Fears Rise for Woman Who Disappeared on Drive From Phoenix

An eight-day search for Jamie Michele Bowie, a Van Nuys woman who disappeared while driving home from an Easter visit to Phoenix, has turned up no clues and only a growing sense of dread among her family and those looking for her.

“We have no clues, no car, no Jamie,” the missing woman’s mother, Dianna Bowie, said Tuesday. “This is just totally unlike her and that is why we think something is terribly wrong.”

Los Angeles police also fear foul play is involved in the 24-year-old’s disappearance on April 16 while driving her metallic blue Volkswagen convertible from Phoenix to Los Angeles along Interstate 10.

Police have conducted three helicopter searches along the freeway in the mostly desert stretch between the two cities but have seen no sign of the woman or her car.

The last confirmed sighting of the woman on the Monday she disappeared was at a service station near Quartzsite, about 15 miles east of the California border, Lt. Charles Massey said. She had gone to the station after her car had an unknown mechanical problem and left the station about the same time as two other westbound cars. There have been reports that she was seen in Blythe, at the California border, but Massey said they were tentative.

“We are going on eight days now,” Massey said during a news conference at which police and Bowie’s parents asked for the public’s help.

Jamie Bowie moved to Van Nuys from Oklahoma in January and was scheduled to start a new job as a legal assistant the day she disappeared. The following day, her apartment was burglarized by someone who apparently had a key, but police have been unable to determine whether the burglar was involved in her disappearance.

With no clues to her whereabouts, police are concentrating efforts on locating Bowie’s Volkswagen, which has an Oklahoma license plate with the number UNP303. Police are attempting to find the people who were at the Quartzsite service station. They were described as a man and woman in an early 1970s Volkswagen with primer paint, and two men driving an early 1970s Cadillac convertible with a white top.