Cathy Terkanian has been piecing together the details of her biological daughter’s life for more than a decade, but there are a number of questions she may never be able to answer. “I’m still deciphering all that madness,” she tells Tudum, before quickly correcting herself. “There is no deciphering — yeah, there is none. I’m the only thing that brought sanity to this.”
Into the Fire: The Lost Daughter, a new two-part documentary, recounts Terkanian’s years-long search for Aundria Bowman, née Alexis Badger — who went missing in 1989 — and the harrowing revelations that culminated in her belief that Alexis had been murdered by her adoptive father. Though Alexis’ killer has been brought to justice, having pleaded no contest to second-degree murder and been sentenced to 35–50 years, Terkanian is still working hard to do right by her daughter.
“I think a lot of this drive came from her rising up in me,” she says. “This is what she would have done. She would have gone looking for me.”
“I was living a real chill life,” Terkanian says, before she received the information that changed everything.
In 1974, when she was a teenager, Terkanian gave birth to a daughter, whom she placed for adoption under pressure from her family. By 2010, she was married to a man named Edward, had settled down, and she felt comfortable. “I was delusional, but I was feeling good,” she explains.
She regularly thought about her daughter: wondering what had become of her and if she was happy. “The only reason they found me was because I had been harassing them,” Terkanian says of the social worker who eventually told her that Alexis had gone missing from Michigan in 1989 — and that recently discovered unidentified remains in Wisconsin could be hers.
“I wasn’t angry immediately,” Terkanian says. “It took like a week of talking to several different people, you know, and getting information.” What Terkanian eventually learned enraged her. Brenda and Dennis Bowman, the couple who adopted Alexis, told police she had run away from home. Dennis claimed that the teen had been acting out, and had packed a bag and stolen money from them. Because Alexis was considered a runaway, the police weren’t as thorough as Terkanian thinks they might have been had there been suspicion of foul play.
When Terkanian set up pages on Facebook and Classmates.com, asking Alexis’ friends to share their recollections of her, the story got more complicated. They remembered that Dennis Bowman abused her, physically and sexually, and that Alexis had reached out to the adults at her school about it. Her adoptive parents denied her claims. A friend says students would be asked to repeat such accusations in front of their parents and feel intimidated.
Most damning, another young girl from the same town as the Bowmans was abducted and sexually abused the same year Alexis went missing. When that woman looked into Alexis’ disappearance, she was stunned to see a picture of the man who had assaulted her all those years ago — Alexis’ adoptive father, Dennis. More research revealed that he had a sordid criminal history, including offenses against women, long before Alexis went missing. It became clear to Terkanian that Dennis had to have been responsible for whatever had happened to her daughter.
The DNA of the Wisconsin woman didn’t turn out to be a match, so Terkanian continued to dig for answers. “I saw what a broken system did to her,” she tells Tudum. “She was a normal teenage kid, but [she was] navigating trying to keep herself alive with two monsters just trying to squash her.”
While talking to Alexis’ friends, Terkanian also learned more about Alexis. “I understood that she was very much her own person. I understand that young girl, changing like a chameleon like young people do, teenagers trying to find their way. I get all that. But I don’t know if she was left-handed or right-handed. I don’t know what her voice sounded like. It’s devastating, the end result of all those feelings.”
“I’d like to think this is a road map to how you find somebody,” Terkanian says of Into the Fire. Hoping to shine a spotlight on the Bowmans, Terkanian made noise online and at missing-persons conferences, contacting the authorities, and doing anything she could to get her daughter’s story out there. “There are times you’re a little crazy, but you gotta get crazy,” she says. “As much as you can, contain yourself: Don’t tick the cops off, build a rapport, and, you know, pray a lot.”
Though Dennis Bowman pleaded no contest in 2021 to Alexis’ murder, Terkanian doesn’t think her work is done. “I’ve got to get that monster's name off of my daughter’s birth certificate,” she says. “Imagine having to fight that system. But I’m going to do it, and I’m going to use this as the teeth and take it right to the governor. I want his name off of it, and then I’m going to adopt her into my name. So then I might be through the fire.”
Watch Into the Fire: The Lost Daughter on Netflix.
