Into the Fire: The Lost Daughter review – a staggering, mesmerising true-crime tale

When Cathy Terkanian learned that the daughter she was persuaded to place up for adoption had gone missing, she knew the police would never bother to find her. So she did it herself

I feel like it’s been quite a while – 10, maybe even 20 minutes? – since Netflix’s last addition to the true crime genre (AKA an anthology of male violence against women and girls), but Into the Fire: The Lost Daughter is worth the wait, in the strange and twisted way of these voyeuristic endeavours anyway.

It is the story of Cathy Terkanian’s search for her adopted daughter Alexis (renamed Aundria by her new parents, Brenda and Dennis Bowman). It began in 2010, when she got a letter asking if she could give a DNA sample to the police in case an unidentified woman’s brutalised body they had found was Aundria’s. That is how she discovered that the child she had been persuaded as a 16-year-old single mother to place up for adoption had run away from home in 1989 at the age of 14 and never been seen again. Cathy herself had been a runaway, from a violent mother. The police, she reasoned, were unlikely to have investigated properly (“They didn’t look for me – they wouldn’t look for her”). So, once the dead woman proved to be someone else’s daughter, she started her own search.

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/H8pEjRy

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