Colin Bouwer
South African murderer
Colin Bouwer (1950 – 15 August 2018) was a South African-born New Zealand former doctor who rose to become Head of Psychiatry at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. He spent 16 years in prison for the murder of his third wife Annette. His crime was dramatised in the TV movie Bloodlines, with Bouwer being portrayed by Mark Mitchinson. His son from a previous marriage was also convicted of an unrelated murder in 2003. His first wife was also convicted of helping their son cover up his crime.
Early life
Bouwer was born in 1950. He married his third wife Annette in 1981 and migrated to New Zealand with her and their children in 1997. He had left South Africa shortly after being declared an "impaired" doctor by the South African Health Professions Council due to a pethidine addiction. He claimed he was a member of the African National Congress (ANC) and had been imprisoned for resisting apartheid, though these claims were later revealed to be untrue. After moving to New Zealand, he became the head of the Department of Psychological Medicine of the University of Otago's medical school at Dunedin Hospital.
“Colin Bouwer” enters the record as south African murderer. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Colin, Bouwer and South can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q16727605. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1950, 2018, 2003 and 1981.
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This entry incorporates text from “Colin Bouwer” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.