Kriti Mehrotra
When 14-year-old Aundria Michelle Bowman (born Alexis Miranda Badger) suddenly disappeared from her adoptive family’s home in Michigan in 1989, it truly left all her loved ones baffled to the core. However, as carefully explored in Netflix’s ‘Into the Fire: The Lost Daughter,’ no real efforts were made to find her back then owing to the fact she had once already run away as a form of acting out. Yet everything changed after her biological mother, Cathy Terkanian, was contacted to secure some DNA samples two decades later, resulting in her actually learning of the ordeal for the first time.
Cathy Terkanian Was Urged to Give Up Alexis By Family
It was reportedly back when Cathy was merely 14 that she chose to escape her home in Virginia for good following a life full of pain, hardships, as well as both physical and sexual abuse. As per her own accounts, not only did she often have to face her mother’s heavy hand after she grew overwhelmed with caring for her six children, but she was also molested at the ages of 10 and 12. Therefore, she knew she had to flee in order to really live her own life and did so in 1972 with the help of hitchhikes and friends until she was able to make it all the way to New Orleans, Louisiana.
Little did Cathy know she would soon find young love with a 19-year-old California native named Randy Badger, only for them to flee to South Carolina and marry in December with parental permission. She unexpectedly fell pregnant less than a year later, only to then welcome their beautiful daughter Alexis Miranda Badger into this world on June 23, 1974 — they named her after actress Alexis Smith. The then 16-year-old naively never imagined that her marriage would soon fall apart due to his unwillingness to settle down, driving her to return to Virginia when Alexis was 5 months old.
Cathy did expect to get some sort of help from loved ones, but she was only cornered by her mother and told she was in no shape to raise a child when she was such a young child herself. “I was very vulnerable,” she somberly admitted in the show. “And my mother… said, ‘You need to give her up for adoption. You can’t take care of this baby. You don’t know what you are doing. So, I didn’t know how to prove I was worthy of my child. I got talked into – – she was going to get the best parents adoption has to offer as long as I gave her up as an infant… I stepped back. She was just nine months old.”
Cathy Terkanian’s World Turned Upside Down Upon Losing Alexis
While Cathy was aware that giving up her daughter would emotionally shatter her, she was actually suicidal for years and even had to leave her home behind for good so as to move forward. Alexis was always at the back of her mind, yet she decided she wouldn’t start looking for her baby girl until she was at least a mature teen in order to not confuse her and mess up her experiences as a kid. Therefore, of course, her heart sank when she learned she could never look Alexis up as she had a closed adoption, but she still hoped her loving daughter herself would one day endeavor to find her.
Cathy, thus, decided to build a new life for herself that she could be wholeheartedly proud of, resulting in her eventually evolving into a licensed nurse practitioner in New Orleans, Louisiana. It was there, in a bar, that she came across Edward Terkanian for the very first time in 1991, only for them to bump into each other again merely three days later and begin a whirlwind romance. She quit her job, rented a U-Haul trailer, and packed her entire life to relocate to Gloucester, Massachusetts, to be with him, just to actually even get married on the way in a chapel in Virginia.
According to Cathy’s accounts, she tied the knot with Edward within a mere ten weeks because she knew he was “the one,” yet it wasn’t until a month after that that she told him about Alexis. He was reportedly completely understanding of her feelings as well as the whole situation, following which he also promised to help her in whatever way she needed as the years passed. Little did either of them know she would get a call in 2010, informing her that her daughter had gone missing 21 years ago and that they needed her DNA sample because a body had been found.
Cathy Terkanian Always Believed Dennis Bowman to be Involved
The remains recovered at the time were actually not of Alexis’/Aundria’s, but the event in itself sparked a fire inside Cathy to find the truth behind what really happened to her adopted little girl. She hence set up pages on both Facebook as well as Classmates, asking Michigan locals to get in touch if they knew her missing daughter, only for many of her close friends and relatives to do so. That’s when she uncovered that the disappeared teen’s home life was far from perfect and that she had even made claims of physical and sexual abuse against her father, Dennis Lee Bowman.
Cathy knew something was awry from that moment on, leading her to seek the help of web sleuths and authorities to investigate the matter further, especially once she learned of Dennis’ dark past. She actually had a feeling from the get-go that he had somehow slain Alexis/Aundria before burying her body in the backyard, but the police obviously couldn’t do anything owing to a lack of evidence. They did launch a formal investigation into the case, though, just for it to turn out that her intuitions were 100% right, resulting in Dennis being arrested, charged, and convicted of her 1989 murder.
Cathy Terkanian is Still Fighting For What She Believes to be Justice
Despite Dennis’ conviction and the fact that Aundria’s adopted mother, Brenda, eventually gave her half of their daughter’s ashes, there is still a lot of anger and grief within Cathy for what the teen had to endure. Therefore, she has since been working to get her baby girl’s adoption annulled, have the killer’s name removed from her birth certificate, and have her name legally changed back to Alexis Miranda. She also hopes to get full possession of all her ashes. She once told People, “She’s my child. She belongs with me. No mother would do otherwise. And then when I’m buried, she’ll be buried with me.”
Cathy also recently told Tudum, “I’ve got to get that monster’s name off of my daughter’s birth certificate. Imagine having to fight that system. But I’m going to do it, and I’m going to use this [aforementioned documentary] 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.” Even though no aspect of the truth would have come out without her efforts, she still believes she has a bigger role to play so as to finally give her daughter and herself some peace.
Nevertheless, it’s imperative to note that while Cathy continues her fight, she is also still dedicated to her life with her husband, Edward Terkanian, in Gloucester, Massachusetts. They actually do not have any children of their own despite having spent over three decades of their forever together until now, but that’s because the former admittedly couldn’t bring herself to bring another soul into this world after having given her firstborn away. This couple has a lot of loved ones who matter to them, and they are proud dog parents, so they seem content with having no biological children in their lives at the moment.
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