Your home is meant to be your shelter. However, what if a stranger moves into your house without your knowledge? “Frogging: Hider in My House“, a new true crime series on Lifetime TV Channel, investigates the actual circumstances in which the homeowners learned that someone else was living in their residence.
The frogging, called “frog”, has a folktale air. It describes a little-known but all-too-common phenomenon where someone secretly, and without the owner’s knowledge, moves into a house.
Finding the victim of this strange crime seemed daunting when executive producer Jessica Everleth first began working on the film. Finding examples for profiles for the show, however, proved to be a lot easier than he expected.
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Who is Tina Bowen and What Happened to Her?
In Pepperell, Massachusetts, at 16, Tina Bowen lived with her father and older sister, Kathy. In 1986, when she lost her mother to cancer, she unexpectedly received a call from a young man named Daniele LaPlante, of the same age. She claimed that he had obtained her phone number from a friend of theirs who lived in the same area where she lived. Tina and Danielle gradually grew closer over several phone calls, and Tina found some comfort in Daniel as she was dealing with the loss of her mother.
Tina eventually accedes to Daniel’s request for a date to meet at the neighborhood fair, only to find that it wasn’t exactly who she imagined. She moved in with him despite initial astonishment at his appearance when they first met, but she soon became uncomfortable with the constant questioning about her mother’s passing.
Being disturbed by these words, she hurriedly went back to her sister’s house from there. A few days later, the Bowen sisters opt to use the Ouija board in an attempt to communicate with their mother’s ghost.
When Tina and Cathy ask the Ouija board questions, they are stunned and, in return, answer by banging on the walls, although the consequences of such activities are controversial. The girls resumed the session, assuming it was their dead mother, but it didn’t end there. As the girls left the room briefly, the apparently “friendly ghost” began to act and terrorize them for a few months by shaking furniture, changing TV channels, and drinking leftover milk.
The situation worsened when the Bowen sisters allegedly discovered threatening writing on the basement walls. When they tried to tell their father, Frank Bowen, about it, he ignored it. Instead, he thought about their accusations and assumed they were just having difficulty accepting their mother’s passing. He was quickly corrected, though, when he got a call from his children and one of their friends at the beginning of 1987. The girls hurried to the neighbor’s house to call him after discovering yet another bloody message, this time on Tina’s chamber wall.
When Frank arrived, he saw the recently used toilet and significantly more disarrayed furnishings than the girls had described. When Frank saw the bloody messages on his walls, he started investigating his home. In addition, Daniel LaPlante was discovered lurking in his late wife’s closet, dressed as a Native American, and brandishing a hatchet. Fortunately, Tina was able to flee to the neighbor’s house and call the police after the adolescent held the Bowens and their friend captive in a room.
Daniel had already disappeared by the time the cops showed up, but two days later, when Frank went back to the house to get some things, he noticed Daniel through the window again. He quickly alerted the authorities, and this time they successfully broke into the home and apprehended Daniel.
However, officer Steve Bezanson also learned that the man had been living covertly in a crawl area between the walls that divided the plumbing pipes from the toilet for about a year. The Bowens were naturally alarmed by this finding because they had no idea that a stranger was living in their home and watching over their personal affairs.
What Happened to Daniel and Where is Tina Bowen?
After being charged, Daniel LaPlante was committed to a juvenile detention center until October 1987. After being granted freedom, he proceeded to murder Priscilla Gustafson, 33, and her two small children in their Townsend home on December 1, 1987. He was tried for it and given three consecutive life sentences in jail. Life was never the same for Tina and her family after he turned his attention to his first victim. The sisters are still troubled by what they went through, according to author Joe Turner, who chronicled Daniel’s life in his book, “The Bizarre Story of Daniel LaPlante.”
“However, even 30 years later, the incident continues to affect the victims, which is what I found to be most fascinating. LaPlante’s primary target, Tina, has forgiven him and doesn’t harbour any grudges against him. In an interview, Joe stated that Tina’s older adopted sister, Kathy, still has trouble sleeping in the dark and is counting down the minutes till LaPlante passes away.
Tina Bowen does not use social media and has chosen to avoid the spotlight. We sincerely hope she will recover from their terrible experience and that her family will be able to move on with their lives.
