Harry Rowan, Sr. was a family man and business consultant who moonlighted as a mob hitman.
Background[]
Harry's maternal cousin, Russell Matthews, inherited the family business, the Fox Hills Crematory in Staten Island. However, Russell had other plans for his future and decided to turn off the crematory oven, bury the bodies he received from funeral homes in an adjacent plot of land, and save money without paying the costs related to his activities. Harry, who was Russell's business consultant, helped him cover up the scam. Russell subsequently made $70,000 with this system, all while giving his clients urns filled with debris.
Harry, secretly a professional hitman who offered his services to New York City's underworld, exploited his cousin's fraud scheme to devise a forensic countermeasure effort aimed at protecting himself against a potential arrest and/or guilty verdict. He took samples of DNA from the bodies buried near Fox Hills and placed them on his victims, in order to divert investigators and create a reasonable doubt in the event of a trial. Eventually, one of the crematory's customers, Damon Tyler, began considering a delay in the delivery of his mother's ashes, thus prompting the funeral home owner, Douglas Hagman, to put some pressure on Russell. The latter feared about his scam being uncovered in the process and asked Harry for help; he replied that he didn't have to worry. That very night, Rowan sneaked into Hagman's funeral home, strangled him, and staged the scene to make it look like the work of a religious fanatic.
Dead[]
MCS Detectives Goren and Eames investigated the case and ended up exposing Russell's fraud, but they realized the leading force behind Russell was Harry. Moreover, a connection was made between the composition of substance found on Hagman's body and a hand cleaner in Rowan's home workshop. Soon after the detectives interviewed him about Russell, Harry set in motion his backup plan: he took the body of Eddie Ferguson, a Masucci hitman he had murdered and kept in a refrigerator, and dropped it in a river in Staten Island. Then, he tipped off police about the location of the body, adding that he had seen Ferguson arguing with Russell. Hair fibers from Matthews were also found under Ferguson's fingernails. By doing all of this, Harry hoped to give the impression that the hitman who did business with his cousin was actually Ferguson.
When Goren and Eames tried to elicit information about Harry from his cousin, Russell refused to speak, claiming he feared Harry. In the end, Goren deduced that Harry was obsessed with not making any mistakes while carrying out his crimes, and he then tricked Harry into exposing himself by convincing him that he had missed Ferguson's porcelain cap in his workshop while moving the body. As a result, Harry spent the entire night tearing his garage apart in search of it, even scaring his family while going as far as sifting in his drainage system. When Rowan was confronted by Goren, Eames, and ADA Ron Carver the next morning, he gave an exhausted, sleep-deprived admission that he "didn't make a mistake" and was arrested for murder. Goren and Eames boasted Ferguson never wore caps, revealing it was all a successful legal ruse.
Known Victims[]
- Unknown dates and locations:
- Three unnamed victims (all murdered and left with DNA from his cousin's crematory on them)
- Tommy Dunn (shot and left DNA from his cousin's crematory on him)
- January 2000, Newark, New Jersey: James Hurley (stabbed and left Kenneth Hemrick's DNA on his corpse)
- Unknown date from 2000 to 2002, Staten Island, New York City, New York: Eddie Ferguson (murdered and preserved his body with his cousin's DNA on it)
- 2002, New York City, New York:
- Brooklyn: Lyle Curachelli (strangled for owing a debt to the Masuccis and left Albert Lundy's DNA under his fingernails)
- Borough unknown: Douglas Hagman (strangled)