EVANSVILLE – It was a beautiful wedding.
The bride wore an ornate dress as her father ushered her up the aisle under the glare of the historic stained-glass windows of St. Francis Xavier College Church in St. Louis. Her soon-to-be husband – an Evansville doctor – waited at the front.
The Rev. William S. Bowdern stood beside him. The priest, teacher and World War II veteran had overseen plenty of weddings before, but this one was special. The bride was his niece.
According to Courier & Press archives, the June 1952 ceremony went off without a hitch, and the couple soon jetted off to California, where the husband was set to begin an internship.
What it doesn’t describe is what Bowdern was thinking that day. And if the horrors he’d allegedly witnessed three years earlier were still fresh in his mind.
In 1949, Bowdern oversaw the supposed exorcism of “Roland Doe,” a 14-year-old boy from Maryland who witnesses believed was possessed by demons. More than 20 years later, the case burst into the public consciousness as the inspiration for the scariest movie ever made: “The Exorcist.”