For a year, Christopher Bowman had told John Baldwin Jr. he was coming home to Southern California, but he didn't follow through, and after a while Baldwin stopped believing him.
Then, a few days before Baldwin was to leave for Tokyo to compete in the World Figure Skating Championships last March, Bowman called him, asking to be picked up at Santa Monica's Third Street Promenade.
The man he saw was not the confident athlete who twice won the U.S. men's figure skating title, a dynamic performer who was known as "Bowman the Showman" because he so easily enthralled skating judges and audiences.
This Bowman had lost his lifelong battle with his weight, carrying as much as 300 pounds on a 6-foot frame. A former child actor and featured skater who earned good money on the Ice Capades tour, Bowman was destitute, having gone through his bank accounts, his friends and a marriage that produced a daughter.
"I think he was planning on staying indefinitely, but I just didn't have the room," said Baldwin, who once employed Bowman to choreograph his skating routines. "I put him in a hotel in West L.A. and paid for it for a little bit. I knew he didn't have any money."
When Bowman left, Baldwin turned to his skating partner, Rena Inoue, and uttered words that were chillingly prescient.
"I said, 'I hope something terrible doesn't happen to him in the next six months,' " Baldwin said. "He had extreme highs and lows. I was afraid he was going to do something extreme."
On Thursday, Baldwin got the phone call he had always known he would receive.
Bowman, 40, had been found dead in a room at a Budget Inn on a busy, nondescript block of Sepulveda Boulevard in North Hills.
Bowman was pronounced dead of unknown causes, said Sgt. Greg Houser of the Los Angeles Police Department. The Los Angeles County Coroner is investigating to establish whether he died from natural causes or a possible overdose of prescription drugs.
Lt. David Smith of the coroner's office said prescription drugs were found at the scene but would not identify them.
Houser said Friday that Bowman's death did not appear to be a suicide.
"We were told by a friend who found him that he went to sleep and didn't wake up. The friend checked on him, believing he was asleep, but he wasn't breathing," Houser said.
He added there was "no indication of trauma and no sign of a struggle inside the room," and no drug paraphernalia was discovered in the room.
