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

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

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

What unfolds is almost beyond belief. Cathy – a mesmerisingly formidable presence whose fierceness nearly burns a hole in the screen – begins with a simple internet search that yields her daughter’s new name and details of her disappearance. Then, with the help of her devoted husband Edward and amateur online investigator Carl Koppelman (an accountant who had compiled a searchable spreadsheet of 19,000 missing persons’ names and histories and solved several cases before Cathy met him), she parlayed it into an all-out assault on the world until it returned her daughter to her.

It is an extraordinary story of one woman’s determination but, while it clearly longs to lean into this and become a reverential paean to maternal instinct, the supranatural bond between mother and child and assorted other pieces of semi-claptrap, the actual facts are so terrible that the film-makers manage to restrain themselves and deliver an account that does them justice.

Aundria had not had the better life the 16-year-old Cathy had been promised adoption would provide. Former school friends who contact her through the website she sets up remember seeing Dennis hit his daughter, once so hard at the dinner table for mentioning the food (she and her friend had been given sandwiches while the couple ate hamburgers) that he almost knocked her off her chair. Aundria made accusations of molestation against Dennis that were all but ignored by her school, the police, the church. It was shortly after that that she supposedly ran away.

Gradually, through the website and a freedom of information request, the truth about Dennis emerges. Once again we find ourselves in a world in which a monstrous man is rarely caught after committing awful acts and when he is, never punished in a way commensurate with his crimes. You can maybe watch one or two of these documentaries and shake your head at the unlucky series of failings that led to a predator going free. Taken in sum, they are a damning indictment of the embedded inequities of the system and unparalleled, undeniable proof of how little female lives are worth and how little their suffering counts.

Cathy carries on piecing together Aundria’s story, becoming increasingly convinced not just that Dennis killed her but that her body is buried in the back yard of the house the Bowmans now live in. Carl thinks this is nonsense – the wood across from the house they lived in at the time would be the logical place. “But I knew,” says Cathy. “He felt he’d had the right to kill her, that he owned her. And he would keep her close.” Is that maternal instinct? Or is that an understanding we all come to as we move through a world where unassailable patterns of entitlement only become clearer the longer we live in it?

One of Dennis’s convictions – 40 years after the event – is for the 1980 murder of 25-year-old Kathleen Doyle. Her aunt Christine’s contribution should be etched on the minds of anyone setting out to make or watch these films. “Except for the fact that he took her from us, he is superfluous to her story … Don’t let the people who did this awful thing be the people everyone remembers. Let them remember the young women who have died.”

• Into the Fire: The Lost Daughter is on Netflix now