Into the Fire: The Lost Daughter on Netflix details a shocking true crime story of how a young teenager was killed at the hands of her adoptive father. But here is the kicker: he reported her missing afterward.
Dennis Lee Bowman told the police some money was missing from his room to make it appear that she had stolen it before running away. The truth however took about three decades to come out.
Into the Fire: The Lost Daughter on Netflix narrates the story of the heinous crimes committed by Bowman in the 80s: alleged sexual assaults on multiple women and at least two murders to cover his tracks.
Today, Dennis Bowman is in prison serving two life sentences and twenty years for raping and killing Kathleen Doyle, and another 35 to 50 years for the murder of his adopted daughter 14-year-old Aundria Bowman.
Details of the crimes Dennis Lee Bowman committed in
Into the Fire: The Lost Daughter
Into the Fire: The Lost Daughter shows that in 2019, Dennis was arrested over Doyle's rape and murder. The victim was the wife of a 25-year-old Navy pilot, whose body was found in her Norfolk home on September 11, 1980. Forensic evidence linked Dennis to the crime scene. He admitted in June to killing her.
He wrote to his wife after his arrest and called her later to say, that Aundria's death was his fault. Brenda mentioned Dennis had told her that he argued with the teenager on March 11, 1989, and slapped her so hard that she tumbled down the stairs and broke her neck. The falling caused her accidental death.
Dennis initially told police he had placed the teenager's body outside with the trash. Later, in February 2020, during one of their conversations after his arrest, Dennis told Brenda that he had buried Aundria's body under a cement slab on their property.
An overview of the documentary Into the Fire: The Lost Daughter
Cathy Terkanian became pregnant in 1974, when she was only 16 years old. In the documentary Into the Fire: The Lost Daughter, Terkanian describes how she never wanted to let her baby go. However, it was her mom who motivated her to give up her child for adoption as she was too young to take care of a child.
The child, Aundria Bowman was adopted by the Bowmans. She was believed to have disappeared as a teen, under mysterious circumstances from the family farm in Hamilton, Michigan. In 2010, Terkanian received a letter from the adoption agency stating that 14-year-old Aundria went missing back in 1989. A dead body had been found around the cornfield, and police wanted Terkanian's DNA to find out whether that was her daughter.
Aundria, before disappearing, accused Dennis Lee Bowman of molesting her. However, her adoptive mother did not believe her and called her a liar. The teenager disappeared from the rural estate of her adoptive family. Dennis has claimed that she ran away after stealing money from her parents. She had been classified as a runaway, for almost thirty years before her biological mother began her search.
How was Dennis Lee Bowman caught in Into the Fire: The Lost Daughter?
Terkanian's work kept the case in the view of law enforcement. But to crack the mystery of her disappearance, they first had to solve another murder.
Detective Jon Smith with the Norfolk, Virginia police department was assigned the duty of reviewing unsolved cases. He re-investigated the 1980 rape and murder of Kathleen Doyle, wife of a U.S. Navy pilot. The bedspread from the crime scene had been preserved; a DNA test cited Dennis Bowman as a potential suspect.
Smith followed his history, finding out that Dennis had been in the Navy for a short time and was in Norfolk. He went to see Dennis and asked for a DNA swab. Dennis agreed, and it matched the DNA on the bedspread. Dennis was arrested in 2019 and confessed to the crime.
Into the Fire: The Lost Daughter: Where is Dennis Lee Bowman now?
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On Feb. 7, 2022, Dennis appeared in an Allegan County court amidst the COVID-19 outbreak and was found guilty of second-degree murder. Judge Margaret Zuzich Bakker sentenced him to 35 to 50 years in prison. Dennis was then extradited from Michigan to Virginia to serve a two-life-term sentence.
The document series of Into the Fire: The Lost Daughter is currently available to stream on Netflix.
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