Original subtitles

Harlan, over here!

Ladies and gentlemen, Harlan Coben.

He's the greatest thriller writer.

Aw, come on.

Coben's written over 30 "New York Times" bestsellers.

With over a dozen hit TV shows and movies.

Just when you think you have it all figured out,

think again.

I'm Harlan Coben.

For most of my career, I've written about

the moment an ordinary life is suddenly shattered.

You're one thing before

and something completely different after.

I'm walking through a neighborhood like that now,

where people soon wake up and head to work,

drive carpools, catch buses.

That's how it was for college student Bonnie Craig.

She got dressed and walked a mile and a half

to catch a bus to campus, just as she had

so many mornings before.

But this is real life, not a novel.

And real life doesn't always give you the next chapter

when you need it.

And that's where our mystery begins.

Bonnie was an old soul.

I've never met anybody as nice and as giving as her.

She was just very loving and willing to help

with any situation.

Bonnie Craig's body was found

at the bottom of a ledge at McHugh Creek.

The cause of death a head injury.

How is that possible?

Like, why would somebody be running

and just slide off of a cliff?

This is not from a fall.

Two days after Bonnie Craig's death,

her mother and sister are convinced

foul play is involved.

Troopers now agree.

We had DNA samples.

Investigators say calls come in every day,

but still there is no break in the case.

My sister's murder took over our lives for a long time.

Four years later, troopers have no new leads,

and their investigation has tapered off.

My only focus was on finding a killer.

How could I give up?

There's no way.

In the fall of 2006, we finally get the call

we've been waiting for.

The director of our state crime lab

told me they got a hit in CODIS.

It matched DNA evidence found on Bonnie Craig's body.

A crime happened here.

The past isn't what it seemed.

The story told turns out to be deception.

And just when you're sure you have the answer...

911.

What is the address of your emergency?

Hello? Anyone there?

There's one final twist.

That day, I wanted to go out on my own for a hike

and wanted to just explore.

The creek was off to the right.

It wasn't the main trail by any means.

I just started kind of walking around that area

and taking pictures.

I noticed the creek ended.

There was a rock wall that came down.

So I couldn't go any further.

When I looked around the corner,

I saw a body in the water, face down.

I got spooked and panicked.

And I just thought I needed to call for help.

Investigators took me out to the cliff.

And that's when we saw Bonnie lying in the pool of water

in the creek.

It was off the beaten path, where the creek comes down

from the mountain into a little pool of water

before it goes into the ocean.

We weren't exactly sure what her cause of death was.

They just knew she went off the cliff.

Did someone do it on purpose?

Did she accidentally fall? Why was she there?

I was a single mom with two kids, Jason and Bonnie.

Their biological father wasn't in the picture.

And then I met Gary.

We ended up getting married and having two more.

Gary took over the role of father

for both Bonnie and Jason.

Gary was a great dad.

He was always there for every soccer game, coaching them.

Jason, Bonnie, Samantha, and I,

we just hung out all the time together and played.

Bonnie loved mothering her younger brother and sister.

She would feed them.

Didn't mind changing diapers.

My parents, Karen and Gary, got divorced

when I was in sixth grade.

Bonnie stepped up.

If someone was feeling down, she would always cheer us up.

When she got something in her head and she wanted to do it,

she was gonna do it regardless of what other people thought.

She was one of the first girls in her school

to ever join the wrestling team.

Her attitude when wrestling was never get pinned.

There are people who weren't very nice to her about it,

but she was bound and determined.

Bonnie started attending University of Alaska Anchorage

in fall of 1994.

She was wanting to be a psychiatrist or social worker.

She only made it five weeks into college.

We identified her body from a class ring she had.

Her name was inside of it.

After dinner, the police showed up at our house

with a pastor.

They asked for my dad to come outside.

We watched our dad fall to his knees.

And we knew something was terribly wrong.

And my sister and I were just praying it wasn't Bonnie.

We were told that she was in a hiking accident

and fell off a cliff and that she had passed away.

I had to go to the funeral home and identify Bonnie.

The first time I saw her face,

I knew it was Bonnie.

And I couldn't believe it.

And you're just shaking and weak

and feel like everything's been torn out of you.

I could see her hands, and they were bruised.

And her knuckle was broken.

And at that point, it was like, no,

the Alaska State Troopers need to get back.

This was no accident.

This was intentional.

During the autopsy, we found that her clothes

were not buttoned properly.

We conducted a rape kit.

We sent that to the crime lab to have them

checked for any type of DNA.

She had marks on her hands and knuckles

that we described as defensive wounds.

She had suffered what we call blunt force trauma

to the head area, which could be from a club, a hammer,

crowbar, any heavy object.

And she was beaten.

All the injuries were inconsistent with a fall.

We were just trying to figure out why and how

she ended up out in McHugh Creek.

She would leave our house early in the morning

on the days that she had class.

Bonnie didn't drive.

She would take the bus to University of Anchorage Alaska

or to Sam's Club, where she was working.

Bonnie's walk to the bus stop was 2 1/2 miles,

where she picked up her first bus.

I believe that someone came into contact with Bonnie

before the bus stop.

We've gotta find evidence to prove

this was an intentional killing.

I had worked as a journalist in the courts.

When the Anchorage Police Department

were looking for women, I decided to join the force

and went through the reserve police academy

in 1991.

The drug trade in Alaska is pretty significant.

It was a very active drug ring.

I started doing the drug buys and undercover stuff.

So people went to prison because of me.

Bonnie was called my Xerox copy.

I could see how someone could very easily

have mistaken Bonnie for me.

She looked like me. She was my size.

Maybe somebody wanted revenge.

Oh, my gosh, what if Bonnie died because of me?

Maybe she was mistaken for me.

We create partitions in our lives...

work, home, family.

But for someone like Karen Foster,

those clean lines can become blurred.

Maybe someone out there has been watching her,

plotting to settle the score.

Maybe the job followed her home and targeted the family

she was trying so hard to protect.

I had just participated in a four-agency drug bust.

So that was involving the Alaska State Troopers,

I was the one who had to identify these people.

They were arrested and put in jail.

And just before Bonnie's murder, they had been released.

She really felt that it was some drug dealers that

she helped bring down in Anchorage that

did this to Bonnie for revenge for the case

that she was working against them.

She saw her position as an undercover cop

with the Anchorage Police Department

as a major threat to her family.

But our investigators researched.

And the lead did not have anything to do

with why Bonnie was killed.

They were just low-level marijuana guys.

We've all seen the fiction cliché

where one cop warns another not to get too personally involved.

Sounds good, sounds logical.

But when the victim is your own child,

does a parent really have a choice?

I needed to know who killed Bonnie,

to protect other people's kids.

You can't give up.

We went back to McHugh Creek,

looking for any other type of evidence.

Our investigator found one leaf

near the edge of the cliff

that had a drop of blood on it.

It turned out it was a positive match

for Bonnie's blood.

That told us that she was injured

before she fell off the cliff.

The investigators never found Bonnie's backpack, ID,

or anything else that she had.

We assumed that the perpetrator destroyed it.

Didn't want anybody to find it.

We have to look at the people closest to the victim first.

They're the ones that usually have the most contact.

The most important person to Bonnie was definitely Cameron.

Cameron meant a lot to her.

He was closely involved with her,

so it would have been easy to do something to her.

Cameron and Bonnie met in school.

They started dating in their senior year.

Cameron was really her first love.

When Cameron was accepted to UC Berkeley,

Bonnie really wanted to go down there and be there with him.

I wanted her to go to University of Alaska.

I thought Anchorage is safe.

My sister and Cameron kept in touch daily.

They would email constantly and call when they can.

They were writing each other daily.

You could tell that they really

didn't like being apart.

Bonnie and Cameron had basically decided

that McHugh Creek was their place.

They loved going there.

But troopers learned that Cameron,

he was going to college in California.

So we couldn't pin anything on him.

He wasn't even in the state.

He would never have harmed Bonnie.

Bonnie also had a stepfather.

There were brothers and sisters.

You always start at the center because a lot of times,

it could be a family member.

So we started checking around

with her family members.

They always become persons of interest

until we can either make them or break them.

We know Bonnie's mom and dad were divorced.

She was living with her stepdad, Gary.

Gary and I were divorced

about a year before Bonnie died

because he didn't want me to be involved

in the police department.

But I want to help people.

The kids were going back and forth, week on, week off.

After the murder, Gary was acting weird.

He didn't want me to go up and take everything

out of Bonnie's room.

He had locked her door.

Didn't want anybody disturbing anything.

When we learned from Karen that Gary locked up.

Bonnie's bedroom and did not want anyone to go in there

and disturb anything, threw up some red flags for us.

Gary also said he wanted to take her body

across the country and be buried alongside

other family members.

To me it was like, no, we need to keep her here.

We need to keep her body intact

to preserve any kind of evidence.

You know, I got really concerned and scared.

Our family was taken to the troopers station.

We were all fingerprinted, all had our ID taken,

and we all had our DNA taken at the time too.

We all were questioned for hours.

They definitely put a spotlight on my dad as a suspect.

When we got Gary's DNA, you could see the impact

it had on the family.

I could see them starting to question Gary to see

if he had anything to do with this.

It's like every possibility is running through your head.

I just thought, no. How could this be?

But you think maybe something fired off in him

and he got upset.

Does he know something?

What's he trying to hide?

Is there something in there he doesn't want us to find?

Grief is the cruelest of companions.

It shades and colors our lives in unpredictable ways.

We all grieve differently.

There's no right way to carry a horrible burden.

So maybe that's what's going on here,

a man trapped in his own cycle of sorrow.

Or maybe when someone guards the door to the past

this fiercely, you have to ask yourself,

is he protecting a memory or is he protecting himself?

A search warrant was obtained to get in Bonnie's bedroom.

We went to the room, but we didn't find anything.

It just seemed like Gary wants to keep her possessions

the way she left them.

They checked on his coworkers and an alibi.

And he was in a meeting at the time.

Also, the DNA results could not come back to him.

We discovered that he was not the person we were looking for.

It was a major relief.

When I'm looking back on things now and knowing a lot more

about how everybody deals with grief,

it made sense that he wanted to preserve

the little bit left that he had of Bonnie.

He loved her like a daughter.

She loved him like a dad.

They were really close.

Obvious suspects don't stay suspects for long.

They get vetted, cleared, and forgotten.

But when the obvious names run out and the list goes empty,

the real secrets begin to surface.

That's when a mystery stops being a case

and becomes an obsession.

I know as we continued the investigation,

the troopers discovered that Bonnie worked at Sam's Club.

She had mentioned to me that she had a coworker

that creeped her out.

She did tell me that he had been able to look up

her information in their computer system,

knew where she lived, knew her phone number.

She went to her boss and told him,

this guy's making me feel uncomfortable.

We contacted Sam's Club and discovered that actually,

there were a couple coworkers she worked with

that really piqued our interest.

One of the coworkers, Bonnie made a complaint

against him that he was harassing her

and wouldn't leave her alone.

The second individual that we were looking at

that worked at Sam's Club, he was supposed to be

at a meeting that day, but he didn't

show up for the meeting.

And no one could figure out why.

That was during the time frame when we figured.

Bonnie was murdered.

When you find out that someone's alibi isn't really

sticking up or, you know, someone is

harassing the victim, you really get the feeling

you may be close to solving this thing.

We located that individual who was missing

an appointment at work, obtained his DNA sample,

and he was cleared.

We also talked to the other individual,

and he was cleared too.

There was no match on the DNA samples again.

Now we're back to square one.

You're really under the pressure

because the longer it drags on,

the less likely you are gonna be able to find anything.

Alaska is such a transient state.

People move around all the time.

You know, at first, I expected

that we would have an answer within the first week.

And then it was, okay, maybe a couple of weeks.

And it dragged on and on.

I kept asking questions, and I didn't get answers.

Tonight at the Office of Victims for Justice,

Friends and Family of Bonnie Craig

held its first meeting.

I was working with the Victims for Justice

and finally got to take a look at the results of the autopsy.

As much as it is incredibly difficult

to look at all these pictures, it was something

that I needed to see.

We don't tell the family members the whole story,

you know, someone like Karen.

There are certain aspects that we can't let anyone know.

We can't have anything leaked, aspects we keep out

that only the killer would know.

During the autopsy, we were looking at the skull,

all the lacerations on the back of her head,

and what looked like a violent sexual assault.

That's when I learned that she was sexually assaulted,

that she died because of repeated blows to her head.

I got a phone call from Bonnie's English teacher.

She was very concerned that there was a student

in the class that she was convinced

might have killed Bonnie.

He was late for class.

Looked like he just got out of the shower.

And the teacher had the opinion that

he was wearing an excess of cologne or aftershave

to cover up a smell maybe.

The English teacher told me that she feared this student.

She was not comfortable with him being in the class anymore.

She showed me a stream-of-consciousness diary.

He had mentioned that September 28th

was going to be a trying day,

that he was gonna be put to a test.

Bonnie was murdered September 28th.

There was also another entry a couple days later.

It said, die, bitch.

When working on a case like this,

you examine everyone... friends, classmates,

even strangers in the hallway.

And you realize you don't really know any of them.

Makes you wonder, who is carrying a secret?

Who's hiding behind a façade?

In the end, the truth isn't found in the obvious.

It's found in the gap between who we pretend to be

and who we really are.

When we're investigating a crime,

we're always looking at suspicious people.

There was one of the students at the university.

Bonnie was nervous about, so much that

she told some people about it.

A couple days later, he mentioned to other students

that he was there at the crime scene

when they were recovering Bonnie's body.

A lot of times, investigators will

see if there's anyone suspicious

or matches the description of a suspect at a crime scene.

You don't just interview them.

You also interview people they were probably with.

You wanna make sure that they have a good alibi.

We had our investigators look at his alibi,

and it was confirmed by his mother.

We were able to clear him with DNA also.

So when we put everything together, it was a false lead.

It's just unbearable to continue

to go back again and again and not get any information.

I kept saying, I gotta find the killer.

All my years as being an investigator,

I've had cases where families get involved.

They come in and ask questions.

But when we say, please be assured

we are doing everything in our power,

nine out of ten times they're happy with that.

They just wanna make sure you haven't

forgot about their loved ones.

But Karen, she was the complete opposite.

She was always there.

She would not let go.

She was frustrated.

She made it sound like she was being told one thing

and felt something different.

Karen suffers every time she sees

her daughter's face on these posters,

but that pain cannot compare with the misery

and the frustration of not knowing who killed Bonnie.

It was tough on them, but it was rightfully so.

I couldn't just sit back and wait.

It was at 5:00 in the morning

on September 28th of last year

that Bonnie set out for her long walk

from home to the bus stop.

She never made it.

Investigators say calls come in every day,

but still there is no break in the case.

And that was over a year ago.

Still, nothing.

This became her life.

And she wasn't happy with the job the troopers were doing.

Her way of doing the investigation

was making Bonnie's presence known in the media continually.

Somebody out there knows what happened.

And we desperately need to hear from them.

We set up Friends and Family of Bonnie Craig

and established a fund for a reward.

We started with posters.

We got bus signs.

Bumper stickers on cars, billboards.

We don't want that killer out there.

Let people know that, yeah, you're gonna get caught,

and you're not gonna get away with it.

Waking up week after week, year after year

and still not knowing what happened,

who the killer is, it haunts you.

The lack of closure can paralyze you,

make you wither away.

Or in Karen's case, it can do the opposite.

It can fuel you.

I can't imagine losing my child like that.

Good for Karen for being relentless

and being that squeaky wheel.

How could I give up?

I needed to protect other people's kids.

But three years after the killing,

investigators are no closer to a suspect

than they were one week after the murder.

We collected over 100 DNA samples during this case.

And all of them were checked and cleared.

One thing we've always been taught

is put some new eyes on the case.

They may see something you don't see.

A new investigator, while reading over the case,

discovered a bus driver for the community bus service,

who is also the bus driver for the bus that

Bonnie took to school every day.

What we found of interest was,

the day that she was killed,

the normal bus driver for that route was off.

It's easy to overlook the person we see every day,

a face behind a windshield, a presence

so constant, so predictable it fades into the background.

But that's the trick.

If you never break character, if you never miss a beat,

you become invisible.

We found that the normal bus driver for that route

was not working that day.

He'd been suspended

for making improper advances on young ladies.

We found out that the driver was at one time

in a camper truck in the parking lot of Sam's Club,

where Bonnie worked.

And at other times, he was on college grounds

where she was going to school.

While checking out the bus driver,

then we learned that he was in California.

And I flew down to California.

When I got there, he was out of town.

We asked local law enforcement agencies to keep an eye out,

to see if they would interview him and get a DNA sample.

I got a call from the Alaska State Troopers.

And I was thrilled that maybe we had caught the killer.

We then obtain this DNA sample from the bus driver.

And when the report came back, it said it was a partial hit.

There was a DNA hit.

It was a brand-new technology at the time.

It was such a high match.

It was something like 90% match.

We were saying, okay, this is the guy.

Finally, there was this little sliver of hope.

Then we get the call from the lab

that they did some further testing on it.

It turned out that he wasn't our guy.

There's criteria that has to be met

in order for it to be a hit.

Like, it could be 50%, 60, 70, 80, 90.

It can even go up to 99%.

But if it's not 100%, it's not a hit.

It didn't match.

It was devastating.

But we wouldn't give up.

I did interviews for "Anchorage Daily News,".

"Northern Lights," the university newspaper,

went on to "Unsolved Mysteries"

and James Van Praagh

to get some answers of what direction we could go.

It's just hard because, you now, another year has gone by

and they haven't solved the crime.

I had to step away from being a reserve police officer.

I was obsessed with finding a killer.

There's bound to be information out there.

Maybe this will help bring it forward.

She's been on a crusade, trying as hard

as she could to find out who killed her daughter.

Five years, you're thinking, wow,

they're not gonna find anyone.

Ten years go by, and we still don't have answers.

The longer it takes, the harder it is.

12 years after the murder, we finally got a call.

There was a hit on the DNA in CODIS.

CODIS is a national crime database put on by the FBI

for a DNA profile.

When you get a DNA profile on a case,

you enter it into CODIS,

and it runs through the national archives,

and you see if it up with a matching DNA

from anywhere the country.

It wasn't until 1998 that CODIS came out.

By the early, mid-2000s, they were really able

to successfully do matches with DNA.

A name came back.

The crime lab said he was our guy.

We got a hit in CODIS, 100% match.

We were so excited.

Suspect's name was Kenneth Dion.

He was in prison in New Hampshire.

Kenneth was not entered into CODIS for all those years.

He was in prison, and they just happened to get

around to running his DNA.

As soon as it was entered into CODIS, we got a hit.

Science is the hero here...

science and a determined mother.

Of course, my heart jumped a couple jumps,

but we don't know what happened.

It was a mystery to us how he was involved.

I started doing a timeline on him.

We learned that he was in jail

a couple different times in Alaska.

We found out that he had an extensive criminal history.

We discovered that he was a paratrooper.

He was assigned to the Anchorage area.

He got involved in drugs.

And once he got out,

he started getting into problems.

He was charged with second-degree robbery, DWI,

disorderly conduct, and assault.

In 1994, he was in jail in Alaska.

And then he was released.

That's when Bonnie was murdered.

We told him that we are investigating this case,

and throw out Bonnie's name.

When I asked him about Bonnie, if he ever met her,

if he ever had any sexual contact with her,

he just said no.

He had never met her. Don't know who she is.

Never had any type of sexual relations with her.

I had a nice picture of Bonnie.

And I took that out and put it on the table.

And at that time, his whole body language just changed.

You know, he just kept staring at that picture,

and then his legs started twitching

and bouncing up and down.

And I'm thinking, okay, I got him now.

And right away, I want a lawyer.

Our biggest problem with the case

was trying to figure out how these two met.

What brought them together?

Kenneth Dion, it was a name I've never heard of before.

You start to think, is he a friend of your sister's?

Did he go to school with her?

Or how did they know each other?

It doesn't appear that Mr. Dion and Bonnie Craig

were associated in any respect.

I mean, we're looking at right now, perhaps

just a random abduction.

They believe that he came into contact with Bonnie

way before the bus stop, abducted her.

It was a completely random crime.

Now that we had his DNA, after our interview with Dion,

we notified New Hampshire that we have an arrest warrant.

They made the arrest, and we were able

to get him extradited to Alaska.

And he was put into our system until

we had the trial four years later.

Now, 16 years later,

a murder trial is about to begin.

Finally, a jury will hear the Bonnie Craig story

and Dion's defense.

Could we get a conviction just with the DNA?

The key points of evidence that the DA brought

were the injuries to Bonnie, the self-defense wounds,

the blows to the back of her head...

11 linear lacerations in the back of the skull.

The sexual assault and the DNA.

- But that's his sperm. - But that's his DNA.

Seeing him for the first time, it's...

It's still scary.

It was tough on the family

because now we're going through a murder trial,

and they're not all 100%.

And we have to relive this memory.

It was always a full court house.

She was really remembered out there

and loved by a lot of people.

In his interview, Kenneth Dion said that

he didn't know Bonnie.

The defense attorney said he could have had sex

with her a day or two before.

But when they played the video with Tim Hunyor

interviewing Kenneth Dion...

He's testifying against himself, right?

It was only four hours that the jury was out.

Mr. Dion, if you and counsel would rise.

We, the jury, find the defendant, Kenneth Dion...

Guilty of murder in the first degree

as charged in count one of the indictment,

guilty of murder in the second degree

as charged in count two of the indictment,

guilty of murder in the second degree

as charged in count three of the indictment.

Verdict four, we, the jury, find the defendant,

Kenneth Dion, guilty of sexual assault

in the first degree.

I'm thrilled, just thrilled.

You know, it's scarier than hell being in the situation.

He could have gotten away with it.

It was almost like the weight of the world

is off your shoulders because you really

have lived for so long thinking that

he's gonna get away with it.

And to hear those words, guilty, guilty, guilty,

is unbelievably freeing.

It was justice.

I always felt like this feeling would

lift off of me of, it's done. It's over with.

But it didn't. She's not here.

So that was hard.

Here's a cold, hard reality.

The world has a very short memory

for other people's tragedies.

For everyone else, the noise fades,

the files are archived, and the story is over.

But some families refuse to let others

decide how their story ends.

They take back the pen and keep writing

until the truth is finally revealed.

Here we had waited 12 years

when I realized that he was arrested

in 1994, 1996, and 2002.

They never took his DNA.

If DNA was taken at the time,

we would have known within days or weeks.

And we ended up suffering through 12 years.

When this case first came out,

there wasn't that many states that

had mandatory DNA collection for violent offenders.

And let me tell you, the pain of losing your child

to murder and then being revictimized

by the criminal justice system

intensifies that pain ten times.

Karen was trying to push

to have this mandated by state law.

Now I need to push for collection of DNA

on all felony arrests.

I started calling all of the lawmakers in Juneau.

And we got the House and the Senate to approve the law,

that DNA would be collected on all felony arrests.

And it became the seventh state in the United States

to collect DNA on arrest.

They called it the Bonnie Craig Amendment.

I think it's great when you can take something that

is so horrible in your life and turn it into something

that matters and will hopefully impact other people's lives.

We started with 7 states, and we got to 30.

And we need to keep on going for Bonnie.

I felt like she deserved so much more.

And I would have done anything to bring her back.

My sister was a very loving person

that would pick you up when you're down,

and she would help you out if you're struggling.

And she was there just to make you smile.

She just loved us.

I truly believe that she's watching over all of us.

We are so proud of her.

And we miss her.

We will always miss her.

12 years... that's how long Bonnie Craig's case sat

in a cold file, waiting for the technology

to catch up to the crime.

In that time, her mother carried a burden

almost too heavy to bear.

But through persistence and love,

Karen found a way to turn her own heartbreak

into a lifeline for others.

In our stories, the final twist is usually a shock.

But here the twist is something more poignant.

A mother didn't just find justice for her daughter.

She changed laws to protect us all.

She built a shield in Bonnie's name,

hoping to spare other families the loss

that changed hers forever.

I'm Harlan Coben.

Good night.