PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — A Bensalem man pleaded guilty Friday to killing a chiropractor inside his office, as well as to attacking a detective who investigated the homicide case.
Bucks County prosecutors said Joseph O’Boyle, 23, admitted to killing Dr. James Sowa, 64, at his Hulmeville Road home office on Nov. 2, 2020.
Investigators cited records showing that O’Boyle saw Dr. Sowa as a patient two months beforehand, but O’Boyle’s relatives said he wanted to sue the doctor for increasing his jaw pain.
“O’Boyle obsessively complained to his family that his jaw pain worsened after receiving the chiropractic care that he got from Dr. Sowa,” District Attorney Matt Weintraub said during the investigation. “In a misguided way, (he) focused on Dr. Sowa as having caused his jaw pain or exacerbated it.”
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Dr. Sowa’s last phone call that morning came at 7:52 a.m., and he began missing numerous calls less than two hours later, according to detectives.
Surveillance video showed O’Boyle walking on Dr. Sowa’s driveway at 8:32 a.m., disappearing from view, then reappearing and going in the other direction just a minute later.
Investigators said that O’Boyle hit the back of Dr. Sowa’s head three times with a blunt object, fracturing his skull, and then hit or rammed Dr. Sowa’s jaw with a blunt object, killing him.
“Almost as if that Old Testament chapter and verse — instead of an eye for an eye, a jaw for a jaw,” said Weintraub at the time O'Boyle was charged.
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“The injuries that were caused to Dr. Sowa, that ultimately caused him to succumb and die, make the defendant’s actions seem like a poetic, perverse irony.”
Surveillance video from near the scene showed the license plate of a car registered to a home on Byberry Road, where police had previously investigated allegations that O’Boyle hit his father after issues about O’Boyle’s depression medication.
According to the Bucks County District Attorney’s Office, O’Boyle’s father confronted him twice about Dr. Sowa’s death, and O’Boyle admitted to the crime.
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Detectives went to O’Boyle’s home a week after the killing. Authorities said O’Boyle attacked a detective and repeatedly punched his head before other officers took O’Boyle into custody.
A hearing has been scheduled on June 6 to decide the degree of homicide for which O’Boyle will be sentenced, with sentencing coming for both cases on a later date.
Jim Melwert contributed to this report.
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