and this is dateline. i can t believe that their baby is lying there lifeless. she was everything to me. she was so sweet everybody. state troopers said bonnie had died in a hiking accident. the said she fell off a cliff. her mother said, they were wrong. i was screaming to them, these are defensive wounds. no witnesses, no weapon. nothing left behind by a stranger s dna. we no longer have some accidental death. this was a homicide. they had no suspect. but for years, her mother kept fighting to find bonnie s killer. bonnie s mother continues her own crusade. then after more than a decade of searching, a phone call. i just got information, there was a match. can we get a conviction on just the dna? and there was something else. something about bonnie herself. it was almost like she knew something hello, and welcome to dateline. we often see headlines about dna evidence exonerating the innocent. it seems we hear less about how dna from an unknow
System. on a semen sample for bonnie craig. they got him. or the system did. codis is short for combined dna index system. it s a national database of dna profiles created by federal state and local crime labs. and codis got a hit with you. everybody was happy. the match was in new hampshire, of all places. a man who had been in prison for arm robbery back in early 2003. but nobody got around to entering his dna into codis until late 2006. they got a hit the first time with him. so, trooper hunyor flew to new hampshire to meet the man behind the match. his name was kenneth dion. hunyor had never heard of him. hi, my name is there q and a session was taped. okay, when did you get into alaska?
It was a pretty high profile case. i can t recall. i can t remember. hunyor tried to jog dion s memory. i took up bonnie s picture and showed it to him. and then, something curious happened. the man who insisted he remembered faces insisted he didn t recognize bonnie. but trooper hunyor was watching his body language. his leg started twitching. might have met her even once, the trooper asked? 18 years old? yes. hell no, my wife would ve killed me. [laughs] then he got right to the point. and the sad thing about it, later on that day her body was found at mchugh creek. whoa, whoa, whoa what are you trying to say? well, like i said, i m just out here investigating. i hear name has gone up. why would my name come up? that s what i m trying to figure out. what do you say you think? i thought we had our man. troopers looked up some of
He was civil. he answered all the questions. just like we were friends. for some reason, i got a bad memory. i forget things. faces i remember. but i forget name. i ve have already forgotten your name. well, it s tim. tim, yeah, i m sorry. no problem at all. he told me he got into heroin and cocaine he started using drugs. he was basically kicked out of the army and cocaine became a big part of his life. he did some armed robberies. to support the cocaine habits. he was in and out of prison and alaska. and then in 1996, two years after bonnie s murder, he moved back to new hampshire. where he got in trouble again. and now, here he was answering hunyor s next question. did he follow the news when he was up in alaska? oh yeah, all the time. did you ever meet someone called bonnie or anything like that?
They retested it and it turned out it wasn t him ouch. no one could believe it. back at square one? back at square one. and dealing with karen again. karen ramped up her campaign to keep the case in the public eye. bonnie s mother, karen campbell continues her own crusade to find her daughters killer. she remains unsatisfied with the investigation. the attention brought in tips. troopers eventually tested more than 100 dna samples. and nothing came of it but frustration. the case grew cold. as cold as some of the winter nights up here. and four years became six, eight, ten. the case faded from the public spotlight. so around thanksgiving, 2006, 12 years after the murder when trooper hunyor answer the phone one day couldn t believe it. the director of the state crime lab contacted me and said that they just got information that there was a match to the codis