06:58 AM PST on Monday, October 27, 2003

Associated Press

PORT ANGELES, Wash. - A doctor who was committed to Western State Hospital after killing his wife with an ax and a baseball bat has been granted Friday permission for overnight visits away from the mental institution.

Bruce W. Rowan, 39, a former hospital emergency room doctor in this north Olympic Peninsula town, also may be allowed to travel out of state in six months, Clallam County Superior Court Judge George L. Wood ruled Friday.

Rowan was sent to the mental hospital after a Superior Court jury found him innocent by reason of insanity in the death of his wife Deborah Lu Rowan, 33, at their home on the day her $500,000 life insurance policy took effect in 1998.

Evidence showed he tried to disguise the killing as a car wreck, then stabbed himself in his bathroom after talking with police.

Doctors subsequently said he had been mentally ill all his life.

In August 2002, after an eight-member hospital review board said Rowan's depression and psychosis had been controlled successfully with medication for more than a year, Wood granted a defense lawyer's request that Rowan be moved from a locked ward for the criminally insane to a new treatment program in a less secure part of Western State.

Wood, who presided over Rowan's murder trial, also ruled in 2002 that he could move into the community two years later if he met certain conditions, including no overnight stays outside the hospital complex for at least a year and then only with court permission.

A year later, the mental institution's Center for Forensic Services Risk Review Board recommended that Rowan be granted overnight visits to friends and relatives in Washington state and Idaho.

Over the objections of Prosecutor Lauren Erickson, Wood ruled that Rowan could be granted overnight visits within the state for the next six months at the discretion of Richard Tomko, the hospital's community program director.

After that period, if Tomko agrees, Rowan may be allowed to travel outside the state, the judge ruled.