Stream It Or Skip It: 'Into The Fire: The Lost Daughter' on Netflix, a docuseries where a woman is determined to find out what happened to her birth daughter (2024)

Into The Fire: The Lost Daughter is a two-part docuseries, directed by Ryan White and produced by White, Charlize Theron, Jessica Hargrave and Matt Maher, details the nearly-15-year-long quest by Cathy Terkanian to find out what happened to her birth daughter, Alexis Badger, who went missing in 1989, when she was 14. Terkanian was 16 when Alexis was born in 1974, and her family convinced her that she should place Alexis for adoption, and she did so when the girl was about 10 months old.

INTO THE FIRE: THE LOST DAUGHTER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: As two people sit in front of a fire, a woman says, “This story is not about me; it’s about a missing child.”

The Gist: The decision to place Alexis for adoption is one Terkanian always regretted, but couldn’t find out anything about Alexis’ whereabouts, because the adoption was closed. But when she was contacted by a social worker from the agency in 2010, looking for her to provide DNA to help identify a Jane Doe found near Norfolk, VA, she then found out that Alexis went missing in 1989.

Through some internet searching, she found out that Alexis was going by the name Aundria Bowman, which is the name her adoptive parents, Brenda and Dennis Bowman, gave her when they brought her into their family. According to the Bowmans, Aundria was a sweet child who “suddenly” started acting out and taking drugs around the time she turned 13, then disappeared one night in 1989, supposedly taking some money and other items with her.

Terkanian was determined to find out what happened to Alexis/Aundria, and created a Facebook group to see if anyone could contribute some insight. She was inundated by posts from Aundria’s friends and family members, all wanting to know what happened. Because she was a runaway — something that Terkanian was familiar with — the police didn’t thoroughly investigate what might have happened.

She brought in Carl Koppleman, an amateur sleuth who kept an extensive spreadsheet of open missing person cases, to prod the police to look. After filing FOIA requests, Terkanian and Koppleman found out things about Dennis Bowman that made them seriously question how Aundria was was still with the family by the time she disappeared, and that Dennis may have had a lot to do with her disappearance.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Into The Fire feels like an extended version of one of the episodes of the Netflix docuseries Missing: Dead Or Alive.

Our Take: Cathy Terkanian is definitely the reason to watch Into The Fire: The Lost Daughter. According to White, Theron read about Terkanian in The Atavist and knew that her determination and doggedness in finding the daughter she hadn’t seen since she was a baby was going to be the centerpiece of the documentary. And boy, was she right.

Terkanian is tough, something she had to be fifty years ago when she became a teenage mother. But she’s also vulnerable, showing how much the decision to place Alexis for adoption has haunted her over the past half-century. She’s grateful that her husband Edward, whom she’s been married to since 1991, has been her rock and support while she drove back and forth from Massachusetts, where they live, to outside of Holland, Michigan, where Aundria lived with the Bowmans.

She was not going to give up, and with Koppleman, she was able to come up with information about Dennis Bowman that somehow escaped the attention of law enforcement at the time of Aundria’s disappearance.

As revelations about Dennis Bowman come to light, White does a good job of keeping the revelations mostly a surprise, peeling away the layers in the same way that Terkanian did as she found out more about the man who raised Aundria. Those revelations are helped along by Metta McLeod, who was attacked by Bowman around the same time as Aundria’s disappearance, when she was only 6. McLeod contacting Terkanian on the Find Aundria Bowman Facebook page truly opened things up as far as Terkanian’s suspicions of Bowman were concerned.

As with most true crime docuseries, there is certainly an element of law enforcement not doing their job, but also it’s a damning portrait of abuse and coercive behavior on the part of Dennis Bowman that, at the very least, drove Aundria to run — if that’s what actually happened.

Sleeper Star: We’ll give this to Edward Terkanian, because of how supportive he is of Cathy’s quest.

Most Pilot-y Line: Nothing we could find. The 150-minute runtime doesn’t leave much room for embellishment.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Into The Fire: The Lost Daughter is a compelling portrait of a woman who is determined to find closure, not just for her but for the daughter she placed for adoption 50 years ago.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.