The DNA request that revealed my child had gone missing

Lives Less Ordinary

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.6 • 814 Ratings

🗓️ 3 February 2025

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In April 2010, Cathy Terkanian received a letter that turned her world upside down. It revealed that her daughter, Alexis, whom she’d had to place for adoption in 1974, had gone missing. Then she was given more shocking news—the police had a new lead, could the unidentified body of a young woman found in Wisconsin be Alexis? They needed Cathy’s DNA to confirm it. As Cathy began to process this, her own painful past surfaced. She had run away from home as a teenager, joining a circus before getting pregnant with Alexis aged 15. In the years after Cathy was pressured to have Alexis adopted, she became a nurse and married, but never had any other children, always thinking about the daughter she had to say goodbye to.

Following the news of Alexis’ disappearance Cathy couldn’t sit and wait for the DNA test results, she needed answers. Determined to find them she turned detective, connecting with Carl Koppelman, an amateur sleuth investigating cold cases. Together they started to unearth evidence that made Cathy suspect the worst—that Alexis’ adoptive father, Dennis Bowman, had something to do with her disappearance.

Cathy had always hoped her daughter Alexis would come looking for her; instead she spent a decade searching for Alexis. This mother’s quest for truth and justice has also been made into a Netflix documentary called Into the Fire: The Lost Daughter.

Presenter: Jo Fidgen Producer: Thomas Harding Assinder

Get in touch: [email protected] or WhatsApp: 0044 330 678 2784

Transcript

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0:00.0	Before you listen to this BBC podcast, I want to tell you why I love podcasting. Hi, my name's Tommy Dixon,
0:06.3	and I make podcasts for the BBC. I'm a big fan of stories, always loved a good book. But when I started
0:12.0	commuting for my first job, I discovered podcasts. I was blown away by how a creative idea and the right
0:17.8	mixture of sounds could take you into a whole new world full of incredible stories. You know, the type that make you go, wow. And that kind of inspired me to
0:25.2	give it a go myself, which to cut a long story short led to a BBC training scheme and a whole
0:29.9	new career giving other people that exact same feeling. So if you want to hear amazing stories
0:34.1	that make you go wow like I did, they're just a tap or click away on BBC
0:38.0	sounds.
0:40.8	I was stunned, to be honest with you, I was kind of like, am I really seeing this return
0:45.7	address?
0:47.3	You know, I've never gotten a letter from the Norfolk, Virginia Human Services.
0:53.2	I'd been calling them for 10 years,
0:56.1	but they'd never returned anything to me.
1:00.2	Kathy Ducanian had been waiting for this moment.
1:03.6	News of the baby daughter,
1:05.2	she had given up for adoption as a teenager in Virginia,
1:09.0	and now here it was.
1:11.3	Only, it was not the news she had been hoping for.
1:16.2	This is Lives Less Ordinary.
1:17.8	From the BBC World Service, I'm Joe Fidgen.
1:20.7	Today, the story of a mother's determination to discover the truth about her missing girl.
1:38.3	... discover the truth about her missing girl. It's April 2010. Kathy is 51, a retired nurse, and living far away in Florida with her husband, Ed.
	...

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