PORT ANGELES — Former emergency room doctor Bruce Rowan, who bludgeoned his wife to death and was committed to a state mental hospital, has been approved for overnight visits away from the facility as part of his conditional release.
On Friday, Clallam County Superior Court Judge George L. Wood, who presided over Rowan’s murder trial in 1998, granted Rowan overnight stays away from Western State Hospital at the hospital’s recommendation.
In another six months, Rowan may be allowed to travel out of state.
Wood’s decision comes more than a year after he approved Rowan’s conditional release from the mental facility to eventually move away from the hospital and into the community.
Rowan, now 39, was sent to Western State in November 1998 for an indefinite time after a Superior Court jury found the former Olympic Memorial Hospital emergency room physician innocent by reason of insanity for killing his wife, Deborah, with a baseball bat and an ax at their Port Angeles home earlier that year.
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The rest of the story appears in Sunday’s Peninsula Daily News.