A California man charged in a 1980 double homicide in Terre Haute was sentenced to 30 years in prison on Monday.
Harry Loven Rowley, 61, appeared in Vigo Superior Court 1 where Judge John Roach accepted a plea agreement for Rowley's admission to the July 4, 1980, shooting deaths of Mary Quillen and Lucinda Farmer.
Rowley is already serving a sentence of life in prison without parole for his conviction in a 1977 homicide in California, and will not ever be released from prison in California, so he will never return to Indiana to serve the sentence imposed in Vigo County.
Rowley was extradited from California to Vigo County and was booked into the Vigo County Jail in December. He was charged in January 2014, with the shooting deaths of the two women, who lived in the same apartment building as Rowley at the time of their slayings.
The terms of the plea agreement called for a 30-year prison sentence on each of the two murder charges for the death of Quillen and Farmer, who were both attending Indiana State University at the time of their deaths. The sentences are to run concurrently to each other, and to Rowley’s prison term in California.
Rowley was arrested in California in 1997 after DNA evidence linked him to an unsolved homicide from 1977. Rowley has a lengthy criminal history, California authorities said, noting that he had also served a seven-year prison term after a series of rapes in the 1980s and a conviction for child molestation in 1983. He was also a suspect in a 1988 slaying of another California woman.
When the Terre Haute homicides occurred, Rowley was a suspect investigated by police. He and his wife Verna fled Terre Haute for Las Vegas a few days after the killings of Farmer and Quillen, whose bodies were found in an alley behind the apartment house where the victims and Rowley lived. They had each been shot once in the head.
Terre Haute Police Lt. Edward Tompkins reopened the cold case investigation in 2010. He spoke to people connected to the original investigation, and he determined that Rowley was seen shooting a handgun on the night that the women died. Rowley had also made self-incriminating statements about the shooting deaths of the women. Tompkins interviewed Rowley at the California State Prison in Lancaster, Calif., on Oct. 22, 2013, and during that interview, Rowley reportedly admitted his involvement in the double homicide.
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