The story behind “Into the Fire: The Lost Daughter”

TThirty-six years after giving birth to a baby girl and giving her up for adoption, a woman learned that the child had been missing for 21 years.

This is not the plot of a crime novel or a fictional film. This is the documentary series Into the Fire: The Lost Daughter begins. The two-part series, which will hit Netflix on September 12, follows Cathy Terkanian's search for her daughter, Aundria Bowman. Although she did not raise the child, Terkanian's maternal instincts come through in the series, in the way she connects with her daughter's friends and the online detectives who help her solve the case. Terkanian sums up her motivation for the search this way: “I saw the fire and I went right into it.”

How it works Into the Fire: The Lost Daughter reveals what happened to Bowman and how her birth mother became involved in the search.

The search for the lost daughter

Terkanian gave birth to Bowman in 1974 when she was 16. In the series, she makes it clear that she didn't want to give up her baby, but her mother talked her into it, convincing her that she couldn't take on the responsibility at such a young age. It was a closed adoption, and Terkanian didn't try to find the child, thinking that maybe they could build a bond when she was older.

But she never got the chance. In April 2010, Terkanian received a letter from the adoption agency informing her that the child had disappeared in 1989, when she was 14 years old. An unidentified body had been found next to a cornfield, and police needed Terkanian's DNA to determine if it was her daughter.

There was no match, but Terkanian was determined to find her daughter. She knew her daughter's birth date and that was all she needed to pull up her file at the Michigan State Police Department's Missing Persons Unit. She learned that her daughter had been renamed Aundria Michelle Bowman and was living in Hamilton, Michigan.

When she started a Facebook page called “Find Aundria Bowman,” she was flooded with messages of support and learned more about her daughter. She learned the adoptive parents were Dennis and Brenda Bowman. She got in touch with Carl Koppelman, an accountant who searches for missing people in his spare time and appears in the docuseries. Also featured is Metta McLeod, a child abduction survivor who contacted Terkanian because she believed Dennis resembled the man who abducted her as a child – although this was never proven – and Terkanian became like a mother to McLeod.

The docuseries paints a disturbing picture of Aundria's life at home. During filming, Terkanian met in person for the first time people she had met online who knew Aundria from her childhood, who claimed her father beat her. One of them describes visiting for dinner one night and the parents ate hamburgers while Aundria and her friend were given sandwiches with only ketchup, mustard and relish. The friend recalled that when Aundria told her friend that was all she was allowed to eat, Dennis came over and hit her so hard that she almost fell off her chair.

How Aundria Bowman was found

Terkanian did important work to keep the case current for law enforcement, but to find out what happened to her, law enforcement had to first solve another murder case.

A detective named Jon Smith, assigned to investigate cold cases for the Norfolk, Virginia Police Department, was investigating the 1980 rape and murder of a local woman named Kathleen Doyle, the wife of a U.S. Navy pilot. There was a bedspread from the crime scene that had been kept, and Dennis Bowman was found as a possible DNA match. After researching his criminal past, Smith learned that Dennis had served in the Navy in Norfolk for two weeks. He visited Dennis and afterward took a cup that Dennis drank from to conduct a DNA test. The test matched the DNA on the bedspread. Dennis was arrested in 2019 and confessed to the murder.

At one point, Dennis asked to meet with his wife Brenda and footage of the conversation can be seen in the documentary series. He asked the authorities to keep the cameras rolling. “Aundria is dead,” he tells her. “She was dead from the start.”

He then admits that he got into an argument with Aundria at home and she tried to run away because she was going to tell the police that he had sexually assaulted her. He hit her and she fell backwards down the stairs of her house. He cut off her legs, stuffed the remains into a barrel and then put the barrel with the neighbors' garbage cans.

But as the docuseries progresses, Dennis changes his story in letters – read by an actor – and in phone calls to Brenda while in prison. In one pivotal phone call seen in the film, he tells Brenda that Aundria is actually buried in her backyard. Authorities sent a bulldozer to the property and the bulldozer lifted the barrel Dennis spoke of. The remains were found in a trash can full of diapers and a Peppermint Pattie candy wrapper dated 1989, the year Aundria disappeared.

Ryan White, Director of Into the Fire: The Lost Daughterargues that Dennis only confessed to the murder when he was told he could serve his life sentence in Michigan – closer to his wife and daughter – rather than Virginia. Early in the series, there are clips of police interviews with Dennis in which he vehemently denies killing Aundria. “I'm still not sure Dennis ever told the full truth about what happened to Aundria,” White says.

On February 7, 2022, Dennis was convicted of first-degree murder. He is currently serving two life sentences for the murders of Aundria and Doyle in a Virginia prison.

At the end of the documentary, Terkanian is hysterical because she has to meet the child she gave birth to in the worst possible way: she receives half of her cremated remains, while the other half goes to her adoptive mother, Brenda. (Brenda Bowman did not provide commentary for the series.)

The filmmakers hope that a documentary series about Dennis on a major platform like Netflix will inspire those who follow unsolved cases to persevere and encourage anyone else who has encountered Dennis to come forward with their stories.

“It's very important that his face is known,” says White. “We hope that in the upcoming documentary, others will be able to connect some dots that have never been connected, just as Cathy did.”

Correction, September 13

The original version of this story misstated the circumstances surrounding Dennis Bowman's DNA test. An investigator examined a cup Bowman drank from; he had not explicitly consented to the test.