Man charged with murdering, beheading wife

A man in prison for murdering his second wife has been charged with decapitating his first wife and burying her head in a New York City park, authorities say. Prosecutors said Phillip Ward, 45, pleaded not guilty Monday in a Manhattan court in the 1989 slaying of his common-law wife Veronica Bowen after allegedly confessing to the crime last month, the New York Daily News reported. Assistant District Attorney Elizabeth Lederer said Ward is accused of luring Bowen, who was pregnant with another man's child, to the rooftop of a Riverside Drive building. There, Lederer said, he beat the 21-year-old woman with a pipe, stabbed her with a dagger and cut her head off with a kitchen knife. He then allegedly put her head in a satchel and washed himself under a water tower, leaving her body on the roof of the building and dumping her clothes in the basement. Later the same night, he buried Brown's head in Riverside Park, Lederer said. Ward had pleaded guilty to the 1994 shooting death of his second common-law wife, Sheila Jackson, and to the rape of her young daughter, the Daily News said. Detective Sylvia Bone, who took on the cold case, told the newspaper Ward's daughter had urged him to confess to the killing of Bowen while visiting him in prison in December. Weeks later, in a program in which inmates talk about their crimes, Ward allegedly asked a prison official to call Bone and confessed. "He was very emotional. He said he had been hiding these things for many years," Bone told the Daily News. "He wanted to do it for his family and he wanted to do it for the victim. He felt the victim deserved to have him confess."