A third possibility, if Tim Smith was responsible for Scott Dunn’s disappearance, was the mile after mile of scrub grass, brush and shallow gullies that surrounded the community where his father had lived. The ground was hard, but a shallow grave could have been dug with a little work and there was enough dried vegetation and brush to cover it. If one didn’t care if the body was found eventually, it could have been tossed in one of the gullies with dried limbs and grass tossed over it. Even then, it might not be found until wintertime, when the wild grasses and weeds died.
The only thing to do was initiate a search, walk the area around Wheat Aviation and around Smith’s father’s home and talk to the City Sanitation Department about the possibility of searching the landfill for Scott Dunn’s body.
Friday morning, a week after the discovery of blood stains in Leisha Hamilton’s apartment, Tal English, Billy Hudgeons, Walt Crimmins, Randy McGuire and Texas Ranger Jay Peoples went to Wheat Aviation. The five men divided the area into grids and walked through the tall grass, thorny weeds and shallow ditches. Finally, sweaty, tired and frustrated after a morning in the ninety-degree weather, the group had found nothing indicating a recent burial or other method of disposing of a body.
English was discouraged, but determined not to give up. After a quick lunch, the group of searchers drove across town to East Municipal Drive. The area where the Smiths had resided was rugged, with a great deal of vegetation. The men combed that area, just as they had the Wheat Aviation area, but discovered nothing remotely resembling a grave.
While they were in the area, English stopped at the private company that collected garbage from businesses and dumped the refuse into the city landfill. English was introduced to Johnny Quintavilla, a supervisor who could give him information about the routes and schedules for the company’s trucks. Quintavilla said his company collected garbage from Dumpsters on both sides of the alley behind the Regency Apartments.
“Can you tell me if a Dumpster from the Regency Apartments was picked up on May 16?” English asked.
“The Dumpsters in that area fill up quickly because of the large numbers of people in the complexes,” Qunitavilla told him. “We pick up the Dumpsters on Mondays and Fridays, so a pick-up should have been made in the early morning of Friday, May 17.”
Perhaps, English thought, Scott Dunn’s body had been discarded in the Dumpster a few feet from his own front door. If the murder had occurred after Leisha got home Thursday evening, she and Smith might have felt safe disposing of the body in the Dumpster, knowing it would be only a few hours before the garbage was collected.
Back at the police building, English contacted Lee Ramirez, the superintendent for solid waste management for the City of Lubbock, and asked if he could locate the area where refuse from Regency Apartments was dumped. The superintendent assured the detective he could and offered to drive out to the landfill with English and show him the spot.
The two men drove to the landfill and met the site supervisor, John Alamanza, there. The supervisor showed Ramirez and English the approximate area where garbage from the Regency complex was dumped on May 17. The area was approximately seventy-five feet by thirty feet and was about fifteen feet deep. Alamanza told them that another layer of refuse would be dumped there in about two weeks.
Alamanza told English it would be possible to conduct a search of the area for a body, but it would require heavy equipment to dig up compacted refuse. English and Ramirez headed back for town and English wondered how he could justify to his superiors the expense of digging up a rather large portion of the city landfill. When he got back to the office, however, his attention was directed elsewhere.
While English had been out trudging through ankle-high grass, over dried rubboard washes and grass burrs, a Crime Line tip had come in from a police informant that a man named Doug Holden had once threatened to kill Scott Dunn. According to the informant, Holden was an insurance salesman who moonlighted selling cocaine. The informant said Holden had believed that Dunn had ratted on him to the Drug Enforcement Agency. Holden was described as a white male, about twenty-five years old, muscular build, red hair, with almost an albino complexion.
Following up on this tip led English to a conversation with Lubbock Sheriff’s Deputy Billy Tims, who said he had received the same information from a confidential informant. Tims’s informant reported that Holden had said he was going to kidnap Dunn and then kill him.
English thanked the county deputy. He appreciated the help, but at that point, he could not correlate Holden’s alleged threat with the other evidence the LPD had obtained. Too much time had passed since the incident between Scott and Holden.
On June 17, Leisha Hamilton called Tal English once again. He thought ruefully that she was calling him almost as much as Jim Dunn. Scott’s father called every morning and English filled him in on everything he could about the progress of the investigation.
Leisha, on the other hand, seemed to find some new evidence to bring to the detective every day. In this case she told English that she had seen Tim Smith waiting for her in the restaurant parking lot when she got off work the day before. She hadn’t wanted to talk to him, she said, so she asked one of the cooks from the restaurant to walk with her to her car. Leisha confided that Tim had told her he wanted to talk to her, but she had refused. When she arrived at home, though, he was standing near her apartment and again said he wanted to talk to her. “I told him to leave me alone and went into my apartment.”
She also told English she had remembered something else about the days just prior to Scott’s disappearance. She said that on the Tuesday night, before she had brought Scott home from Max Gianoli’s, Tim had followed her to the grocery store when she went to get food and medicine. He had asked her to come home with him, but she had refused, telling him that Scott was sick and she had to stay home and take care of him. “That night,” Leisha said, “Tim called the apartment several times, but I refused to talk to him.”
The following day, when she had gone again to the store to get more food for Scott, Tim had followed her again, asking her to go to his apartment. Again she had refused.
English made notes of what she told him, wondering if she had conveniently forgotten to tell him this earlier or if she was simply stepping up a campaign to blame Smith for Scott’s death.
For several days, English had been anxiously waiting for the Registrar’s office at Mississippi State University to return his call concerning Jessica Tate, the girl Scott had told his father he’d gotten engaged to. Finally, it came and he learned that Jessica’s records contained her mother’s telephone number and that of her sister, both of whom now were living in Texas. English called Jessica immediately and, as the conversation went on, the investigation took a new direction.
Jessica Tate told English she had met Scott Dunn when she went to the store where he worked to buy a stereo system for her car. At that time she was eighteen years old and a senior in high school. Scott was twenty-two. She lacked only two courses to graduate, so she went to class for those two periods each day and worked part-time at a supermarket. Her mother and stepfather had given her a new car and she decided to use some of her earnings to get a better stereo system for it.
“I was frugal enough to try to talk Scott down on the price,” Jessica told English. “We negotiated for a while. Finally, he said he would come down on the price if I would go out with him.”
She didn’t take him up on his proposition for several days, but she kept going back to the store to talk to him. “The weather was warm, so he didn’t wear a shirt when he was working in one of the cars and he had a nice tan. He was cute.
“And he was funny, really funny,” she said. “I just liked being around