Shane Valentine caught on a security camera attempting to break into a house.
LAS VEGAS — Allie Bowden, the daughter of Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department Police Officer Clarence “Ty” Bowden, texted a friend on May 2, 2017, “I honestly don’t think he [Shane Valentine] wanted to kill Cindy [Sydney Land], but I think she was there, he didn’t have a choice. I hate him. Hope he drops dead; My dad wants to kill him and do the rest of the life in prison.”
The text was obtained by the Baltimore Post-Examiner during this news organization’s investigation into the murders of Sydney Land and Neo Kaufmann who were found fatally shot in their apartment on October 27, 2016.
Allie Bowden texting about Shane Valentine on May 2, 2017.
So, why would Ty Bowden have a reason to want to kill Shane Valentine, as his daughter stated in that text message.
If you recall from the Baltimore Post-Examiner’s on-the-record recorded interview with Las Vegas Township Justice Court Judge Melanie Andress-Tobiasson in May of 2018, Tobiasson claimed that Allie Bowden was a prostitute who was working for Shane Valentine and that at some point Allie switched from Valentine and was working for Nehemiah “Neo” Kauffman. There are no criminal records to support the judge’s allegation and she offered no direct evidence to support the claim.
Ty Bowden
Obviously Ty Bowden didn’t kill Shane Valentine, at least not yet. Valentine is still alive; however, you can’t say the same thing for Neo Kauffman, who Tobiasson claimed was Allie Bowden’s new pimp.
According to social media posts, Ty Bowden isn’t the only person who wants to kill Shane Valentine.
As the Baltimore Post-Examiner reported in a previous story, Alicia Jimenez, Valentine’s girlfriend, told a friend in a 2017 text message, “I have friends who call me every day just to tell me their gonna kill Shane.” Also from other social media posts, there is no shortage of those who want to see Valentine dead.
Allie Bowden also said in that text message: “Yeah I think it was Shane. I know it was. Because Neo was pimping. And making good money. And Shane was like nah Nigga you ain’t gonna come disrespect like that, watch your back. I’ve talked to two detectives. Not one ounce of evidence.”
Bowden’s comments are similar to many others who have been posted on various social media platforms after the murders. Plenty of it appears to be speculation with no real basis in fact, although other posts appear to have some investigative merit. Many times comments are the result of the snowball effect. People just repeat what someone else says which makes it a very hard process to track it down to verify the actual source of the information.
Allie Bowden (Facebook)
Valentine is currently incarcerated in Nevada State Prison for charges of burglary and for shooting into the occupied residence of Alethea Kauffman on October 8, 2016, the mother of Neo Kauffman. On that day, as the Baltimore Post-Examiner previously reported, Valentine threatened the lives of Alethea Kauffman, Sydney Land, and Neo Kauffman.
Less than three weeks later, the bodies of Neo Kauffman and his girlfriend, Sydney Land were found, both shot in the head, in their Southwest Las Vegas apartment on October 27, 2016.
The last official word from the LVMPD in October 2018 was that Shane Valentine was still a suspect in that now three-year-old unsolved double homicide. Nobody has been charged with the murders to date, and that has many asking why?
The Baltimore Post-Examiner has been at the forefront in reporting on the Land/Kauffman murders, including our stories detailing how the murders are surrounded by allegations of police corruption; and misconduct, negligence, and incompetence during the crime scene investigation and the subsequent criminal investigation.
So what does the Land/Kauffman murders have to do with Allie Bowden and her father, LVMPD Police Officer Ty Bowden?
Well, according to Tobiasson, it has everything to do with the murders.
During our interview with Tobiasson, she claimed that during the time her daughter Sarah was a sophomore at Bishop Gorman High School, Sarah was very good friends with Allie Bowden who was also a sophomore. Tobiasson claimed that Allie was working for Shane Valentine while still a student at Bishop Gorman, although no criminal charges have ever been filed against Bowden and Tobiasson offered no evidence to support that allegation. Tobiasson also never said that Sarah was ever a prostitute, only that Shane Valentine attempted to recruit Sarah into the sex-trafficking trade.
Judge Melanie Tobiasson
According to Tobiasson, on October 25, 2016, LVMPD Vice Detective Bill Van Cleef told her that on that day Vice Detective Justine Gatus had called Ty Bowden and asked him if he would bring his daughter Allie in for an interview because Allie may have information with regard to a pimp and the human trafficking of juveniles.
Tobiasson told the Baltimore Post-Examiner that during that interview with Allie Bowden and Ty Bowden, Detective Van Cleef told Tobiasson that the first question Vice Detective Justine Gatus asked Allie Bowden was, “Do you know Sarah Tobiasson,” to which Allie responded, “Yes, I do, she’s one of my best friends.”
The next statement by Gatus was, “We got your name from her mom; she says you’re working as a prostitute for a pimp by the name of Shane Valentine.”
Allie Bowden has never been charged and there are no criminal records to support the judge’s allegation.
Tobiasson said that Van Cleef called her and told her that he didn’t know what to do, referring to the fact that Gatus had just outed Tobiasson as a confidential source of information to the police during the interview. Gatus was never disciplined for outing Tobiasson.
Tobiasson told the Baltimore Post-Examiner that she told Van Cleef, “How about you get back the fuck back in there and fix this, she just put a fucking target on my daughter. You don’t think this guy is going to kill me? He’s not going to kill me; he’s going to kill my kid. What is wrong with you people, there is no way that this was an accident. No vice detective, I don’t care if they’ve been there one day, would do that by accident, this was intentional.”
Tobiasson said Van Cleef went back into the interview and called her when the interview was over and told her, “Well we talked to her [Allie Bowden] and we told her not to talk to your daughter about it.” Tobiasson said she replied, “Are you an idiot, she’s on the phone with my daughter right now, in fact, I bet in 30 seconds I have a phone call from my daughter.”
Tobiasson told the Baltimore Post-Examiner, “Sure as shit, I get a text message from my daughter who said, “Are you serious, you called the police on us?”
Tobiasson said that she told her daughter that Allie and her “need to get to my house right now, you’re not safe.”
“I bring them to my house. I plan to give them the song and dance because I don’t really want to tell them yet, you know, I don’t want to admit to them that at this point I’ve been bringing information to the cops because you know, they’re still young and they’re still, I don’t want to lose my connection with them, especially right now. I give them the song and dance about why the police would do this. I make it very clear to them, that they are not safe,” Tobiasson said.
Tobiasson said Van Cleef called her back and told her that Gatus and he wanted to meet with her and her daughter Sarah. “I told them basically, I don’t want to tell you what I said, but it wasn’t very nice. And I said, “you guys have a reason for doing what you did, and I don’t know what it is,” but I said, “if something happens to my daughter, we’re going to have a real big fucking problem.”
“That night, unbeknownst to me at this time, Allie leaves my house and she Tweets, she puts out a Tweet about the fact that she was called in and questioned by Vice, okay. Now, unfortunately at this point, Allie is no longer associated with Shane Valentine, she was associated with Neo Kauffman. Like I said, they had a beef because Shane was upset that Neo was taking Shane’s girls… So, that night at about 12:30, so it would have been 12:30, October 26, 12:30 a.m., Shane Valentine, a guy by the name of Dominique Thompson, he went by “Domo,” and a girl by name of Frankie Zappia go to…Shane, Domo, and Frankie, whose step-dad is a police officer by the name of Dano Giersdorf, go to Neo’s house and execute Neo and his girlfriend, Sydney Land.
Shane Valentine (NDOC)
The double homicide that happened eight hours after I was outed as a source of information to one of Shane Valentine’s prostitutes who had left him and was now working for Neo. Eight hours later, her new pimp is killed by her old pimp because she puts out on Twitter that she had been called in and interviewed by Vice. They know and everyone else knows that this murder happened as a result of what they did that day,” Tobiasson said.
Tobiasson told the Baltimore Post-Examiner that she was receiving confidential details about the homicide investigation from LVMPD Homicide Detective Jarrod Grimmett:
“Anyway so, these murders happened. The first detective who is investigating the case, thank God is someone who knows me and respects me, and I have a good relationship with. He tells me for the first three or four weeks after the murders while Shane is on the run, what information they have and what proof they have that Shane’s involved. Now after the double homicide, they get Neo’s phone and there’s like forty thousand text messages on it. Apparently, Neo never deleted his text. There’s text messages between Neo and Shane, there’s text messages between Allie and Neo confirming that she is having an involvement with Neo, prostitution-related involvement with Neo and there are many, many, many other text messages on his phone. I’m advised of this by the detective working on this case, that they have this information. There is a significance to them having the text messages between Allie, the girl they outed me to, the cop’s daughter, and Neo. Because at this point in time they now know that Allie is, in fact, a prostitute.”
“Nobody has been arrested in the murders, I told you that. He [Shane Valentine] was a suspect in the murders, they have all the evidence they need to make arrests in the murders. I told you about the detective that was originally on the case he told me all the evidence they had that showed it was Shane, Domo, and Frankie. A month after the double homicide they take him off the case. That never happens. If you start a murder case, you finish a murder case, unless you retire. They take him off the case. They make another detective the lead detective. His name is Mitch Dosch.”
“And they know that the fact that they outed me, got two people killed. It wasn’t the two people they were trying to get killed, me and my daughter, but it got two people killed. I tell you; Joe [Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo who runs the LVMPD] does not want this story out there.”
Closing comments
There are quite a few holes in what Tobiasson told me during our May 2018 interview that I would have liked to have cleared up.
I did not have the opportunity to do a follow-up inquiry with Tobiasson as she broke off contact with the Baltimore Post-Examiner in January of this year after we published her story.
Why Allie Bowden went over to Tobiasson’s house with Sarah Tobiasson after the police told Allie that the Judge had told them that she was a prostitute seems strange to me.
When Allie left the Tobiasson home that night did Sarah Tobiasson go with her and if so who did they contact and where did they go?
Was Ty Bowden aware that his daughter was a prostitute who had worked for both Shane Valentine and Neo Kauffman before that October 25, 2016 interview with vice and if so, did he inform the police department that his daughter was a prostitute and what did the vice section do, if anything?
If Ty Bowden indeed does want to kill Shane Valentine, I would have to agree that any father worth his salt would say the same thing if they found out that some pimp had turned his daughter out. The problem, in this case, is that Neo Kauffman ended up dead and he was Allie Bowden’s new pimp, if Tobiasson is to be believed.
Until someone is charged in this case, all leads must be investigated and all those who had a motive to kill Kauffman and/or Land must be ruled out. Hopefully, the police have done that. Homicide investigations are fluid and things are not always what they appear to be, and anything can change the course of the investigation at any time.
Tobiasson never explained why she believes that Sydney Land and Neo Kauffman ended up dead, when she claimed it was supposed to be her and her daughter who were meant to be killed. We need to hear from Tobiasson on that.
How did Tobiasson and her daughter getting outed by the police end up with murder as Tobiasson claimed?
Tobiasson either told the truth or she provided false information to the Baltimore Post-Examiner about the Land/Kauffman murders and if that’s the case then why haven’t the police commented on this. The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department has never refuted anything that Tobiasson told us.
Tobiasson said that the police had all the evidence that indicated that Shane Valentine, Frankie Zappia, and Dominique Thompson committed the murders. If that is true, then why is it that over three years later nobody has been charged in the case?
Why was Homicide Detective Jarrod Grimmett providing confidential details about the investigation to Tobiasson as she claimed?
Dominique Thompson Instagram
The Baltimore Post-Examiner broke the story that LVMPD Homicide Detective Mitchell Dosch confirmed that Tobiasson was outed by vice detectives in that October 25, 2016 interview, giving validity and corroboration to that aspect of Tobiasson’s story.
The Baltimore Post-Examiner broke the story that Det. Dosch told Connie Land, Sydney’s mother on April 27, 2018 that, “So many things happened since the murder happened that I’ve never seen before and I had zero control over. I won’t get into them, but they are well chronicled. Det. Grimmett and I are left to pick up the pieces and work toward a successful outcome despite all the “things” that have happened along the way.”
That is an unbelievable statement for any homicide investigator to make, and sooner or later the police will have to comment on that, either publicly or in court if anyone is ever charged with the murders. As a matter of fact, everything that has gone wrong with this case will be scrutinized by defense attorneys. It would be one hell of a discovery process.
The Baltimore Post-Examiner also broke the story that Steve Land, Sydney’s father, found evidence in the same blood-stained master bedroom where his daughter was murdered and this happened after the police had cleared the crime scene. As a former criminal investigator, I cannot even comprehend how that even happened.
The purpose of the crime scene search is to obtain evidence. Anything and everything can be evidence at a crime scene. To leave evidence at a crime scene only to be found by the father of the murder victim is incomprehensible. The police need to explain this, not later but now.
The Land and Kauffman families deserve answers from the police and also from Judge Tobiasson.
Tobiasson is a sitting judge who has gone on the record with the Baltimore Post-Examiner and made some startling allegations about the Land/Kauffman murders and police corruption.
Tobiasson said that there is a police cover-up in the homicide investigation and that the police have destroyed evidence: “Now they’re trying to cover up the homicide where Shane Valentine is a suspect and I believe that’s the reason that Metro does not want this to come out is because if the entire story comes out, it’s going to be clear that their behavior on that case, in this case, created an instance to continue to target our kids, not just judges, and cops, but a lot of kids. It’s not just our kids, you know, our kids are involved, they allowed it to happen, they knew it was happening. The problem is they don’t know that I know what evidence they have. Chances are they destroyed it by now,” she said.
The LVMPD needs to be held accountable for their actions. Way too many things have been alleged and many things have been proven in what appears to be a botched double homicide investigation.
Tobiasson is withholding information as to why the murders happened.
That in and of itself is a crime, both legally, ethically and morally.
Tobiasson admitted during our interview with her that her daughter Sarah was friends with Neo Kauffman. The Baltimore Post-Examiner has since learned that Sarah Tobiasson also knew Daniel Stewart aka Supercool Daj and other friends of Kauffman.
Lauren Harvey and Frankie Zappia (Facebook)
According to police records obtained by the Baltimore Post-Examiner, Stewart was the person who discovered the murders and called the police on October 27, 2016. Stewart, at the time, was also the boyfriend of Sydney Land’s cousin, Lauren Harvey. Harvey was the one who called Stewart and asked him to go check on Sydney and Neo. Harvey was also friends with Frankie Zappia, who Tobiasson said was also involved in the murders.
Zappia has denied the allegation.
Detective Dosch told Connie Land that Tobiasson wouldn’t let the police talk to her daughter and made numerous comments concerning the homicide investigation. Even that bothers me. Apparently Dosch just like his partner Grimmett, are blabbermouths, to say the least.
Lauren Harvey and Daniel Stewart aka Daj (Instagram 2016)
Tobiasson told Connie Land in an October 5, 2017 text message, “I’m still not entirely convinced that the murders are connected to Allie.” That statement is at odds with statements made by Tobiasson during our interview with her in May of 2018.
If Shane Valentine is ever charged with the murders, the police will have to answer as to why they botched the crime scene investigation of the Kauffman family residence on October 8, 2016, after Valentine shot into the home. The police did not retrieve the single most crucial piece of evidence for that crime. They never recovered the bullet from the residence until after the murders were committed and never followed through with the investigation. Had that been done, Valentine may very well have been incarcerated and the murders may never have happened. Again, that is if Valentine was involved.
Also, if it is ever proven as Tobiasson claims, that the Land/Kauffman murders occurred as a result of Vice Detective Gatus outing Tobiasson and her daughter, the police could be held civilly liable for the deaths of Sydney Land and Nehemiah Kauffman.
As we reported in a previous story, Gatus has since been transferred to the Homicide Bureau. Great place to be if you dime out confidential sources of information. I wonder if she is working on the Land/Kauffman murders. At the very least she would be privy to the homicide investigation and that is more than troubling.
Sydney Land and Nehemiah Kauffman are dead. It makes no difference what they were involved in. Murder is murder and that is the only thing that matters here. After three years, those responsible for the murders are still out there living their lives. They need to be brought to justice and answer for their crimes.
Ty Bowden never returned a request for comment. Allie Bowden couldn’t be reached for comment.
The time is now for Judge Tobiasson to hold a press conference. You wanted to be a whistleblower, so go ahead and publicly expose what you know and produce your evidence. You said you talked to the police and that did no good. In fact, the police violated their duty to protect confidential sources and exposed you and your daughter. You said you provided information to the FBI and nothing to date has come of that. What are you waiting for?
I have said in prior stories that one of the things that troubles me with Tobiasson, is why she allowed her underage daughter at the time to frequent and hang out in one of the clothing stores that Tobiasson said was a front for prostitution; owned by pimps, frequented by criminals and off-duty LVMPD police officers?
I cannot fathom why any mother, let alone a former prosecutor and sitting judge, would knowingly let their minor daughter not only frequent but later work in such a place. To me that’s contributing to the delinquency of a minor, putting your own daughter in harm’s way. Then Tobiasson cried foul when one of those pimps, Shane Valentine, tried to recruit her daughter into sex trafficking. I cannot justify that in any way and will never understand Tobiasson’s conduct in doing what she did.
I was told by a ranking member of the LVMPD a few weeks back that I should stop writing stories about the Land/Kauffman murders. That was the wrong thing to say to this investigator. The police may be able to pressure the Las Vegas media but not the Baltimore Post-Examiner. Sheriff Joe Lombardo doesn’t control us.
Spoiler Alert:
An upcoming story from the Baltimore Post-Examiner will focus on a comment made by Tobiasson in an October 2017 text message to Connie Land: “…I never forget. Just ask Shane Valentine, Jeff Wagonseller, Domo, Frost and many others. Only death will free them from my sights.”
Maybe she will address that text at her press conference if she has the courage to hold one.
Editor’s Note: Investigative journalist Doug Poppa will be featured in a podcast focusing on the unsolved Land/Kauffman murders in the near future that will include new details surrounding the murders and the evidence that the police failed to recover from the crime scene. The link to the podcast will be published on the Baltimore Post-Examiner’s website. Stay tuned.
The post Daughter of Las Vegas Metro Police officer said her father wants to kill Shane Valentine appeared first on Baltimore Post-Examiner.