Court documents shed light on NC man charged with killing Lexington’s Jessica Gutierrez
Thomas Eric McDowell is due back in Lexington soon to face charges that he kidnapped and murdered 4-year-old Jessica Gutierrez from her bedroom more than 35 years earlier.
It’s an unthinkable crime. But court documents provide details about the background of McDowell, 61, and shed light on his own troubled childhood.
After Jessica Gutierrez’s 1986 disappearance, McDowell spent a decade, from 1987 to 1997, in a North Carolina prison for second degree rape, second degree sexual offense, grand theft and attempted first degree burglary. McDowell’s older brother Eddie is on death row in California for a 1984 conviction of felony murder, burglary, attempted rape and attempted murder, court records show.
Thomas McDowell is currently awaiting extradition from Wake Forest, N.C., where he was arrested last week in a major breakthrough of the 1986 abduction of Jessica Gutierrez. She was taken in the middle of the night from her Lexington home and never seen again. Investigators say fingerprint evidence found at the scene link McDowell to the kidnapping and helped bring charges against him more than three decades later.
Eddie McDowell’s 2008 appeal of his California death sentence depends heavily on mitigating evidence highlighting conditions in the McDowells’ childhood South Carolina home in York County, including a litany of physical, sexual and psychological abuse to which the McDowell children were subjected.
Eddie McDowell was born seven years before Thomas McDowell, called Tommy by the family. They lived in a 1,000-square-foot home between York and Sharon, which would eventually hold six children. His mother, Shirley, was 16 when Eddie was born, and both she and his father, Charles, were described as having never “showed Eddie one shed of affection” and were “violent and hostile to him from birth,” according to the California court documents.
As adults, all of the McDowell children bear the marks of how they were raised, Eddie McDowell’s death penalty appeal claims. Besides the two brothers in prison, middle brother Ronnie McDowell died homeless at the age of 40 after struggling with alcohol and heroin abuse, and the two surviving sisters lived a “reclusive” life and rarely left home. None of the siblings finished high school, according to the appeal.
Members of the McDowell family testified that Charles McDowell routinely beat his children on the slightest pretext, frequently leaving them with injuries. While much of the appeal focuses on Eddie’s abuse, the court heard testimony that Charles McDowell broke one of Tommy’s ribs when he was 4 years old by “stomping” on him. The injury went untreated for six months until a doctor put Tommy McDowell in a body cast for a year and a half, during which time his father switched to whipping him with a belt.
Eddie McDowell testified of being sexually abused by several older men. Tommy told the court he witnessed several of these acts, and also reported he was molested as a boy by Eddie.
The McDowells’ youngest sister died at the age of 5 when she was struck by a car, something their father blamed on Eddie and Tommy. He would read the pastor’s eulogy for the girl to the whole family while forcing them to look at her photo, and tell the boys if they had been watching her it wouldn’t have happened. A family friend testified she “witnessed this spectacle herself three or four times.”
Charles and Shirley McDowell later divorced. He remarried and died in York at the age of 75 in 2008. She moved to Gaston and died in 1997.
Arlene Andrews, a professor of social work at the University of South Carolina, testified at Eddie McDowell’s trial that such an upbringing can “induce a number of social problems in a child,” producing a “deficiency in their social and moral education” in how men and women interact with each other, with the expectation that violence is how problems can be solved. They develop a “level of terror” about whether they or a loved one will be injured or killed, while their emotional and developmental needs are neglected.
Andrews said the McDowell case was remarkable in the “complete lack of any form of social support” for the children, including from their other siblings. “Dr. Andrews had never seen a family where the siblings were more in conflict,” the appeal filing reads.
Reporter Avi Bajpai contributed from the News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C.
This story was originally published January 12, 2022 at 10:02 AM with the headline "Court documents shed light on NC man charged with killing Lexington’s Jessica Gutierrez."
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