed her on his lap while he showed her pornography on his computer.
Sheriff’s deputies arrested Bowers on March 24, 2014, charging him with rape, aggravated sodomy, and aggravated indecent liberties with a child.
After his arrest, Bowers was interviewed by Detective Al Dunn. Bowers said he was innocent of the charges but that it was possible that T.S. had inadvertently seen pornography on his computer. (Deputies searched Bowers’s computer and did find pornography but nothing matching the girl’s descriptions of the images she said she had seen.)
During the interview, Dunn asked Bowers if he would be willing to take a polygraph. Bowers answered, “Yes. Any day. Right now.” Dunn then asked Bowers if he would “pass” the polygraph. Bowers said. “Right now. Right now. Tomorrow. I don’t care. Any day. Any time. Any place. Anywhere. 100 percent. I have no doubts about that. None. That crap is not happening in my house. My house is not where—phew—I just don’t want to say anything. I want to go home. I want to act like this is a dream, a very bad dream. Wow, just wow. Whatever I can do for you I will do for you, no matter what it is.”
At the time of his arrest, Bowers was on probation after pleading guilty in July 2013 for an unrelated charge of battery involving his son.
Bowers’s first trial, in Jackson County District Court, ended in a hung jury on December 22, 2014. His second trial began in March 2016.
Prior to the second trial, Bowers’s attorney, Sarah Swain, moved to prevent Shehi-Chapman from testifying as an expert witness and then asked for a hearing. The state said in a filing and at the hearing that Shehi-Chapman would only testify about her interview with T.S. Judge Norbert Marek Jr. ruled that Shehi-Chapman could testify about her training and whether she followed her training but could not testify as an expert witness.
Shehi-Chapman had used an interviewing technique with T.S. called “Finding Words,” a protocol deployed at many child advocacy centers. Swain sought to exclude evidence derived from this interview. In a motion, she said there was no scientific proof that the Finding Words protocol produced reliable results. The state said in a response that the protocol was “designed to elicit untainted statements from a child witness.” Judge Marek allowed the admission of the evidence.
T.S. testified that Bowers came into her room at night and sexually abused her, placing his hand and his mouth on her “girly parts.” She said she looked at pornographic photos while sitting on his lap at his computer.
During cross-examination, Swain asked T.S. about her interview with Shehi-Chapman. The girl testified that she did not remember the interview. She also testified that she remembered little about her interview with Spiker.
Shehi-Chapman testified about her interview with T.S. as well as her education and job history. Shawna Miller, the Jackson County Attorney, asked:
“Based off your experience in interviewing many other children, is it at all uncommon for this type of abuse, where it’s ongoing for a long period of time, to occur in the child's home?”
Swain objected, asserting that Miller was asking Shehi-Chapman to testify as an expert. Judge Marek overruled the objection, and Shehi-Chapman said: “In my experience, of the kids that I have forensically interviewed, it is not uncommon for abuse to happen in the home. It is not uncommon for abuse to continually happen or a pattern where the same abuse continues to happen over time.”
Shehi-Chapman testified that abusers often would inappropriately touch their victims in the presence of others but call the contact an accident.”
Later, Shehi-Chapman testified about grooming, which she defined as the “process of eroding a victim’s boundaries to physical touch and desensitizing them to sexual issues. If somebody would want to cultivate a trust with a victim and then gradually introduce sexual behavior until it ... reaches a point where it becomes possible to perpetrate a crime against them.”
Spiker also testified about his interview with T.S.
Bowers did not testify, although jurors heard part of his recorded statement to Detective Dunn, excluding the section where he and Dunn discussed a polygraph test. The state had successfully moved to bar that part of the statement, arguing that state law prohibited evidence on the results of polygraphs or about a defendant’s offer to submit to a polygraph or refuse to take one. Swain had argued that this situation was different; Bowers hadn’t offered but rather had responded to an offer, and no test was done.
The jury convicted Bowers on the three charges on March 31, 2016.
Swain moved for a new trial, asserting that Judge Marek should have allowed jurors to hear that Bowers was eager to take a polygraph and that Shehi-Chapman improperly testified as an expert witness. Judge Marek denied the motion on August 9, 2016, and sentenced Bowers to three consecutive terms of 25 years to life in prison. Bowers served the initial six months of that sentence at the county jail because his probation on the battery conviction had been revoked at the time of his conviction on the sexual-abuse charges.
Bowers then appealed Judge Marek’s denial. Two years later, on November 30, 2018, the Kansas Court of Appeals vacated his conviction and granted Bowers a new trial.
The appellate court said that Judge Marek had erred in allowing Shehi-Chapman to offer an opinion on: whether abuse is commonly perpetrated by someone the child knows in the home; whether abuse frequently occurs while someone else is in the same room as the child; whether sex offenders use pornography to desensitize children to sexual acts; and how offenders use grooming to erode a victim’s boundaries. The ruling noted that the Kansas Supreme Court had ruled that grooming evidence “typically” required expert testimony.
It was possible, the appellate court said, that the jury would have come to the same decision without Shehi-Chapman’s improperly admitted testimony, but the state had not met its burden of showing the errors were harmless.
Bowers was released from prison on January 4, 2019. His retrial began in June 2021. This time, Bowers testified. Swain also presented new expert testimony about child-interview techniques and evidence pointing to the girl’s stepfather as the real perpetrator.
On June 18, 2021, the jury acquitted Bowers on the rape and sodomy charges but hung on the indecent liberties charge. Miller dismissed that remaining charge on July 20, 2021.
After his exoneration, Bowers filed a claim for state compensation. He settled his claim in May 2025, receiving $182,650, plus $25,000 in attorney fees.
– Ken Otterbourg
Posting Date: 06-16-2025
