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On Saturday, March 11, 1989, Dennis Bowman contacted police to report his 14-year-old daughter, Aundria Bowman, missing. At the time, she was a freshman in high school. Sadly, more than thirty years would pass before Aundria’s whereabouts were uncovered & in the meantime, the depths of darkness grew deeper & deeper.
As the Allegan County Sheriff’s Office & the Michigan State Police began their investigation, Dennis explained that his daughter was a good kid, however, two years earlier when she turned twelve, it was like a switch was flipped. She started getting into trouble, running away from their Hamilton, Michigan home & having issues at school.
Classmates described Aundria as a fun girl who always wanted to be around people. She was someone who went out of her way to make others happy. She was a typical teen who wanted to fit in & because of this, she would sometimes adapt herself & her interests to fit the person she was hanging out with at that time.
Dennis went on to say that with his daughter’s changes at 12-years-old, she also started taking drugs from other kids at school, shoplifting, lying & she once punched out a front window in a fit of anger.
Aundria was adopted by Dennis & Brenda Bowman in 1975 when she was nine months old. According to Dennis’ cousin, who went to high school with both Dennis & Brenda, Brenda was always a quiet girl who kept to herself & Dennis was her very first boyfriend.
After high school graduation, Dennis went into the Navy, a time when the couple began discussing the idea of marriage. They ended up getting married in 1971 & when they tried to start a family, Brenda was told that she had a double uterus & would be unable to carry a child of her own, so they began to pursue the idea of adoption.
When they brought their daughter home, they described Aundria as a gift from God who was the sweetest little girl. The family soon relocated from Virginia to Hamilton, Michigan, which at the time, was a very small town with gas stations, many churches, a school & a grocery store; a place where bad things didn’t happen.
When Aundria was 13, Brenda began feeling constantly sick so she decided to take a pregnancy test & to her shock, she realized they were having a second child. She said that when Vanessa was born, Aundria was ecstatic to be a big sister.
Now with Aundria missing, investigators spoke with Brenda, who recalled the day that their daughter vanished. Dennis took Aundria to school that Saturday for a band event & when he picked her up, she was very quiet. Later that day, Dennis took the baby along to drive Brenda to work so that Aundria could focus on her homework without distraction.
When Dennis got home, he found the house quiet as he came through the front door; he laid his sleeping 14 month old on the couch & went upstairs to check on Aundria. He saw that she was gone, but the lock on his bedroom door was busted open, one of their overnight bags was missing as well as Aundria’s purple coat, the cash from their tax refund he’d put in his dresser drawer as well as change from Vanessa’s baby bank.
Dennis’ version of events painted the picture of a troubled teen who had likely run away, an idea that was only reinforced when there were initial sightings of Aundria in Holland, Michigan, a town 10 miles (16 km) northwest of Hamilton. Someone mentioned seeing her in line at the grocery store with bleached hair; they said she may have been pregnant. Another person believed they saw her at a nearby skating rink as well as all the way in Indiana. Someone else said she may have been working at an adult entertainment club or that she’d climbed into a truck & was living elsewhere.
With no other leads, time continued on, these sightings became few & far between & the case grew cold.
Aundria was born Alexis Miranda Badger in Virginia on June 23, 1974 to Cathy Terkanian, a now retired nurse who was 16-years-old when she gave birth to her daughter. Two years before she had her daughter, Cathy ran away from home & headed down to New Orleans to escape her physically abusive mom. About one year later, she realized she was pregnant & when Alexis was born, she did her best to raise her daughter for the first nine months of her life. However, being young, scared & in a vulnerable position, with the encouragement of her parents, she made the difficult decision to put Alexis up for adoption when she was nine months old.
Cathy was assured that her daughter would be going to an incredibly loving home & because the adoption was closed, as the years went by, she knew nothing of what became of the little girl she’d named Alexis, but she always fantasized that she had the best life.
Fast forward to 2010, after the passage of 35 years when Cathy suddenly received a letter from Social Services asking her to get in touch. As she read through the letter, she felt a sense of hope & excitement & wondered if maybe her daughter, who would by then be 36-years-old, was trying to find her.
However, when Cathy contacted them, she was stunned to learn that the baby she’d given birth to had been missing for 21 long years.
The information within the letter was otherwise limited in terms of who adopted her, but Cathy was able to see that her daughter was living in Michigan at the time of her disappearance. Since she didn’t even know the name her daughter had been given after her adoption, she had only her birthday to go on.
Cathy’s husband Edward began doing some digging online & using Alexis’ birthday, they quickly found information regarding Aundria’s disappearance. Now with a photo, Cathy stared into the missing 14-year-old’s eyes & saw that they matched her own.
Cathy was asked to provide a DNA sample to see if the body of a Jane Doe was Aundria. The young girl, whose body was found discarded in a Wisconsin cornfield in 1999, had been a victim of both physical & sexual abuse before her murder. Feeling devastated by this information, Cathy could only wonder what the circumstances were around her biological daughter’s disappearance, what her life looked like up until the point that she went missing & where she may have gone.
Cathy waited three long years until she found out that the DNA was not a match to the Jane Doe in Wisconsin. However, she decided that she was going to make it her mission to figure out what did happen to Aundria. She started by creating a Find Aundria Bowman Facebook page & was shocked by the response she got.
Cathy was contacted by not only Aundria’s old friends, but also family members who shared disturbing stories of her home life prior to her disappearance. Aundria had confided in her friends as well as her mom that Dennis had been molesting her; he would come into her room at night & make her do things she didn’t want to do. Sadly, Brenda didn’t believe her daughter & accused her of lying. Her friends tried to help & brought her down to speak with school officials & when that led nowhere, they encouraged her to leave home, but Aundria refused to run away, fearful of what could happen to Vanessa if she left her baby sister behind.
One friend recalled a time when she stayed over at the Bowman house for dinner; Brenda & Dennis ate hamburgers while she & Aundria were given a ketchup, mustard & relish sandwich. Dennis suddenly got up & struck his daughter with such force, Aundria nearly fell from the chair. Her friend was stunned & while this was happening, Brenda was right there, feeding the baby as if nothing happened. The friend could only wonder that if he was willing to be so violent in front of a guest, what must life be like when no one else was there to see what was going on?
Another woman, Metta McLeod, also reached out to Cathy. After seeing information about Aundria’s disappearance online, she is positive that Dennis is the man who lured her as a 6-year-old into his red pickup truck near a gas station in Holland, Michigan in September 1989, only five months after Aundria disappeared.
The man told her he was taking her to a barn to see some puppies. Metta said she was nice at first & told her that he knew her mom, but when he pulled over, he took a rope from the back of the truck, yanked Metta from the car by her neck, removed her clothing & covered her mouth with her sweater. After he sexually assaulted her, dogs from a nearby campground began barking which thankfully scared him away. Metta managed to untie herself & run, naked for help. She worked with investigators to create a composite sketch but the case went unsolved.
As Metta got older, she continued to do research on other area girls that may have been abducted & came across Aundria’s case. She saw that she vanished only months before her own abduction from the same area & wondered if they shared the same abductor. As she dug deeper, she saw a photo of Aundria’s adoptive father, Dennis Bowman, & immediately realized that she was looking at the face of her kidnapper.
Metta recalled that the man who abducted her had a dirty smell like a mechanic with a paint-like odor; Dennis worked in the Macatawa Harbor as a carpenter working on yachts just down the road from where she was abducted. She was taken along the route he would have driven home, a little after 3 pm, right around the time he would have gotten off of work. Not only that, the man drove a faded, old pickup truck which also matched the description of the truck he drove at the time.
For the next decade, Cathy & Edward continued to dig for answers. As more & more information came to light, she felt certain that Dennis not only killed Aundria, but buried her in his backyard.
On top of what she was told by Aundria’s family & friends, she also learned that Dennis had an exceptionally disturbing criminal background with violence against women. In 1981, when Aundria would have been 7-years-old, Dennis was sentenced to 5-10 years in prison for an assault with intent to commit criminal sexual conduct after he attacked a teenage girl in May 1980 when he was 31-years-old.
The teenage girl was riding her bike down the road when Dennis came up from behind her on a motorcycle & pulled in front of her, forcing her to stop. He pulled out a gun, forced her off her bike & told her to walk toward the woods, firing the gun in her direction twice. He told her he would kill her, but thankfully a car drove by at this exact moment & she was able to wave them down. He was released five years into his sentence in 1986 when Aundria was 11-years-old.
Family members of the Bowmans were shocked when Brenda chose to stay with Dennis, allowing him to be under the same roof as their young daughter. Two years later in 1988, Vanessa was born.
In 1998, nearly a decade after Aundria went missing, Dennis was arrested again, this time for breaking & entering into an Allegan County property. He was later found with a shotgun & a duffel bag that contained lingerie & he was sentenced to one year in jail & five years probation.
Cathy was horrified to learn that when she put her baby girl up for adoption in 1975, she was sent to live with a monster. She was furious when she realized that no investigation had been done after Aundria vanished & the police took Dennis’ word at face value despite his violent, criminal past.
Not only did Cathy travel from her home in Massachusetts to Michigan on multiple occasions, convinced that Dennis Bowman was responsible for whatever happened to Alexis, she also called Brenda & Dennis Bowman multiple times a day so they knew she would someday unveil the truth. She also had a billboard placed along the main road near their house with an $11,000 reward that would lead to an arrest in her unsolved missing person case as a way to taunt them.
Cathy scoured the property where Dennis & Brenda were living on Google Earth & despite the fact that it was not the same house they lived in when Aundria vanished, she was convinced her daughter was buried in the backyard. As she looked at the property on Google Earth over the years, she noticed a particular area that stood out to her & she believed in her heart that this was where Alexis could be found.
Throughout her visits to Michigan, Cathy was able to connect with members of the Bowman family who also believed that Dennis had something to do with Aundria’s disappearance. Finally, in November 2019, nearly 31 years after she vanished, Cathy got a phone call that Dennis was getting arrested on suspicion of murder. However, it turned out that this arrest had zero to do with Aundria’s case & was instead, in regards to a murder that happened in Virginia in 1980 when Aundria would have been 6-years-old. This was also one year after he forced the teenage girl off her bike & shot at her, threatening to kill her.
Back in 1980, Kathleen Doyle was a 25-year-old woman living in a quaint little house on Granby Street in Norfolk, Virginia. She had been married to her Navy pilot husband since December 1979, but with her husband deployed on the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, she was home alone with her kitten on the night of Tuesday, September 9, 1980.
Kathleen decided to invite her friend Vivian over to hang out & chat over a couple of glasses of wine. Vivian left at 9:30 pm that night & in the following days, she started to grow concerned that she was unable to get a hold of her friend. Two days after their visit, on Thursday, September 11, Vivian & her husband drove over to Kathleen’s house to check on her.
As they approached the front door, they found it unlatched & as they walked into the living room, Vivian noticed the wine glasses from two nights before were still where they left them, something she found strange. As she entered Kathleen’s bedroom, she was horrified to find her friend’s nude body, dead on the floor.
The room showed a clear sign of a struggle; clothing was strewn about & the mattress was pushed away from the box spring. When Vivian’s husband tried to contact the police, he realized that the dispatcher couldn’t hear him & saw that the mouthpiece had been removed from the phone.
Kathleen’s cause of death was mechanical asphyxiation by strangulation. She had also been stabbed in the chest & back, her hands were bound, she was sexually assaulted, covered in bruises & left for dead. She also had a circular burn on her right cheek that matched a Lincoln Log toy that investigators found in her bathroom trash with a scorched end, an odd find since she didn’t have any children.
Kathleen’s hands were tied behind her back with a rope, an electrical cord was around her neck while a blue leotard had been used as a gag.
With it being only 1980, DNA testing was in its infancy; there were no fingerprints or suspects identified within the Doyle’s neighborhood & sadly, Kathleen’s case went cold for the next forty years.
Moving forward to 2018, 38 years later, the Norfolk Cold Case Unit & Detective Jonathan Smith learned that genetic genealogy was being utilized to solve cold cases. They were aware that a DNA profile was found on the bedsheet from Kathleen’s house so the department decided to give it a try.
One year later, the genealogy company sent Detective Smith a list of 31 potential matches in 2019. Number 31 on the list was Dennis Bowman. When Smith learned about Aundria’s disappearance & the man’s criminal record, he thought he might be the person responsible if he could prove that he was in Virginia at the time of Kathleen’s murder in September 1980.
In what he referred to as a stroke of dumb luck, Detective Smith just so happened to meet Detective Sgt. Bryan Fuller of the Michigan State Police at a Regional Homicide Investigators Association conference in Norfolk. As the two got to talking, Smith realized that Fuller was very familiar with Aundria’s case & reinforced that he also believed that Dennis Bowman was likely the guy he was looking for.
As he looked through court records, Smith was able to determine that Dennis had indeed been in Norfolk for a two-week training camp for the Navy at the time of Kathleen’s murder.
With this information, Detective Smith was absolutely positive that Dennis Bowman was responsible for Kathleen’s murder, he just needed the DNA to prove it. He came up with a plan to bring Dennis & Brenda into the station under the guise of discussing their concerns about Cathy harassing them.
Once at the Allegan County station, Dennis gladly accepted a drink & investigators were able to lift DNA from the cup he drank from which proved to be a solid match to the DNA from Kathleen’s bed sheet.
Despite this solid evidence, Smith still hoped to secure a confession. During a video recorded interview, Dennis said that he drunkenly broke into a home in Norfolk on the night in question in September 1980 using a pocket knife to open a window. He said he was looking around the house for money when he opened a door & saw a woman sit up in bed & begin to scream. He claimed that he covered her mouth with his hand to quiet her & when she grabbed his hand that held the knife, the knife accidentally pierced her stomach. He said he quickly left the house & that was the end of it.
When Dennis was confronted with the true details of what led to Kathleen’s death, according to Detective Smith, his demeanor suddenly changed; he would no longer face him & he also became childlike in a way.
Dennis insisted that he did not sexually assault or stab Kathleen more than that one time in the stomach as he repeated over & over, I didn’t do that.
However, after Smith walked out of the room & left him alone with the tape still rolling, he muttered twice, I’ve done it again.
In June 2020 Dennis pleaded guilty to first-degree murder, rape & burglary for Kathleen’s death. He was sentenced to two terms of life in prison plus 20 years for the burglary.
Kathleen’s family had waited forty long years to find justice for her, something her father wasn’t alive to witness. Each day, her aunt touches her photo & tells her niece, I love you. They shared a love for lilacs & looked forward to the flowers blooming every spring & now that she’s gone, she tells her, Kathleen, the lilacs are out. Each time she smells their beautiful fragrance, she thinks of her & how much she misses her.
As Kathleen’s case came to a close, Aundria’s cracked wide open.
After Dennis was charged for Kathleen’s murder, investigators from Virginia & Michigan came up with a ruse & told Dennis that if he gave them information as to what happened to Aundria, they would arrange for him to stay in Michigan. This way he would be closer to Brenda & Vanessa rather than extraditing him to Virginia to spend the rest of his life behind bars in a place that was over a ten hour drive away. However, he maintained he had nothing to do with Aundria’s disappearance.
They also worked with Brenda, who still remained fully dedicated to her husband, to encourage Dennis to confess the truth so he could remain in Michigan, close enough for routine family visits.
In the meantime, investigators were also at the Bowman’s house using cadaver dogs, ground penetrating radar & digging in certain areas around the property, something Cathy always wanted them to do, but they didn’t find anything.
During taped phone conversations between Brenda & Dennis, he continued to deny having anything to do with Aundria’s disappearance & insisted that he had no idea what happened to her. However, in late 2019, he requested that Brenda be allowed to visit him in jail so he could have a private conversation with her.
During a videotaped conversation, Dennis told Brenda that on the day he reported Aundria missing in 1989, rather than finding Aundria gone when he came back from dropping her off at work as he originally claimed, he saw her coming out of their bedroom with a bag she’d packed. When he confronted her, she told him she was running away & if he tried to stop her, she would tell everyone that he’d been molesting her.
The last thing Dennis said to Aundria was, No you are not. He told Brenda that he struck their daughter which caused her to fall backwards down the stairs. When he checked her for a pulse as she lay motionless at the bottom of the staircase, there was none.
He elaborated that he knew she was dead when her head rolled over & she just stared like doll eyes. Fearing that he would be sent back to prison, rather than call for help, he wrapped her in a blanket & carried their 14-year-old daughter out to their barn where she remained for several days. He burned her overnight bag which may have contained the cash from their tax return, as well as her purple coat.
Dennis said he tried to put Aundria’s body inside a cardboard barrel, but because she didn’t fit, he decided to cut her legs off with an axe. Once in the barrel, he rolled it out to the street & said he placed it next to their neighbor’s trash cans for garbage pick-up. The next day, it was gone. He told Brenda, As long as I didn’t tell you, you had hope.
Not believing Dennis’s story, authorities continued to monitor his communication with Brenda, including the letters he wrote to her. In one letter that was dated December 12, 2019, part of his story changed.
He wrote that Aundria had fallen down the stairs, but rather than dismembering her body & placing her in the barrel, he buried her in a proper grave next to a private graveyard. He indicated that at the time of her death, she was wearing jeans, a sweater & a gold necklace with a heart & a cross. He wrapped her body in a clean white sheet, like a mummy, wrapped her arms & legs with a red ribbon & sprinkled her remains with cedar chips, cloves & cinnamon. He wrote that he’d driven out to this location more than 100 times over the course of 30 years.
With this information, investigators drove around to area graveyards to find this potential burial site while they remained skeptical with this new version of events.
They instructed Brenda to push Dennis harder for the truth. When she spoke with him, she told him that she wanted our baby girl home with me in a very pretty urn
During another phone conversation, Dennis finally admitted that Aundria was indeed buried in their backyard, an idea Brenda challenged since they hadn’t even lived in their current house when Aundria vanished. He explained that before they moved, he dug the barrel up that held her remains & relocated it to their new home, saying, She’s been right there the whole time.
In February 2020, excavators were back at the Bowman’s home for another dig, this time with heavy machinery that could break through cement. Here, they recovered skeletal remains. They were among the broken down pieces of the cardboard barrel & divided between four garbage bags that were filled with used diapers from their baby. A wrapper from a peppermint patty was there as well that was dated from 1989, the year that Aundria vanished.
Using Cathy’s DNA, these remains were positively identified as Aundria’s. Cathy remarked that it was as if her daughter had been screaming in the backyard for years.
Despite his horrific crimes & the fact that he murdered their own daughter, Brenda said, I haven’t forgotten what he did, but I have forgiven. I take my marriage vows seriously.
After Brenda had Aundria’s remains cremated, she offered to give half of the ashes to Cathy, who accepted them with reluctance. She is determined to get all of her daughter back, sickened that once again, Alexis’s body is broken apart. She was horrified that the baby girl she’d given birth to had been forced to live in such a horrific home & felt that Brenda was just as guilty for turning a blind eye.
On December 22, 2021, Dennis pleaded no contest to second-degree murder. On February 7, 2022, he was sentenced to a minimum of 35-50 years in prison for Aundria’s death which were added to the sentences for Kathleen’s case.
Cathy was in the courtroom for his sentencing hearing & was able to hear Allegan County Circuit Court Judge Margaret Zuzich Bakker say, His numerous assaults, his behavior in this case, other convictions all indicate Mr. Bowman is a serious, dangerous man that has harmed many communities, many families. This was something Cathy had waited ten years to see & described the moment as surreal.
Weeks later, Dennis was transferred to Virginia to start serving his life sentences since everyone involved didn’t want to give him an ounce of control by allowing him to stay in Michigan near his wife & daughter.
According to law enforcement officials, the full extent of Dennis’s violent crimes will likely never be known. In 2021, police indicated that Dennis also confessed to the 1979 rape & assault of a 27-year-old woman in her Holland, Michigan home. The woman described her attacker as a white male between 25-30-years-old with sandy hair & wire-rimmed glasses. More than 40 years later, he admitted that he did bad things to her; she was bound & gagged before she was sexually assaulted.
He has never admitted to being responsible for Metta McLeod’s abduction & rape despite the fact that both she & Ottawa County detectives believe he was responsible. The rope found at the scene was tested for Bowman’s DNA, but came back negative. As DNA testing continues to advance, they plan to retest & he remains the main suspect.
Dennis Bowman is currently 76-years-old & serving his multiple life sentences at River North Correctional Center in Independence, Virginia.
In the meantime, Cathy Terkanian is living with her husband in Massachusetts & continues to fight for her daughter. She wants Aundria’s adoption annulled & her name changed back to Alexis Badger, saying, I’ve got to get that monster’s name off my daughter’s birth certificate. She also continues to fight for her full remains.
In September 2024, Netflix released Into the Fire: The Lost Daughter which details Cathy’s journey to uncover the truth behind her daughter’s disappearance.
In the end Cathy says, I don’t know if Alexis was left-handed or right-handed, I don’t know what her voice sounded like, I never heard her voice, she never said ‘I love you mommy’, she never called me mommy, but I am her mommy all the way to the bone.
References:
- 10 Wavy: Unsolved: Catching Kathleen’s killer
- People: What happened to Aundria Bowman? The heartbreaking true story of Netflix’s Into the Fire: The Lost Daughter
- E! News: The chilling true story behind Into the Fire: Murder, buried secrets & a mother’s hunch
- Wikipedia: Into the Fire: The Lost Daughter
- News Channel 3: Records show Allegan County man had a history of violence prior to cold case arrest
- Wood TV 8: Convicted killer confesses to 1979 cold case crime
