S1: E26– Someone Is Getting Away with Murder, Part 1

When a teenage girl was found dead in a creek. The police said it was an accident, but was it.

She had all these head injuries. I see her knuckles, They're all battered, and I realized, no, these are defensive wounds. She's fought for her life. You've got to look into this as if it's murder.

Determined to find her daughter's killer, a mother went in search of justice.

There is someone out there and they're getting away with murder.

Her investigation led her to consider the unthinkable. Was her daughter's death a result of something she did?

It just made me so sick to think it could have been solved in wags instead. It was seventeen year saga.

Today, we're in Angora, j Alaska, for the first episode of Someone Is Getting Away with Murder. I'm Slow Glass and this is American Hama Side. Just to note that this episode contained some graphic content. Please take care while listening. Relocating from southern California to Anchorage was a big deal for Karen Foster and her family.

My children had never been to an area like Angorage before, and I was concerned that they would not enjoy the winters, the cold, but they totally adapted immediately.

Ditching their shorts for snowsuits. Went easier than expected for Karen and her children.

You know, Anchorage was incredible and there's so much to see, and the kids were learning so much, you know, going to glaciers, ski hills, you've got parks, you've got hiking trails, there's just so much adventure there.

Arguably Karen's most active child was her daughter, Bonnie, who, by most accounts, was not your typical teenager. She wrote poetry, played the violin, and planned to become a psychologist.

She started a group of students against drunk drivers when she lost a really good friend of hers. So she was very kind, caring, just a sweetheart day everybody.

Bonnie had brown hair, a face full of freckles, and stood just five feet tall, not exactly someone you'd expect to see on a wrestling mat.

She was into wrestling, which is something I never really wanted her to do.

At her high school, Bonnie even managed to break the glass ceiling.

She was the first female wrestler in the state of Alaska.

Kristin McCart was friends with Bonnie.

She was always trying to like do things that other people would perceive they shouldn't do. It was her not to be friends with Bonnie. She was probably one of the kindest people I've ever met. It was almost impossible for somebody not to like her.

Bonnie graduated from high school in nineteen ninety four and planned to follow her boyfriend to college in California, but her plan didn't work out.

Everybody's talking about like, what we're you gonna do next year, and Bonnie seemed like sad a little bit about graduating, and she wasn't going to be going out of state.

So Bonnie's mom wanted her to stay home for her freshman year.

But ultimately that was her plan, was to go out of stay with him.

In nineteen ninety four, Kristen and Bonnie started classes at the University of Alaska in Anchorage.

I mean, we were both working pretty much full time to help pay for college because neither of us wanted a lot of debt.

On Wednesday, September twenty eighth, nineteen ninety four, Bonnie left her home before sunrise to catch her bus to campus.

But nobody remembered seeing her at school that day.

Bonnie never showed up for her seven am English class or any of her classes that day.

Was really weird that she didn't come to school because she didn't she I don't remember ever missing a day of school in high school, Like even when she was sick, she would still show up.

That evening, Kristen's boyfriend learned why Bonnie didn't make it to class.

He said, they found Bonnie's body, and I was like, what, like total shock. He just says, yeah, they found her body at McHugh Creek. They don't know what happened, and like I just started crying.

McHugh Creek runs through a state park some ten miles from both the University of Alaska campus and Bonnie's home in Anchorage.

We all wondered, like how she got there. She didn't even drive a car.

Bonnie didn't have a driver's license and preferred taking public transportation. But note buses went to that forest preserve.

And that was such a long walk. You would have to walk down the highway quite a ways.

All of that added to the mystery.

It would have meant that she chose to get in a car with someone, which she wouldn't have done. So in my mind and in the mind of most of our friends, we knew something had happened to cause her to end.

Up in Mechu Creek.

Bonnie's mother, Karen, was vacationing in Florida when an Alaska State trooper called her with the news.

A trooper gets on the line and he says, that my daughter Bonnie is dead. She fell in a hiking accident.

The trooper explained that Bonnie slipped off the ledge at a state park in Anchorage, hit her head on some jagged rocks, and plunged more than thirty feet into a creek. He told her that another hiker spotted her body that afternoon and called the police.

I mean total denial. And I asked them who was with her? He says there was no one with her. I said she didn't drive, how would she have gotten out there? And he has no answer for me. I said what time was she found? And he said two o'clock in the afternoon. I said, no, she should have been at the university. She had papers that were due, and she had a paper that she was going to be handing in that day at her English class.

If Bonnie had gone hiking that afternoon, that meant she would have had to skip school.

There's no way that Bonnie would have missed a class she was very particular about going to school and going to her classes.

Bonnie was found in a creek several miles from campus with a dozen cuts to her head, including a deep gash at the base of her skull. She also had bruises on her knuckles, and strangely, Bonnie's back pack, keys, and even the can of mace attached to her keychain were missing.

Nothing made sense, so I immediately told him, no, no, it's got to be murder. You've got to look into this as if it's murder.

Karen spent the long flight home trying to make sense of what the troopers told her.

So from Florida back to Alaska, you're at least twelve hours flying time, you can't sleep, and you're just you're shaking. Who would hurt Bonnie? How could this be?

Bonnie was a creature of habit and had routine every morning when she went to school, So.

That morning, body would have gotten up, probably her own five five point thirty, walked down the block and then out to a bus stop a mile from the house. She would have been at the university from a seven am class until three in the afternoon.

Karen wondered if someone had been watching Bonnie and knew her usual route, and that's one of thought sent chills down her spine.

So I was a reserve police officer with anguage Police Department, and we would go out and buy drugs from certain people. We also had informants that would tell us who the people were and who was selling drugs and stuff like that. And just before Bonnie was murdered, we did a major bust.

Although Karen worked undercover, her name was listed throughout the court documents.

All over the indictment. Is my name again and again and again. They know who I am. And the people that I identified had been released from the day before.

Those drug dealers Karen helped to put away were back on the street the day before Bonnie's mysterious death.

You just never a thought that somebody like that would hurt your child. It just made me so sick to think, oh my god, Bonnie may be dead because of my work with the police department.

Eighteen year old Bonnie Craig was supposed to be in school on the morning of September twenty eighth, nineteen ninety four. Instead, the police found her face down in a creek some ten miles from her college campus. They ruled her death a hiking accident, but after viewing her daughter's remains, Bonnie's mother, Karen was furious.

You see a Bonnie's body and I see her knuckles. They're all battered, and I realized, no, these are defensive wounds. She's fought for her life, and I told them, you need to get back here, take more pictures. It's not a hiking accident.

Karen worked with the Anchorage Police Department and at the time had recently helped break up a dangerous drug cartel. She feared that that bust might be connected to Bonnie's death.

Because of the work I've been doing. Maybe they have gone after me. Maybe they are doing that to get back at me, to get back atn Angriage Police Department.

Alaska State troopers took a second look at Bonnie's autopsy and agreed that her death was not accidental, but they assured Karen it was not the work of a local drug cartel.

They said, no, this had to be somebody on their own. There wasn't more than one person involved in this.

At the time, the troopers were focused on a different suspect, Karen's ex husband, Gary, Gary was not Bonnie's biological father, but he raised her. This was the person she called dad.

Gary and I got married when Bonnie was just three years old, so Gary took over as dad immediately and was always dad to her.

But Karen and Gary's marriage didn't last. The two divorced in nineteen ninety two, which stung their children.

You know, they didn't want their mom and dad divorced. That's hard for kids.

Although Karen and Gary tried to remain civil, it wasn't easy. Things got especially tense when Bonnie decided to move in with Gary right before she start to college.

I was devastated when Bonnie moved out. I mean, I was so hurt because she didn't tell me. She said, I didn't want to tell you because I knew you would want to stop me. It's going to be easier for me to get to school and to college, she was talking about.

So just before college started, Bonnie moved in with her then former stepdad, and there was a reason the police wanted to question him.

Gary was supposed to be out of town and he came back early. In fact, he got back the night before and he was in bed sleeping when Bonnie left for school the next day.

That caught the attention of investigators.

Because he came back early and Bonnie ended up dead the next day. They were looking into it.

It was an uncomfortable situation, not only for Gary but for Karen.

Gary was her dad, he loved her dearly. But yet I still started to think could it have been him? You know, we had gone through a nasty divorce and he wasn't happy with me. There was anger towards me, but no, not to the cats.

Investigators didn't want to spook Gary, so they came up with a plan. They asked Karen, Gary, and all of their children to voluntarily provide their fingerprints and a sample of DNA.

They were afraid that if they just asked Gary that he might lawyer up.

But Gary didn't lawyer up. He cooperated with investigators and told them he had an alibi.

They had talked to people where he worked and he was in the office that day.

Three months after Gary supplied his DNA to investigators, he was finally cleared.

So we know that they did interview members of the family and her boyfriend, but at the time they were quickly ruled out as suspects.

Maria Downey worked for an Anchorage TV station.

Bonnie was Karen Foster's daughter, someone of who I've known for years.

The two were longtime friends, and for Maria, covering the murder investigation of a friend's daughter wasn't easy.

It was really tough. I think it was tough for the whole community to hear that because Bonnie was such a well loved young lady. She was Alaska grown. She was always involved in from high school to junior high and at the university, very active in the community, really intelligent, young girl, kind, compassionate, and so we really hit the community hard.

Karen confided in Maria and shared the frustration she had with the Alaska State Troopers.

She felt like troopers weren't doing enough because she believed right away there was a killer out there.

The troopers originally declared Banni's death an accident, which upset Karen, but once investigators came around to what Karen originally suspected, she was equally dismayed. And how little homicide detectives shared with her. Keep in mind, Karen was an insider, one of them, and yet she was still shut out.

The repeat line was they weren't releasing more information. Now we're all aware during a murder investigation, you do withhold key information, but in this case, so much information was with HOWLD that I really do think it jeopardized their case because people out there who might have noticed something suspicious going on never said anything because they thought it was accidental.

At the time, Karen was a mom on a mission. Nothing was going to stop her. She responded by holding press conferences of her own.

I think it was so important to hear from Karen because we were getting so little information from the troopers that she helped to fill in some of the blanks where Bonnie was supposed to be what she typically would be doing that time of day, and it really helped, I think, the community to start being more aware of what they might have seen that day.

Karen then took it a step further. She started her own investigation. Any lead that came in she'd personally look into, including one about a student from Bonnie's English class.

And she showed me excerpts from a student journal a student who happened to be in class with Bonnie, and they were really disturbing, very graphic, very violent stories within this journal.

He mentioned that September twenty eighth was going to be a very stressful day for him that he was being put to a test.

September twenty eighth was the day of Bonnie's murder, and this student who wrote that September twenty eighth would be a stressful day for him, was absent from class that day.

He seemed very violent and very angry, and in one location had even said die bitch.

Later that day, on September twenty eighth, that student eventually showed up to his professor's office.

And he came to her office later on in the day and he looked soak and wet, like he'd just gotten out of the shower, and she said he rereaked of perfume.

That student informed the professor that he had been at McHugh Creek that day when they pulled a body out of the water. It was Bonnie Craig.

We both thought that that was incredibly strange, and so we brought that to the troopers again, and they said that they had already looked into him and they had taken his DNA, and DNA didn't match.

It was another dead end for investigators. By this point, nearly all of Bonnie's Fais, family, friends, and acquaintances had been questioned. And cleared, meaning the suspect likely was someone Bonnie didn't know. Three long years would pass before the Alaska State Troopers revealed new details about Bonnie's murder to the public.

The troopers told me Bonnie was raped.

On the third anniversary of Bonnie's murder, Alaska State Troopers publicly shared that Bonnie had been sexually assaulted and severely beaten just before she toppled over a cliff and plunged to her death. They hoped this information would help someone come forward with a name. Bonnie's mother once again felt this information would have been helpful earlier in the investigation.

Three years after she was abducted, raped and murdered, they finally allowed the public to know.

It was really difficult.

So the story just kind of kept unfolding along the way. It's just stunning.

Journalist Maria Downey had never heard of holding this information from the public for so long.

We asked the troopers repeatedly why they waited so long and why this information wasn't released, and we never quite got a clear answer.

At that same nineteen ninety seven press conference, the Alaska State Troopers also shared that the backpack Bonnie was carrying that morning was never recovered.

The troubling part about this is that I think more information, a lot more details, would have helped this case.

Bonnie Craig was murdered in nineteen ten ninety four. Throughout their investigation, the Alaska State Troopers questioned dozens of suspects, but by the year two thousand, the case remained unsolved.

We covered this story for months and then it was years journalist Maria Downey. As time went on, we heard very little about the case. It could very well be investigators were working behind the scenes on it, but there were still posters and there were still flyers being disseminated years after to help solve this case.

Frustrated with the investigation, Bonnie's mother, Karen did her own detective work.

Many mothers they want to find justice. They'll do all they can to find closure, to find the person responsible for their child's death. But Karen took it not just one, not just two, but many many steps forward from there.

She was that.

Steady, informational source who would uncover things on her own and investigat her own daughter's case, and she continually kept front and center to get that information out to help solve this case.

Karen did everything she could to keep the unsolved case in the news. She continued to host her own press conferences, and she made sure that Bonnie's face remained in the public eye.

Throughout Anchorage, there were signs all over town. We're talking big billboard signs, bus signs, basically to help find Bonnie's killer. And that went on for years.

In giant letters, these billboards asked who killed Bonnie and someone's getting away with murder.

I had people walking up to me all the time, giving me a hug and saying they were sorry. They were total strangers, but they knew from the amount of interviewers I had done that I was Bonnie's mom.

Some people even called Karen with TIFFs late at night. Even some psychics contacted her. No matter how far fetched the information they shared may have seemed, Karen took all of them seriously.

I would write everything down, I would take notes, and I bring it to the Alaska State Troopers and they would just say, okay, we're looking into it.

In two thousand, the DNA found in Bonnie when she was murdered was entered into the FBI's Combined DNA Index System known as CODIS. That program formally went into place in nineteen ninety eight with the hopes of solving cold cases like Bonnie's.

I truly believe that our only weapon of finding anything it was DNA.

DNA helped to clear all of the suspects the Alaska State Troopers questioned except for one, and this is someone we haven't talked about yet, the bus driver who drove Bonnie to campus on the morning of her murder.

They got some reports that he had been inappropriate with a couple of young girls on the bus.

Notably, that driver wasn't the usual driver.

For the route that day. I think he was filling in for somebody else, and he took off just after that day.

The bus driver sort of disappeared, but the troopers tracked him down and immediately were suspicious of his story.

When he was interviewed, he said he didn't see Bonnie on the bus, and then I believe the Alaska State Troopers had a couple other people that said, yeah, she was on the bus, so they were concerned.

So investigators collected a sample of the bus driver's DNA and tested it to see if it matched the DNA found in Bonnie. When the results came back, they were all speechless.

The DNA came up with the match.

This was the moment that Karen had been waiting for.

You're just hoping so much that yes, make this it and get the evidence so that we can convict somebody.

But there's more. The Alaska lab that did that testing was equipped to test six spots of DNA. Then investigators ordered a more advanced DNA test that looked at thirteen different points of DNA.

After they did a second DNA test, they knew, no, it's this isn't the guy. It's unbelievable, Just freaking unbelievable.

I can't imagine her disappointment. That had to have felt like two steps forward one huge step back. It was another blow to investigators and Karen.

It was like my guts had been ripped out. I basically shut down.

In September two thousand and one, Karen had plans to do her annual press conference on the anniversary of Bonnie's death, but then came nine to eleven.

After September eleventh, I decided, you know, our whole nation's grieving and it was time to move on. The murder of one girl in Alaska was nothing compared to September eleventh.

Instead of going back on the media circuit, Karen decided to take a more low key route.

Not that I was ever going to give up. I would always check with the Alaska State Troopers and ask what was going on, if they're doing anything, is there any leads?

Their answer was always the same nothing. In two thousand and two, the TV show Unsolved Mysteries highlighted Bonnie's case, but once again there were no arrests. It wouldn't be until two thousand and six, some twelve years after Bonnie Craig's murder, that news came in about the investigation.

I am in Thailand, on a remote island, and I get this email saying that it's from the Alaska State Troopers fan that he would really like to talk to me.

Karen managed to get to a telephone. That's when she heard the words that she had been waiting over a decade to hear.

He found the killer.

DNA evidence led Alaska State Troopers to a suspect some three thousand miles away in New Hampshire.

They had identified somebody who's matched.

The suspect was a man named Kenneth Dion, who at the time was thirty seven years old.

He was addicted to oxy conton and successfully robbed a couple of pharmacies to get his oxy conton.

At the time of his arrest, Kenneth Dion was serving time for those robberies. In two thousand and six, his DNA was put into the National CODIS database and quickly matched the DNA found in Bonnie.

They were almost one hundred percent sure that this was the guy who killed Bonnie.

Alaska troopers flew out to New Hampshire to interview Kenneth Dion. Kenneth claimed he had no memory of Bonnie and denied any involvement in her murder, but his DNA said otherwise, so the police arrested Kenneth and charged him with sexually assaulting and murdering Bonnie Craig. In the twelve years between Bonnie's death and the arrest, the name Kenneth Dion never came up as a suspect.

He didn't know Bonnie and none of us knew him. It was a total random crime.

Even with her daughter's suspected killer and custody, Karen couldn't shake a bad feeling.

I always thought I would be so excited and relieved to hear that, and I just got so fearful thinking, Oh my god, are we going to be able to convict him? Oh, We've got his DNA.

And his defense team would put up a fight that would force investigators to account for a key piece of missing evidence.

All you need is one juror who could end up throwing.

The case, all of which would push Karen's patience to its limits.

It could have been solved in weeks. Instead it was seventeen year saga.

Would end with Karen engaged in a totally different fight.

No, no, no, it's too important. We need to change this law now.

In the conclusion of someone is getting away with murder, we'll go into the court room where a key piece of evidence goes missing. I'm Slow Glass. That's next time on American Homicide. You can contact the American Homicide team by emailing us at American Homicide Pod at gmail dot com. That's American Homicide Pod at gmail dot com. American Homicide is hosted and written by me slown Glass and is a production of Glass Podcasts, division of Glass Entertainment Group,