The Chilling True Story Behind Into the Fire: Murder, Buried Secrets and a Mother's Hunch

Dennis Bowman called police to report his 14-year-old daughter missing on March 11, 1989.

Aundria Bowman was a good kid but at the age of 12 or so it was like "somebody flipped a switch," Dennis told investigators, as heard in a recording played in the Netflix docuseries Into the Fire: The Lost Daughter. She had started running away, he continued, and getting into trouble at school.

When he returned to their Hamilton, Mich., home on the day she disappeared, not only was Aundria gone, Dennis said, so was the tax refund cash he'd stashed in the dresser and the change from his younger daughter's baby bank.

Initially there were reported sightings of Aundria from nearby Holland—in line at the grocery store, at a skating rink, etc.—all the way to Indiana, authorities recalled in the series. But those eventually tapered off and the case went stone cold.

Aundria's birth mother, Cathy Terkanian—who placed the 9-month-old daughter she'd named Alexis for adoption in 1975—said in the series she had no idea anything was amiss until she got a letter from the adoption agency in 2010.

She recalled thinking that perhaps her daughter was looking for her. Instead, it was a request for a DNA sample to see if the body of a Jane Doe found in a Wisconsin cornfield in 1999 might be Aundria.

Three years later, Cathy found out her DNA was not a familial match for the unknown woman. But in the meantime, it had become her mission to find out what did happen to Aundria. 

And she admittedly didn't anticipate the response she'd get when she set up a "Find Aundria Bowman" page on Facebook. She ultimately ended up connecting with old friends of Aundria who had disturbing stories to share about the teen's home life before she went missing. 

Cathy recalled being "devastated" and wondering, "Who the hell adopted my daughter?"

Who are Dennis Bowman and Brenda Bowman?

Dennis and Brenda Bowman (née Engweiler) married in 1971 and adopted Aundria in 1975.

Dennis, a U.S. Navy veteran, was sentenced in February 1981 to five to 10 years in prison for assault with intent to commit criminal sexual conduct after he attacked a teenage girl in 1980, according to court documents shown in the series. He was released Jan. 1, 1986, when Aundria was 11.

Dennis and Brenda's younger daughter Vanessa Bowman was born in 1988.

As Cathy detailed in Into the Fire—named so because she compared her quest for the truth to seeing a house fire and choosing to walk right in and get burned—she became certain that Dennis not only killed Aundria but had buried her right in his backyard.

She started calling the Bowmans multiple times a day and had a billboard put up along the main road to their house offering an $11,000 reward for an arrest in the unsolved missing-person case.

Yet as several investigators pointed out in the series, Cathy's hunch wasn't the evidence or probable cause they needed to go digging up the Bowmans' yard. And Dennis had denied repeatedly through the years having anything to do with his daughter's disappearance.

But in November 2019, Dennis was arrested on suspicion of murder.

He was not being charged, however, in connection with Aundria's disappearance. Rather, according to authorities, forensic evidence put him at the scene of the 1980 murder of Kathleen Doyle in Norfolk, Va.

Who was murder victim Kathleen Doyle?

Kathleen, 25, had been married to her Navy pilot husband since December 1979 and was living in a small house in Norfolk while he was deployed.

On the night of Sept. 9, 1980, Kathleen had a friend over for a couple glasses of wine, according to Deputy Commonwealth's Attorney Phil Evans. The friend left at around 9:30 p.m. Kathleen was found dead on the floor of her bedroom two days later.

Detective Jon Smith of the Norfolk Police Department's Cold Case Homicide Unit said in Into the Fire that Kathleen's cause of death was "mechanical asphyxiation, essentially strangulation." She had been sexually assaulted and had a circular burn mark on her right cheek, Smith said, that matched a Lincoln Log toy with one scorched end that was found in her bathroom trash.

But with no fingerprints or likely suspects among the Doyles' neighbors, the case went cold for almost 40 years until advances in DNA testing—including the rise of genealogy and genetic testing services—made a break possible.

Investigators were able to build a Y-chromosome DNA profile from evidence found on Kathleen's bedspread. Using genetic genealogy matching, they compiled a list of 31 names who were possible matches.

Dennis was No. 31 on that list, Smith said in the series, and he soon learned about Aundria's mysterious disappearance and Dennis' criminal record.

But in what he called a stroke of dumb luck, Smith coincidentally met Detective Sgt. Bryan Fuller of the Michigan State Police at a Regional Homicide Investigators Association conference in Norfolk.

As both men recalled in the Netflix series, Fuller was very familiar with Aundria's case and told Smith that Dennis was probably the guy he was looking for.

From court records, Smith subsequently confirmed that Dennis had been in Norfolk at the time of Kathleen's murder for a two-week training camp while he was in the Navy.

Dennis was subsequently arrested in Allegan County, Mich., where investigators lifted DNA from a cup he used at the station. It was a match for the DNA collected from Kathleen's bedspread, Smith said.

What did Dennis Bowman say about Kathleen Doyle's murder?

In a videotaped interview with Smith shown during Into the Fire, Dennis said he drunkenly broke into a Norfolk house on the night in question using a pen knife to open a window. He was in the living room, he said, when a woman walked in and "freaked out." She grabbed his hand holding the knife, Dennis said, and the knife pierced her stomach.

According to Smith, Kathleen had been stabbed in the chest and back, her hands were tied behind her back and she was bruised all over.

Confronted with the grisly details, Smith recalled in Into the Fire, Dennis' demeanor changed and "he wouldn't face me." He became "childlike, in a way," the detective added.

As seen in the video of his interrogation, Dennis denied sexually assaulting Kathleen or stabbing her more than the one time he admitted to, and continued to repeat, "I didn't do that," once he was alone in the room. Then he muttered twice, "I've done it again."

In June 2020, Dennis pleaded guilty to one count apiece of first-degree murder, rape and burglary. He was sentenced to two terms of life in prison, plus 20 years for the burglary.

By then, however, the case of Aundria's disappearance had cracked wide open as well.

What happened to Aundria Bowman?

After Dennis was charged with Kathleen's murder, authorities in Virginia and Michigan engaged his wife Brenda in trying to get him to admit to killing Aundria.

They offered the possibility of Dennis getting the chance to serve his prison time in Michigan instead of Virgina so he'd be closer to his wife, if he came clean.

Meanwhile, investigators did start digging up the Bowmans' yard—as Cathy had always hoped they would—but they didn't find anything.

Dennis continued to deny in taped prison phone conversations with Brenda, sampled in Into the Fire, that he didn't know what happened to their daughter. Until one day in late 2019 he requested that his wife be allowed to visit him in jail so he could speak to her alone.

In the videotaped conversation, he told Brenda that, on the day he reported Aundria missing, he had actually returned home and spied the teen coming out of their bedroom. When he asked what she was doing in there, she said she was leaving home, and if he tried to stop her she'd tell people he'd been molesting her.

He hit her, Dennis said, and Aundria fell down the stairs.

Seeing that she was dead—"Her head rolled over," he told Brenda—"and she just stared, like doll eyes"—and fearing he'd be sent back to prison, Dennis continued, he carried the 14-year-old's body out to their barn. She was there for several days, he said, during which he burned her overnight bag (and possibly the cash he'd reported stolen had been in the bag, he told police, because he never found it) and her coat.

Dennis said that he tried to put the body inside a cardboard barrel and, when she didn't fit, he cut her legs off. He rolled the barrel out next to the neighbor's trash on pickup day, he continued, and it was taken away.

"As long as I didn't tell you," Dennis told Brenda, "you had hope."

Where was Aundria Bowman's body?

But authorities continued to monitor the couple's communication, including letters Dennis wrote to his wife, and in one dated Dec. 12, 2019, a copy of which was shown in the series, he changed part of his story.

Aundria did fall, he wrote, but then he buried her in "a proper grave" next to a local graveyard. According to Dennis' letter, she was wearing jeans, a sweater and a gold necklace with a heart and a cross when he wrapped her in a clean white sheet "like a mummy," then encased her in a tarp with cedar chips, cloves and cinnamon. He drove by the site more than 100 times over 30 years, he wrote.

Investigators said during Into the Fire that they followed up and searched near graveyards for a potential burial site, but they were admittedly skeptical and told Brenda that she needed to press Dennis harder for the truth.

Finally, over the phone in another recorded conversation, Dennis admitted that Aundria was buried in their backyard. When Brenda protested that they didn't even live there when their daughter disappeared, he said that he had put her in a barrel and buried her at their previous home. Then, when they moved, he said, he dug up and moved the barrel as well. 

"I dug the hole, and I put the barrel in," he said. "She's been right there the whole time."

A subsequent dig of the Bowmans' yard, this time with the help of heavy machinery to break through cement, recovered skeletal remains in February 2020.

The bones were positively identified as Aundria's through a familial DNA match with Cathy, who remarked in Into the Fire that it was as if her daughter had "been screaming in that backyard for years."

Aundria's remains were given to Brenda, who—having told Dennis in one of their taped conversations that she wanted "our baby girl home with me in a very pretty urn"—had them cremated. She offered to give Cathy half of the ashes.

Cathy reluctantly accepted but said in Into the Fire that she was determined to get all of her daughter back, lamenting, "All that is is just chopping her up more."

The docuseries notes that Brenda refused to be interviewed or otherwise comment. E! News couldn't immediately locate contact information for Brenda and reached out to Netflix, but did not hear back.

Where is Dennis Bowman now?

On Dec. 22, 2021, Dennis pleaded no contest to second-degree murder, and on Feb. 7, 2022, he was sentenced to a minimum of 35 to 50 years in prison.

"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," Allegan County Circuit Court Judge Margaret Zuzich Bakker said at the sentencing hearing. "It's impossible to even articulate the words to describe what he has done. Reading what he has done is sickening."

Cathy, who was in court to watch, called the moment "surreal," telling reporters afterward, "I spent 10 years trying to see that happen."

Weeks later, Dennis was transferred back to Virginia to start serving his life sentences. According to the state's Department of Corrections, the 75-year-old is an inmate at River North Correctional Center in Independence.