Kenneth Dion, convicted of sexually assaulting and murdering 18-year-old Bonnie Craig of Anchorage in 1994, lost an appeal of his conviction with the Alaska Court of Appeals on Wednesday.
A hiker found Craig's body submerged in McHugh Creek on Sept. 28, 1994. She had died from a series of blows to the head and had been sexually assaulted.
The murder case haunted Anchorage for years as the investigation lacked good leads and stalled.
Then, in 2006, Alaska State Troopers were alerted that semen found in Craig matched the DNA profile of Dion, who was serving time for a string of armed robberies in New Hampshire, and the investigation turned to him.
Dion was sentenced in 2011, 17 years after Craig was killed, to 124 years in prison.
Dion had levied three arguments on appeal: that the 2006 search warrant application used to obtain his DNA "contained intentional misrepresentations and omissions" about the 1994 investigation into Craig's murder, that the state should not have let Craig's boyfriend speak as a rebuttal for the defense claim that Dion and Craig had consensual sex, and that the evidence presented at trial was "legally" insufficient to support his convictions.
On Wednesday, the Alaska Court of Appeals upheld Dion’s conviction and affirmed an Alaska Superior Court appeal judgment.