I gave my baby up for adoption only to find out she’d mysteriously disappeared – my search led to a horrific truth
AS a teen, Cathy Terkanian reluctantly gave her baby up for adoption, only to discover 36 years later that she’d disappeared aged 14.
Here, Cathy reveals her quest to unravel the mystery – and bring her murderer to justice at last.
The letter from social services said: “Call us urgently.” It was April 2010 and Cathy Terkanian’s life was about to be turned upside down forever.
“I thought I was going to meet my daughter,” says Cathy, who had reluctantly given her nine-month-old baby girl, Alexis, up for adoption 36 years earlier.
“Instead, the woman on the phone said a detective was looking for me. He needed my DNA because there was a Jane Doe [unidentified female body] in a place called Racine in Wisconsin.
They thought it might be my daughter who, they said, had disappeared aged 14.”
The call began a remarkable 12-year quest – recounted in the Neflix documentary Into The Fire, produced by Oscar-winning actress Charlize Theron – during which Cathy relentlessly searched for information about what happened to her daughter, and fought to bring her killer to justice.
Having grown up in a troubled home with a single mother, Cathy, now 66, became pregnant at just 16, in 1975.
Her mother, who was battling cancer, convinced her that the baby would be better off with another family and, without any other support and still just a child herself, Cathy felt she had no choice.
“It was heart-wrenching [handing her over],” says Cathy, a retired nurse from Gloucester, Massachusetts. “She was the prettiest baby I ever saw, with beautiful eyes.”
She wasn’t told where her daughter had gone, only that she was with parents who loved her.
As the years went by, Cathy trained as a nurse and in 1991, married her husband Ed. The pair never had children of their own, and she never stopped thinking about the daughter she’d lost.
Cathy left her details on file with the adoption agency in the early ’90s, in the hope that, one day, Alexis would want to make contact. But she heard nothing – until she received that letter.
Not the kind of woman to get upset or emotional, instead, on learning her daughter was missing, Cathy got angry. Reeling, she got off the phone to social services that day in 2010 and started to plan.
“I had a chill life at that point,” says Cathy. “I had retired young. At 51, I was in the best shape that I could be, mentally and physically. The news of Alexis’ disappearance hit me like a bombshell.
‘The news of Alexis’ disappearance hit me like a bombshell’
“They didn’t tell me her adopted name or what had happened, so I asked Ed to look on the Michigan State Police Department’s website for a child who went missing at 14 years old and who was born on June 23, 1974.
He found her within 10 minutes: now I had a name and a picture. I only remembered her as an infant, but I could see she was my little girl. She had my eyes.”
From the missing person’s report, Cathy learned that Alexis had been renamed Aundria and that her surname was Bowman.
The website said she had gone missing from her adoptive parents’ home in Holland, Michigan, on March 11, 1989.
Cathy called the local Allegan County Police Department and spoke to the detective dealing with the cold case.
She then set up a Facebook page called Find Aundria, as well as a Classmates.com account in Aundria’s name, to try to connect with her daughter’s old friends.
She learned that Alexis had been adopted by a couple called Dennis Bowman, a wood machinist, and his wife Brenda, who had been told she was unable to have children.
The pair were also Sunday-school teachers.
As she waited for the results of the DNA analysis, Cathy also connected with armchair sleuth Carl Koppelman, who had been researching the case of the Racine County Jane Doe.
They began working together to find out more about Alexis, while Cathy also contacted a retired Michigan detective familiar with her daughter’s missing persons case, who told her that police had botched the original investigation.
Suicide attempts
Old friends who got in touch revealed Alexis had made suicide attempts before her disappearance and claimed that Dennis was abusing her.
They said she had only been given scraps to eat and was locked out of the house in freezing weather.
They encouraged her to report it to her teachers – but when she did, the Bowmans managed to convince them that she was just a problem teen prone to telling lies.
Fifteen months before Alexis disappeared, Brenda unexpectedly fell pregnant and had a baby girl, who the Bowmans named Vanessa.
Friends told Cathy that Alexis was expected to stay at home and look after the newborn.
When Dennis called the police in March 1989 to report that Alexis had run away, her friends were not surprised and assumed she had gone to find her birth mother.
“It’s so infuriating,” says Cathy. “If I had been supported to keep her, she would be here now. I hate myself for that.
“I believed everything my mother told me at the time – that she would have a beautiful life [with her adoptive family].”
Three years after receiving the letter, Cathy finally got the DNA results – which showed that she was not related to the Jane Doe, who was later identified as Peggy Johnson, a murder victim in an unrelated case.
But it only made Cathy more determined to find out what had happened to Alexis.
With the Bowmans refusing to talk to her, in 2012 Cathy obtained copies of Dennis’ criminal records through a Freedom of Information request.
He had been convicted of assault with intent to commit criminal sexual conduct in 1981, and sentenced to five to 10 years in prison after attempting to force a 19-year-old woman into woodland at gunpoint.
And in 1998, he pleaded guilty to one count of breaking and entering the home of a former co-worker. Police found items of her underwear when they searched his home.
“When I found out from the records that he was a felon who had attempted to murder a teenage girl, that really lit a fire under me,” says Cathy, who fearlessly continued to keep the pressure on.
“I wasn’t afraid of him. He didn’t go after grown-ups,” she says. “He went after little kids or women who were looking in the other direction. He attacked them from the blind side.”
‘I felt like I was just a crazy woman screaming into the void’
Years passed and Cathy continued to chip away, keeping pressure on the police. And the cops began taking notice.
They got a warrant and searched the Bowmans’ home, where they had moved shortly after Alexis’ disappearance, but didn’t find anything.
Meanwhile, the Bowmans cast themselves as harassment victims to the police.
By 2016, Cathy had started to focus on an area of land at the back of the Bowmans’ property. “I asked myself what would a dumb piece of crap like him do with a dead body that he thinks he owns? He’d bury it in the backyard,” she says.
She started using Google Earth to look at aerial imagery of the property over the years and noticed a patch of ground with a concrete slab over it.
Convinced Dennis Bowman must have murdered Alexis at their previous house, then brought her body with them when they moved and buried her remains there, she posted her suspicions on Facebook.
The couple did not welcome her interest in the case and refused her requests to talk to them, eventually reporting Cathy to the police for harassment.
By 2019, however, she was becoming doubtful that Alexis’ killer would ever be brought to justice.
“I thought: ‘I’m just going to be doing this forever and the police are always going to give the monster the benefit of the doubt. I’m just some crazy woman screaming into the void.’”
Forty years for science to snare a killer
But then, on November 22 that year, Dennis Bowman was arrested in relation to the 1980 murder of 25-year-old Kathleen Doyle.
She had been strangled with electrical cord, then raped and stabbed at her home in Norfolk, Virginia.
Police had taken DNA from a semen sample at the scene, but it took science almost 40 years to catch up.
Faced with irrefutable DNA evidence, he confessed to Kathleen’s murder.
Police kept up the pressure and tried to get him to reveal what had happened to Alexis.
It was Allegan County Prosecutor Myrene Koch’s job to try to get a confession.
She tells Fabulous: “A lot of us who worked on the case thought Bowman was involved, but thinking it and being able to prove it in a court of law are two entirely different things.”
Nevertheless, Myrene was preparing to charge Bowman with Alexis’ murder even without a body.
“He did not like me,” she continues. “And the feeling was mutual. Up until that time, he had been able to control every woman or girl in his life.
“He controlled his wife. He controlled Alexis and all the other victims he’d had throughout the years.
“Then he had the luck of the draw to get a female prosecutor and he also had a female judge. He didn’t react particularly well to having females involved in his case.”
His tearful wife Brenda, along with his daughter Vanessa, had stuck by him, but as Myrene at the behest of investigators continued to press Bowman to come clean about what happened during their frequent prison calls, which were all monitored, he finally admitted where he’d buried her body.
In February 2020, police dug up his garden and found human remains.
Cathy provided her DNA again and the result confirmed they were that of Alexis.
She had indeed been buried beneath the concrete slab Cathy had identified several years before.
Bowman said he’d killed her by accident and that Alexis had fallen and broken her neck after he hit her.
She had been dismembered and her body parts were wrapped in plastic bags and stuffed into a cardboard barrel.
The remains were too decomposed to establish a cause of death, but the circumstances were sufficient for the medical examiner to rule homicide.
In June 2020, Dennis Bowman received two life sentences for the murder and rape of Kathleen Doyle, plus 20 years for burglary.
‘We finally had some justice – that was one of the most important things to me’
In February 2022, he was sentenced to between 35 and 50 years for the second-degree murder of Alexis.
“I know that he’s committed other crimes,” says Myrene. “He’s been convicted of some and accused of others. He admitted to other rapes decades earlier.
“I felt we finally had some justice [for Alexis] – that was one of the most important things to me.”
For Cathy, the conviction was bittersweet. “There was relief that finally the truth was out,” she says.
But there was also unwarranted guilt that she unwittingly put her daughter in harm’s way, and anger at the system that sent her to live with a monster.
“I didn’t give her up because I wanted to. I was promised rainbows and unicorns,” she says of the social workers who placed her daughter with the Bowmans. “She couldn’t tell her story, so I did. I love my daughter. I wanted the truth.”