Great Dismal: The Murder of Kathy Bonney

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.

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Sources:
Deadly Whispers by Ted Schwarz
Investigation 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 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
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 or roasting murderers and marshmallows
around the true crime campfire. A young woman found naked

(00:21):
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.

Speaker 2 (00:52):
So campers, we're starting this one in Camden County, North Carolina,
just across the border from Virginia. Sunday, November twenty second,
nineteen eighty seven, Wes Linquist 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

(01:15):
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 seventeen, where

(01:35):
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

(01:56):
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 wigs spreading across the dark water. And I

(02:20):
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 Midud'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

(02:41):
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

(03:02):
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,

(03:23):
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 nine to one one 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 West

(03:44):
should take a seat in the back of his patrol
car and catch his breath relax a little. It wasn't
till 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

(04:06):
until the detectives arrived. Investigators thought the victim was somewhere
between her mid teens and mid twenties. It was clear
that identifying her would take some work. She'd been shot
twenty seven 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

(04:30):
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.

Speaker 1 (04:49):
She'd been shot twenty seven times with twenty two 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

(05:09):
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 Wes Lindquist a likely suspect. He was released but
told not to leave town. The young woman's identity would

(05:30):
not be a mystery for long. That morning, in Chesapeake, Virginia,
about twenty miles from where the body was found, Tom
Bonnie had tried to report his daughter Kathy as missing.
She hadn't come home that night before, but Kathy was
nineteen years old, an adult, she could only be reported
missing after twenty four hours. Wes Lindquist had found the

(05:51):
body at around three pm. At seven, Tom Bonnie called
the police to say Kathy was still missing and it
had now been twenty four 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

(06:12):
for sure that their murder victim was Kathy Bonnie, and
there were plenty of reasons why a nineteen 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

(06:34):
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

(06:54):
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 gotten into some minor league trouble when she was

(07:16):
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 lamour. 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.

Speaker 2 (07:40):
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 ten 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 Bonnie had some clue of what was brewing
between his employee and his daughter and tried to put

(08:02):
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. Cathy was riding the
hive an exciting new romance. Although her friends didn't 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

(08:24):
mess and really only defensible when you remember that they
were nineteen and twenty 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 Bonnie's junkyard business was thriving. Chesapeake

(08:47):
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 till they
started falling apart. Tom would buy their junkers for peanut,
strip them and sell the parts for a profit. He
often netted about one thousand dollars a week from the junkyard,
and you can multiply that by three to get today's value.

(09:08):
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 nineteen 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

(09:30):
body was found, he was excited to get a call
from a guy named John. John had a nineteen seventy
nine 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 four hundred bucks. Tom thought that if the Blazer

(09:54):
was how John described it, it'd be the perfect gift
for Kathy. They agreed to meet at a nearby seven
ol 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 age,
and he seemed only interested in selling the Blazer, not

(10:14):
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 seven to eleven parking lot
and waited and waited. He was worried, of course, when
Kathy didn't come back, but he was also pissed to Tom.

(10:36):
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 hum in
the morning with no sign of Kathy. He walked down

(10:57):
to the police station and tried to report her missing.
Got the whole song and dance about not being able
to report for twenty four hours He called back at
seven pm 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

(11:18):
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 nineteen year old missing for twenty four hours,
pretty much little to none. Kathy had probably been with
a boyfriend or had been out partying. She'd show up.
Cathy had, in fact stayed out all night at least

(11:38):
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.

Speaker 1 (11:50):
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,

(12:10):
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.

(12:32):
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 sr. The
Bonnies had told the officers that Kathy was five two
and one hundred and ten 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.

(12:54):
The next morning, Detective Williams went to a one salvage
to talk to Tom Bonnie, where he learned about Cathy.
These 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.

Speaker 2 (13:14):
Oh my god, oh no.

Speaker 1 (13:17):
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

(13:38):
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 the cops.
M The content of Kathy's letter haven't been made public,

(14:02):
which is understandable, so we're going to rely on Ted
Schwarz'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

(14:23):
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.

Speaker 2 (14:39):
The letter was sexually explicit, but it was also kind
of a sad, raw confessional piece of writing. Apparently all
Tom Bonnie had taken from it was that his daughter
was screwing around. He called it vulgar. She's an adult Tom,
But okay, man.

Speaker 1 (14:55):
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, Yeah,
i'd be like semi understanding if he was mad about
the affair, but he's not. He's mad about the sex.

Speaker 2 (15:08):
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?

(15:31):
Was she pregnant? Among murdered women in the US, 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

(15:54):
do with Cathy's death, and he had an alibi for
when investigators thought she'd been killed. He didn't seem a
v actually shaken up by her death, which was charming,
but he wasn't setting off any of the cops bullshit detectors.
He was probably not Kathy's killer. Still, it was way
too early to dismiss him as a suspect, so they
keep taps on him. On Wednesday morning, the coroner's office

(16:18):
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
Carroll 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.

(16:41):
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

(17:03):
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 builds, straight
brown hair, not long but not short. He had a mustache,

(17:23):
and were baseball cap as the identicit artist, Detective Castillo
honed in on more specific details, like this 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 Castillo. Tom Bonnie had described the man

(17:46):
sitting across the table from him, something that happens from
time to time with distraught witnesses, and Tom Bonnie was
still clearly distraught. Some people describe themselves too, That's pretty common.
It is interesting. Tom clearly thought that the police should
keep looking at Kathy's boyfriend, John Hoskins. Tom said that
he'd owned a sowd Off twenty two caliber rifle, but

(18:07):
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 junk
yard 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

(18:32):
rifle wasn't the only piece of potential evidence that was missing.
Shortly after Kathy's funeral, he'd sold his Chevy Impaula 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

(18:55):
with Kathy's murder other than being the car Tom had
driven her in to take a look at the Chevy Blaze,
but still they took note that Tom had sold a car.

Speaker 1 (19:05):
When detectives searched Kathy's bedroom, they found drafts of other
letters she'd sent to John Hoskins and hid in her
closet a playboy, a hustler, and a pair of handcuffs.
Kathy was clearly interested in sex, as plenty of nineteen
year old women are, but the letters showed that she
was still relatively sheltered. In one of them, she described

(19:26):
what she called a kinky scenario, but it was just
her and John drinking champagne and having sex in front
of a fireplace.

Speaker 2 (19:33):
It's weirdly, kind of wholesome, it's kind of sweet.

Speaker 1 (19:37):
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 Bonnie. Despite probing,

(20:01):
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 Bonnie, had a whiny, suck up way of

(20:21):
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. Did his
nervousness come from guilt? From fear of being caught? And
as police talked to Tom again and again, things started

(20:41):
to change in his story. His twenty two caliber rifle
hadn't been stolen. He sold it to a guy in
Virginia Beach. He and Cathy hadn't driven to seven eleven
in the Impala, It had been his tow truck. These
were significant changes to things that had happened recently, wouldn't
his story stay straight? During one interview, to try and

(21:04):
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 to accept that the young woman in them,
deathly pale with features misshaven by gunfire, was Kathy. There

(21:25):
was no big emotional breakdown, no confession. Tom figured out
that he was now a suspect in Cathy'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.

Speaker 2 (21:39):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (21:40):
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 and Paula.
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 Motor Shop
in Virginia Beach. He was there now and was getting

(22:01):
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.

Speaker 2 (22:18):
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

(22:41):
it with gas and started driving for Florida. When Williams
arrived at the body shop and found out Tom wasn't there,
he put out an alert for Tom's truck, but he
didn't know about the motor home, and Tom trundled out
of town and made a slow speed getaway down I
ninety five before turning around and heading North. The next
crime scene, technicians found blood evidence inside the Impala and

(23:04):
arrest warrant was issued for Tom Bonnie, and soon everyone
started to get a picture of who he truly was.
Tom Bonnie was born during World War Two 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

(23:29):
the date of Tom's conception.

Speaker 1 (23:31):
His dad was just a prick.

Speaker 2 (23:33):
He was also an abusive prick, both to his wife
and as kids. How bad the abuse was dependent 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 Bonnie

(23:55):
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 Cathy, who knew exactly what her dad was
doing and wouldn't play ball. Tom just would not pay rent.

(24:19):
When a landlord got around to take him to court,
there'd be a thirty 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

(24:39):
sneak over at night and just steal the bike back.
Let me sell it again, and rents and repeat till
the local heat got too much and the family would
yet again move to a new town. What a champ.

(25:17):
An odd wrinkle in this existence of constant motion came
in the nineteen seventies when Tom Bonnie became obsessed with
the TV show The Waltons, imagining a happy future with
himself as the wise old patriarch of a loving, hard
working family. I don't remember The Waltons ever having to
skip town to dodge a grand theft auto rap, but
then I haven't seen it since I was a kid.

Speaker 1 (25:39):
Yeah, that was one of those very special episodes.

Speaker 2 (25:43):
I don't recall Paul Walton smacking around his wife and
kids either, But almost as soon as he had a family,
Tom Bonnie 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

(26:04):
with another family. Tom had a short temper and fast hands.
From when she was young. Kathy occupied 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

(26:24):
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.

(26:48):
Her friends had to give fake names and change their
voices whenever they called, or else they'd get cut off,
cut off cold.

Speaker 1 (26:54):
One time, when she was sixteen, Kathy was real upset
about something and snuck out to see a girlfriend 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 gonna kill me. Tom more or

(27:16):
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.

Speaker 2 (27:24):
Jesusjon was that poor kid.

Speaker 1 (27:27):
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 mall parking lot, Tom suddenly leapt out from behind
Bruce's truck and backhanded Kathy across the face hard enough
to spin her around. Oh my god, he screamed at her,

(27:49):
calling her a tramp. And a whore, while Kathy yelled
at Bruce to run away, which he did.

Speaker 2 (27:54):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (27:55):
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.

Speaker 2 (28:08):
Yeah, he would have hated anybody, Yeah that she tried
to bond with, if any gender like friends, boyfriends, whoever, Yeah, it.

Speaker 1 (28:15):
Wouldn't it never mattered an any lifeline to the outside world.

Speaker 2 (28:19):
Exactly was wrong. Yep.

Speaker 1 (28:23):
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 was a formal dinner with an
invited speaker.

Speaker 2 (28:43):
My god, nerd alert, who would possibly want to go
to that in high school? And you know it was
like some absolute dee, like the speaker would be some
guy from the Kowanas club to talk to you about
hard work and diligence.

Speaker 1 (28:58):
I mean, yeah, it's just fun. I always thought like
footloose was a little bit of a exaggeration. Yes, seriously,
it 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.

(29:19):
The school did nothing about it.

Speaker 2 (29:21):
Ah.

Speaker 1 (29:22):
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 know, one time in high school, Kathy had a
pregnancy scare. She'd taken a test and it was negative,
but Tom had found the test and was furious. As
Kathy cried and tried to explain that she'd been raped,

(29:43):
her dad baled 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.

Speaker 2 (29:55):
Kathy's mom, Carol, had 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 flippant on a light, and he got
even worse. After Cathy's death. Tom had found a set
of handcuffs and the key in one of the cars
sold to his junkyard after Cathy was dead, but before

(30:18):
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 the relationship between Tom Bonnie and his daughter. He

(30:40):
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. Carroll wasn't the only one scared for her
life after Casie died. Cathy's younger sister, Susan, once woke

(31:03):
up to find her dad standing over her with a
knife 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,

(31:25):
she'd be next In Dover, New Jersey, Tom traded in
the motor home for a nineteen seventy nine Chevy Nova
and five thousand dollars 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

(31:48):
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,

(32:09):
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

(32:30):
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 Shiff,
while walking her beat, thought that a dude just sitting
in his car without a 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

(32:51):
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 Bonnie 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

(33:13):
Bonnie 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 confessed
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

(33:34):
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 twenty two revolver he'd found

(33:56):
an adjunk car. It sat fully loaded under a cot
in the front seat. Tom said he had it with
him to protect himself and Kathy because it was getting
dark out.

Speaker 1 (34:06):
Tom said that when he took out Kathy's letter, 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

(34:27):
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 twenty seven times. He shot it empty, reloaded,
shot it empty again, reloaded again, and shot it empty.

(34:50):
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 and 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.

Speaker 2 (35:14):
Tom, buddy, that's not a probably question.

Speaker 1 (35:17):
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

(35:40):
engine trouble. The mechanic drained out the fuel and heard
rattling in the fuel tank inside he found twenty seven
shelf casings. So as confused as Tom presented himself as
he'd carefully collected and disposed of evidence from the scene.

Speaker 2 (35:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (35:57):
Now, so far this has been a grim dark case
of generational abuse, but things are about to get weird.
Doctor 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

(36:20):
to collect newspaper clippings that he thought showed signs of
people with the condition. But what he really should have
been doing was trying out for the Olympic long jump team,
because doctor 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,

(36:41):
Doctor Dell said, that's the kind of thing a multiple
could do, and he more or less invented a history
of abuse for this ambidextrious kid he'd never met. Seems
real ethical to me.

Speaker 2 (36:56):
Oh my god. Also, I remember a headline from twenty
fifteen when pitcher Pat Van Ditti 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 A talented guy.

Speaker 1 (37:18):
That's why editors matter. So obviously, this doctor Dell was
seeing did everywhere he looked, and the Bonnie case quickly
caught his attention. News report 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

(37:40):
going to jail.

Speaker 2 (37:42):
Newspaper reports told of Carol Bonnie describing how her husband
would sometimes flip out and then not even remember a
minute later, and Doctor Dell focused on something Tom was
reported as saying about the gun used to kill Kathy.
It was thrown in the river. This, to doctor Dell
was dissociatively wage one alter personality describing something they'd witnessed

(38:04):
but not done themselves. According to Ted Schwartz's book, the
actual recording as Tom saying, I throwed it in the river,
but doctor 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

(38:27):
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 Bonnie had already been evaluated by

(38:48):
jail psychiatrists, who noticed that he played dumb whenever 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 association from
reality from time to time, although they weren't really sure
about the details. It was certainly a long way from

(39:09):
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 doctor Dell to evaluate their client.
The doctor's first impressions weren't great. He described Tom as whining,
childlike depressed and slow.

Speaker 1 (39:28):
Great start.

Speaker 2 (39:29):
Yeah, he didn't know at the time about Tom playing
dumb to the other psychiatrists, a habit he was apparently continuing.
Tom claimed 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. Doctor Dell

(39:51):
didn't get much out of Tom during that first interview.
At the end, he pressed him again and again. Tom,
who shot Cathy. I don't think she was shot at
at all, Tom said. He'd say later that Kathy had
been talking to him ever since Tom left town in
his motor home from the seat behind him, that if
he'd just turned around, he would have seen her, although

(40:11):
he never did. How much of this was invention or
actual hallucination will never know, but Tom absolutely did hear
Cathy 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

(40:33):
until he'd hanged himself. In the same cell that now
held Tom Bonnie. Emily knew that if you spoke loudly
close to the vents, your voice could be heard in
some of the other cells in an echoey 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

(40:56):
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 event was anybody but
Tom Bonnie, I'd say pretty evil too. After a few moments,

(41:17):
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 Cathy hadn't actually been pregnant. Maybe Tom was flashing
back to Kathy's high school pregnancy scare, when he'd been

(41:39):
first forced to realize she was a real person and
not a gender swapped John Boy Walton.

Speaker 1 (41:45):
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 while I was coming up fast. Doctor Dell
decided to try and use hypnosis to reach the altered personalities.

(42:05):
He was sure we're 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 court room. 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 fluff of God. But

(42:29):
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

(42:52):
you guys gonna talk to me.

Speaker 2 (42:54):
Oh okay, hmmm. Of those three options, I wonder which
one i'd pick. Great job, dot, great interview.

Speaker 1 (43:02):
Technique, objection leading the witness.

Speaker 2 (43:05):
I know, I mean, he just got what he wanted.
Like it's so so leading.

Speaker 1 (43:10):
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 uh the Satanic panic interview
those mm hmm, like it was it was like, so,
what kind of pentagram did they place you in?

Speaker 2 (43:29):
Right? Absolutely, it's a dreadful, dreadful technique just puts the
ideas right out there and then they grab onto it
because you know, he's saying right out the only way
you're gonna not have an absolutely miserable 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.
One oh one, it's so stupid.

Speaker 1 (43:50):
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 doctor Dell's urging.

(44:14):
Tom was who most people thought of as Tom Bonnie,
although he'd been created in Tom Bonnie's childhood. Just like
his other alter personalities, Tom was an ineffectual, whiny, prudish teen,
often poudy about getting in trouble for things he couldn't remember.
Mammy was literally Tom's grandmother, whom he loved. At her funeral,

(44:34):
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. Okay,
Satan was not the devil, but a powerful protective figure
who bragged that he knew everything and could do anything.

(44:55):
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. Doctor Dell thought Demian was a direct reaction
to Tom's abusive father, a violent and hateful personality capable

(45:15):
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.

Speaker 2 (45:34):
Yeah, and we're not even close to Doune. Tom apparently decided,
if this doctor's decided this is my way out of
life in prison, I'm gonna give that bitch Sybil a
run for her money. Viking, Tommy, Hitman, and Preacher were
four teenage personalities created in the same event when a
thirteen year old Tom was being beaten by his dad.

(45:54):
Viking and Tommy were both friendly, helpful kids who could
avoid punishment by being good. 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. Dad was a

(46:14):
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.

(46:38):
Most of these personalities spoke as if they were reliving
the night of the murder, with desperate pleas 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

(47:00):
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 remembered 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

(47:22):
action secret from the others. Tom's alter personalities still tried
to avoid responsibility for Cathy'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

(47:43):
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

(48:04):
it real? Everyone in Tom Bonnie's life knew he could
suddenly flip out and become foul mouth 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.

Speaker 1 (48:24):
Whiff of that.

Speaker 2 (48:25):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (48:25):
Abusers often claim they have no recollection of their outbursts
as a way to avoid responsibility. It's not a sign
of d id It's a sign of deep avoidance of
personal responsibility. I highly recommend everyone read Why Does He
Do That? By Lundy Brent Bancroft. He discusses this in detail.

Speaker 2 (48:44):
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.

Speaker 1 (48:50):
So the example, the perfect example of that Bancroft uses
in the book is oh, I just lost control, and
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 lost entirely,
why didn't she get Well, she's my wife. I don't
want to hurt her like that.

Speaker 2 (49:11):
Right.

Speaker 1 (49:11):
Oh see, you did have control.

Speaker 2 (49:13):
Mm hmm, you're right exactly. So in his conscious mind,
Tom Bonnie definitely did not have the creative chops to
just sit down and invent stuff like this absorbing his
grandmother through a flower over her crave and stuff. But
he'd been taken into a hypnotic state and continually pressured
to let his alter personalities talk. So to me, it

(49:36):
seems plausible that many of these altars sprang into being
right then and there in front of doctor Dell. The brain,
and especially an unusual brain like Tom Bonnie's can do
strange things like that under hypnosis. Lots of analysis has
been directed at Tom Bonnie'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

(49:58):
Viking and Demian and Satan didn't do much of anything
to convince the North Carolina jury that Tom Bonnie wasn't
culpable for his daughter's murder. He was found guilty of
first degree murder and sentenced to death.

Speaker 1 (50:10):
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
court room behavior at his next sentencing hearing convinced the
judge to declare a mistrial, and he suspended proceedings until
Tom was declared confident to stand trial. In nineteen ninety four,

(50:31):
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

(50:54):
sucked his mom's consciousness into his brain via a convenient daffodil,
but you know, probably probably. He wandered around for four
days before being recaptured. Tom wasn't declared competent for sentencing
until two thousand and seven, when he was given a
life sentence. The last reference to him we found was

(51:14):
from twenty twenty three, when he was in a minimum
security prison at the age of ninety one. There's no obituary,
so I assume he's still there two years later.

Speaker 2 (51:24):
Why do people like this always live to be a
million years old and like nice people will keel over
at forty 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 house,
dreaming of making it as a mystery novelist, just cut

(51:47):
down before she even hit twenty 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 his 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

(52:09):
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

(52:31):
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,
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(52:53):
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