True Crime Campfire - Great Dismal: The Murder of Kathy Bonney

Episode Date: May 23, 2025

A young woman found naked and dead in the water. A diary that held clues to a secret life. Dark truths hidden behind suburban walls, and a mind at war with itself. This week we have a tale of mystery and madness where the borders of reality itself start to crumble.Join Katie and Whitney, plus the hosts of Last Podcast on the Left, Sinisterhood, and Scared to Death, on the very first CRIMEWAVE true crime cruise! Get your fan code now--tickets go on sale February 7: CrimeWaveatSea.com/CAMPFIRESources:Deadly Whispers by Ted SchwarzInvestigation Discovery's "Swamp Murders," S1E1, “Multiple Personalities”UPI archives: https://www.upi.com/Archives/1988/11/11/Video-shows-accused-killer-as-Satan/7506595227600/Court paperwork: https://law.justia.com/cases/north-carolina/supreme-court/1991/38a89-0.html Follow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfirehttps://www.truecrimecampfirepod.com/Facebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/truecrimecampfire/?hl=enTwitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail]! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.comBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello, campers, grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. A young woman found naked and dead in the water, a diary that held clues to a secret life. Dark truths hidden behind suburban walls and a mind at war with itself. This week, we have a tale of mystery and madness where the borders of reality itself start to crumble. This is Great Dismal, the murder of Kathy Bonnie.

November 22, 1987. Wes Lindquist had gone out for a drive to clear his head after church. The pastor had been railing against men who mistreat women, and this had hit home for Wes. He'd only recently found religion, and now worked as a handyman at the church, and had just gotten engaged. Before that, though, he'd been kind of a player, very much a love him and leave him kind of dude, and the sermon had left him riddled with guilt over his fornicating past, and also about the impure thoughts that plagued him about his as-yet unconsummated new relationship. His drive took him down Highway 17, where he stopped beside the Dismal Swamp Canal to wrestle with his thoughts and skim rocks across the water. The canal runs down the eastern edge of the

great dismal swamp, a half million acres of tangled wetland that teems with life and is just about as appealing as the name suggests it will be. On this chilly November day, with bare branches scratching at the cold, clear sky as far as the eye could see, the great dismal was a dark and sinister place. Down by the water, Wes caught a glimpse of something pale and went for a closer look. He saw what he thought was a sex doll, lying half in and half out of the canal,

the hair from its wig spreading across the dark water. And I want to preface this next part by telling you that a detective later described Wes as someone who, quote, didn't have all his oars in the water. The cheese wasn't very firmly on Medud's Cracker, in other words. This is not someone who often thinks clearly and well, and he thought this blow-up doll was some kind of test sent to him by God,

and if he picked it up and flung it out into the canal as far as he could, it would be a powerful symbol of Wes rejecting his dirty, dirty past. That, at least, was what he would tell the cops, but I have a horrible suspicion that our boy Wes was fully intending to take home a blow-up doll, he found in a swamp to help him with his horrible sinful urges. At any rate, he reached out for the doll's foot. But as soon as he touched it, he felt cold, clammy flesh, and a trickle of blood ran down his hand. This was not a doll.

It was the naked body of a young woman. In a panic, Wes scrambled back into his truck and raced back towards Chesapeake where he lived, looking for anywhere by the side of the road where he could call the police. He saw a roadside phone booth and made a frantic 911 call, then headed back to wait beside the body. When a patrol officer arrived, Wes was agitated, insisting they cover up the young woman to preserve her modesty. The officer agreed with Wes that they should do that,

but first, Wes should take a seat in the back of his patrol car and catch his breath, relax a little. It wasn't until he was in there that Wes realized there's no way out of the back of a police car from the inside. The officer had met a weird, frantic man who had found a dead naked girl, and he'd figured there was a good chance the killer was standing right in front of him. He wanted to keep West secure until the detectives arrived. Investigators thought the victim was somewhere between her mid-teens and mid-20s. It was clear that identifying her would take some work.

She'd been shot 27 times, including one shot to her head that had left her face swollen and distorted. They initially suspected the victim had been killed elsewhere and dumped here. The canal was just yards from the highway. But they soon found evidence of gunfire at the scene and recovered a green sweater and a torn teddy from the side of the canal, both bloody. It looked like the victim had been shot and killed right here and then stripped naked and discarded by the side of the water. She'd been shot 27 times with 22 caliber ammunition. that suggested a couple of things. First, this was no heated spur of the moment killing. The killer had shot their gun empty, reloaded, then shot it empty again, at least twice. Second, this was obvious overkill, which often suggests some kind of close emotional relationship between killer and victim. The body was free of any signs of animal or insect activity. It hadn't been here long, probably less than a day. But it had been there too long to make West Lindquist a likely suspect. He was released, but told not to leave town.

The young woman's identity would not be a mystery for long. That morning, in Chesapeake, Virginia, about 20 miles from where the body was found, Tom Bonney had tried to report his daughter Kathy as missing. She hadn't come home the night before, but Kathy was 19 years old, an adult. She could only be reported missing after 24 hours. Wes Lindquist had found the body at around 3 p.m. At seven, Tom Bonney called the police to say Kathy was still missing, and it had now been 24 hours since anyone had seen her. The grim logic here was inescapable. A young woman was missing.

A young woman's body had been found. An officer went to interview the Bonnie family. Carefully, though. They didn't know for sure that their murder victim was Kathy Bonnie, and there were plenty of reasons why a 19-year-old girl might skip out for a day or so. Kathy Bonnie was a smart, pretty young woman with big dreams. She was a prolific writer and had her heart set on making a living with mystery novels. For now, though, she worked as the secretary at her dad's junkyard and had almost saved up

enough money to get her own place over in Virginia Beach. Kathy had five siblings, and they and their parents were all crammed into a nice but small house on Briarfield Drive. Kathy was the oldest and clearly the star of the family, the one everybody expected to make something of herself. Tom was always bragging about his smart daughter. Her mom Carol was kind of awkward and Kathy was one of her only friends, in some ways her only solid connection to life outside of the home. Kathy drove her places and made sure to carve out time to spend with her lonely mom. But Kathy also had a rebellious streak. She and her friend Jill Kelly had

got into some minor league trouble when she was younger for shoplifting underwear and vandalizing the parochial school they'd both been sent to to try and improve their behavior. But like a lot of young women, Kathy's acts of rebellion mainly revolved around la more. She developed ninja-level skills at sneaking out of the house after dark to go see her boyfriends and sneaking back in without anybody knowing. Yeah, been there, done that. Sorry, Mom. Her current boyfriend was a guy named John Hoskins. John was one year older than Kathy, and until 10 days ago he'd worked at her dad's junkyard. It's not clear why he stopped working there, but I'd bet a reasonable amount of cash that Tom Bonny had some clue of what was brewing between his employee and his daughter and tried to put the kibosh on it.

But not only had that ship already sailed, it was playing the theme from the love boat as it left the harbor. Kathy was riding the hive an exciting new romance, although her friends didn't think. think she and John would last long. They had good reason for their doubts, namely that John Hoskins was married and had a young daughter. Yikes. The whole relationship was a mess and really only defensible when you remember that they were 19 and 20 years old, which is right in the sweet spot for making awful life choices, especially when it comes to, you know, bump and uglies. But the investigator's attention would quickly focus on a second mysterious guy also named John. Tom Bonney's junkyard business was thriving.

Chesapeake was just south of Norfolk, and the naval base there was home to tens of thousands of service people, usually young, often with shitty vehicles they had to drive until they started falling apart. Tom would buy their junkers for peanuts, strip them, and sell the parts for a profit. He often netted about $1,000 a week from the junkyard, and you can multiply that by three to get today's value, so good money. With them both working in a junkyard, obviously Tom and Kathy sometimes, talked about cars. Kathy wanted one of her own, as any 19-year-old spreading her wings would,

and Tom knew exactly what her ideal vehicle was, a Chevy Blazer, a classic two-door SUV. Tom would soon tell detectives that on Saturday, the day before Kathy's body was found, he was excited to get a call from a guy named John. John had a 1979 black Chevy Blazer that had a ton of miles on it, but the engine and brakes were still in good shape and the roof didn't leak in the rain. It was still a solid vehicle, but right now John needed cash more than wheels. He was looking to sell for 400 bucks. Tom thought that if the blazer was how John described it, it'd be the perfect gift for Kathy. They agreed to meet at a nearby 7-Eleven late that afternoon, and when Tom drove an excited Kathy there, she hopped out of his car and said,

Hello, John, as easily as if she'd known him for years. John was a young guy around Kathy's and he seemed only interested in selling the blazer, not in the cute girl he'd be selling it to. And that was why Tom felt comfortable agreeing when Kathy asked to take the blazer for a test drive with John. As the black SUV rolled down the highway, Tom sat in his car in the 7-11 parking lot and waited. And waited. He was worried, of course, when Kathy didn't come back, but he was also pissed. To Tom, Kathy's independent streak was an irresponsible streak, and it would be just like her to change plans without telling him. Maybe she'd taken the blazer home to show it to her mom. Maybe John had asked her to go get a burger or something. Anyway, he wasn't going to waste the day waiting for her. He drove

home. In the morning, with no sign of Kathy, he walked down to the police station and tried to report her missing, but got the whole song and dance about not being able to report for 24 hours. He called back at 7 p.m. and made that report. The dispatcher sent an officer over to the Bonnie House, but that officer didn't know that the body of a young woman had already been recovered from the dismal swamp canal. Tom and Carol Bonnie were upset and worried, but if you've been listening to us for a while, you can probably take a guess at the degree of urgency and concern the cop showed about a 19-year-old missing for 24 hours. Pretty much little to none. Kathy had probably been with a boyfriend or been out partying. She'd show up. Kathy had in fact stayed out all night at least once before.

A few years previously, when the family had lived in Virginia Beach, she'd caught Tom peeking into her diary. She'd grabbed the book and stormed out and didn't come home till the next day. Just as he was about to leave, the dispatcher put the officer in touch with detectives at the crime scene. They wanted a photo of Kathy so they could compare it to the body, but he had to do it carefully. There was still every chance Kathy would show up alive and well, so the police didn't want to scare the Bonnies for no reason. The officer got Kathy's driver's license, making it seem like a standard part of the missing person's report, then took it straight to the crime scene by the dismal swamp canal. Detective Martin Williams took the driver's license into the ambulance where the victim's body was,

but he still couldn't be sure that this was Kathy. Virginia licenses at the time used a photo taken from the side rather than face-on, which didn't help identification, but the bigger problem was that gunshot wounds to the victim's head had misshaped and swollen her features. Detective Williams couldn't be sure, but he was close to sure. The Bonnies had told the officers that Kathy was 5'2 and 110 pounds, and that looked to be a match for the victim. No other young women had been reported missing nearby, either in Virginia or North Carolina.

The next morning, Detective Williams went to A1 Salvage to talk to Tom Bonny, where he learned about Kathy's relationship with John Hoskins and about the other John Kathy had driven off with to test drive the Chevy Blazer. Tom became obviously distraught when telling the detective that he hadn't gotten John's last name or the license plate of the blazer. Oh my God, oh no. Tom also said that with Kathy missing,

he had gone into her room to look for any clue of where she might have gone. He'd opened her diary and a letter had fallen out. It was written by Kathy, a draft of a letter to her married boyfriend, John Hoskins. Tom, obviously embarrassed, handed the letter over to Detective Williams, saying it contained nasty things. Williams glanced at the first page, realized this could be important evidence, and stuck the letter in his pocket. Tom didn't say anything, but Williams could tell he was upset that the detective was keeping the letter.

Y'all, be careful about what you just hand over to the cops. The contents of Kathy's letter haven't been made public, which is, like, understandable. So we're going to rely on Ted Schwartz's book, Deadly Whispers, which was one of our sources for this case. Ted apparently did see the letter himself. There were definitely some of Tom's nasty things in there. Kathy was a talented writer, and I'm guessing she was a girl who liked to linger over the senior sections of romance novels. She wrote to John Hoskins about what she enjoyed in their sex life, but strangely, she also wrote that she was scared of him. and thought he might hurt her.

Some of her previous sexual experiences had been unpleasant. The letter was sexually explicit, but it was also kind of a sad, raw, confessional piece of writing. Apparently, all Tom Bonney had taken from it was that his daughter was screwing around. He called it vulgar. She's an adult, Tom, but okay, man. Like, if you're snooping around your adult daughter's room,

you're not allowed to be mad if you find out she's doing adult daughter things that don't hurt anyone. Like, I'd be, like, semi-understanding if he was mad about the affair, but he's not. He's mad about the sex. Yeah, absolutely. The next day, police interviewed John Hoskins for hours at the Chesapeake Police Station. In any homicide, a romantic partner is going to be a suspect, and the circumstances of John and Kathy's relationship only intensified the suspicion. Kathy was John's mistress.

Had she pressured him to leave his wife? Threatened to tell his wife about the affair? Was she pregnant? Among murdered women in the U.S., the most common perpetrators are intimate partners, and to the police, John Hoskins seemed a much more likely suspect than Chevy Blazer John. Hoskins was open about his affair with Kathy.

He said he'd gotten a letter from her very much like the one Tom had found in her diary, which had evidently been a first draft. He denied having anything to do with Kathy's death, and he had an alibi for when investigators thought she'd been killed. He didn't seem especially shaken up, by her death, which was charming, but he wasn't setting off any of the cop's bullshit detectors. He was probably not Kathy's killer. Still, it was way too early to dismiss him as a suspect,

so they'd keep taps on him. On Wednesday morning, the coroner's office made a positive ID from fingerprint records. The body found by the side of the dismal swamp canal was that of Kathy Bonnie. Three officers went to tell Tom and Carol Bonnie that their daughter had been murdered. They fell apart, screaming and sobbing together on the couch. Then Tom slid down onto the floor, yelling out incomprehensible words and panting. He said he was going to die. There was a fire station just a few blocks away, and afraid Tom was having a heart attack, an officer called in the paramedics. Tom wasn't having a heart attack, but he was hyperventilating and having heart palpitations, a panic attack, completely understandable under the circumstances.

The paramedics helped him control his breathing and calm down just enough to agree to come to the police station later to help an artist create an image of Chevy Blazer John. Tom was able to recall lots of details, but unfortunately Chevy Blazer John was apparently a fairly nondescript kind of dude. Medium height, medium build, straight brown hair, not long but not short. He had a mustache and wore a baseball cap. As the Identicate artist, Detective Castillo, honed in on more specific details like the shape of the eyes, mouth, and hairline, the image started to look like a distinct, recognizable face. Once Tom had gone, other officers looked at the portrait and recognized the man it showed. It was Detective Castelow. Tom Bonney had described the man sitting across the table from him.

Something that happens from time to time with distraught witnesses, and Tom Bonney was still clearly distraught. some people describe themselves too that's pretty common which is interesting Tom clearly thought that the police should keep looking at Kathy's boyfriend John Hoskins Tom said that he'd owned a sawed-off 22 caliber rifle but that it and some ammunition had been stolen from his truck the theft had happened right before he'd fired Hoskins Tom didn't know the brand the serial number or anything else about the rifle that might help identify it his junkyard was a cash business and Tom felt the need to protect himself from robbery. He always had guns around, bought privately and casually with no records. Super.

And Tom's rifle wasn't the only piece of potential evidence that was missing. Shortly after Kathy's funeral, he'd sold his Chevy Impala to a guy outside a junkyard over in Norfolk. This wasn't at all unusual for Tom. He'd often sell his personal vehicle if he could get a good price and just replace it with one brought into the junkyard. And as far as investigators knew, the Impala had nothing to do with Kathy's murder, other than being the car Tom had driven her in to take a look at the Chevy Blazer. But still, they took note that Tom had sold the car. When detectives searched Kathy's bedroom, they found drafts of other letters she'd sent to John Hoskins and hidden her closet, a playboy, a hustler, and a pair of handcuffs.

Kathy was clearly interested in sex, as plenty of 19-year-old women are, but the letters showed that she was still relatively sheltered. In one of them, she described what she called a kinky scenario, but it was just her and John drinking champagne and having sex in front of a fireplace. It's weirdly kind of wholesome. It's kind of sweet. Her letters might have been R-rated,

but they weren't X-rated. Still, they made clear the truth that Kathy was a sexually active young woman, which might be an unpleasant shock to someone who still preferred to think of her as a little girl. Someone, like, say, an overprotective father. Yeah. The investigators were starting to wonder about Tom Bonney. Despite probing, nothing more came up to implicate John Hoskins,

and the other John and his black Chevy Blazer seemed to have vanished into the ether like a ghost. Maybe that's all they'd ever been. Detectives have to fight against their personal biases, and that was true in this case because none of them, like Tom Bonney, He had a whiny suck-up way of talking that made their skin crawl, and they had to keep reminding themselves that this was a grieving father that they should be nice to. But without other suspects, Tom's behavior started to take on a new light. Does his nervousness come from guilt, from fear of being caught?

And as police talked to Tom again and again, things started to change in his story. His 22-caliber rifle hadn't been stolen. He sold it to a guy in Virginia Beach. He and Kathy hadn't driven to 7-Eleven in the Impala. It had been his tow truck. These were significant changes to things that had happened recently. Why wouldn't his story stay straight? During one interview to try and startle an emotional reaction out of him,

investigators showed Tom pictures of his daughter's naked, bullet-ridden corpse from the crime scene. They didn't get the response they'd hoped for. Tom agreed that these were sad, awful pictures, but he just refused. used to accept that the young woman in them, deathly pale, with features mischabined by gunfire, was Kathy. There was no big emotional breakdown, no confession. Tom figured out that he was now a suspect in Kathy's death, but he didn't get angry.

He just seemed apologetic. Like, he felt sorry for the police for having to go to all this trouble. Wow. A few days later, Detective Williams got a call from Tom, and for the first time since Williams had met him, Tom sounded upbeat and happy. He found the Chevy Impala. He knew the police wanted to see it, so he'd driven around trying to track it down,

and wouldn't you know it, had found it at London Bridge Motorshop in Virginia Beach. He was there now and was getting ready to drive the Impala to the Chesapeake Police Department. Williams asked to speak to an employee at London Bridge, and both confirmed that was where Tom was and told her not to give him the car keys. Whether consciously or unconsciously, Tom might destroy potential evidence in the car. Tom would later claim that now that the police had the Impala, they didn't need anything else from him. These last two weeks had been deeply confusing, and Tom felt like he needed to get somewhere quiet and think things through. So he left Virginia Beach before Detective Williams reached the body shop and went back to the junkyard and switched his truck for a battered old motor home.

He filled it with gas and started driving for Florida. When Williams arrived at the body shop and found out Tom wasn't there, put out an alert for Tom's truck, but he didn't know about the motorhome, and Tom trundled out of town and made a slow-speed getaway down I-95 before turning around and heading north. The next day, crime scene technicians found blood evidence inside the Impala. An arrest warrant was issued for Tom Bonney, and soon everyone started to get a picture of who he truly was. Tom Bonney was born during World War II, while his dad was serving overseas.

Backtracking from Tom's birthday had apparently made his dad suspicious. When he came back home, he frequently accused Tom's mom of cheating on him and called Tom That Little Bastard. There wasn't actually anything suspicious about the date of Tom's conception. His dad was just a prick. He was also an abusive prick, both through his wife and his kids. How bad the abuse was depended on who you asked. Tom's sister said they'd both occasionally felt their dad's belt,

but Tom claimed his childhood was a constant stream of terrible beatings. His sister said that just didn't happen. For most of his adult life, Tom Bonney was a crooked hustler, dragging his family all over the south and justifying his dishonesty by telling himself he was just doing what was necessary to support them. His family got used to Tom coming home and telling them that they were all going to have to use a different name for a little while. They all went along with it, except for Kathy, who knew exactly what her dad was doing and wouldn't play ball. Tom just would not pay rent. When a landlord got around to taking him to

court, there'd be a 30-day window before eviction. Before that time was up, the Bonnie family would have a new name and be living in a new city, renting from some new sucker. One of Tom's regular scams was to sell somebody a motorcycle. As part of the transaction, he'd get the buyer's address, and in a few days, he'd sneak over at night and just steal the bike back. Then he'd sell it again, and rinse and repeat until the local heat got too much and the family would yet again move to a new town. What a champ. An odd wrinkle in this existence of constant motion came in the 1970s when Tom Bonney became obsessed with the TV show The Waltons, imagining a happy future with himself as the wise old patriarch of a loving, hardworking family. I don't remember The Waltons ever having to skip town to dodge a Grand Theft Auto Wrap, but then I haven't seen it since I was a kid.

Yeah, that was one of those very special episodes. I don't recall Paul Walton smacking around his wife and kids either, but almost as soon as he had a family, Tom Bonney started inflicting the same abuse he'd suffered onto them. They lived in Florida initially and racked up frequent visits from social services because of Tom hitting his kids. One young son was entirely removed from the home and fostered with another family. Tom had a short temper and fast hands.

From when she was young, Kathy, a lot of Tom's attention. Some people just have a bright light around them, an energy that draws other people to them. That's not always a good thing. Tom was uncomfortable letting Kathy out of his sight for long, except when she went to classes at the parochial school. If Tom had to go out on an errand, he'd make Kathy come with him. He was intensely jealous of her attention, even with her friends. If one of Kathy's girlfriends called just a few times, Tom would demand that Kathy cut her off, have nothing to do with her ever again. God, that is so toxic. Her friends had to give fake names and change their voices whenever they called, or else they'd get cut off,

cut off cold. One time when she was 16, Kathy was real upset about something and snuck out to see a girlfriend and talk about it. Once they were in the car, the friend just had time to say, what's wrong, before Tom pulled up alongside in his truck. Kathy said, oh, no, and started driving. Tom chased them. Kathy started crying and said, oh my God, he's going to kill me. Tom more or less ran them off the road, then pulled Kathy out of the car by her hair and started slapping her. Then he threw her in the truck and drove her home. Jesus Jones, that poor kid. None of Kathy's boyfriends were allowed anywhere near the house. Tom could barely stand knowing they existed. One time, Kathy snuck out to watch a movie at the mall with her high school boyfriend Bruce. When they were walking across the parking lot, Tom suddenly left out from behind Bruce's truck and backhanded Kathy across the face hard enough to spin her around. He screamed at her, calling her a tramp and a whore while Kathy yelled at Bruce to run away, which he did. One of the main reasons Tom sent Kathy to a Christian parochial school was because he worried she'd meet the wrong type of boy in the public school

system. But there was no right type of boy, and there never would be. Yeah, he would have hated anybody. that she tried to bond with, of any gender, like friends, boyfriends, whoever. Yeah, it never mattered. Any lifeline to the outside world was wrong. Yep. A childhood of constant motion had pretty much made Kathy give up on making friends at her new schools. She was kind of a loner, spending a lot of time writing, and she had no interest in extracurriculars. She skipped her proms, and who can blame her, because her school thought dancing was sinful, and prom.

and prom was a formal dinner with an invited speaker. Oh, my God, nerd alert. Who would possibly want to go to that in high school? And you know it was like some absolute dweeb. Like the speaker would be some like guy from the Kiwanis Club to talk to you about hard work and diligence. You know what I mean? Yeah. What fun.

I always thought like footloose was a little bit of a exaggeration. Yeah, seriously. Turns out, not so much. Not so much. Several times, Kathy showed up to school with bruises and made no secret about the fact that her dad had hit her. The school did nothing about it. Ugh. One of the only friends she made there was Jill Kelly, a fellow rebel, and the two of them flung bricks through windows at the school.

Can't honestly say I blame them. Hell no. One time in high school, Kathy had a pregnancy scare. She'd taken a test and it was negative, but Tom had found that. test and was furious. As Kathy cried and tried to explain that she'd been raped, her dad bawled his fist and punched her as hard as he could in the stomach, then shoved her down the stairs. Jesus. This was the Tom Bonnie that everyone thought loved his daughter more than anything. Kathy's mom, Carol, it had kind of a nightmare childhood, which sadly often leaves people

less able to escape abuse in their adult lives. Tom's violent temper could come on as fast as flipping on a light, and he got even worse after Kathy's death. Tom had found a set of handcuffs and the key in one of the cars sold to his junkyard. After Kathy was dead, but before Tom left town, he'd taken his wife Carol into their bedroom, handcuffed her to the bed, and sexually assaulted her. He'd never used any handcuffs on Carol before. And I want to be clear that we're definitely moving into speculation here, okay, but lots of people have wondered about the exact nature of relationship between Tom Bonnie and his daughter. He was never charged with any sexual abuse of his children, but there was that pair of handcuffs hidden in Kathy's closet, which still seems out

of character with her own fairly vanilla fantasies. Were those handcuffs, Tom's too? Ugh, such an awful thought. Carol wasn't the only one scared for her life after Kathy died. Kathy's younger sister Susan once woke up to find her dad standing over her with a nice in his hand and a crazy look in his eyes. She'd already been scared of him. The night Kathy disappeared, Susan had asked her dad where she was. Tom had grinned and said, Kathy's gone, then started laughing like a cartoon villain. Susan was terrified that whatever had happened to Kathy, she'd be next. In Dover, New Jersey, Tom traded in the motorhome for a 1979 Chevy Nova and $5,000 in cash, then meandered down to Daytona Beach, Florida, and worked

day labor jobs, dreaming wistfully of a happy, Walton-like reunion with his family. In fact, Carol Bonnie was terrified of him and had frequent nightmares of Tom chasing her around the house and violently beating her. That was a scenario that had played out for real many times during their marriage. She was convinced Tom had murdered Kathy, and she was worried enough about the other children that she asked social services to put them in foster care until Tom was caught. God Almighty. In January, Tom had had enough of Daytona Beach and hit the road once again. Also, he hadn't been paying his rent, of course, and things in Florida were about to get a little

too toasty for him. He drove to Indianapolis for no reason other than that's where the interstate took him and discovered that Indiana in the wintertime is pretty damn cold. But he got lost in the city and frustrated and nearly out of gas pulled into a parking lot and sat there with his parking lights on. This was not the best part of town and police officer Julie Schiff while walking her beat thought that a dude just sitting in his car with out-of-state plates was weird enough that she radioed in for a license check. At the same time, Tom saw her and waved her over to ask directions to the interstate. As she got closer, Julie's headquarters called her back to tell her the car was registered to a Tom Bonney wanted in North Carolina for murder. She drew her gun and told

Tom to get out of the car. He was arrested with no resistance. Officers from Virginia and North Carolina flew up to escort Tom Bonney on his extradition flight south, and he was soon comfortable enough with them to talk openly about Kathy's death, which they recorded. Tom mostly sort of kind of confess to killing his daughter and would essentially stick to this version of events. He had driven Kathy out to the great dismal canal to confront her about the letter he'd found while snooping in her diary, to tell her her behavior was unacceptable. And remember, we're talking about his fully adult daughter here. Even if you accept this narrative and you absolutely should not, the problem is Tom's obsessive controlling behavior, not anything Kathy was doing. Tom had a gun in the car,

a nine-shot 22 revolver he'd found in a junk car. It sat fully loaded under a coat in the front seat. Tom said he had it with him to protect himself and Kathy because it was getting dark out. Tom said that when he took out Kathy's litter, she knew right away that he'd been going through her diary and she was furious. She'd lunged for the gun, Tom said. Well, sort of said. Actually, one of the cops suggested that's how things might have gone, and Tom was like, gosh, how did you know? How Kathy had even known the gun was there, it wasn't clear, but she and Tom struggled over it until it accidentally went off and shot Kathy in the head.

Right. Everything else that happened, Tom claimed he couldn't remember. His revolver held nine bullets, and Kathy had been shot 27 times. He shot it empty, reloaded, shot it empty again, reloaded again, and shot it empty. Then he stripped her naked and dumped her in the canal. He said he didn't remember any of it, but he was his usual whiny, compliant self. When pressed for details, he said, whatever you tell me, I don't know, whatever the papers say, whatever you say.

When the detective asked if he remembered taking off his daughter's clothes, he said, Probably. Tom, buddy, that's not a probably question. He said he remembered the struggle for the gun, and after that, I can't remember no more. I just, it's a bad feeling. It's a feeling I don't know how to get straight. When you go over the end, the edge or something, you just,

it's like you're on remote control. Don't stop. Most of his story was vague and confused. Not long after, the tow truck at Tom's junkyard had engine trouble. The mechanic drained out the fuel and heard rattling in the fuel tank. Inside, he found 27 shells casings. So, as confused as Tom presented himself as, he'd carefully collected and disposed of evidence from the scene.

Yeah. Now, so far, this has been a grim, dark case of generational abuse, but things are about to get weird. Dr. Paul Dell was a psychiatry professor at Eastern Virginia Medical School. His specialty was family therapy, but he had a fascination with dissociative identity disorder, or, as it was called at the time, multiple personality disorder. The guy liked to collect newspaper clippings,

that he thought showed signs of people with a condition. But what he really should have been doing was trying out for the Olympic long jump team because Dr. Dell could make some huge leaps. For example, he read about a high school baseball player who could pitch both left and right-handed. I said to myself, Dr. Dell said, that's the kind of thing a multiple could do. And he more or less invented a history of abuse for this ambidextrous kid. never met. Seems real ethical to me. Oh my God. Also, I remember a headline from 2015 when pitcher Pat Vindiddy made his first appearance for the Oakland A's. He could pitch with both

hands, too. And the headline said, amphibious pitcher makes debut. A baseball star and a teenage mutant ninja turtle. Talented guy. That's why editors matter. So obviously, this Dr. Dell was seeing DID everywhere he looked, and the Bonnie case quickly caught his attention. News reports showed Tom in very different moods, hiding his face from the cameras on his way to arraignment, then demanding to make a statement to the press before going to jail. Newspaper reports told of Carol Bonnie describing how her husband would sometimes flip out and then not even remember a minute later. And Dr. Dell focused on something Tom was reported as saying about the gun used to kill Kathy. It was throwed in the river.

This to Dr. Dell was dissociative language, one alter personality describing something they'd witnessed but not done themselves. According to Ted Schwartz's book, the actual recording has Tom saying, I throated in the river, but Dr. Dell didn't know that at the time. He happened to be a casual acquaintance of Tom's defense attorney, and he called him up to say, I think I know what's going on with this guy. Multiple personality disorder, now more commonly called dissociative identity disorder, is a condition characterized by the existence of two or more distinct identities within one person, often with separate names, behaviors, and memories.

Contrary to what you may have seen on TikTok, it's actually very, very rare, and often associated with severe childhood trauma or abuse. Tom Bonney had already been evaluated by jail psychiatrists, who noticed that he played dumb whenever he played dumb whenever he. he was with the doctors, but not when he was with the other inmates. He was trying to manipulate them. Nevertheless, the psychiatrist thought that Tom genuinely did experience dissociation from reality from time to time, although they weren't really sure about the details. It was certainly a long way from a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. The trial date was coming up soon, and Tom's defense

team was desperate. They asked Dr. Dell to evaluate their client. The doctor's first impressions weren't great. He described Tom as whining, childlike, depressed, and slow. Great start. Yeah. He didn't know at the time about Tom playing dumb to the other psychiatrist, a habit he was apparently continuing. Tom claimed to not remember how old or how tall he was. This was a guy who'd made money ripping people off all across the South for decades. He might have had a weird brain, but he wasn't an idiot. Dr. Dell didn't get much out of Tom during that first interview. At the end, he pressed him again and again. Tom, who shot Kathy? I don't think she was shot at all, Tom said. He'd say later that Kathy had been talking to

him ever since Tom left town in his motorhome, from the seat behind him, that if he just turned around, he would have seen her, although he never did. How much of this was invention or actual hallucination, we'll never know, but Tom absolutely did hear Kathy speaking to him in his jail cell. A young woman called Emily Weston was at the district jail at the same time as Tom. She knew the jail well. She'd been in there several times, although not as often as her dad, who'd been in and out a lot until he'd hanged himself in the same cell that now held Tom Bonny. Emily knew that if you spoke loudly close to the vents, your voice could be heard in some of the other cells, in an echo-y, kind of ghostly way,

and she knew that the vent in her own cell connected to Tom's. Jail is boring, and one night Emily decided to have a little fun. She put on a little girl voice and called into the vent, Daddy, Daddy, why did you do me like that? Why did you shoot me all those times, Daddy? I didn't do anything. Holy shit, that is so creepy. And if the person on the other end of the vent was anybody but Tom Bonnie,

I'd say pretty evil, too. After a few moments, she heard Tom's voice come back. Because you're pregnant. You're pregnant, too. This stopped being funny for Emily at this point, or as she put it, it freaked me motherfucking out. I bet. Kathy hadn't actually been pregnant.

Maybe Tom was flashing back to Kathy's high school pregnancy scare when he'd been first forced to realize she was a real person and not a gender-swapped genre. one boy Walton. Emily didn't try the voice trick again, but she told other female inmates, and plenty of them did the same thing when they were in a cell connected to Tom's. Tom heard his daughter's voice through the vents most nights. Because the trial was coming up fast, Dr. Dell decided to try and use hypnosis to reach the altar personalities he was sure were lurking inside Tom.

He didn't have any experience with criminal cases, or he might have been more wary about how evidence from hypnosis would go down in a courtroom. He got Tom into a hypnotic state and tried to cajole another personality to come forward. I know you guys are in there, he said. It's not really a secret. For the love of God. But he got nothing until he made clear what the stakes were. Look, you guys got three options, and only three. Either you go to court and you get convicted, then you're sentenced to prison for a long time. Or you can go to court and you get convicted and you get sentenced to death. Or the third alternative is you go to court and they decide the place you belong is in a hospital. Those are the only three alternatives here. So you guys going to talk to me?

Oh, okay. Hmm. Of those three options, I wonder which one I'd pick. Great job, Doc. Great interview technique. Um, objection leading the witness. I know. I mean, he just got what he wanted. Like, it's so, it's so leading. This is, this is exactly how, Like the, I forget which daycare it was. It's exactly how the interviewers that interviewed those kids during the, the satanic panic interviewed those kids. Like it was, it was like, so what kind of pentagram did they place you in? Right.

Absolutely. It's a dreadful technique just puts the ideas right out there. And then they grab onto it because, you know, he's saying right out out. The only way you're going to not have an absolutely miserable. triple time for the rest of your life is if you tell us what we want to hear. I mean, it's just, it's like coercion 101. It's so stupid. A high-pitched sobbing voice came from Tom. I've got to protect her. Don't shoot her. I'm going to protect her. I love her. Don't shoot. He's going to shoot her. Don't. Don't. Don't. This timid, panicky speaker had the unlikely

name of Viking and was just the first of many personalities that would now spill out at Dr. Del urging. Tom was who most people thought of as Tom Bonney, although he'd been created in Tom Bonney's childhood, just like his other altar personalities. Tom was an ineffectual, whiny, prudish teen, often pouty about getting in trouble for things he couldn't remember. Mammy was literally Tom's grandmother, whom he loved. At her funeral, Tom had taken a flower from her grave as a memento. But Mammy had still been alive in her coffin, just waiting for this chance to travel up through the flower and into Tom, where she'd remained as a comforting presence. Satan was not the devil, but a powerful protective figure who bragged that he knew everything

and could do anything. He hated God and Jesus and called Tom the wimp and claimed he could control anyone. But in fact, the strongest personality was Demian, who could take over Satan whenever he wanted. Dr. Dell thought Demian was a direct reaction to Tom's abusive father. a violent and hateful personality capable of explosive rage. He thought Demian was responsible for the violence Tom directed at his own family. He also thought it was

highly likely Demian had molested Kathy, something he managed to hide from the other personalities. Demian could control all the other personalities without them knowing about it. Yeah, and we're not even close to Dunn. Tom apparently decided, if this doctor's decided, this is my way out of life

in prison, I'm going to give that bitch Sibble a for her money. Viking, Tommy, Hitman, and Preacher were four teenage personalities created in the same event when a 13-year-old Tom was being beaten by his dad. Viking and Tommy were both friendly, helpful kids who could avoid punishment by being good. Preacher was all logic and religious reason, who could use his words to convince Tom's dad to be a better person. And Hitman was there to stand up and take revenge on whoever hurt Tom. Y'all take in notes? I'm not done yet. I'm not done Dad was a fantasy father figure, loving and kind and very different from Tom's real-life experience. And then there was Kathy herself.

Just like with Mammy, Tom had taken a flower from Kathy's casket, and through that, his daughter had flowed into him. Only Tom could see her. Kathy enjoyed being with Tom, keeping him company and offering him any support he needed. Most of these personalities spoke as if they were reliving the night of the murder with desperate please for Kathy to not get into the car. They knew Satan was going to kill her, although only Demian knew that he was the one controlling Satan all the time. Satan recounted the murder much as Tom had told the police. Kathy had lunged for the gun, they struggled, and he'd accidentally shot her in the head. Although he'd been planning to shoot her anyway. Kathy had struggled out of the car,

still alive, and Satan had shot her again and again. None of the personalities remember taking off Kathy's clothes, or at least none was willing to admit it. I guess if you accept the internal logic of all this, it could have been Demian who was able to keep his action secret from the others. Tom's alter personality still tried to avoid responsibility for Kathy's death, putting at least some of the blame onto her for initiating the struggle over the gun. I don't think for a second that that's what happened. Tom drove her to the canal, yelled at her, and shot her in the head. Satan recalled the incident

when Tom had punched Kathy in the belly and shoved her down the stairs except to him Kathy had just stumbled and he'd accidentally brushed his hand against her trying to stop her from falling if these alter personalities

were a way to avoid unpleasant realities they were doing their job so that's a lot right question is was any of it real everyone in Tom Bonnie's life knew he could suddenly flip out and become foul-maph

and aggressive, and that he would at least claim to have no memory of what he'd done afterwards. But there were just those two states, normal Tom and angry Tom, not this elaborate set of personalities. Nobody'd ever gotten so much as a whiff of that. Yeah, abusers often claim they have no recollection of their outbursts as a way to avoid responsibility. It's not a sign of DID. It's a sign of deep avoidance of personal responsibility. I highly recommend everyone read why does he do that by Lundy Brandcroft he discusses this in detail my ex used to do that he would i mean he would put me through absolute hell and he would claim he didn't remember any of it the next day the the example the perfect example of um that that uh bandcroft uses in the book

is oh i just lost control and and the the psychiatrist says okay well you know if you lost control you push her to the ground why didn't you kick her in the head right like if you you you lost entire, why didn't she get, well, she's my wife. I don't want to hurt her like that. Right. Oh, so you did have control. Mm-hmm. Right. Exactly. So in his conscious mind, Tom Bonny definitely did not have the creative chops to just sit down and invent stuff like this, absorbing his grandmother through a flower over her grave and stuff. But he'd been taken into a hypnotic state and continually pressured to let his alter personalities talk. So to me, it seems plausible that many of these.

alters sprang into being right then and there in front of Dr. Dell. The brain, and especially an unusual brain like Tom Bonnies, can do strange things like that under hypnosis. Lots of analysis has been directed at Tom Bonney's brain over the decades, and I guess we'll never know for sure what was going on in there, but we do know that tales of Viking and Demian and Satan didn't do much of anything to convince a North Carolina jury that Tom Bonney wasn't culpable for his daughter's murder. He was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to death. When Tom's appeals reached the North Carolina Supreme Court, they avoided the death sentence on the basis that the jury had been improperly instructed, although the murder conviction

stuck. Tom's courtroom behavior at his next sentencing hearing convinced the judge to declare a mistrial, and he suspended proceedings until Tom was declared competent to stand trial. In 1994, Tom and another prisoner escaped from central prison in Raleigh by crawling through a trash compacting shoot and hiding in a garbage truck. Authorities were mostly convinced that the two of them had been smushed to death by the trash compactor, but they'd both gotten out. Tom visited the graves of Kathy and his mother who died while he'd been on death row. We don't have any sources on whether he sucked his mom's consciousness into his brain via a convenient daffodil, but, you know, Prawley. Prolly.

He wandered around for four days before being recaptured. Tom wasn't declared competent for sentencing until 2007, when he was given a life sentence. The last reference to him we found was from 2023 when he was in a minimum security prison at the age of 91. There's no obituary, so I assume he's still there two years later. Why do people like this always live to be a million years old, and like nice people will kill a over at 40. It's like, is evil some kind of preservative? I don't get it. This is such a sad, disturbing story. A young woman, just on the cusp of freedom, saving money to get the hell out of her parents stifling how, streaming of making it as a mystery novelist. Just cut down before

she even hit 20 by a dad who found one racy letter and decided his daughter was a filthy slut. It's just awful. And I have a theory. I'm pretty sure that this is the case that inspired David Lynch's TV show Twin Peaks. Now, if you're a fan, you've probably made that connection already. We've got a dad possessed by an evil spirit, beautiful young daughter who's living a double life, secret diary. I mean, it's so close. If David Lynch did not know about this case, it's one of the most bizarre coincidences I've ever seen. And like Twin Peaks, the story at its core is a story of innocence versus evil, goodness versus meanness and jealousy. There's something very dark fairy tale about it, right down to the name of the place where it happened, the great

dismal swamp. It's heartbreaking that the one place where Kathy should have felt safe, the person she should have trusted more than anyone, ended up as her greatest danger. So that was a wild one, right, campers? You know we'll have another one for you next week. But for now, lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe until we get together again around the true crime campfire. If you haven't booked your spot on the Crime Wave True Crime Cruise from November 3rd through November 7th, get on it, y'all. Join Katie and me, plus last podcast on the left, scared to death, and sinisterhood for a rock and good time at sea. There will be buffets, there will be swimming pools, there will be nights out on the deck looking at the stars. We will be king of the world, okay?

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