Tucked within the low-lying coastal plains of southeastern Virginia, the Great Dismal Swamp is a living labyrinth of towering bald cypress trees emerging from murky, muddy pools.
In ancient times, the peat rich forests that surround the swamp were the favored hunting grounds of the native Chesepian and Nansemond tribes, who stalked deer, wild turkey and feral hogs through black gum trees that turned a bright orange-pink in the fall.
While more recently, the swamps served as a refuge for those escaping a life of slavery in the antebellum South.
These days, the Great Dismal Swamp has been designated a National Wildlife Refuge, with contemporary conservation efforts ensuring a boom in the populations of black bears, bobcats and otters, along with its seventy species of reptiles and amphibians, and its two hundred and thirteen varieties of birds. The swamp is even home to a few alligators; vagrants who swim up the Pasquotank River from the wetlands of North Carolina.
But in the late nineteen eighties, it played host to one of the most chilling criminal events of the decade.
Thomas Lee Bonney was born and raised in Chesapeake, Virginia, and as a young man, he established an auto salvage yard which he grew into a very successful business.
He married a woman named Dorothy Mae in the late nineteen sixties, then in August of 1968, they welcomed the first of six children into the world; a girl, named Kathy Carol Bonney.
Thomas loved his daughter dearly, but Dorothy Mae soon noticed a certain overprotectiveness in her husband. He was both a religious and reasonable man, meaning his wife felt perfectly comfortable in confronting such behavior.
But when she raised the issue, Thomas made a heart-rending confession.
Although he didn’t go into too much detail, Thomas explained he’d grown up in the shadow of a deeply abusive father.
He was neglected for long periods of time, and whenever his father was around, he’d subject his young son to severe physical abuse for even the most minor of infractions.
Thomas told Dorothy Mae that he “loved and despised his father” with equal measure, and that he was terrified of making the same terrible mistakes.
His wife assured him that, together, they’d ensure that didn’t happen. But Thomas never quite rid himself of his overprotective instincts.
Despite Thomas Bonney’s overbearing supervision, or perhaps as a result of it, his daughter’s teenage years were characterized by a growing spirit of rebelliousness.
When he emphasized the importance of her education, she responded by dropping out of high school; then after he tried to enforce a so-called ‘no dating’ rule, a nineteen-year-old Kathy began an illicit affair with a married man more than twenty years her senior.
Concerned by his daughter’s behavior, Thomas searched her bedroom for signs of anything troubling, and in a desk drawer, he found a letter written by her much older paramour.
It’s believed this letter contained extremely graphic descriptions of illicit acts, and upon reading it, Thomas became incensed.
He explained to Kathy that dating such a venally deranged individual wasn’t safe, and that extramarital affairs either ended with heartbreak at best, or violence at worst. Yet to his horror, his daughter refused to listen.
Thomas was faced with every father’s worst nightmare.
He loved his daughter dearly, but her increasingly reckless behavior was putting her at risk in ways that were impossible for him to explain. Then in late fall of 1987, Thomas Bonney’s deepest and most primal fears – became reality.
On the morning of November 22nd, Thomas contacted the Chesapeake police department to file a missing person’s report.
He told them that, the previous evening, he’d driven his daughter to a nearby 7-Eleven to meet a man named John.
According to Kathy, John wanted to sell his old Chevvy Blazer, which due to its age and heavy mileage, was being offered at a very reasonable price. Naturally, she wanted to give the SUV a test drive before handing over the cash, and had agreed to meet its owner at the 7-Eleven parking lot at around 9pm.
Thomas agreed to give Kathy a ride, but only if he could observe the meeting to ensure it wasn’t dating related. His daughter seemed only too happy to let him witness the exchange, so off they went.
Thomas then recalled how, upon arriving at the 7-Eleven parking lot, he witnessed his daughter’s meeting with the Chevy’s owner, John.
Kathy climbed into the SUV’s driver’s seat, took it for a spin around the parking lot, then handed over the cash once she was happy with its performance.
Thomas said he congratulated his daughter on the successful purchase of her first car, then in her excitement, she asked if she could take it for a spin before meeting him back home.
Realizing that stifling one of his daughter’s first major milestones would be foolish, the usually overprotective Thomas agreed to the proposal. But not without a warning to be home before midnight.
Kathy agreed climbed into the driver’s seat of her brand-new Chevy, then drove off with a toot of her horn. But upon waking up the following morning, Thomas discovered that neither his daughter, nor her new car, where anywhere to be found.
Police told Thomas his fatherly concern was understandable, but in the eyes of the law, Kathy was an adult, who was free to do as she pleased.
Under the circumstances, a missing person’s report could only be filed after twenty-four hours without contact.
Thomas tried waiting until the 9pm deadline, but was so gripped with terror over his daughter’s wellbeing that he called back just prior to seven to express his anxiety.
Then, and only then, was an officer dispatched to the Bonney family home.
Upon the arrival of law enforcement, Thomas repeated his account of giving Kathy a ride to purchase the SUV.
He believed that John, the vehicle’s apparent owner, might somehow be involved in his daughter’s disappearance. But given her newfound mobility, she could’ve driven just about anywhere before getting herself into trouble.
Thomas also mentioned the extramarital affair Kathy had been conducting, and how he believed the man in question was a dangerous deviant.
Then, after sharing as much pertinent information as possible, the officer thanked Thomas for his time, then departed his residence.
For Kathy’s friends and family, the night of November 21st was a sleepless one.
While many feared that driving at night on deserted Virginia highways had resulted in some kind of road accident, others suspected Kathy’s recklessness had finally borne a terrible fruit.
Yet the reality - was much more horrifying.
The following afternoon, a local hunter named James Sawyer was trudging along a heavily wooded area near the Great Dismal Swamp Canal, when he made a deeply alarming discovery.
A pair of bloodstained underwear were sitting near the water’s edge, and just a few feet away, the naked body of an adult female was lying in a disturbingly unnatural position.
Her torso was riddled with gunshot wounds, and she’d been so badly beaten that she could only be identified via her fingerprints.
Then, and only then, did police realize that the victim in question – was the missing nineteen-year-old – Kathy Bonney.
A subsequent search of the teenager’s bedroom revealed a half-finished letter to her married paramour (the contents of which have never been made public), along with some adult magazines, and a pair of handcuffs.
Thomas was devastated.
He had long suspected that his daughter’s older lover was priming her for deviancy, and the discovery of the handcuffs seemed only to confirm his worst fears.
In light of that, his cooperation with detectives was enthusiastic to say the least, with Thomas giving hours upon hours of recorded interviews in the hopes some minor detail would force a break in the case.
Yet the more he talked, the more certain inconsistencies in his story became apparent.
The first thing that aroused the detectives’ suspicion was a casual change of detail in Thomas’ story.
For weeks, he’d claimed to have driven his daughter to the test-drive in his wrecker. Then one day, he suddenly claimed to have used his Chevrolet.
Thomas also told detectives that, in the weeks before his daughter’s murder, he’d sold his nine-shot .22 revolver for a hundred bucks.
But when police asked the name of the person he’d sold it to, Thomas claimed he couldn’t remember.
Detectives then spoke to Thomas’s business partner, whom he operated the salvage yard with.
In his experience, Thomas was an honest, hardworking, and deeply conscientious person; a man who made doing business with him a pleasure.
But over the previous few weeks, he’d started noticing something strange.
One day, Tom’s partner approached him with a solution to an ongoing problem they’d been experiencing. He explained the situation, then laid out the proposed solution in as simple a manner as possible.
Yet to his surprise, Thomas Bonney didn’t seem to know what he was talking about.
He remained quiet, maintaining a confused, almost bewildered look about him. Then when his partner asked if he understood, Thomas replied with a nervous sounding - “yes, sir”.
Firstly, Thomas never, ever called his partner “sir”.
The two weren’t exactly close friends, but they’d been working together long enough to have developed a casual but trusting partnership.
The most formal Thomas ever got was calling his partner by his first name. So, where had the “sir” suddenly come from?
Later that day, Thomas’s business partner reapproached him regarding his potential solution, just to make sure all had been understood.
Thomas seemed to have returned to his composed and confident self. But to his partner’s confusion, he claimed to have no recollection of the discussion regarding their problem.
Assuming Thomas had been preoccupied, and had not fully listened, his partner reexplained his proposal. Thomas understood perfectly, gave him the go-ahead, then concluded the discussion amicably.
His partner was pleased, yet remained so unsettled regarding Thomas’s apparent memory loss, that it was one of the first things he mentioned when questioned by police.
Detectives soon turned to Kathy’s siblings for answers, and in December of ‘87, they spoke to her younger sister.
Susan Bonny claimed that, despite his wholesome veneer, her “paranoid control freak” of a father was feared by all his children. But none more so than she.
You see, it was her that’d seen blood stains in her father’s Chevy, on the same night Kathy was thought to have disappeared; it was her that’d pretended not to see them; and it was her that prayed her father remained ignorant of her discovery.
Not wishing to raise suspicion, detectives found a way of casually asking about the Chevy's whereabouts. When Thomas told them he’d sold it in the days following his daughter’s disappearance, they rushed to track it down, and in doing so, a terrible truth began to emerge.
After seizing Thomas Bonney’s Chevy from its new owner, forensic investigators conducted a thorough analysis of the suspect vehicle.
They located the blood stains Susan had referred to, along with long strands of hair in the vehicle’s trunk, then quickly determined both belonged to Kathy.
It’s not clear how Thomas Bonney got wind of the investigation’s sudden shift, but on December 11th of 1987, he fled Chesapeake in the middle of the night.
Dorothy Mae was so alarmed by some of the things her husband said and did as he packed up his car that she reported herself to the police that same day, claiming she couldn’t protect herself or her children from a man she no longer recognized.
The manhunt lasted almost two months, then on January 31st of 1988, Thomas Bonney was arrested in Indiana.
Once back in Virginia, and having been detained on suspicion of his daughter’s disappearance, Thomas was interviewed extensively by psychologist Dr. Paul Dell.
Using hypnotherapy, Dr. Dell was able to identify ten separate personalities contained within Bonney’s mind, leading the doctor to conclude that Thomas was one of the most profoundly deranged individuals he’d ever come across.
Along with Tom, the so-called ‘host’ personality, Dell identified personas named Satan, Mamie, Demian, Viking, Tommy, Hitman, Preacher, Dad, and finally – Kathy.
These personas had been created by Thomas’s psyche, with each serving as a conduit by which he could process the horrific abuses of his childhood; which were apparently far, far worse than anyone had been led to believe.
Dr. Dell conducted extensive interviews with many of Thomas’s split personalities, including one in which he claimed Kathy was still alive, and visited him in his cell every night once the guards turned out the lights.
In Dr. Dell’s opinion, such prolonged interactions left him in no doubt whatsoever that Thomas was suffering from an acutely severe case of dissociative identity disorder, along with post-traumatic stress disorder and mixed personality disorder.
Dr. Dell also claimed Thomas had extensively expanded on his childhood traumas, how his father had subjected him to unthinkable levels of emotional and physical torture, and that his issues surrounding control stemmed from the sudden and unexpected death of his grandmother, when he was just ten years old.
However, at Thomas’s trial, a prosecution appointed psychiatrist contested Dell’s diagnosis.
Dr. Philip Coons had not interviewed Thomas personally, nor did he posit any official diagnoses. But after reviewing a whopping thirteen hours of Dell’s footage, he realized the doctor had almost completely failed to main proper standards of care.
Not only was Dr. Dell’s line of questioning unbefitting of a psychiatric interview, but he’d allowed Bonney to ramble, asked him suggestive and leasing questions, and had improperly suggested to Bonney that he might have other personalities while the patient was under hypnosis.
What’s more, Dr. Coons argued that the death of a family member was insufficient to induce a dissociative identity disorder, then made the shocking claim that Thomas’s symptoms might’ve actually been created by Dr. Dell’s hypnosis.
Dr. Coons’ testimony was somewhat backed up by a physician, who’d interacted with Thomas Bonney during treatment in October of 1988.
This physician argued Thomas was indeed displaying symptoms consistent with Dr. Dell’s diagnosis, but disagreed with the idea that Thomas had somehow blacked out while murdering Kathy, or was otherwise unaware of the severity of his acts.
In summation, the prosecution’s argument was as follows.
On the night of Kathy’s murder, it had in fact been Thomas Bonney’s idea to go check out an SUV that was for sale, but the entire story had been nothing but a fabrication.
It’s clear the pair stopped by the 7-Eleven that Thomas spoke of, as Susan Bonney actually witnessed her father’s vehicle pulling out of the lot.
However, instead of taking Kathy to view a car, he drove her south towards the North Carolina state line, where a violent argument ensued.
Thomas confronted his daughter regarding the extramarital affair she was conducting.
Then when he was told to mind his own business, he pulled over, dragged her out of the car, then shot her to death at the side of the road.
Then, to make it look as if she’d been killed by a lover, Thomas Bonney stripped Kathy of her bloody clothes, made sure to leave her underwear clearly visible to anyone who might discover her, then beat his own daughter’s face to a bloody pulp, to give the impression her murder was a crime of passion.
Bonney’s defense team announced they agreed with almost half the prosecution’s version of events.
However, in their opinion, it had been Kathy who (in the heat of the moment) had reached for the firearm she knew her father kept in his glove compartment.
The defense then argued that, during the ensuing struggle for Thomas’s firearm, it accidentally discharged; and this is when the persona known as ‘Demian’ took hold.
To ‘Demian’, Kathy was not his child, merely a threat to be eliminated. Demian had been created to protect Thomas Bonney, it was the persona’s one and only purpose - and protect him it did.
Two hours after murdering his own daughter, Tom returned home, and possibly owing to the condition diagnosed by Dr. Dell, he was able to look his wife dead in the eyes, and ask with all sincerity - “where’s Kathy?”
Bonney’s defense team made a compelling argument, but the jury disagreed, and following a seven-week trial, they pronounced him guilty on November 25th of 1988.
Bonney appealed his life sentence, but the North Carolina Supreme Court upheld his conviction in June of 1991.
On July 29th of 1994, at around eight-thirty in the morning, Bonney and a fellow inmate escaped from Central Prison through a trash compacting chute, and hid in a garbage truck.
While it was initially speculated that both had been crushed to death in a trash compactor during their escape attempt, the two men had stolen a car and driven to Hampton Beach.
Thankfully, Bonney was captured by police four days later, and offered no resistance.
He explained the escape had been a spontaneous idea, and that his main motivation had been to visit the grave of his late mother, whose funeral he was unable to attend.
He also said he wished to visit the grave of his daughter, Kathy, in order to offer an apology for his ultimate and unforgivable failure – to protect her from himself.