The Disappearance of Debbie Hawk

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Speaker 5 She was there.

Speaker 11 She'd walk into the room and it just kind of brightened.

Speaker 12 And then she wasn't.

Speaker 13 My initial reaction was, oh my god, what has happened?

Speaker 12 The mother they adored, missing.

Speaker 14 In her place, a trail of blood.

Speaker 11 My biggest fear was that we were going to find her.

Speaker 12 What police found instead was a puzzle.

Speaker 18 In my 28 years, I've never seen that before.

Speaker 12 A missing woman, a mystery with few clues.

Speaker 19 Did you find any fingerprints?

Speaker 20 No. Hairs? Anything.
No.

Speaker 12 But did one man have a motive?

Speaker 18 You steal $300,000 and you're about to be exposed for it.

Speaker 12 Except without proof, how could anyone convince a jury?

Speaker 22 So, you don't think they had any useful evidence against you at all?

Speaker 23 Can anybody name anything?

Speaker 12 Could anyone solve the mystery?

Speaker 15 We, the jury, find the defendant, David Martin Hawk.

Speaker 12 I'm Lester Holt, and this is Dateline.

Speaker 12 Here's Keith Morrison with The Disappearance of Debbie Hawk.

Speaker 7 The key was waiting for them under the mat that evening in June 2006 outside their mom's house.

Speaker 31 Silence.

Speaker 26 No one home. Where was she?

Speaker 32 She was always on time to pick them up from their dad's place. But tonight, he had to drive them.

Speaker 33 This just wasn't like her.

Speaker 34 Where was she?

Speaker 36 Conrad, the eldest, put the key in the lock, opened the door.

Speaker 38 Chelsa, in the middle, crossed the threshold, stopped.

Speaker 39 What was this?

Speaker 11 Once we took a few more steps in, then we realized there was something wrong.

Speaker 31 This was the moment, the defining one.

Speaker 26 Nothing the same after this.

Speaker 13 And there was

Speaker 13 a lot of blood everywhere.

Speaker 41 Then the adrenaline kicked in.

Speaker 39 Instinct took over.

Speaker 11 We just dropped our stuff and split throughout the house.

Speaker 26 Panic rising now.

Speaker 41 Conrad was 15 then.

Speaker 32 His little sisters Chelsa, 14, and Savannah, 10.

Speaker 22 Three kids trying to make sense of a horribly frightening scene.

Speaker 13 My mom normally keeps it completely spick-and-span. There's hardly ever any dust anywhere, let alone anything out of order.

Speaker 26 And now things were anything but...

Speaker 11 Where the desk was, you could see that there were papers scattered around, drawers were, you know, ripped open.

Speaker 31 And you went into the bedroom?

Speaker 11 I think that was the first place my sister ran into.

Speaker 11 And then so she quickly called us in and then we followed her.

Speaker 42 What did you see there?

Speaker 11 There's blood on the ground.

Speaker 39 A lot?

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 43 Her mom's bed.

Speaker 44 It was made, but...

Speaker 11 It was kind of haphazardly thrown together, you know, not quite smoothed out.

Speaker 45 And she would have done it a different way.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 44 At that point, you were pretty upset, I imagine.

Speaker 26 Yeah.

Speaker 11 My biggest fear was that

Speaker 11 we were going to find her. That's what scared me most, is that we'd find her somewhere in the house.

Speaker 26 But they did not.

Speaker 10 No Debbie Hawk, not anywhere.

Speaker 13 There was

Speaker 13 some drag marks, some kind of smear marks leading out to the garage where they stopped.

Speaker 31 And Debbie's van was gone, too.

Speaker 13 My initial reaction was, oh my god, what has happened? Who could have done this?

Speaker 45 The girls ran to a neighbor's house.

Speaker 31 Conrad called 911.

Speaker 31 We went in our mom's room and and her bathroom and there's blood on the carpet.

Speaker 13 After the initial shock of it, I kind of start to be reasonable and think, whoa, wait a minute, let's not overreact here.

Speaker 13 Clearly, she cut her hand with a knife or something and she was bleeding and she raced out to the car to go to the emergency room. This is all just a big misunderstanding.

Speaker 46 But it wasn't, though there were plenty of misunderstandings to come and questions that stubbornly refused to be answered, like where was Debbie Hawk?

Speaker 39 What happened to her?

Speaker 41 And what happened to the sacred bond that once held three children together?

Speaker 42 Back at the beginning, even the police were confused.

Speaker 18 This case seemed very unusual from the start.

Speaker 53 Aside to the case at the time, a Hanford, California police investigator, Darren Madison, along with a Kings County DA investigator, Aaron LeBlue, both had worked other cases here at Hanford and out among the suburbs and the almond orchards and the giant odorous dairy farms that splay across the miles of flat valley floor.

Speaker 51 But this one did not smell right at all, thought Madison.

Speaker 18 It appeared that she was drugged out of the house, obviously against her will.

Speaker 18 And in my 28 years, I've never seen that before.

Speaker 26 Whatever happened must have been planned, thought out.

Speaker 18 It looked like a staged crime scene. Her jewelry in her bedroom, neatly laid out just where she had put it.
Nothing was missing but her and her van.

Speaker 55 Had somebody been trying to make it look like Debbie Hawke had been kidnapped?

Speaker 32 Or was the intention, a failed intention perhaps, to show that she'd just left home?

Speaker 18 I believe it was designed to look like a missing person's case. The bed was made.
Yeah. Most of your crooks don't do that.

Speaker 41 And had the perpetrator been looking for something?

Speaker 18 There were paperwork that normally would have been put away, at least stacked up. It wasn't.
It was scattered and this financial document was on top.

Speaker 26 Significant?

Speaker 48 Maybe, but certainly significant were the sounds neighbors reported hearing in the middle of the night, the night before Debbie's kids arrived at her doorstep and discovered she was missing.

Speaker 18 Several neighbors actually heard a loud scream. It was a blood-curdling type.

Speaker 43 Why did nobody call 911?

Speaker 14 That is not the type of neighborhood that bad things happen in.

Speaker 17 No, and not the type of person to whom bad things happen. Debbie was an accomplished woman, a sales rep for a pharmaceutical firm, and with a wide circle of friends, was immensely popular.

Speaker 15 She was very regal, and to us, royalty. She definitely fits the bill as the princess.

Speaker 15 She should have been a Kennedy.

Speaker 47 Which is why the ribbons that suddenly bloomed everywhere around Hanford were royal purple.

Speaker 34 And the people who put the ribbons on, and up

Speaker 25 also joined a search to find her.

Speaker 60 They walked the riverbanks.

Speaker 32 They peered among the trees.

Speaker 45 Not a trace.

Speaker 57 By then, as you can imagine, the whole town knew about the disappearance of Debbie Hawk.

Speaker 41 And they knew something else, too.

Speaker 33 Two days after she vanished, there was a find, and it wasn't good.

Speaker 26 But it wasn't Debbie.

Speaker 61 Instead, police found her van. It was parked on the street in a high crime district of Fresno, 40 miles from home.

Speaker 32 The drug samples Debbie had kept in the van, medications for nasal allergies and asthma, were missing.

Speaker 55 And this was weird.

Speaker 47 The windows were down, the keys in the ignition, the license plate had been replaced with a stolen one.

Speaker 63 It appears that whoever left it there wanted somebody to get in and drive off.

Speaker 10 Oh, and one more thing.

Speaker 40 The van's back seat was covered with blood.

Speaker 63 At that point, whoever was driving the van would immediately become a suspect in Debbie Hawk's disappearance.

Speaker 10 Police were pretty sure that was exactly what the killer wanted.

Speaker 43 It was a ruse, an attempt to plant blame somewhere else. But around town, some people had already begun directing blame.

Speaker 3 At one individual, they thought they knew who did it.

Speaker 65 She had said to me, You know, if anything ever happens to me, you know where to look.

Speaker 26 But suspicion runs fast, the truth dawdles along.

Speaker 26 Has it arrived even now?

Speaker 12 Coming up.

Speaker 13 Things like, she needs a taste of her own medicine, she's going to get hers, she's going to get what she has coming to her.

Speaker 12 When dateline continues.

Speaker 33 You couldn't go anywhere that summer of 2006 without seeing those purple ribbons, a vivid reminder of Debbie Hawk, the mother of three who'd vanished from her home in Hanford, California, leaving only traces of blood.

Speaker 35 Before long, in her absence, Debbie was famous as if everybody in town had known the woman her children so loved.

Speaker 11 She'd walk into the room and it just kind of brightened.

Speaker 13 There was never a dull moment.

Speaker 68 She was all for her family, her children.

Speaker 62 These are her parents, Angie and Bud Triantis.

Speaker 68 Hard worker.

Speaker 68 She was just

Speaker 68 to me, she was perfect.

Speaker 1 She was a perfect doctor.

Speaker 68 And I dearly love her and miss her.

Speaker 69 There was a lot of lives that have been shattered because of her demise.

Speaker 7 Demise, yes.

Speaker 41 No getting around it now.

Speaker 57 In July of 2006, the case was reclassified from missing person to homicide.

Speaker 43 A formality, really.

Speaker 56 They knew from the moment they arrived at the house, said DA investigator Aaron LeBlue,

Speaker 36 somebody killed Debbie.

Speaker 63 We kept up hopes, obviously, for the family's sake, but it was clear that

Speaker 63 she was not alive based on the crime scene.

Speaker 41 Investigators poked around Debbie's life history, looking for clues.

Speaker 65 She was very talkative, friendly,

Speaker 65 likable, always was kind of the life of the party.

Speaker 31 This is Debbie's sister, Diane, who recalled how friends set her up on that blind date years ago.

Speaker 70 A firecracker.

Speaker 25 He was the date.

Speaker 3 Dave Hawk.

Speaker 23 She was short and

Speaker 23 attractive and

Speaker 23 a lot of fun and pretty good sense of humor. You know, you'd say something, man,

Speaker 49 she'd pop back with something that he didn't quite expect.

Speaker 28 They were married within a year.

Speaker 30 They built a home among his family's almond groves.

Speaker 65 I think they both wanted to have a family. And I think that was like the

Speaker 65 impetus for the

Speaker 65 acceleration, I guess you'd say, of the relationship.

Speaker 42 Though Debbie's big sister wasn't sure what she saw in him.

Speaker 65 He seemed very quiet,

Speaker 65 very opposite of my sister.

Speaker 43 Then before long, Conrad arrived.

Speaker 44 And Chelsea.

Speaker 43 and Savannah.

Speaker 11 I still remember Christmases where my brother and I would run around and deliver all the gifts to everybody and everybody's getting along.

Speaker 11 Definitely some happy memories there.

Speaker 31 But sadly, a lot of unhappy ones too.

Speaker 13 I mean, pretty much from when I can remember, fighting and arguing were pretty routine.

Speaker 45 And after nearly nine years, this marriage, like so many others, fell apart.

Speaker 23 We might have been a little bit more different. than

Speaker 23 we were willing to

Speaker 70 admit early on.

Speaker 13 Even at that age, I could definitely see, yeah, the water was about to boil over.

Speaker 45 The kids were nine, eight, and four when the divorce was finalized in 2000.

Speaker 48 And young Conrad Chelsea and Savannah learned how to navigate the choppy waters known all too well by children of divorce.

Speaker 11 They just couldn't talk to each other really. So I tried to step in and help

Speaker 11 resolve that.

Speaker 45 You were kind of a mediator, in a way.

Speaker 3 It's a tough role for a kid to play, isn't it?

Speaker 11 I think it was easier to be the mediator than to have them yelling at each other on the phone.

Speaker 43 And living apart, said Conrad.

Speaker 13 My mom was happier than ever. I think all of our lives improved.

Speaker 57 Debbie did well enough as a pharmaceutical representative that she was able to buy her own home.

Speaker 13 She could finally start living her life the way that she wanted to.

Speaker 73 Except

Speaker 2 there were issues.

Speaker 67 Once after they separated during the squabbles of a divorce, she claimed he tried to choke her.

Speaker 65 She said he

Speaker 65 just looked like a crazed animal and I thought he was going to kill me.

Speaker 65 And

Speaker 65 not too long after that, she had said to me, you know, if anything ever happens to me, you know where to look.

Speaker 62 Dave said that choking thing just never happened, that he wasn't ever violent with her.

Speaker 23 I've never choked anybody.

Speaker 47 Things settled down eventually, though there was always some dispute.

Speaker 32 And the things Conrad says he heard his dad say about his mom awful.

Speaker 13 Things like she needs a taste of her own medicine. She's going to get hers.
She's going to get what she has coming to her.

Speaker 19 In fact, the very night he discovered Debbie had vanished, Conrad told police his dad might have done this.

Speaker 13 I don't see anything that would

Speaker 13 disqualify him from being able to to carry that out.

Speaker 48 Which is why, just hours after the kids discovered Debbie was missing, it was 2:20 a.m.

Speaker 62 by then, police called Dave, woke him up, asked him to drive down to police headquarters for a talk.

Speaker 3 And the phone call was curious, thought Investigator Madison, because Dave didn't ask why.

Speaker 18 I've received calls in the middle of the night. My first thought for me is family.
What's going on, especially if it's the police department.

Speaker 18 He didn't.

Speaker 45 And when he arrived in the interview room,

Speaker 8 Dave didn't seem to have much of a reaction at all to learning his ex-wife, the mother of his three kids, was missing.

Speaker 32 At this point, I have no clue as to where she might be. Well, I'll let you tell you what's been going on last week.

Speaker 74 What did you expect?

Speaker 18 More surprise, any surprise?

Speaker 18 I didn't see that at all.

Speaker 48 Of course, people do react in different ways to traumatic news.

Speaker 7 Besides, Dave told them he was at home asleep in the early morning hours when police believed Debbie must have been killed.

Speaker 41 And his kids said they didn't hear him leave the house. They were there too at the time.
And there was no evidence that Dave was ever at the crime scene.

Speaker 16 Did you find any DNA?

Speaker 26 No.

Speaker 76 Did you find any even fingerprints? No.

Speaker 44 Hairs? Anything? No.

Speaker 36 But then, they'd just begun to uncover the troubling secrets of Dave and Debbie Hawk.

Speaker 12 Coming up, a family divided.

Speaker 11 I don't believe that he'd even be capable of doing something like this.

Speaker 13 My suspicion was growing stronger and stronger.

Speaker 12 When Dateline continues.

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Speaker 35 It was a frustrating summer back in 2006 in the farmlands of California's Central Valley.

Speaker 21 Those purple ribbon search teams came up empty, though they looked everywhere for weeks.

Speaker 36 Police named Dave Hawk, a person of interest.

Speaker 67 But he seemed to have an alibi.

Speaker 51 All three kids were with him in his house the night Debbie vanished.

Speaker 57 And besides, there wasn't a shred of physical evidence to tie Dave to the scene of an apparently violent abduction.

Speaker 67 His own daughter, who spent the day after the abduction with Dave, told the police it couldn't have been him.

Speaker 11 I don't believe that he'd even be capable of doing something like this.

Speaker 9 But then they started poking around in the relationship between Debbie and her ex-husband.

Speaker 48 And there, some curious things began to emerge.

Speaker 55 For example, in the months before Debbie disappeared, Dave took Debbie to court and she was fighting back.

Speaker 48 Kim Agiri was Debbie's attorney.

Speaker 60 The issues that she was dealing with were custody and support.

Speaker 61 Dave had asked the court for a reduction in his $553 a month child support payment.

Speaker 26 Why?

Speaker 47 Because he claimed he only earned $6,000 a year.

Speaker 22 His salary came from his dad, who paid him $500 a month to work on his almond farm.

Speaker 26 His only income, apparently, though Debbie's attorney found that a little hard to believe.

Speaker 24 He lived in what I understood to be a very nice home.

Speaker 78 He drove a late model suburban.

Speaker 24 That's hard to do on $6,000 a year.

Speaker 35 So Debbie asked the court for more time with the children.

Speaker 24 His response was to ask for half custody.

Speaker 78 The percentages were something like 65 with Debbie and 35 with Dave, and he wanted to make it an even 50-50.

Speaker 26 And that's when the battle moved to trust funds set up for the children's futures.

Speaker 35 The money came from Dave's father.

Speaker 45 But Dave controlled the funds, and Debbie was sure Dave was stealing from them to support his own lifestyle.

Speaker 34 Why would she think that?

Speaker 26 Well,

Speaker 34 this was actually the second set of trusts established for the children.

Speaker 55 Several years before a judge caught Dave's hand in the cookie jar of the first trust, which listed both Dave and Debbie as trustees.

Speaker 47 Dave was removed as trustee of those funds.

Speaker 48 But during the divorce, Dave's father gave him sole control of a second, quite generous, trust fund.

Speaker 45 But when investigators ran the numbers on that second fund administered only by Dave...

Speaker 18 Basically, there were supposed to be several hundred thousand dollars in each account, and instead there was just a couple hundred or a thousand dollars in each of the kids.

Speaker 18 He'd been living off of it for up to about five years at that point.

Speaker 73 Something like $300,000 was missing.

Speaker 54 Though Dave cried poverty, he bought his girlfriend, Mary Royer, a $27,000 Lexus, took her on vacation to Hawaii, and used $60,000 to pay off divorce costs and the $1,500 he owed to his kids from the first set of trusts.

Speaker 31 But here, believed the detectives, was the heart of the motive for murder.

Speaker 59 Debbie, if she hadn't disappeared, was about to expose all that in court.

Speaker 18 You stealed $300,000 and you're about to be exposed for it.

Speaker 69 By a woman despised.

Speaker 51 Exactly.

Speaker 63 Certainly one more piece of the puzzle.

Speaker 48 And there was yet another strange piece to this puzzle.

Speaker 41 Remember that mess around Debbie's desk?

Speaker 48 Documents scattered everywhere?

Speaker 34 Well, sitting right on top of the pile were the records from the children's first set of trusts, the one only Debbie controlled.

Speaker 18 There was $166,000 in those accounts.

Speaker 41 The investigators in Hanford now focused hard on Dave. Searched his home several times, carted off lots of stuff, including a stun gun, which it turned out he bought a month before Debbie disappeared.

Speaker 32 He told investigators it was for home protection for his daughter's girlfriend Mary.

Speaker 18 However, he had never discussed it with Mary. He had never discussed it with the children at all.

Speaker 18 They did not know it existed.

Speaker 31 They couldn't find anything to connect the stun gun to the crime, but it was odd.

Speaker 25 They also took his computers, of course.

Speaker 32 And since Dave did volunteer work at a local church, they seized the church computer, too.

Speaker 51 Even cuffed him outside his house in full view of local television cameras, which were now buzzing around endlessly, asking, did you do it?

Speaker 79 For the last time, no.

Speaker 79 I'm getting tired of answering that question. No means no.
But the fools at the Hanford Police Department don't seem to understand that.

Speaker 79 They're on a witch hunt, is what's going on. They're on a witch hunt.

Speaker 45 Whatever they were on, they couldn't find the evidence to arrest him.

Speaker 31 Dave remained a free man, something that made his own son, Conrad, very nervous.

Speaker 13 My suspicion was growing stronger and stronger.

Speaker 29 Conrad had already told police about the night after he discovered his mom was missing when he saw his dad sharing a bottle of wine with his girlfriend.

Speaker 13 They opened it and toasted and had wine out in the patio with cheese and crackers. I didn't want to jump to conclusions, but at the time, I thought my father and his girlfriend had really poor taste.

Speaker 7 Conrad and Dave spent that summer on the outs.

Speaker 35 It was after quite some time of not getting along terribly well.

Speaker 74 And in August 2006, two months after his mother's disappearance, Child Protective Services took 16-year-old Conrad to a foster home.

Speaker 70 There were

Speaker 13 just a few altercations that we had had, kind of like what my mom had gone through.

Speaker 32 Investigators talked many times to Dave's girlfriend, Mary, and eventually this exchange occurred.

Speaker 32 I never verbalized to you at all

Speaker 80 how much he hated the woman.

Speaker 32 Absolutely. What did he say, Jack?

Speaker 32 What did you say?

Speaker 26 An aha moment?

Speaker 35 Well, maybe not quite.

Speaker 80 I don't believe he was here. No, early on I thought, it's never going to stop till she's dead, maybe it's going to go on his whole life.

Speaker 80 I know, I never, it was never in my life like that he would kill her. Never.

Speaker 26 So it all seemed quite suspicious.

Speaker 30 In fact, most people in town seemed to have made up their minds about Dave Hawke.

Speaker 47 But one of them was not the DA.

Speaker 18 They kept pushing and pushing. And we kept sitting back.

Speaker 34 Did the the cops have it wrong?

Speaker 43 Dave Hawks, longtime pastor, thought so.

Speaker 12 Coming up.

Speaker 38 This person who is portrayed as such a monster just simply isn't.

Speaker 12 Another side of an accused killer. When dateline continues.

Speaker 18 They kept pushing and pushing, and we kept sitting back.

Speaker 16 The prosecutor at the time, Larry Crouch, told his investigators he would not charge Dave Hawk with the murder of his ex-wife Debbie, even after it was obvious this popular single mother had been murdered.

Speaker 16 Even after months of searching around Hanford, California turned up no sign of her anywhere, and after police had convinced themselves that Dave was responsible, Prosecutor Crouch would not budge.

Speaker 20 Not yet, anyway.

Speaker 18 We're going to wait until we find the body or give the body more time to come up.

Speaker 26 Instead, a year after Debbie vanished, Dave was charged with embezzling, stealing more than $300,000 from his own children's trust funds.

Speaker 7 He pleaded not guilty, was released on bail.

Speaker 46 Dave, how does it feel to be out of jail?

Speaker 47 And waited for the other shoe to drop.

Speaker 62 Now, imagine this.

Speaker 31 The police, not to mention most of the town, believed their father killed their mother, leaving three children caught in the middle.

Speaker 48 Conrad had no doubt his dad killed his mom, a dad he began referring to as Dave.

Speaker 13 I tried to cut all ties that I had with him as much as I could. He was nothing to me now.

Speaker 7 But Chelsea has been and is her father's staunchest defender.

Speaker 42 Why do you think your siblings have chosen the other path?

Speaker 11 I think they're just very upset by what happened, and their relationship was not as close to my dad. They were either not home or not awake when I was awake.

Speaker 11 And they were not around him the next day like I was around him.

Speaker 33 She also says Dave was acting perfectly normal the day after whatever happened happened.

Speaker 62 No odd behavior, nothing whatever to suggest he'd been up all night committing a terrible crime.

Speaker 11 So the things that convince me about his innocence aren't there to convince them. I think they are defending my mom so much so that it's like they're going to point to the most obvious suspect.

Speaker 52 But Chelsea wasn't the only one in this small town who believed Dave Hawk was innocent.

Speaker 38 I believe what he says that he had nothing to do with her disappearance and presumed death.

Speaker 47 Sandy Brown is Dave's longtime pastor and friend.

Speaker 38 This person who is portrayed as such a monster just simply isn't. He's a man who has worked hard in the church, is a good father.

Speaker 7 As their son prepared to face serious financial charges, Dave's parents, Stan and Lois Hawk, took over custody of Chelsea and Savannah.

Speaker 41 Not the way they expected to spend their 80s, any more than they expected to have to defend their son.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 12 he's made some mistakes, but

Speaker 1 nothing of the scope that is generally accepted in the community.

Speaker 48 Stan established those trusts for his grandchildren and says Dave had the right to use the money how he saw fit to benefit the children.

Speaker 64 Were you surprised to discover how it was used?

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 27 Apparently his financial situation was worse than I knew.

Speaker 40 A year passed in this gossipy limbo.

Speaker 72 Now it was May 2008, nearly two years after Debbie's disappearance.

Speaker 57 Her body still hadn't been found.

Speaker 47 And there was no new evidence tying Dave to her murder.

Speaker 48 But Prosecutor Larry Crouch heard disquieting reports from his investigators.

Speaker 18 Dave starts surveilling our office, the police offices, eventually starts driving by an investigator's home.

Speaker 16 It was getting pretty concerning out there.

Speaker 4 Time to move.

Speaker 48 On May 29th, 2008, Dave Hawk was arrested and charged with first-degree murder and a special circumstance, murder for financial gain. He pleaded not guilty.

Speaker 58 When the trial finally began more than a year later, Dave faced murder and the earlier embezzlement charges together.

Speaker 28 Prosecutor Larry Crouch offered the jury this theory, that Dave snuck out of his house in the middle of the night without waking his sleeping children, maybe even used a ladder to get out of the window, and got someone to give him a ride to Debbie's house.

Speaker 44 and entered her bedroom.

Speaker 18 I think he tried the stun gun on her and she screamed very loudly.

Speaker 18 And he struck her with something more than once. And at that point I assume he suffocated her.

Speaker 22 Then, said the prosecutor, he must have dragged Debbie's body to the garage, put her into her own van, disposed of her somewhere, then drove the van to Fresno and left it in a high crime zone.

Speaker 33 How did he get back home?

Speaker 61 That accomplice, said the prosecutor, must have picked him up and driven him the 40 miles back to his farm.

Speaker 10 But really, there was no body.

Speaker 48 There was no DNA, no forensic evidence to show Dave had even been at the murder scene. Everybody in town seemed to have a theory.

Speaker 33 Apparently, the prosecutor did too.

Speaker 2 But was that proof?

Speaker 54 So the state tried to build a bridge from Dave's alleged financial crimes to the murder, painting him as an evil man who decided to eliminate his ex-wife when he knew his misuse of the trust funds was about to be exposed.

Speaker 26 Enough?

Speaker 26 Well,

Speaker 33 we shall see.

Speaker 14 There's a number of other explanations for what could have happened other than Dave. Dave was a convenient ex-husband.

Speaker 12 Coming up. One of his children is convinced he's not guilty, but could Dave Hawk convince a jury?

Speaker 23 I told him that I wanted to testify.

Speaker 12 When Dateline continues.

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Speaker 24 The alignment of the stars in this case was just stacked against us, stacked against Dave Hawk.

Speaker 49 At least in the harsh court of public opinion, it looked bad for Dave Hawk as his murder trial approached in Hanford, California.

Speaker 41 Dennis Peterson and Mark Coleman were Dave's attorneys.

Speaker 24 We had this guy allegedly stealing from his kids, saying bad things about the sympathetic victim, and all of these things being widely played in the press.

Speaker 48 If there ever was a case for change of venue, this must be it, said the defense.

Speaker 41 After all, almost everybody seemed to have heard the accusations about Dave, and every time he had a court appearance, purple-clad friends of Debbie crowded into the public gallery.

Speaker 48 In fact, during jury selection, said Attorney Coleman, he actually heard some jurors tell the judge they had already decided Dave Hawk was guilty.

Speaker 14 The judge asked him, well, if I order you to set those opinions aside, can you do it? Well,

Speaker 54 I guess so.

Speaker 49 Still, the defense application for a change of venue was denied, as was the defense request to separate the financial charges from the murder charge.

Speaker 41 Defense would argue the embezzlement accusations were unfairly prejudicial.

Speaker 14 They wanted to make him look like a bad person. A person who would take money from his kids would be likely to murder his ex-wife.

Speaker 82 In fact, the prosecution would say Dave's fear that Debbie was about to reveal in open court his his theft of the kids' trust funds was a powerful motive for murder.

Speaker 14 But the fact of the matter was that was already exposed. It had already been filed in open declarations in court.

Speaker 48 I mean, he would have gained nothing by getting rid of her at that stage.

Speaker 39 No.

Speaker 66 We also have that great old American saying, if it walks like a duck and if it cracks like a duck, it's probably a duck.

Speaker 45 But you're saying it's a turkey.

Speaker 14 Burden is on them to prove it's a duck. In this case, they didn't.

Speaker 72 No, the defense argued that the prosecution had absolutely no evidence that Dave even left his house the night Debbie was abducted and presumably murdered.

Speaker 26 In fact, his daughter Chelsea insisted he could not have left the house without her having heard him.

Speaker 11 That just doesn't seem at all possible.

Speaker 48 And even though investigators would tell the court that the kids slept so soundly it was hard to wake them up when they went to see them one morning, the defense claimed that the prosecution's theory of what happened just didn't add up.

Speaker 14 That's just beyond belief that somebody would take that kind of a risk.

Speaker 14 That he would sneak down the hallway, open the door, drive the 10 or 12 miles over Debbie Hawk's house, subdue her, bludgeon her, load her into the van, drive it to Fresno, and then get back to his house without getting any blood on him, without being discovered.

Speaker 48 So what did happen to Debbie Hawk?

Speaker 25 The defense floated this theory.

Speaker 48 Debbie worked in pharmaceutical sales.

Speaker 19 Perhaps a drug addict had gone after the samples she kept in her van.

Speaker 14 All of the pharmaceuticals in her van were missing.

Speaker 52 Somebody took them.

Speaker 40 But that was a ludicrous idea, countered the prosecution.

Speaker 54 Debbie carried very few samples.

Speaker 8 And anyway, if drug theft was behind it, why didn't the thief take any jewelry or electronics?

Speaker 56 No, it all seemed to come down to Dave.

Speaker 28 His behavior, his character, his own words.

Speaker 48 Like the conversation with a friend police recorded, in which Dave speculated on what might have happened to Debbie.

Speaker 49 The defense played it in court as an unguarded indication that Dave had no idea what happened.

Speaker 69 He basically offered that, you know, I don't think she's ever going to be found.

Speaker 26 Did it work?

Speaker 55 Listen to prosecutor Larry Crouch.

Speaker 1 You're going, oh no, why are they putting that in?

Speaker 70 I thought it was harmful.

Speaker 10 Though what the jury thought, no one could say.

Speaker 25 Then there was inevitably a conversation about whether or not Dave would testify.

Speaker 23 I told them that I wanted to testify.

Speaker 26 And an idea that Dave's attorneys did not like one bit.

Speaker 14 Dave is a combative individual. He's very prideful.

Speaker 67 He's offended easily.

Speaker 64 He thinks he's smart and he hates for anybody to think he's not smart.

Speaker 70 I mean, he'd be just perfect fodder for a trained prosecutor.

Speaker 39 And so Dave held his tongue in court.

Speaker 32 He saved his story for us.

Speaker 22 So you don't think they had any useful evidence against you at all?

Speaker 70 Can anybody name anything?

Speaker 12 Coming up. Dave Hawke speaks out, and so does the jury.

Speaker 15 We, the jury, find the defendant, David Martin martin hawk when dateline continues

Speaker 48 dave hawk on trial for the murder of his ex-wife debbbie did not testify didn't tell the members of the jury what he was thinking But he had a sinking feeling he knew what they were thinking.

Speaker 23 Always blame the ex-husband first.

Speaker 55 It was an awful problem, as he saw it.

Speaker 33 Had been from the day his ex-wife, Debbie, disappeared through a trail of her own blood.

Speaker 47 The number one suspect was him.

Speaker 26 That's what the police had been saying all along.

Speaker 55 And that's apparently what a great many people thought in Hanford, California.

Speaker 28 Even as he sat as a defendant in a murder case.

Speaker 26 Even though...

Speaker 23 I didn't have the motive and I didn't have the capacity.

Speaker 48 You know how it could be, said Dave.

Speaker 41 Once people get it in their heads you did something, they'll tend to misinterpret everything to make you look guilty.

Speaker 23 I was home with my children in another town all night,

Speaker 23 but I'm being accused of being in another place committing a terrible crime based on financial shenanigans that didn't exist in the first place.

Speaker 72 Shenanigans, like for example, that trust fund for his kids. His father made the terms very broad, said Dave, so he could spend the money as he saw fit, any way that would benefit the children.

Speaker 23 The money is to be used for

Speaker 23 the health, education, support, and maintenance of the children. And that's exactly what it was used for.

Speaker 22 And

Speaker 33 I acted legally

Speaker 23 in that respect.

Speaker 72 And then, since they didn't have any evidence against him, said Dave, prosecutors made a case based on misinterpreting things he said.

Speaker 35 Like the time he said to a friend, if I was a bad guy, I'd throw somebody off a bridge.

Speaker 1 My point was, they haven't looked for her.

Speaker 23 If someone had thrown her off the bridge, it would have floated downstream.

Speaker 70 They didn't look anywhere.

Speaker 69 So did you throw her off the bridge?

Speaker 23 No, I didn't throw anybody off a bridge.

Speaker 47 They also made a huge deal about something he supposedly said to his girlfriend about Debbie.

Speaker 9 Dave said,

Speaker 31 you know, we won't be rid of that

Speaker 66 until she's dead.

Speaker 26 I might have, but I don't remember that.

Speaker 23 And that certainly does not mean that I'm going to go kill somebody.

Speaker 48 And then there was his own son, Conrad, who, after all, believed he was guilty and told police he saw Dave and girlfriend Mary share a celebratory toast after Debbie's disappearance.

Speaker 7 Conrad said, Dave just didn't get it.

Speaker 70 Whenever we open a bottle of wine,

Speaker 23 we always raise our glasses and say cheers.

Speaker 64 It's just a tradition.

Speaker 23 We were not toasting anybody's

Speaker 1 anything.

Speaker 30 Why have you never been able to persuade Conrad of your innocence?

Speaker 1 I don't know.

Speaker 70 He knows that I was at home the whole time, never left, didn't have any involvement in anything illegal, but he's perhaps

Speaker 23 angry and needs to fill in the blanks with something.

Speaker 49 Well, maybe he's angry at his dad because his dad killed his mom.

Speaker 64 His dad didn't kill his mom.

Speaker 48 He thinks so, though.

Speaker 23 He could be wrong.

Speaker 72 So who did kill Debbie?

Speaker 41 Dave has an opinion about that, too.

Speaker 26 Who else wanted her dead?

Speaker 23 Maybe the boyfriend that was stalking her?

Speaker 23 Stalking her? This is somebody who was reported to the police, and the police swept it under the rug, apparently. It was an ex-boyfriend.

Speaker 75 Of course, investigators say they did look into that and other leads, too, but they all came back to Dave and one primary motive.

Speaker 34 So, some cross-examination.

Speaker 48 Prosecutors said you killed your ex-wife because she was going to expose your embezzlement of the children's trust funds.

Speaker 19 They said, Were you, for example, afraid your father was going to find out what you were doing with that money from the trust fund?

Speaker 22 Your father who lovingly put the money into the trust fund before you couldn't have siphoned it out?

Speaker 23 I really don't like the way you're characterizing these things. I really don't like the way the prosecutor has accused me of

Speaker 26 it or not.

Speaker 72 Those are the accusations.

Speaker 70 Yeah, and they're not right.

Speaker 26 They're wrong. They're false.

Speaker 23 Which part did you not understand?

Speaker 10 What part did I not understand?

Speaker 7 What I understand is you bought a $27,000 car using trust fund money.

Speaker 82 You took a trip to Hawaii with your girlfriend.

Speaker 30 You paid off your divorce attorney's fees and money you took from the first set of trusts by taking $60,000 out of the kids' second trust fund.

Speaker 23 The money was used for the children.

Speaker 27 Which child drove the Lexus?

Speaker 70 All three children were driven in the Lexus.

Speaker 41 Which child went to Hawaii on vacation?

Speaker 23 Perhaps that money was my own money.

Speaker 26 Prosecutor never bothered to figure out what dollar went where, did they?

Speaker 30 Well, you made it kind of hard for them because you were mixing up the trust fund money and your money all the time.

Speaker 64 And frankly, that's what scam artists do.

Speaker 37 I'm not a scam artist.

Speaker 48 Why didn't you go get a job?

Speaker 39 I had a job.

Speaker 66 I'm talking about a job that actually paid enough to support your family, which is what a dad does.

Speaker 23 You're reading from a script that the prosecutor's given you, apparently, because none of these things are true.

Speaker 19 A guilty man or not?

Speaker 19 The jury did not take very long to decide.

Speaker 15 We, the jury, find the defendant David Martin Hawk guilty of the murder of Debbie Hawk.

Speaker 20 Guilty of murder and nine financial crimes.

Speaker 50 Dave Hawk was sentenced to spend the rest of his life behind bars.

Speaker 51 But was that the end of this story? Not in the least.

Speaker 50 His defense attorney appealed the case as high as he could, even trying the Supreme Court, which declined review.

Speaker 52 Then in March 2016, 10 years after Debbie Hawk disappeared, a farmhand found her remains in a field in the neighboring town where Dave grew up.

Speaker 41 Debbie's father, Bud Triantis, had a dying wish that she be found before he passed away.

Speaker 53 He left this earth just a week after that discovery.

Speaker 52 And the children, who held opposing views about their father's innocence?

Speaker 64 It's complicated, isn't it?

Speaker 64 Yeah.

Speaker 61 Has this created a rift between the two of you?

Speaker 60 Yes.

Speaker 52 Surely not easygoing for the children of Dave and Debbie Hawk.

Speaker 3 Well, we do the best we can.

Speaker 12 That's all for now.

Speaker 27 I'm Lester Holt.

Speaker 12 Thanks for joining us.

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