THEY were a good-looking couple in a city that had never looked worse: a New Orleans romance from the darkness of Hurricane Katrina that lightened the heart of other survivors.

In the weeks after the disaster Zakery Bowen and Addie Hall were interviewed by three newspapers as reporters scoured what was left of New Orleans looking for a “good news” story.

But their tale did not end in happy scenes of French Quarter bohemianism — where he fashioned a makeshift stove out of a metal bucket, she flashed her breasts at passing police cars and both held court trading alcohol and swapping stories with passing journalists.

On Tuesday Bowen, 28, threw himself off the seventh floor of the Omni Royal Orleans Hotel, filmed by a CCTV camera that showed him hesitating before making the leap.

When police searched his body they found a suicide letter telling them to go to the apartment he shared with his girlfriend.

There they found Hall’s head, charred and unrecognisable in a cooking pot, her legs and arms in the oven and her torso in the refrigerator.

A second rambling letter to police set out in graphic detail how he had murdered Hall by strangling her in the bath before dismembering her body.

Bowen confessed that he had lived for almost two weeks with the corpse of the woman who had loved him.

Bowen, who came from California and had two children, had served in Afghanistan and Iraq. His body had 28 cigarette burns on it, which his letter said represented each year of his life.

He refers to “school, jobs, military, marriage, parenthood, morals, love”, adding: “Every last one of these I failed at.”

Hall, 30, fell in love with Bowen on the night of Hurricane Katrina, when she gave him shelter from the storm. Though she grew up in Pennsylvania, both of them were regarded as “hard core” in their commitment to their adopted city. In an interview after the hurricane with The New York Times, Bowen said: “It’s actually been kind of nice. I’m getting healthier, eating right and toning up.”

Bowen and Hall both got jobs as bartenders, the handsome Bowen being hired by a bar called Buffa’s as a “little eye candy for the ladies”.

However, his flirting with women got him into trouble with Hall and Bowen told friends he was planning to “get rid of her”.

Their landlord, Leo Watermeir, who rented them an apartment above a voodoo shop, said Bowen had told him that he was being kicked out by Hall because she had caught him cheating on her. “In retrospect,” he added, “he may have been a little troubled.”

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