May 19, 2025 (Summer)
The most unsettling true-crime cases …
Creep of the Week: Daniel LaPlante
Home is meant to be a place of solitude and privacy, so when something happens to break that tranquility, it can be extremely unsettling and often leave families feeling paranoid and scared to continue living in their home. Unfortunately, this is exactly what happened to an unsuspecting family of three in 1986. Coming out of Pepperell, Massachusetts, our case in this week’s edition of “Creep of the Week” surrounds the terrifying home invasion of the Bowen family, who unknowingly had a man living inside their walls for six months.
In the fall of 1986, Frank Bowen and his two daughters, 15-year-old Tina and 9-year-old Karen, were dealing with an incredible loss after their wife and mother had passed away from cancer. Tina and Karen took this especially hard and just wanted to talk to their mother. In their desperation, the girls retrieved an old Ouija board and went down into the basement to use it. They asked questions repeatedly but never received any responses in return. Feeling defeated, the girls packed everything up and retreated back up to their respective bedrooms. That night, and over the next few weeks, the girls would hear tapping noises coming from somewhere inside the house. At first, it didn’t bother them as they thought it was their mother speaking to them; however, as the sounds persisted and the haunting escalated, the girls began to feel scared.
Eventually, they told their father, Frank, about the tapping, objects being misplaced, and written messages left around the house, but he just kept shrugging their concerns off. He figured that it was just their way of coping with their mother’s death. However, as the days went on, Tina and Karen continued to insist to Frank that something was really wrong, and they were scared to sleep at night. After hearing that his girls were losing sleep, Frank decided to intervene. On one particular night, the girls had one of their friends over. However, that didn’t stop Frank. He, with all three girls now by his side, walked into Tina’s bedroom on the first floor where the girls told him they had recently seen a message written on the wall and heard the tappings again. Frank was immediately drawn to a closet in the corner of the room. Cautiously, he opened it and was met by a man who walked out dressed in one of his wife’s dresses, wearing clown makeup, and wielding a hatchet. The unknown man then pointed at Frank and the girls, instructing them to go upstairs to the second level of the house. Before he could get any closer, Frank reflexively stepped between the man and the girls, instructing them to go upstairs as he and the unknown man followed. Once on the second level, Frank told the girls to go into the first bedroom, which they did, and he followed them inside before slamming and holding the door shut, preventing the man from coming in. A struggle ensued to open the door, and Tina, unsure of what to do, ran and jumped out of the second-story window.
She got up, seemingly unharmed, and ran over to the neighbor’s house. She pounded on the door and the neighbor opened it and immediately sensed that something was wrong. All the while, Tina was screaming at him that someone was in her house and for him to call the police, which he did after pulling her inside his house.
When they arrived, the police went into the Bowen household, only to find Frank and the two girls, shaken but alive. The intruder was gone. What followed was a very thorough search of the property that led to police finding nothing. It wasn’t until another search of the residence was conducted that the intruder, Daniel Laplante, was found in the basement, hiding inside a tunnel system that he’d created behind the family’s washing machine. After he was taken out of the wall and arrested, it was discovered that Daniel had a love interest in Tina Bowen and six months earlier, had tried to ask her out on a date, but she rejected him. In response, Daniel broke into the Bowen family’s home, cut a hole in the wall, and began burrowing tunnels that went all throughout the house. He used this as a way to spy on and mess with the family inside by writing messages, moving furniture, and creating tapping noises from all parts of the house.
Daniel Laplante would only serve 10 months in prison for the crimes he committed against the Bowen family. However, after being released, he went on to commit another crime, the triple murder of the Gustafson Family, which consisted of 33-year old Priscilla, 8-year old Abigail, and 5-year old William Gustafson. For this, he would be sentenced to life in prison.