[ad_1]
Thirty-six years after she gave birth to a baby girl and placed her for adoption, a woman learned that the child had been missing for 21 years.
That’s not the plot of a mystery novel or a fictional film. It’s how the docu-series Into the Fire: The Lost Daughter begins. Out on Netflix Sep. 12, the two-part series follows Cathy Terkanian’s quest to find her daughter, Aundria Bowman. While she did not raise the child, Terkanian’s motherly instinct comes through in the series, in the way she connects with the friends of her daughter and the online sleuths who help her crack the case. As Terkanian sums up her motivation for the search, “I saw the fire, and I walked right in it.”
Here’s how Into the Fire: The Lost Daughter uncovers what happened to Bowman and how her birth mother became involved in the search.
The search for a lost daughter
Terkanian gave birth to Bowman in 1974 when she was 16. In the series, she makes it clear that she did not want to give her baby up, but that her mother persuaded her to do so, convincing her that at a young age, she couldn’t handle the responsibility. It was a closed adoption, and Terkanian didn’t try to look for the child, figuring that they might connect when she was older.
But she never got the chance. In April 2010, Terkanian received a letter from the adoption agency informing her that the child had gone missing when she was 14 years old, in 1989. An unidentified body had been found next to a cornfield, and the police needed Terkanian’s DNA to see if it was her daughter.
It was not a match, but Terkanian became determined to find her daughter. She knew her daughter’s birth date, and that’s all she needed to bring up her file in the missing persons section of the Michigan state police department. She learned that her daughter was renamed Aundria Michelle Bowman, and that she lived in Hamilton, Michigan.
When she started a Facebook page called “Find Aundria Bowman,” she started getting flooded with…
[ad_2]
