JUSTICE FOR BONNIE-I.J. Schecter

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the first place. Armed with little more than her own conviction, Karen set out to find the truth behind her daughter's death. After a long series of false leads and dead ends, it seemed the case would forever go unsolved. Then, after twelve years, of public campaigning, private despair, and increasingly tense dealings with the detectives work in the case, Karen received

an email that would change everything. The system, at long last, had produced a match for the unknown DNA in the case from a man in a jail all the way across the country. Here is a chilling tale of a mother's unflagging fight to track down the monster who stole her daughter's life, and the battle to ensure that he and others like him would no longer be able to evade justice. The book that we're profiling this evening is Justice for Bonnie, an Alaskan teenager's murder and her mother's

tireless crusade for the truth. With my special guests Karen Foster and ij Scheckter. Welcome to the program, and thank you for agreeing to this interview.

as a person? And two do I think they weren't being told? And do they have a space for the public to see them? So when I heard Karen's story and saw the news footage, I immediately did contact her and went down to Florida to meet with her. And I was struck not only by the heartbreaking nature of the story, of course, something no families should go through, but I was also really struck by Karen's resilience and

I stood in admiration of her approach to this. The first thing I asked her, very straight up was how do you go on I mean, I have three kids myself who are younger. But very frankly, I told her, I don't know if I could endure this losing one of them. How do you do it? Is it faith in God? Is it spirit? What made you survive? And she simply said, you know, when something like this happens and your heart is torn out like this, you have two choices. You can choose to go on or you

can choose not to. And Bonnie, she said, my daughter, Bonnie would have wanted me to choose the path of going on and honoring her legacy in the best way that I could. And she had other kids that she had to be there for and a life to live in purpose to honor Bonnie. So we had a very frank and open conversation about not only that, but details of the horrors that her family had gone through. And I really appreciated not only how honest she was with me,

but the rest of her family as well. They brought me into this world of pain and the nightmare that they had endured, but never with a judgment or expectation. They just gave me the information I needed, including the emotions and the feeling in their sense of solidarity and support to write the story in the way that I hope that I felt it would deserve to be told.

incredible story. So let's talk about Karen Foster, her background that would prepare her for this campaign, for this crusade, for this fight of her life. Tell us what her background is.

other things. She has multiple kids from different relationship and at the time before this awful event happened, she had not only Bonnie, her daughter, who was eighteen, but three other kids as well from different relationships. She had also gone from her original home in a small town in Canada to a number of different places, in large part because one of her husbands, who worked for BP, the oil company, had been moved around both Canada and the States.

So they had lived everywhere from Chestnut Creek in California to Anchorage, Alaska for a period, and many points in between, and eventually they landed back in Anchorage. But there had been time in Calgary, there had been time in different parts of the state, so they moved around a lot. They had fairly complicated but busy and fun life with

multiple kids and different households and such. Bonnie was just starting to attend the University of Anchorage in Alaska, so it was a very It was a very busy time for the family, lots of kids doing different things, Karen trying to maintain and juggle this all but a very very happy and positive existence. I encourages somewhere between kind

of a small town in big city. I think most people think of it as a bit of an outpost because it's Alaska, but in fact it's on par with places like Pittsburgh and Saint Louis in terms of its size. So it's still a very big, kind of thriving community, but because of Alaska, and it also has a very nice small town mentality where everybody kind of knows everybody.

talked to Karen and her family so much. Bonnie was a very driven, optimistic, cheerful young woman who was liked by everybody around her. She had a real activist kind of side to her. She had a friend who sadly lost her life in a drunk driving accident, and no sooner had that happened than Bonnie had started a group called Students Against Drunk Driving at her school. She was the first female on the school wrestling team, so she

was very sporty. She was very active. She was a very happy and popular sibling to her brothers and sisters. Very driven in her school work. She would get up early and go to school and study hard and then go work at Sam's club after school. So she was that of girl that people picture when you think of that kid who wants to do well, succeed, be liked, be good to people, and by all accounts, just a really fine person.

really sweet, sweet love affair going on. And Bonnie had just started her studies in September ninety four at the university and was studying diligently and putting in lots of hours in the school library and in class and as I said, working a part time job as well to make money and helping take care of her younger sister, and just starting the life of a very buttoned down freshman wanting to do great at school.

daughter move out, understood and supported her fully. So she went to live with her dad and be closer to school and be able to get to and from places. We're a little more expedition, So that was the reason for that. It didn't it didn't cause any discord in the family. It's just, you know, it's hard to let your let your kid go. You give them roots and you give them wings, but it's it's obviously tough to to to let them go as much as you love

and support them. So she had just she had just made that move and was living with her that at the time, and the other kids were split between living with with Karen and living off on their own. Her older son, Jason was living off on his own.

on the water. She and a gentleman named Jim, the gentleman she was currently in the relationship with at the time, had gone down to a place called Saint Mark's in Florida because Jim's brother Ken was getting married and so they were down there to attend the wedding and celebrate and had taken the sailboat down around the western lip of Florida, and one night there were sounds on the boat in the middle of the night that awoke them, and it turned out it was Ken, the brother, coming

to tell Karen that he had received some news from Alaska. The Alaska and Alaska and Skate States trooper had contacted him. They couldn't reach Karen because she was on the boat,

so Uh, that's who they had somehow gotten to. He showed up at the boat and Uh reached out with a yellow post it note saying to Karen, I got a call from an Alaska State trooper saying they need to talk to you, and in a in a shaky voice, he said it's about Bonnie, and so of course, UH in that moment, it's hard to describe for anybody who

hasn't gone through it. I I fortunately haven't, though I feel through Karen that I can understand it about as well as someone Ken who hasn't actually lived through the nightmare of that moment, and I think, uh, though it would be clearer coming from her. My sense of it is that it becomes kind of surreal instantly. You are in the twilight zone. You're you're somewhere else. You're spinning out, trying to make sense of what is a piece of

simple information that someone has just given you. There's a name, there's a phone number, and there's news about your daughter. But because of what all this implies or could imply, your mind obviously races and goes to the darkest places. As a parent, your mind goes to those places. Even on the best of days, your kid runs across the street and you freak out. You lose years off your life just from that event. So you can imagine what it feels like when someone reaches out with the number

of a trooper and says it's about Bonnie. What he said was she was in a hiking accident. That is the news that he had received from the trooper. So he relayed this to Karen as well. Karen was trying to, through her confounded state, make sense of it, so she asked him a number of questions over and over, even as she was trying to keep it together, and he kept saying, look, all I have is a name and a phone number, and they just need you to call them.

So they immediately packed up their things from the boat, went into town, found a payphone, and then she made the call to the trooper and the trooper told her her daughter had been in an accident, had fallen off a thirty foot cliff at a place called McHugh Creek, which is a popular place to go in Anchorage. And was that.

heavy undercover work. So she's what, I don't even know what the word is, but she's a veteran and she's hard nosed and and so immediately, what is her reaction in terms of how she deals with this Some people would deal with it differently, But how does she deal with this news initially besides this initial sort of denial that but when she does get that information, what what is inn her mind in terms of when she hears

hiking accident? What's Bonnie's experience? What does she immediately think in terms of a hiking accident.

freak out emotionally. Karen had spent some time as a volunteer undercover detective on the Anchorage Force and had spent a lot of time participating in everything from detective raids to drug busts to trying to bust people who were doing wrong in the community, So she kind of snapped into what I would call detective mode when she first heard hiking accident. Her first reaction was was that it couldn't be. One of the things she thought was Bonnie would never go alone out there. How did she get

up on a cliff? How would she fall off a cliff accidentally? How would she get there? She didn't drive a car. She started asking all of these questions naturally because of I think her detective work, and immediately started kind of interrogating in her own mind to try to put together the pieces of a that was obviously very fuzzy and preliminary for her, but that was her natural bent. So when she got on the phone to the trooper in Alaska. She started asking these questions, and of course

they had very seq ansures. They simply kept repeating the information they had, which was that we're very sorry to tell you this, but she fell off. She's lost her life, and it was clearly an accident. So she started saying, where's her idea, where was her backpack, where's her wallet, none of which they had. They had identified her from her class ring, which is all they had. So one of the questions she was asked, Karen was asking, was then what accounts for where her stuff went? How did

you get there? How can you explain a fall? Is this is an athletic girl who's strong, coordinated, and it seemed immediately absurd to her, not only the story that she would go out there by herself, but that she would have an accidental slip and fall off a cliff from that height in that way. So she immediately went into that mode and stayed there, maybe as a defense

mechanism to try to keep it together. I think we all do different things in the face of news like that, to try to stay composed, let's say, and I think that was her way of staying composed in the moment, going into interrogation mode and trying to get information. So she called journalists that she had known from the city.

She called contacts in the homicide department that she had known, just trying to pull together whatever information she could based on this vague bit of news that she had received.

her mind, that's what they've told her. What does she do to the media. What does she say to the media in terms of this hiking accident theory or conclusion that the police have made. What does she say to the media and how does the media react to her claims?

no standing in the correctional system. So in fact, the police are under no obligation to tell the family anything, which seems stunning when we say it, but it's true. So you really are kind of on an island trying to find things out by yourself. So Karen was saying to anybody who would listen, including the journalists who were now trying to get to her TV people trying to get her to do interviews, she would say yes to

all of it. And of course this is just in the hours after finding out, So she was telling people, if it's Bonnie, it can't be an accident. It must be murder. It couldn't have been an accident. None of it adds up. So she was trying to scream it from the rooftops and use any pulpit she could. She could excuse me to try to find out by enlisting the help of the media and the public and the community.

As I said, it's a tight knit community. Everybody knows everybody, and she had many contacts, so she was trying to leverage that profile to get people on side, try to find out answers along with her. The police were staying tight lipped because all they had ruled it an accident, and that's the only thing they were telling her. As soon as she got back and met with the lead detective on the case, she tried to ask every possible question she could from every angle, and she was getting

what she felt was stonewalled. At every turn. They would say to her simply, we're telling you everything we can right now. It was an accident. We're extremely sorry. We will follow every lead and find out everything we can, but there's nothing more we can tell you. So Karen did a lot of interviews, talked to everybody she could, and just tried to build a ground swell of support to get information. And you have to remember in a case like this, there's immediately a lot of frustration that

goes around. There's frustration on behalf of the police, who feel potentially that they're being told they're not doing their job if they don't have everything solved right away, which they rarely do, on behalf of the family feeling like they're being told nothing where when they're the first people who should be told. There's frustration on behalf of the community and the public who have suddenly lost a young member of They've lost one of their own, and it

promotes fear and increases anxiety. It creates a whole collective feeling of something totally different from what came before, and they want answers to So within hours you've got a bunch of different parties or factions who were kind of necessarily at cross purposes.

the relationship they had, and this question of rape. And this is a strong question for Karen to ask, and the result from this Sergeant Mars and this question put to him.

critical information, you might scare them off. You never know when someone might come forward with the critical piece that we need, and the more you're out in the public, the more that probably diss that person. That was one thing.

The other thing was that a number of people had called into the detectives to give this tidbit or that information about what they might have known about Bonnie or scene, and every time Karen had heard from one of them that they had called and would then ask Sergeant Mars or the others, they would say the same kind of

non answer, which was, we're following every lead. We don't really have the time to update you daily because that would take away from the time doing the actual work of the investigation, to which she would reply, what's the work on the investigation that you were doing on not seeing any evidence of it? And they would repeat the pad answer that the detectives have to give, which is we're doing everything we can. When she asked him was she raped, she got a similar answer, which was there's

not much we can tell you. We're following leads. She asked to see the autopsy report and again found the the shocking result that even as the mother of the victim, she had no right to go talk to the medical examiner to see the autopsy report. You would imagine that she would be the first person to be able to see such things. So Sergeant Mars alluded to vaginal injury and tear, but she was not able to obtain any more information than that, as hard as she tried to get more.

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come back in. These are defensive wounds. She knew this

from or police training. And there's no other explanation for someone having broken knuckles and bruised arms other than, you know, probably something other than an accidental slip off a cliff that that wouldn't be the case most likely, so she immediately identified that as a red flag and then some and called them back in to continue investigating, and in the course of further investigation, they found extensive other injuries eleven different lacerations on the back of Bonnie's head which

were obviously telltale well which were to Karen telltale is something other than an accidental fall, other bruises, cuts, a broken finger, et cetera. So that immediately changed the course of things.

the detectives are giving no concrete or conclusive information. So she did what she does and asked him as many questions as she could. He told her about all the different injuries, he told her about the vaginal pairs and what that implies, and what he said to her most crucially at the end was that we won't call it good news, but there's one productive thing that we can

take away from this. And Karen said, what's that? And the medical examiner said, whoever did this to your daughter left his DNA and that means that they can then try to find a match to someone.

about that when when we talk about the trial. But the fact that they had a DNA sample in Bonnie didn't necessarily give them give them any further apprehend because what you'd need to do at that point is try to find matches, you know, a one off, ad hoc kind of way. The detectives had been investigating different people, and over the course of the subsequent months and even a few years, different suspects emerged. A couple of young men who had worked with Bonnie at Sam's Club, who

were potentially suspicious for one reason or another. They would bring them in. The detectives would bring them in, test them against the DNA sample, and ultimately they all proved not to be a match. There was a bus driver who had worked on Bonnie's route who also became a suspect, who had then moved down to California, and the detectives had even flown down to interrogate him and brought him in as well to try to match the sample, and

he was also not a match. So this is a very slow, one off, step by step process, and you're not actually trying to match people until they become suspects. It's a little bit backward, one would say, and you're always trying to reverse engineer the process. So at the time, there's no database, there's no group of samples from which you can choose.

So what specifically does Karen start with and what does she move towards in terms of specific changes that are important to this story and just important for the fight against and fight injustice period.

their own court. It's each case simply because she was a member of the community who heard about the story and cared as a fellow mother excuse me, and in genesis case, as someone who had formed a group called Victims for Justice because of a tragedy in her own life. People like this came out of the woodwork to support Karen. In the case of the latter, it was something that Sergeant Mars had suggested Karen get involved in as a

way of finding support from others. And so through those different groups and that different support, Karen found at different points the continuing strength to go on and continue the crusade and the campaign. Part of what they helped her do was to raise money to get back into the media,

continue to give interviews. At the point where Karen had kind of lost hope and was becoming really despairing, people like Sandy and Janice bucked her up, helped her keep the story public, trying to rally the community around the story to try to get answers. So they had things like ads on the sides of buses saying who killed Bonnie. They wrote articles in the local newspaper. They tried to get into as much media as possible, and that did

have the effect of profile of the story. Again for pature of these things, because sadly, numbers do happen in this world. You're on page one on the first day, and then quickly it slips to the back page, and then no sooner has that happened than it disappears from people's consciousness altogether. So going back into the media and raising the awareness again had a positive effect not only on people putting more pressure on the detectives, but even

personally people coming to support Karen. You go from being the mother of the girl who was murdered, who people tend to avoid because they don't know what to say, to people coming up and hugging you spontaneously on the street and offering whatever help they can give. So from that they pushed for information. They pushed for the detective to try to be more open with them. They started pushing for laws to be changed about the collection of DNA.

Karen spent time for with Governor Palin, Sarah Palin, who helped her in a matter of I think it was thirteen days pass a bill to cause Alaska to start collecting DNA on arrest when very few states were doing it at the time.

by pessimism. Every time a new suspect comes up, you you hope, and then every time the detective calls you and says they're on a match, you're ready to give up. And I think that becomes more and more difficult over time, so that by the fourth or fifth time, you think to yourself, they they must be trying to do their jobs. But at the same time, every every person who comes up is a false lead or a dead end, so shh. You know, you try to take matters into your own

hands as much as possible. She had done things like walked Bonnie's route from home to school to try to uncover her own clues or whatever evidence she could, and y you want to give the police the benefit of the out and have faith that they're doing everything they can. And you know that yours is not the only case, and you know that unfortunately some things don't get solved. But it's hard intellectually, you know that, but emotionally that's a hard thing to manage. You still want answers.

much happening and no information really coming through. So Cara was on a trip in Manila in the Philippines with a friend, and one night on the little computer that she had brought with her on the trip, out of nowhere, an email popped up from the gentleman you referred to Tim Hunter, who had been on the force for a number of years in different capacities and actually had retired but then had been asked to come out of retirement

to go back onto the cold case unit. And she received an email from him, just a couple of lines long, introducing himself and saying there's been a development in Bonnie's case and can you contact me now? Of course she's in the Philippines and it's the early two thousands, so it's not that easy to make contact. So over the course of the next couple of days, in fits and starts, she tried to make contact with Detective hunya In exchanged a couple of email messages with him excuse me, and

he made reference to a man named Kenneth Dion. He told her over the course of a few emails that there had been a hit on the DNA of this man who was actually in a jail in of all places, New Hampshire for a different crime, and he was serving a six to fifteen there excuse me, and that there had been a hit in a match and they were investigating. So, of course, as they said after the emotional roller coaster that she had endured, your hope immediately flares, but your

skepticism does as well. So a h percent of you wants to hope, and a hundred percent of you says, don't get your hopes up because we know where this goes. So she asked him as many questions as she could, and Detective Hunter said, uh, well, he's he he has a record, we've got a DNA hit. His information is in the database in codis and uh, we're following up. That's that's what he said. We're following up and we'll tell you what we can. And so so soon after that she started for home.

So that's how serious they were. So what was that bit of information that Karen It took four years for Karen to find out that was gotten from that that interview that the trooper Hunyer had with Dion.

Tim Hunter, who would be in many people's minds the kind of archetypal figure of a soft spoken midwestern guy, very unassuming, but he demonstrated brilliant detective work in this interview with this interrogation with mister Dion. Later on they would show it at the trial and Karen would see it in full and find out everything he had done. He established a rapport with Kenneth Dion and started slowly asking him questions and uncovering inconsistencies in the story and such.

She asked him if he had ever known Bonnie, had he heard of her? And of course it was met with a bunch of denials and contradictions in the story. So when you read the transcript or see the footage of the interrogation, you come to greatly respect this man for his detective work and how pivotal this conversation was in turning things around in terms of the pre trial.

Extradition is more difficult than people think. So you would imagine, once you have a hit, why can't you just fly the man from New Hampshire to Alaska and start a trialing and get on with things. But obviously the wheels of justice turn a bit more slowly than that, and there are lots of reasons for things to be delayed. So incredibly, there were four years of pre trial hearings

and delays. Judges get switched off, people go on vacation, Attorneys and prosecutors claim they don't have enough information and need more time, a whole host of reasons that became increasingly frustrating for Karen and her family. So on one hand, there's the I don't to say exhilaration. There's the satisfaction of finding out that there's a man here who they think may be the actual killer. There's a real match, it's a person who was in the city at the time,

and that's enough to produce a lot of hope. On the other hand, you want to you want the wheels to move even faster once you know that. In a way, they move even slower because they're processing a lot of cases. They're doing these pre trials where you feel like information is coming in dribs and drabs, and meanwhile, he's still in New Hampshire, et cetera. Eventually she got a call, Karen did, from Detective Hunter saying the extradition has happened

and he's in Alaska. He's in the state. I think creates a whole bunch of discrepant feelings in someone like Karen, as the mother of the victim. You feel a whole new sense of invasiveness and disgust and repugnance for this man. And then of course you also feel the hope of things moving along, step by step, even if they're moving slowly. And so four years later, which is which is now seventeen years later from the time of the murder, the trial finally began.

of the jurors. The only thing they found with blood on it at the site of McHugh Creek was a single leaf with one drop of blood. The the the team defending beyond made a big deal out of the fact that had she been uh beaten, raped, bludge and thrown off a cliff, wouldn't you see more blood everywhere? Wouldn't you see spatters? Wouldn't you see a trailer? Excuse me, a trail of blood on the ground. Wouldn't you see uh scrapes, uh, disturbed foliage, debris everywhere? Things like that.

But they focused a lot on the blood because that leaf was the only thing found anywhere on the on or near the site with any blood on it. So that was one of the things that they made a very very big deal out of. Repeatedly They kept coming

back to that. So on one hand, on one side, you had the prosecution placing Kennethy on uh there by virtue of the evidence of the fact that his DNA was in side Bonnie's body, and you had the defense saying, there's no evidence, there's no weapon, there's one drop of blood, nobody can say they saw him, nobody saw the car that fit his description, So to them that that was enough for a reasonable doubt. And they kept coming back

to the blood again and again. When the medical examiner would take the stand and say the eleven lacerations on her head are not consistent with what would be an accidental fall where you would see kind of a random pattern of bruises and cuts and scrapes, they would come back to the blood and say, well, where's the blood from this beating and rape that you're talking about. There's no evidence of a physical beating, there's no evidence of blood, and there's none of that.

They didn't necessarily collect the things they should have. This was resolved a little bit later when they showed the video. It was actually a positive thing for Karen because it helped fill in the picture for her a little bit, to show that they had actually done a more diligent job than she had assumed. And in fact, after she saw that, she stopped the detectives in the hall and outside the courtroom and actually thanked them genuinely for doing

work that she thought they had neglected to do so. Yes, while they did provide a lot of fodder for the defense to go after them for conducting an investigation that didn't necessarily produce the evidence they might have. Frankly, the evidence might not have been there anyway.

of a an odd duck. He as someone who had contacted Karen soon after the murder or soon after the death of Bonnie had been known, and Karen had gone over to his home and had tea, and he had told Karen that he had been out that day at McHugh Creek and had seen a group of young people, two girls and two two guys, and that he he after seeing the pictures of Bonnie on TV, he remembered one of them as having been Bonnie, and that she was very light hearted and energetic, bounding down the steps

and so forth, and when he then later took the stand, as you said, he was not of much use to either side. In fact, he was he was older and a little bit I don't want to say flippant, but he was. He was kind of just talking. He didn't say much that was of help to either side because he said what he had said before to Karen that he felt he had seen her that day, but he couldn't say whether he had seen again any evidence of

Kenneth Deon. He couldn't really place a time or fix her in a specific spot, so the information that he gave kind of amounted to nothing.

kind of inconsistency. And we're not talking about a crime that happened a day ago or a month ago. We're talking about something that happened almost two decades ago. And so one of the big challenges for the prosecution was trying to get consistent stories. Well, first of all, trying to get people in the first place who could even talk about any kind of memory at the time of Bonnie, of the event of the timeline, and further to that, talk about it in a consistent and or specific way.

That's hard enough. We've all heard from psychologists about how different witness testimony can be. Take three people who saw something yesterday and you'll still inevitably almost get three different stories. Now go seventeen years into the past and try to get consistent stories out of people.

any blood? Can you prove in any way that you saw him, that he was there, that you identified his car, anything, And of course they would say, well, no, I can't. And the second thing he did, which was obviously much more objectionable and hurtful to Karen and her family, was I guess what any defense team does when they're grasping at straws, which was to call into question Bonnie's character

and integrity. So he would do things like refer to the fact that she was out playing pool with a group of other students one night and talking to a boy. You know, when she had this boyfriend in Berkeley, or the fact that she exchanged phone numbers with the classmate,

things like that. So he would ask Gary when he was on the stand about whether as her father he knew everything she did and everywhere she was all the time, And of course no parent knows that of an eighteen year old, and so he would honestly have to answer

will no, of course, and those kinds of things. This is obviously for the purpose of casting doubt in the in the jury's mind about what kind of person Bonnie was, which is reprehensible when you compare it to the comments that you get even today on let's say, the Facebook

page that we have for the book. The way people talk about Bonnie, the hurt that they still feel in the community for her loss, the kinds of testimonials that you get about her as a person stand in such stark contrast to that line of questioning that you know, even as someone who is not her parent. It even makes my blood boil.

to talk. So Yeah, he talked about the fact that he had some drug addiction problems, he had a failed marriage, he was into martial arts and carried weapons in his trunk and such, and the si is as a small kind of hooked weapon, which was consistent with one of the key injuries on the back of Bunny's head that

the medical examiner too. So while the defense was repeatedly saying these injuries would not come from a baseball bad or an axe or something else, the martial arts weapons that he had were a potentially positive reference to the kinds of injuries that she had sustained.

it last, if you're getting it at all. So you have to fill the pictures in in your head of what went on or what didn't go on, what was asked, what wasn't asked, what was investigated, and what was not. So Karen had thought for all this time that not only had they maybe bungled the investigation, but maybe had not even really conducted a full investigation. She had almost no picture in her mind of what had gone on.

Seeing the video in court really helped her make a kind of emotional passage to a place where there was some level of closure and satisfaction. On one hand, you are seeing you know, I don't want to you can't overstate the emotional power of this. You're seeing your child lying face down in a creek. That so there's that to try to deal with, but it it stands in in contrast to the the fact that at least you're you're getting some satisfaction that the police did the job

they were supposed to do. And then in terms of in terms of the trial, it also showed that a full investigation of the crime scene was done, and it showed that Bonnie was down in the creek in the cold. This is glacier fed water, so there were a couple of implications. One blood that she may have had on her may have been washed off by washed away by by the creek. Who knows, And also showed a certain

position that she was in. It showed that she was in the creek at a certain time in a certain way, and that the the It allowed the prosecution to take the position they Kennet may have murdered her put her taken her down into the creek for the very purpose of trying to wipe away any evidence that could have incriminated him.

bruss cuts, and so forth. There's a certain area in the back of the lower neck which is generally protected in a fall, and that's where she had had that injury. That was in that interesting shape, which was not just a standard one that one sees. So on one hand, the medical examiner was saying, that's not the kind of injury you would see from an accidental fall, because even when someone falls from a height, that's usually not where you get an injury. It's just protected because of the

part of the body that it's on. But doctor Burnell was saying, well, now that consistent from that height. But the prosecution did a really expert job of dissecting his testimony, not only showing that he was not the expert that he purported to be in terms of this topic, but that he was not necessarily engaged in the way a witness should be. He fell asleep at one point between

the testimonies during a break. They proved that he had not been the expert on the literature that he claimed to be, And in addition, he was the kind of person that testified at a number of different trials, and so there was the suspicion on Karen's part that he may not have been there as a fully legitimate witnessed so much as someone invested in testifying at trials.

with win. Tami Errans And testified this is excuse me, Kennethyonzek's wife, and on the stand she talked about both the difficulties they had had in their marriage, his aggressive and vio streak, and she painted a picture of him that I think helped the jurors see him as the

kind of person who could indeed commit this kind of act. Karen, to her great credit and admiration at least in my eyes, went out of the afterwards and stopped Teddy and despite all the different things that would imagine she could have said to her, expressed sympathy woman to woman, wife to wife, and told her that essentially she was sorry that she had to go through those things.

those kinds of testimonies went back and forth. Ultimately, Acution appealed to the jury's common sense and uh and and sense of truth and logic by saying, you know, we we have heard from people, and we now know who this girl is and what she was. It does not make any sense that she would have been there on her own. She we don't know how she could have

gotten there on her own way. Uh. All the testimony, the moony that you've heard, including in particular the pattern of the physical injuries and the lacerations, do not have any logical connection to the to what would be an accidental fall. And you've got a man here with a certain history. And it's true, we don't have evidence of extensive blood, we don't have a weapon, we don't have witnesses. But search your minds and listen to your hearts and come back with what is the right decision?

physic physical disturbance to the grounds. There's no one who saw this man who can put him at the scene or in connection with Bonnie. Uh. There's DNA that proves sex, that proves nothing else. There's no one who saw a car, uh, et cetera. So they stuck to the practical facts and the truthful line that there was no real concrete evidence proving murder.

But what is her reaction at the end, What is her feeling towards the likely conviction She doesn't know, of course, but what is her sense having experienced this trial, what does she think is going to happen? What's her state of mind?

there obviously throughout the trial. Over the course of these years, lots of things had happened in her family, marriages, divorces, parents, dying. She had left a brother to an accident during that time, so obviously, over the course of anybody's life in seventeen years, lots of things happened in a family, so there had been many changes for her independent of this quest. Excuse me to try to find and put away Bunny's killer. So when the jury goes out to make their decision,

it's up in the air. You want to convince yourself, obviously, with as much hope as possible, that they'll they'll come back and deliver the verdict that you want to hear. But on the other hand, you've heard the defense for weeks repeat the same line again and again, pointing out the fact that there's so little evidence, and again all they have to do is create a bit of doubt in the right person's mind, and then the man walks free, so she doesn't know she's hoping against hope.

end up coming back. Excuse me, in just a matter of hours, where the expectation was that it would take quite a bit longer than that m maybe days or weeks, who knows, But they come back in just hours, and that's exciting news because again, as a general principle, I think it stands to reason that there they decide, the more the more clear they are their agreement one way or another. Of course, that agreement could be that he's innocent,

who knows. But it's at least a moment of excitement, let's say, to know that there's a decision forthcoming, and you don't have to wait any longer to know what's going to happen.

So yes, we can certainly call that the most the most positive result that she and her family could have could have hoped for. So their reaction, I think is hard to describe. Maybe you'd call it ecstatic relief or something again, a hesitant to attach any kind of positive adjective to it, because this girl has still has still been taken away from them forever. Nothing could ever change. But for whatever counts as closure, I think they achieved that.

In that moment, the family collapses in tears and hugs endlessly. And if nothing else, at least the man who did it has now been found convicted.

And the reason for that, of course, is that if one thinks about it. Had his DNA been in the system at the time of the murder, well, that could have been matched in a matter of literally weeks. So instead of the number of years that it took not only for them to identify him, but for it to come to trial, it could have been two weeks, it could have been a month. Instead, her family had to go through that hell for twelve years before anyone was even identified, not to say nothing of the four years

of pre trial and such. But the important point here is that if you have a database of DNA collected on arrest, then other family other families can be spared the kind of hell that Karen's family had to go through for that amount of time. Now you can every RaSE the hell of losing a family member, much less a child, but you can minimize the time for having to live in an awful purgatory of not knowing.

would be devastated. These people have taken it upon themselves, very much like Karen, to join forces and join organizations and form organizations to be able to do what is absolutely necessary thinking about people in the future, as you say, so that other people won't have to endure this. So they turn this very very negative is not even the word, this devastating life event, and do some good from this.

So even though this book is a heartbreaking story of murder and years and years of almost this perfect person getting away with this murder, it is somewhat of a happy ending in terms of the result for the betterment of the judicial system itself.

you have to define what going on means. And I think for most people, going on means trying to honor the legacy of the person whom you've lost in the best way you can and in Karen's case and the case of so many other parents and families, what that means is coming together to try to make changes to prevent other people from having to experience the same thing.

And that's why I hold her so it's great admiration because she made the choice from well really from moment one to do that instead of to go into a shell, instead of to get angry, instead of to lash out, instead of to blame others, she immediately made the decision to try to get closure, but also to try to help others avoid having to go through this. And I don't think there's anything better you can say about a person.

simply look up Justice for Bonnie. They can also look up either Karen or me on Facebook or LinkedIn or Twitter, and we would be only too happy to talk to anybody about the case about Bonnie, about how they might like to support the book or the story, or the policy changes that we're trying to get them.