vivid reminder of debbie hawk, the mother of three who vanished from her home in hanford, california, leaving only traces of blood. before long, in her absence, debbie was famous as if everyone had known the woman. she would walk into her room and it would brighten. never a dull moment. these are her parents, angie and bud. hard worker. she was just to me, she was perfect. she was the perfect daughter. and i dearly love her and miss her. there s a lot of lives that have been shattered because of her demise. demise, yes. no getting around it now. in july of 2006 the case was reclassified from missing person to homicide. a formality, really. they knew from the moment they arrived at the house, said d.a. investigator aaron lebleu,
his response was to ask for half custody. the percentages were 65 with debbie and 35 with dave. he wanted to make it an even 50-50. and that is when the battle moved to these, trust funds set up for the childrens futures the mon came from dave s father but dave controlled the funds and debbie was sure dave was stealing from them to support his own lifestyle. why would she think that? well, this was actually the second set of trusts established for the children. 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. dave was removed of trustee of those funds. during the divorce dave s father gave him sole control of a second quite generous trust fund. but when investigators ran the numbers on that second fund administered only by dave.
getting any blood on him, without being discovered. so what did happen to debbie hawk? the defense floated this theory. debbie worked in pharmaceutical sales. perhaps a drug addict had gone after the samples she kept in the van. all of the pharmaceuticals in her van were missing. somebody took them. that was a ludicrous idea, countered the prosecution. debbie carried very few samples. anyway, if drug theft was behind it why didn t the thief take any jewelry or electronics. no. it seemed to come down to dave. his character, his behavior and his own words and a conversation with a friend police recorded when dave speculated what might have happened to debbie. the defense played it in court. hey. he basically offered i don t think she is ever going to be found.
looked for her. if someone had thrown her off a bridge it would have floated downstream. they didn t look anywhere. so did you throw her off the bridge. no. i didn t throw anybody off a bridge. they made a huge deal about something he supposedly said to his girlfriend about dave. dave said we won t be rid of that f ing bitch until he is dead. i might have. that doesn t mean i m going to go kill somebody. there was his own son conrad who believed he was guilty and told police he saw dave and mary share a celebratory toast after debbie s disappearance. dave said he didn t get it. whenever we open a bottle of wine we raise our glasses and say cheers.
prove it s a duck. in this case they didn t. no. the defense argued the prosecution had absolutely no evidence dave even left his house the night debbie was abducted and presumably murdered. his daughter insisted he could not have left the house without her having heard him. it doesn t seem at all possible. even though investigators would tell the court the kids slept so soundly it was hard to wake them up when they went to see them one morning, the defense claims that the prosecution s theory of what happened just didn t add up. that is just beyond belief that somebody would take that kind of risk, he would sneak down the hallway, open the door, drive the ten or 12 miles over to debbie hawk s house, subdue her, bludgeon her, load her into the van and drive to fresno and get back to his house without