Infant's parents led troubled life
Nitamargarita
A look behind the death of baby Tanner Dowler
By Justin George, Camera Staff Writer
October 20, 2002
LAFAYETTE — The couple, dirty and tired, pulled up to the dirt parking lot
at the Circle Motel, across from the Lafayette Cemetery.
She was pregnant.
Joseph and Audra Dowler had been sleeping in the covered truck bed of their
white Ford Ranger or scrunched up in another car Audra owned.
It was hot, the first week of June. Audra was burning up. Her belly was
protruding, said Barbara Reathman, the stern but motherly motel manager.
"She didn't want a baby," Reathman said. "She was a baby herself."
Reathman took pity on the couple. She called them her "orphans" and rented
them trailer No. 2, a cream-colored unit with brown trim on the east side of
the property.
It was within the confines of the trailer — a little shorter than a school
bus, a little wider than a couch — that Joseph and Audra Dowler brutalized
their infant son for much of his short life, police said.
A broken arm was followed a week later by another one. Two broken legs.
Second-degree burns. Brain bleeding and oxygen deprivation. Cracked ribs.
His cries were muffled, police said.
Then, baby Tanner Dowler was silent.
Unresponsive and brain-damaged, he spent nine days in critical care at a
Denver hospital. His grandparents terminated life-support systems on Oct.
12, the day Tanner turned 9 weeks old.
No one knows exactly what took place in the trailer, except Joseph, 34,
jailed on charges of first-degree murder, and Audra, 19, who is being held
on suspicion of child abuse resulting in serious injury.
But people who saw the Dowlers outside the mobile home or with insight into
the couples' lives sketch Joseph as a troubled father with attention deficit
disorder and other developmental problems who could be considered a teenager
mentally. Audra, people who know her say, was an immature high school
dropout who fell in love and became a mother too young.
'Troubled individual'
Joseph Dowler grew up in Cedar Lake, Indiana, a rural bedroom community. He
was an only son, said his mother, Karen Dowler.
Young children and older people got along well with him, she said, "probably
because he treated all of them with respect."
People his own age picked on him.
"And he's always taken it," his mother said.
Joseph was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder syndrome and lacked
basic social skills. He attended special education classes and often argued
and fought with his father, sisters and some neighbors, Karen Dowler said.
"Joseph is a troubled individual," she said, "but he's a very good-hearted
individual."
His mother said Joseph had to see a psychologist to overcome "emotional
difficulties" that she is hesitant to talk about.
But she said, "I have never seen, in my mind, any violent tendencies in
him."
Joseph was never able to hold down a full-time job for more than four
months, his parents said.
He moved to Colorado about five years ago to help his father, Nolan "Woody"
Dowler of Brighton, with a family business. Nolan Dowler put Joseph to work
and helped him with housing.
The son soon went on to other jobs. His mother said he especially liked
delivering pizzas because the job offered the social contact he craved.
"As he grew up and grew out of the lack of social skills he had early on, he
got to the point where he loved people," she said. "He always loved being
around people."
Audra meets Joseph
About three years ago, Dowler was working part-time for a Brighton Pizza
Hut, where he met co-worker Audra Riley. She was about 16 and was attending
Brighton High School.
Audra was from a typical suburban home in Brighton. She was a member of the
high school golf team and played saxophone and later the oboe in the student
jazz band.
"She was just a prince of a gal," says Robert Weinholdt, the father of
Kalene Weinholdt, Audra's childhood best friend.
Brighton High band director Ted Worth said Audra didn't have a large circle
of friends.
"She had a ready smile but was not the life of the party," Worth said. "To
me it seemed like she was revolting against something."
But he said Audra was a good student who stayed away from drugs and had
parents who were actively interested in her school life. During her junior
year, she and her parents traveled to Hawaii with the band.
It wasn't until her senior year that Worth noticed a change in Audra, he
said.
"She started slipping academically and then moved out of her home," Worth
said. "By Christmas she was fading fast."
About that time, Joseph Dowler and Audra Riley were becoming more seriously
involved, people who knew them said. Though their ages were 15 years apart,
they had some things in common.
Both loved cars and auto racing. In high school, teachers and friends say,
Audra aspired to be a mechanic. In a technical school, Dowler earned a
certificate for working on diesel engines, his mother said.
With one semester remaining before graduation, Audra Riley, then 18, dropped
out of school.
"Everybody at school tried to get her back in to finish out," Weinholdt
said. There was no getting through to Riley, he said, because Dowler had
"such a hold on her."
She was probably pregnant.
"Her dad didn't even know she was pregnant until after the baby was born,"
Weinholdt said.
She ran off with Dowler because her parents tried to separate them, friends
said.
Dowler estranged himself from his father and stepmother because they wanted
him to give up his unborn child to adoption.
Riley and Dowler moved into their cars and spent most of the time parked at
the Tomahawk Truck Stop in Brighton, according to his father and stepmother.
Rented trailer
In the first week of June, the couple rented a tiny trailer for $150 a week
at the Circle Motel in Lafayette. They had both found jobs delivering for
the Lafayette Pizza Hut.
Knowing that a baby was on the way, Dowler asked the property manager for a
larger trailer, which they got for $10 a week more.
It was about this time that Joseph's father and stepmother began contacting
medical and social services officials, according to letters obtained by KUSA
Channel 9.
In a letter dated June 19 to the Platte Valley Medical Center in Brighton,
Nolan and Lea Dowler wrote that they were worried about the imminent birth
of a grandchild and his future well-being.
"They can barely feed themselves," the letter said of their son and Audra
Riley. "They both have tempers."
Despite his father's misgivings about the relationship, Dowler told his
mother in Indiana that he planned to marry Riley.
"Absolutely he adored her," Karen Dowler said.
The couple wed on June 27 — six weeks before Tanner was born — at the clerk
and recorder's counter at the Southwest Weld County Services Complex in Fort
Lupton. There were no judges, ministers or witnesses, according to a Weld
clerk.
The couple exchanged simple silver bands later, said neighbors and motel
workers who were shown the rings.
Audra Dowler did not know how to prepare for a pregnancy, motel manager
Reathman said. She smoked, said a maintenance man who cleaned cigarette
butts off of the couple's porch.
Reathman, on a few occasions, asked Audra Dowler if she was eating right.
"She'd very seldom answer," Reathman said. "He'd jump in there with, 'I made
her eat a whole pack of Doritos.'"
Reathman told the couple that the expectant mother needed prenatal vitamins.
There was no sign that she took any, but the couple did see doctors at the
Salud Clinic in Brighton, police said.
The couple's trailer was often unkempt, with pop cans strewn around and the
garbage overflowing, Reathman said. But she said she couldn't evict the
Dowlers because Audra was pregnant.
Tanner is born
On Aug. 10, she gave birth to Tanner at the Platte Valley Medical Center in
Brighton.
According to Dowler's mother, Joseph always wanted a child.
"When he called me after the baby was born, he was flying high," she said.
"He was ecstatic with joy."
She said social services workers — spurred by Joseph's father and
stepmother's letter — visited the couple in the medical center before the
baby was born and again before Audra and Tanner Dowler checked out.
Reathman said she didn't find out about the new birth until she saw that
Audra Dowler's belly was no longer swollen.
"Oh you had the baby?" Reathman recalled asking the new mother.
"Yeah, but I'm going to work," Dowler responded.
"No, you're not. You'll hemorrhage!" Reathman said.
"I'm fine," Dowler said.
She went back to work just days after having the baby, and Joseph Dowler
stayed home to watch the baby.
When Audra paid rent for the last time on Sept. 23, Reathman said, the
19-year-old complained that Joseph hadn't been working in two weeks but
spent the family's last few dollars to fix his truck.
"She knew that if they didn't have rent, Joe would tell her to ask her
mother for rent," Reathman said.
Neighbors said the couple put the newborn baby — wearing nothing but a
diaper — in a stroller and wheeled him around the motel complex. The baby
soon looked sickly, they said, and his eyes were matted by a greenish
discharge.
There were other signs that the couple didn't know how to care for Tanner.
Once, Joseph taped a blanket around Tanner to keep it on him, a neighbor
said.
In an Aug. 26 letter, Joseph Dowler's father and stepmother again made a
plea for intervention, this time by writing to social services departments
in Boulder, Weld and Adams counties.
"We don't want to raise the baby or take him away from them," the letter
said. "But these two need parenting classes, nutrition classes and Joe needs
anger-management classes."
Four weeks into Tanner's life, however, Joseph Dowler called his mother to
tell her the baby had gained 13 ounces. He sounded like a proud father,
Karen Dowler said.
But some neighbors said he had a darker side. Phil Peterson, a Circle Motel
maintenance man, said Dowler once threatened to fight a neighbor out of
jealousy because the neighbor brought Audra Dowler food.
Others said they never saw Joseph Dowler violent, and he was often carrying
the diapered baby when they saw him outside the trailer.
The week before the couple was arrested, Reathman said, she began to notice
more clothing on Tanner, possibly to "cover up all his hurts."
Police interviews with Joseph Dowler paint a horrific picture of what went
on in the Dowlers' trailer. He admitted to shaking and smothering the baby
when he cried and contorting his arms to the point that they possibly broke,
police said.
Joseph Dowler's mother said she can't understand it.
"It was a horrible, horrible thing that happened, and I lost my grandson,
and I am devastated," Karen Dowler said. "I don't know what happened. I
wasn't there, and no one will absolutely know the truth of what's going on."
She said she has visited her son in jail.
"He was totally devastated," she said. "He was in tears all morning."
But she didn't allow Joseph to give her an explanation, she said.
"I don't have a clue," she said. "All I can say is none of this makes any
sense to me."
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Nita
DedNdogYrs
baby.
Dogs & children first.