S1: E27– Someone Is Getting Away with Murder, Part 2

For twelve years, Signs hung all over Anchorage asking who killed Bonnie Craig.

There's signs on all the buses, there was signs on benches, there was fires.

With no arrest. The victim's mother lost hope.

It wasn't investigated real well. They don't have a lot of evidence.

And then finally the suspect turned up in a prison some forty five hundred miles away. But did he kill Bonnie?

This man stands up and starts yelling at Bonnie's family that they're all liars and that he didn't do anything.

The only evidence was a drop of blood and some DNA. Would it be enough to get a conviction? It's always a crap shoot.

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

Today we're an Anchorage, Alaska for the conclusion of some one is getting away with murder. I'm Sloan Glass and this is American homicide. Just a note that this episode contained some graphic content. Please take care while listening. Bonnie Craig was an eighteen year old college freshman at the University of Alaska in Anchorage. On the morning of September twenty eighth, nineteen ninety four, Bonnie headed to class that afternoon.

Those moments, it's etched in my brain and you don't forget something like that.

That's Bonnie's friend, Amy Navotney.

How could this happen to somebody like Bonnie? It didn't seem real. It didn't seem real at all.

After first calling Bonnie's death a hiking accident, Alaska State troopers later ruled it a homicide.

I don't recall anybody ever thinking it was an accident. Just didn't make sense.

You can learn a lot about Bonnie Craig by looking at her college schedule. While most college freshmen were asleep at seven am, Bonnie was already in class. Her friends and family said, if you believed Bonnie willingly skipped school to go hiking, you didn't know Bonnie.

Bonnie was very reliable and she wouldn't have missed school.

The fact that her body turned up more than ten miles from her home raised plenty of questions.

Bonnie didn't drive, that's quite a ways away from where she lived, or from the.

University, and if she walked.

It would take probably, you know, several hours to walk to mc que Creek from her home.

Bonnie exclusively took the bus to campus. None of those buses went to McHugh Creek.

Just a lot of unanswered questions. At that point, something was definitely wrong.

Investigators later revealed that Bonnie not only was murdered, but also had been sexually assaulted. Even with that DNA evidence, twelve years went by without an arrest.

How come nobody's coming forward? Somebody knows something? Is this ever going to get figured out?

Every new promising lead fizzled out, leaving Bonnie's family and friends feeling uneasy.

What's scary? You know, scary? And that went on for a lot of years. You know, every year, I think it got a little bit more difficult.

At the forefront of the investigation was Bonnie's fierce and strong willed mother, Karen. She gave frequent press conferences and was responsible for putting up all those signs throughout Anchorage that said who killed Bonnie and someone is getting away with murder.

Karen ver determined person she was going to get to the bottom of it.

As Amy and Bonnie's other friends graduated college, got married and had children. They couldn't help, but wonder what if.

Definitely every year kind of just breaks your heart and you kind of think of all the amazing things that Bonnie would have amounted to, places that she would have gone, you know, the family that she could have started, and just live in life like the rest of us. Those things go through your mind every year.

Bonnie Craig was killed in nineteen ninety four. It wasn't until two thousand and six when police had a man in custody in New Hampshire.

That was one of the best days. I think. I cried tears of joy. They finally had who was responsible for taking such a wonderful person away from so many people.

This aspect was a thirty seven year old former Alaska resident named Kenneth Dion.

The name makes me utterly sick to my stomach.

At early sick, So who is Kenneth Dion. At the time of his arrest, he was serving time in a New Hampshire prison for armed robbery Back in nineteen ninety four. Kenneth was twenty five years old and living in Anchorage.

Like a lot of people that end up in Alaska, Kenneth Dion was stationed here in the military.

Journalist Casey Grove covered the story.

At some point divorced his wife or she divorced him, and he apparently was into crime.

Kenneth was discharged from the military and later served some time for a string of robberies. Just two months before Bonnie's murder, Kenneth was released from prison in Alaska and placed on probation. He then violated his parole and was sent back to prison. After his release in nineteen ninety six, Alaska for New Hampshire, where he got into more trouble.

He had been addicted to oxy conton committed a string of armed burglaries. He was serving time for that, and they collected his DNA under this mandatory program.

In two thousand and six, an Alaska lab worker did a weekly check of the code AS system. That's when Kenneth Dion's DNA matched the DNA found in Bonnie.

New Hampshire was one of like a handful of states at the time that had mandatory DNA collection for violent crime. They would not have caught him if not for that law in New Hampshire.

Alaska investigators immediately flew out to New Hampshire and questioned Kenneth.

You know, the investigators didn't just come out and say, hey, we think you killed this girl.

What these two Alaska State troopers did do was put on a clinic on how to interrogate a suspect.

They first asked him, you know, when he was in Alaska and why he was in Alaska, and he talk wasn't with the military, and he kind of mentioned that he was into martial arts, and somehow that came up. He was like a black belt in karate.

I think.

I had noon chalks, you know, three sectional staffs. I had all kinds of things because I'm a fifth degree black belt.

So you can hear he's got this kind of like New Englander accent that I wasn't expecting.

Along with his thick accent. Kenneth had red hair and stood around five feet ten inches tall. He told the troopers he grew up fighting his whole life, and then the topic turned to Bonnie.

There's a pretty pretty high profile case.

So did you read the news or listen to the news, read the newspaper, bet and that back then?

Oh yeah, all the time.

Okay, you may you've probably heard about about the situation then about a young girl named Bonnie Craig.

Bonnie Craig, eighteen year old college student.

I can't rega, I can't remember she's this, you know, this teenage girl? Do you know her? And he said no, did you.

Ever meet someone called Bonnie or anything like that? I have no idea.

And then finally, you know, they they show him this picture of Bonnie Craig and ask him if he knows her.

She's an eighteen year old college student, lived in South Anchorage. She left her home around you know, five ten, five twenty in the morning. I had to go catch your boss off Lake Oders.

I think when the investigators sort of first presented this photo of Bonnie Craig to Kenneth Dion, it was have you ever met this girl? He said no, you'd never seen her before, and then they left it sitting there, maybe as advice to see what his reaction was. Over time.

Did you ever.

Recall maybe you know maiden or through somewhere else, one of your friends or anything?

Eighteen years old?

Oh no, my wife would have killed me, he said, no. You know, if I had known her, I've been hanging out with her. My wife would have killed me, you know, because he was married at the time. I think it's worth pointing out too that anybody who had been around at that time would have seen this picture or a picture of Bonnie Craig, even people that don't follow the news very closely, would have seen these posters and would have seen these photos on the side of a bus.

You know.

So for him to have said he had never seen her before just seemed implausible.

That's when the troopers flipped the script.

And a sad thing about it. Later on that day, her body was found at the Q Creek. WHOA, WHOA, WHOA?

What are you trying to say?

He says something along the lines of what are you guys trying to say here? Like why are you here talking to me about her?

Your name has come up, you know, like hundreds of names. Why would my name come up? That's what I'm trying to figure out. You know, you say you didn't have no association with her. You know, that's good. You know, I'm trying to I'm just trying to get clarifying you own.

And of course it's hard to get around the fact that his DNA was found inside of her and she was dead. There was just some good police work that had to be done. To really nail this guy down, and they did it.

Alaska State troopers charged Kenneth Dion was sexually assaulting and murdering Bonnie Craig. Another five years would pass before Kenneth Dion stood trial. By then, a key piece of evidence would go missing and would impact the integrity of the investigation. Bonnie Craig was eighteen years old when she was mysteriously found dead in a creek several miles from her home and college. In twenty eleven, Some seventeen years later, her accused killer, Kenneth Dion, was on trial for murder.

I would have been twelve years old when this happened, and you know, I think I was maybe thirty or something like by the time this went on trial.

Journalist Casey Grove wrote about the case.

I've thought about that a lot. I mean, the amount of time that went by from when she was killed to when Kenneth Dion went on trial was almost as long as she.

Had been alive that time. Difference became obvious when prosecutor showed pictures of Bonnie during the.

Trial, like just the way that she was dressed, tapered jeans, you know, back in the nineties and her hair was kind of in a holdover from the eighties, kind of like that feathered somewhat bigger hair than people wear nowadays. It was kind of a throwback to that time too, where people didn't have a phone in their pocket to take pictures of everything, so like a lot of the photos were sort of like school photos or you know, family photos from gatherings and things like that.

On the other side of the courtroom sat Kenneth Dion, whose red hair wasn't the only feature that's it out.

He actually had knuckle tattoos that said lost soul, it lost on one hand and sol on the other hand on his knuckles tattooed. I've covered cases where they actually use makeup to cover the tattoos up so that the person looks better maybe to the jury.

Prosecutors explained to the jury that this lost soul was responsible for killing and sexually assaulting Bonnie Craig.

There's a direct line there between him and her, and it's impossible to get around that. But I think the theory of what actually happened when Bonnie was murdered was kind of muddy, or at least took a lot of filling in of the blanks.

There were no eyewitnesses to the crime, so the defense adopted the original theory from the Alaska State Troopers that Bonnie fell in a hiking accident, but with a twist.

These two people had consensual sex and then you know, one of them just sort of fell off a cliff and died accidentally.

The defense reiterated to the jurors what the police first told Bonnie's mother.

The defense attorney he asked, well, so could somebody fall off a cliff and strike their genitals in this case, on a sharp rock, and would that produce the kind of injuries that you're saying are evidence of sexual assault. This is in front of Bonnie's mom and sister and her other family, and just about everybody just kind of like rolled their eyes, you know, like how I could even say that, and you know what.

I feel the same way. What the defense is proposing happened to Bonnie is unbelievable. After the defense floated alternative theories, prosecutors pointed the finger directly at the defendant.

Bonnie was walking to the bus stop, and the prosecution theory was that Kenneth Dion saw her and somehow got

Bonnie took at least a dozen blows to the head, and prosecutors believe Kenneth Dion used a weapon for the fatal blow.

They believed that Kenneth Eon had killed Bonnie Craig by hitting her in the back of the head with like nunchucks.

Prosecutors leaned heavily into that interrogation tape of Kenneth Dion where he admitted to being into martial arts.

They knew that he had these martial arts weapons like nunchucks and those kind of things.

But the defense said if Bonnie was murdered, there would have been blood everywhere on the side of the cliff, not just the one drop they found on a leaf. And as for Kenneth's DNA.

The defense attorney he insinuated that Bonnie might have been promiscuous and might have had consensual sex with Kenneth Dion.

The defense argued Kenneth and Bonnie had sex in the week leading up to her death, but remember Bonnie had a long distance boyfriend at the time.

Bonnie's boyfriend at the time was brought back, you know, seventeen years later for this trial and testified.

Bonnie's boyfriend, Cameron, was thirty four years old at the time of the trial. He testified how Bonnie was his first girlfriend and said the two had plans to marry.

Everything that the boyfriend said about her and about their reallyf reationship was not in agreement with the idea that she could have been sleeping with other guys. They talked on the phone all the time. They had like promise rings that they were wearing. They thought that they were going to get married and have a happy little life with each other and go off and do great things.

Cameron told the room that he and Bonnie spent there last night together before he went away to school. It happened in July of nineteen ninety four on the rocks near Mchew Creek, the same place her body was later found.

It was very sad to see her boyfriend on the stand talking about what had been such a beautiful thing in their lives, their love for each other.

Testifying about his last night with Bonnie became too much for Cameron.

They paused his testimony at one point. They just kind of overcome with the grief, and he went out in the hallway in the courthouse and just kind of walked up and down the hallway and kind of gathered himself.

After that emotional testimony, prosecutors played the interrogation tape of Kenneth Dion.

You've probably heard about their situation about a young girl named Bonnie Craig.

I can't go, I can't remember.

They're very clearly trying to pin him down on oh, you don't know her, Okay, how'd your DNA get inside of her? You know, never seen her face before. Well, later, when you try to claim that you had consensual sext with her, that's not going to make any sense.

Kenneth Dion never took the stand in his own defense. He simply jotted down notes and made frequent eye contact with Bonnie's mother, Karen.

He looked at us very angry a couple times, and it was seeing the face of evil.

Other witnesses from Kenneth's past also testified about his dark side.

We had more than one woman on the stands and he had abused her, and I mean even his wife ex wife at that time, had to testify about him and his abuse and his drug abuse.

Things were looking good for the prosecution until something happened to a key piece of evidence. Back on the afternoon of Bonnie's death in nineteen ninety four, investigators used a camcorder to record footage at the crime scene, but suddenly that tape was missing.

You know, ultimately just it was an important piece of the whole story. But the video from the murder scene never showed up.

Journalist Casey Grove I.

Don't remember ever hearing a good explanation for why the video was lost. The most detail about that was just it had been checked out of the evidence for the case and not returned.

The defense attacked investigators for losing a key piece of evidence, but then on the second day of the trial, prosecutors approached the judge. They explained that the missing tape had mysteriously resurfaced that was bizarre. Suddenly the trial came to a screeching halt.

The fact that this video surfaced right after the trial started. Basically, I mean the defense of course fought that, vigorously fought that being admitted as evidence.

The judge stopped the trial for both sides to argue whether to admit the video.

I was with fear that he could walk.

Not knowing what that meant for the trial threw Bonnie's mother, Karen into a panic.

It wasn't investigated real well. They don't have a lot of evidence. All you need is one juror who could end up throwing the case.

Suddenly, the slam Dune case against Kenneth Dion took a turn.

Oh my gosh, are we going to be able to get a conviction.

Kenneth Dion is on trial for the nineteen ninety four murder of Bonnie Craig. But there's a problem. A videotape of the crime scene that Alaska State troopers took was missing.

Seventeen years had gone by since the murder, and then this thing with this video comes up.

Journalist Casey Grove covered the trial.

It's supposed to be you know, like the first day of testimony, and they paused the trial for a week.

The videotape disappeared and then reappeared two days into the trial, and after much debate, the judge allowed prosecutors to admit it into evidence.

It shot on like a VHS cassette tape with grainy like home video footage kind of looked to it.

As the dated footage flickered on the television screen, the jurors leaned in to get their first look at the crime scene.

This video, I like, really put you at that scene at that time. You know, the leaves were all yellow and things were kind of changing towards fall. The moss or the lichen is kind of starting to turn red. It's very colorful.

The beauty of Alaska's changing seasons was broken by what showed up next on the videotape.

These investigators wearing like hip waiters, are wading out to the body and they flip it over and you can see her face and it's just very like pale white. For Karen Bonnie's mom, it was tough because she had never seen that.

As you can imagine, seeing this footage of her daughter's body floating lifeless Inmchu Creek was tough to see for Karen showed a part of the investigation she had not been privy to for the first time.

I'm finding out what they did when they arrived there. When of the Alaska State troopers he had called on his knees down paths looking for any kind of evidence, He found just one leaf with a drop of blood that they later determined was Bonnie's blood.

That video showed that one leaf that troopers found that contained Bonnie's blood.

That was crucial to find that leaf with that one drop of blood because that proved that Bonnie was injured before she went over into the water below.

Karen hoped that video would help disprove the defense's theory that Bonnie fell to her death.

The defense immediately said, well, and how she had all these headed, there would have been blood everywhere. The prosecutor in rebuttals said that there was no blood anywhere because Bonnie went over the cliff and Kenneth Dion ran down the side of that cliff and got Bonnie and hit her with the numbchucks while she was in the water, again and again and again until she was lifeless.

In other words, the only blood would have been in the creek.

It had all washed away except for that one drop of blood that they found, and it was Bonnie's.

The jury agreed with the prosecutor's argument. They found Kenneth Dion guilty sexually assaulting and murdering Bonnie Craig.

We cried, We all cried, d burn It was a better sweet victory to know he's not getting away with murder anymore.

Kenneth Dion never took the stand, but he broke his silence at the sentencing hearing.

He had a couple of outbursts. He would lose it.

You know.

Twice. At his sentencing hearing, Kenneth Dion shouted towards the prosecutor. He said he would never admit to killing Bonnie because he didn't do it. But his outbursts didn't spare him. The judge sentenced Kenneth Dion to one hundred twenty four years. He won't be eligible for parole until twenty fifty, when he's eighty one years old.

He's going to be spending one hundred and twenty four years in jail. He's never going to get the opportunity to kill another child.

Throughout the investigation, Karen was critical of Alaska state troopers. She was further incensed when she learned what happened in New Hampshire in two thousand and three. Kenneth Dion was incarcerated in New Hampshire, but his DNA wasn't collected until two thousand and five, and it wasn't until two thousand and six when his DNA was entered into the CODA system.

Thing a furious about the fact that they hadn't bothered to input his DNA into codis our criminal national database.

Think about that Bonnie's murder could have been solved years earlier if Kenneth Dion's DNA was collected on time.

That's when I went after the media again and called all of the legislators and the representatives and let them know that we need to change the law.

In two thousand and two, New Hampshire became one of only a handful of states with a law allowing DNA to be collected from state prisoners convicted of violent crimes. Karen wanted Alaska lawmakers to pass a similar law.

We pushed bar it and within sixty days they were signed by the governor. In law, Alaska is number seven to start collecting DNA on all felony arrests.

Thanks to Karen's lobbying, Alaska law now requires DNA samples from suspects arrested for a violent crime like robbery, domestic violence, or sexual assault. The swabs then get sent to the state crime lab, where the DNA can be matched against evidence from cold cases and kept on file to aid in future cases.

This guy had been in jail two months before he murdered Bonnie, out on bail when he murdered to her, and then back in jail two months after. If they had had collection of DNA on arrest, they would have known right from the get go. We wouldn't have had to wait months years. It could have been solved in weeks. Instead, it was seventeen year saga trying to get him convicted.

As of twenty twenty four, Alaska is now one of at least thirty one states that requires DNA samples to be collected upon arrest or when criminal charges are filed against a person. But the program isn't without its critics.

The people scream and say, oh, you know, we're innocent till proven guilty. Well, it's not that it's proven you guilty, just to have your DNA there. All it does is identify the person. You still have to prove the case when they take the mud shots, when they take the fingerprints, get that DNA, collect DNA on arrest. It's crucial to justice.

It's a simple concept in theory, but the program isn't without its flaws. A twenty twenty pro Publica article reported that Alaska continues to be one of many states with a long backlog of uncollected and or unprocessed DNA, despite the program's words, Karen considers the law a critical tool for investigators and the families of victims.

And in Bonnie's case, we turn tragedy into triumph by getting these laws changed and knowing that because of Bonnie's murder, they will be spared being a victim because of the DNA laws that have changed.

Nearly a decade after Bonnie's murderer was convicted, her close friend Amy still couldn't find closure. She had to confront a place that was meaningful to the two of them, a Q Creek.

Last summer was the first time I actually went there.

Amy returned to the place where Bonnie's body was discovered, and she didn't go alone.

My youngest daughter had went there with me. She hugged me, and you know, I just needed to just let me sit here and just just think. I definitely shed some tears, a little emotional just being there.

Amy had come to the realization that Bonnie's death affected the way she parents her own children.

So it made me a little overprotective as a parent, not wanting to leave my kids, needing to know everywhere they're going, just because there's really there's a lot of monsters in this world, and it scares it scares you. Like I said, never would have thought something like that would have happened to Bonnie, And if it happened to her, it could happen to anybody. So yeah, less definitely it's changed me or shaped me to be the parent that I am.

That afternoon at the creek, Amy said she sent something.

Sunbeams were shining down. They actually kind of feel her presence there almost.

Next time, on American Homicide, a hiker sets up camp and a dead body is found, but the hiker claims he had nothing to do with the murder. Wool had to whirl to Lita, Alaska for the case of the Mountain Man murders. I'm slung glass and 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 Sloane Glass and is a production of Glass Podcasts, a division of Glass Entertainment Group, in partnership with iHeart Podcasts. The show is executive produced by Nancy Glass and Todd Gants. The series is also written and produced by Todd Gantz, with additional writing by Ben