Chavers to plead guilty in body-in-well case

A woman linked to three mysterious deaths will plead guilty next week to discarding her boyfriend’s body in a well on his property in Louisa County, her attorney said today.

Ulisa Mary Chavers has admitted she put Reginal Cody Bowles’ body in the 33-foot-deep well, said her attorney, Mike Caudill. Bowles’ body was found in March in some water at the bottom of the unused well. He disappeared more than two years ago.

The state medical examiner’s office still is trying to determine his cause of death.

Chavers, 60, will plead guilty Wednesday—the day she is set to go to trial—to charges of concealing a body, possession of a sawed-off rifle, identity theft and credit-card fraud, Caudill said.

He and prosecutors have reached no agreement as to her sentence. She faces up to 40 years in prison.

Chavers is not accused of killing anyone, and she denies having done so. But she admits that she buried her second husband, Clent Chavers, in their backyard in Amelia County in 1994. She has said he died of natural causes, and that she dumped him from his wheelchair into a hole and buried him.

Authorities believe she collected Bowles’ and Clent Chavers’ Social Security money after they disappeared

Law enforcement officials exhumed Chavers’ remains in the yard in April and found them wrapped in a sheet. His skull was missing.

Authorities said this week that Chavers admitted she had lopped off his head with a shovel about a year after she buried him and threw out the skull at a landfill in Amelia.

She told authorities that she initially had planned to remove all of his remains from the shallow grave because she was planning to move away and was afraid they’d be found. But after she started digging, according to her statement, she noticed the sound of traffic and heard a plane overhead. Fearing someone might see her, she removed only the head.

She said she put it in a trash bag and left it in a trash bin at the landfill.

It took authorities several months to confirm through DNA testing that the remains are those of Clent Chavers, who was 68 when he died. Advanced decomposition prevented the state medical examiner’s office from concluding the cause of his death or how his skull was removed.

His remains recently were taken to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, where they are under examination by renowned forensic anthropologist Douglas Owsley, who hopes to determine the cause of death.

Also raising eyebrows are the circumstances surrounding the death of Bowles’ mother, Eleanor K. Bowles.

In July 2004, Chavers reported finding Eleanor Bowles’ body in a trailer beside the house where Chavers was living with Cody Bowles, who was still alive at the time.

Eleanor Bowles, 69, was discovered in a chair with food and vomit in her mouth. Her death was ruled to be by natural causes and no autopsy was conducted. Authorities have said they wanted to have an autopsy performed on her body, but they can’t because it was cremated.