Later, when he got hungry, I went to the store and got him some brown gravy to go with some hamburger meat so he could eat it. I also got him some medicine for his throat.
“Then I went back home, cooked up the hamburger meat and we ate. For a while, we sat around and watched TV and talked; then I took a shower and went to bed. I was lying in the bed when I heard Mike Roberts come over and I could hear them talking. Mike was still there when I went to sleep.”
Leisha said that when she woke up the next morning, Scott was in bed with her. She got up and got ready for work. According to Leisha, it was about 5:15 or 5:30 when she got ready to leave, and she woke Scott. He said that he didn’t need to get up, that Mike was coming to pick him up. Leisha left and went on to work.
“I got home from work about 2:30 PM,” her statement continued. “The front door was locked. I went into the bedroom and saw the afghan lying on the floor, where the pallet usually lay. It was spread out as if someone had made up a bed underneath it and the afghan was the bedspread. I could tell that there weren’t any sheets and stuff under it. I lifted up the end of the afghan where the feet would have been when we were in bed and saw that there was nothing under it. I saw that the sheets and pillows were gone and so was the waterbed liner.”
Leisha said that next, she went into the other bedroom, which she referred to as Scott’s bedroom, and saw that a basket of his clothes was gone. The box that his shoes were in was gone. All of his shoes were gone. She said she noticed that his belt was still there, though.
“I checked the box containing about fifty dollars worth of change that I kept in my closet and it was still there. I also checked the coffee can in the kitchen where I kept change and the change was still there.”
After that, Leisha said, she called Max at ProSound and asked him if Scott was at work. Max said he wasn’t. He said Mike had gone to the house that morning and had gotten no answer when he knocked at the door calling Scott’s name.
“I told Max about the stuff being gone. I made Max swear to me that Scott was not there. I thought that Scott had just packed his shit and left.”
At that point in her statement, Leisha’s memory became somewhat fuzzy. She didn’t remember what she had done after she talked to Max. She didn’t recall whether she went to her favorite club. All she remembered was going to bed Thursday night and getting up Friday morning. But her memory apparently cleared as she recited what happened after that.
“Friday, I went to work and came home. When I came home, the front door was open. I am very careful about locking the front door. I went on in the house and looked around to see if Scott was there. He wasn’t. I looked in the spare bedroom where the back door was and saw the wood had been kicked off and it was busted in. I looked around and saw the stuff for Scott’s radio controlled boat and the other clothes basket was gone. I had put the boat, my radio and all the money in the trunk of my car, so that if Scott came back, he could not get them and would have to come to me and explain what was going on.
“I called Max and asked him if he had seen or heard from Scott that day. I told him what had happened. I made him swear that he didn’t know what was going on. I talked to Mike and made him swear to me that he didn’t know what was going on.”
Then she went down to the office of the apartment complex and told the manager about the back door, because there was no way to secure it. The assistant manager told Leisha to call the police and make a report. She also told Leisha they would need an estimate and directed her to find the maintenance man and ask him to look at the door.
“I found him and he gave me an estimate and locked the door up.” Leisha said. “He was still there when the police arrived. I made the report.”
At this point Leisha seemed so eager to talk that English didn’t need to ask questions. It was as if she were reading from a script.
She continued. “On Monday, the twentieth, I went and got Scott’s car at his workplace. Max was talking about towing it. At first I didn’t go get the car, because I didn’t know I had the keys. I was cleaning the house on the twenty-eighth and noticed the carpet under the couch was missing.
“I have also noticed several times that things were moved around while I was gone. The ashtray was moved, the chairs were moved out from under the table and the table mats were moved. I thought that someone had been in my apartment, but it was just small stuff, so I wasn’t sure.
“This last Sunday I knew someone had been in my apartment because the key to Max’s apartment, a letter and a comic card from Dairy Queen were all missing. I thought Scott had been there, because he would recognize the red key to Max’s apartment.”
Leisha told the detectives she had called both of Scott’s parents a few times about the missing man. She said that she had not noticed the bloodstained carpet in the bedroom until English and White showed it to her.
Leisha Hamilton’s statement was typed up afterwards and she signed it and dated it—June 8, 1991.
Next White asked Leisha if she would take a polygraph test and she agreed. An appointment was set for her to come in the following week. As she prepared to leave, Leisha told the detectives that Tim Smith continued to bother her and was leaving notes on her car and on her apartment door.
All the time Leisha had been talking, Burt Todd had sat quietly listening. But now as Leisha and he prepared to leave, English asked Todd if he would be willing to answer some questions for them. Todd agreed and stayed.
Todd told them that he was twenty-two years old and that he lived east of Lubbock, in a small community of weekend homes, along with some permanent residents. He said that he first met Leisha Hamilton when she went to work at the restaurant where he worked.
“A strange guy named Tim would hang around while Leisha was there,” Todd said, “but Leisha was living with a different guy named Scott. Then one day Leisha came to work and said Scott had moved out.”
“Right after that, I asked Leisha if she would go to a party with me.” Pressed for the exact date, Todd thought it was on either the thirteenth or the twentieth of May. Although he wasn’t sure of the date, he was certain it was after Leisha told him Scott had left. The party was at the home of one of his friends. Leisha drove over in the yellow Camaro that belonged to Scott. After the party, Leisha said that her taillights were out and asked Burt to follow her to her apartment. They got to her apartment about three or four o’clock in the morning. Todd and Leisha crashed on the couch in the living room. Todd said he had never seen Scott.
After Leisha and Todd had left, English remained at the conference table, feeling tired and frustrated. Nothing in either statement provided any new leads to the whereabouts of Scott Dunn—or Scott Dunn’s body. They felt Todd had only repeated what Leisha had told him, the same things she had told the detectives. The only new item of interest was Todd’s report that he had spent the night with Leisha soon after Scott’s disappearance. If Todd was sure it was a Monday, and he seemed to be, and if he was sure it was after Leisha told him Scott had left, then it would most likely have been Monday, May 20, five days after Scott’s disappearance, the day she had gone to Scott’s workplace and picked up his Camaro, Yellow Thunder.
English shook his head. Even in his line of work, people sometimes amazed him. Leisha’s live-in boyfriend disappeared on a Thursday while she was at work. That night, according to her first conversation with Jim Dunn, another boyfriend, Tim Smith, had spent the night with her. Then on Monday, four days later, she had gone out with yet a third man, who had spent the night with her. What kind of relationship had Leisha Hamilton and Scott Dunn had, anyway? And did it have anything to do with Scott’s disappearance?
