He is in jail for killing one girlfriend - and now admits beheading another

A man has been charged with cutting off his pregnant girlfriend’s head on a New York City rooftop in 1989.

Prosecutors say he was suspected for years but only recently confessed to the killing.

In court this week, however, Philip Ward pleaded not guilty to murdering Veronica Bowen.

Ward already is in prison for killing the woman who became his girlfriend after Bowen’s death.

Defence lawyer Frank Rothman says Ward has been co-operating with authorities.

Rothman says Ward is driven by a desire to build a better relationship with his and Bowen’s two children.

Bowen’s naked, headless body was found on her Upper Manhattan apartment building rooftop in February 1989.

Her head was never found.

Manhattan prosecutors allege Ward attacked her after learning she was carrying another man’s child.

Bowen was 21 when she disappeared in February 1989, the Daily Mail reports.

She and Ward had met as teenagers at a group foster home and developed a relationship marred by domestic violence, the newspaper said, quoting the Manhattan district attorney's office.

Prosecutors say she had moved out of the upper Manhattan apartment they shared.

After finding out she was carrying another man's child, Ward lured her to the apartment building's roof overlooking the Hudson River, beat her with a pipe, stabbed her with a dagger and ultimately cut off her head with a kitchen knife, Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Elizabeth Lederer told a judge.

He bagged Bowen's head and hid it in a hole he dug in a nearby area, Lederer said. Her body was left on the roof, where it was discovered 15 days later.

Police and prosecutors in a cold-case unit reopened the case last year as part of a routine process of reviewing old cases, usually to see whether new DNA techniques might solve them. But Ward quickly gave them another form of potent evidence, they said: His confession.

After Bowen's death, Ward moved on to another relationship that ended in violence.

He admitted in 1994 to shooting and killing another girlfriend, caterer Sheila Jackson, in front of her roughly 11-year-old daughter at the home they all shared in February of that year in North Salem.

While serving his sentence for killing Jackson, Ward has gotten a high-school degree and gotten training in masonry and metal assembly, among other things, according to state Department of Corrections and Community Supervision spokeswoman Linda Foglia.

He also has been trying to forge ties to his children, recently meeting with them under authorities' watch ‘to air out some things,’ his lawyer said.

‘He's very reserved, very calm,’ Rothman said. ‘His motivation, at this point, appears to be to have some type of relationship with his children.’

Rothman said Ward's son was in court Monday for his father's arraignment, having said he felt a tie to his father whatever the truth of Bowen's death.