Do you know who murdered Paula Bowling? Paula Bowling, a 21-year-old white female, was found dead on February 13, 1989, in a desert area off Paradise Road, south of Robindale in the Las Vegas Valley. At about 5:30 p.m., her body was discovered in the scrubland beyond the pavement, the winter light fading as investigators marked off the scene. The discovery anchored the case to a lonely stretch south of the city’s bustle, where traffic thinned and sand and creosote took over.
Investigators identified her and noted she had also been known by the names Paula Howard and Chardon Jazzmen. According to police, she was familiar with the Fremont and Eastern Avenues corridor, and public records indicate prior arrests in Las Vegas for prostitution and drug-related offenses—details that sketched a precarious daily orbit around the city’s neon core and its edges. Even with those leads about where she spent time, the desert yielded few answers about her final hours.
Detectives classified the killing as an open homicide and appealed for information, but the case file lists no identified suspect and records no arrests tied to her death. Decades later, the entry remains in Metro’s cold-case rolls, a brief official synopsis standing in for a longer story that has yet to be told.
