Dean Alan Thoms was a 21-year-old man when he disappeared from Phoenix, Arizona, on July 31, 1987. He was last seen at approximately 5:00 p.m. in the area of North 73rd Avenue and West McDowell Road, on the west side of Phoenix, and after that sighting he was never known to have contacted his family or returned to his normal life. Published missing-person information describes Dean as a white male with blond hair and hazel eyes, approximately 5 feet 4 inches to 5 feet 7 inches tall and weighing about 155 pounds. One particularly identifiable physical characteristic was a partial amputation of his left ring finger. His disappearance would eventually be classified as an endangered missing-person case, but the publicly available summaries contain very little information about what Dean had been doing immediately before he vanished, whom he was expected to meet, or what initially caused his family to fear that something serious had happened to him.
What is clear is that his absence was not treated as an ordinary decision to leave: Dean remained unheard from, and the circumstances surrounding his disappearance eventually led Phoenix homicide investigators to believe that he had been the victim of foul play.
As the investigation developed, Phoenix Police came to a far more specific conclusion about what they believed had happened. In a Phoenix Police Department Cold Case Squad account, investigators identified Fred Curtis Bowers as the suspect and stated that Bowers had planned during the summer of 1987 to rob and murder Dean. According to that law-enforcement account, Dean was killed at 1608 North 73rd Drive in Phoenix and his body was subsequently transported into the desert and buried. Police said Bowers left Arizona afterward, while Dean's family reported him missing and investigators began examining the suspicious circumstances of his disappearance. The case remained with Phoenix homicide detectives for decades. Detective Clark Schwartzkopf worked the investigation extensively before retiring, after which Detectives Tobi Myers and Dominick Roestenberg continued pursuing it. The extraordinary passage of time meant that Dean's family was left without his remains and without a definitive public accounting of what had happened for many years, while investigators continued treating the disappearance as a homicide despite the absence of a recovered body.
More than three decades after Dean vanished, the investigation finally produced a major legal development. Phoenix Police reported that an indictment was obtained in July 2018 charging Fred Bowers with first-degree murder. According to the department's cold-case account, Phoenix detectives traveled to Dallas, Texas, on August 12, 2018, arrested Bowers, interviewed him, and booked him into jail. News coverage later reported that Bowers was extradited from Texas to Arizona in connection with Dean's death. Court paperwork cited by 12 News alleged that Bowers was responsible for Dean's murder and had also conspired with others to commit armed robbery before the killing; following his return to Arizona, he was being held in the Maricopa County Jail on a $1 million bond. Contemporary missing-person summaries subsequently noted that Bowers had been charged with Dean's murder and conspiracy to commit armed robbery, while emphasizing that little information about the evidence supporting the prosecution had been publicly released. These developments transformed a disappearance that had remained largely out of the public eye for decades into a criminal prosecution centered on the police theory that Dean had been deliberately killed and concealed in the desert.
The court record shows that the prosecution continued for several more years. State of Arizona v. Fred Curtis Bowers, Maricopa County Superior Court case CR2018-002601, was filed in July 2018 and remained active through extensive pretrial proceedings. The publicly indexed docket shows that a plea agreement was reached in February 2022, followed by sentencing proceedings in March 2022 and an order of confinement involving the Arizona Department of Corrections. The accessible online docket information does not clearly identify the precise offense to which Bowers ultimately entered his plea or provide enough reliable detail to state the exact sentence imposed, so those particulars should not be inferred from the record that is publicly visible through the indexed source. What the docket does establish is that the case progressed beyond the earlier stage in which public missing-person summaries described Bowers as merely awaiting trial: a plea agreement was entered and the court proceeded to sentencing.
Despite the criminal case, Dean himself has never been publicly reported as physically recovered in the sources available online. The Phoenix Police account says his body was taken into the desert and buried, while missing-person resources have continued to preserve his identifying information and the circumstances of his disappearance. NamUs still maintains case MP10683 for Dean Alan Thoms as a missing-person record, and The Charley Project continues to list him as an endangered missing person who disappeared from Phoenix on July 31, 1987. That continuing record carries particular weight because Dean was only 21 when he vanished, and for those who loved him, the passage of decades has not supplied the most basic thing a family in such circumstances seeks: the ability to bring him home and know with certainty where he rests. In overview, Dean's case began with the unexplained disappearance of a young man from west Phoenix in the summer of 1987, grew into a long-running homicide investigation, eventually led Phoenix detectives to identify and arrest Fred Bowers more than thirty years later, and culminated in a criminal case that reached a plea and sentencing in 2022; yet Dean's remains have not been publicly reported as recovered, leaving the location of his body as the enduring unanswered part of a case that investigators spent decades pursuing.Last Seen: Jul 31, 1987
