two months after his mother s disappearance. child protective services took 16-year-old conrad to a foster home. they were just a few altercations that we had. kind of like what my mom had gone through. investigations talked many times to dave s girlfriend, mary. and eventually this exchange occurred. has he ever verbalized to you at all how much he hated debbie. what did he say. it s not going to stop until she s dead. how many times. numerous times. did you take him serious. no, early on i thought it s never going to stop until she s dead meant it s going to go on his whole life. never in my life had i thought he would kill her, never. most people in town seemed to have made up their mind about dave hawk, but one of them was not the da.
to a friend, if i was a bad guy, i d throw somebody off a bridge. my point was, they haven t 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 also made a huge deal about something he supposedly said to his girlfriend about debbie. dave said, you know, we won t be rid of that [ bleep ] until she s dead. i might have, but i don t remember that. and that certainly does not mean i m going to go kill somebody. and then there was his own son conr, who after all, believed he was ilty and told police he saw dave and girlfriend mary share a celebratory toast after debbie s disappearance. conrad said dave just didn t get it. whenever we open a bottle of
more time with the children. his response was to ask for half custody. the percentages were something like 65 with debbie and 35 with dave. and he wanted to make it an even 50/50. and that s when the battle moved to these, trust funds set up for the children s future. the money came from dave s father. 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 trust 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 trustee. dave was removed as trustee of those funds. during the divorce, dave s father gave him soul control of a second quite generous trust fund. when the investigators ran the
claimed he tried to choke her. she said, he just looked like a crazed animal. and i thought he was going to kill me. and not too long after that, she had said to me, you know, if anything ever happens to me, you know where to look. dave said that choking thing just never happened. that he was never violent with her. i ve never dhochoked anybody things settled down eventually. there was always some dispute. the things conrad said he heard his dad say about his mom, awful. things like she needs a taste of her own medicine. she s going to get hers. she is going to get what she has coming to her. in fact, the very night he discovered debbie had vanished conrad told police his dad might have done this. anything that would disqualify him from being able to carry that out.
dave. told the police it couldn t be him. i don t believe he could be capable of doing something like this. then they started poking around in the relationship between debbie and ex-husband. there curious things began to emerge. for example, in the month before deb disappeared. he took debbie to court and she was fighting back. the issues were custody and support. dave had asked the court for reduction in $553 a month support payment. why? because he claimed he only earned $6,000 a year. his salary, came from his dad. who paid him 500 a month to work on almond farm. only income apparently, but debbie s found that a little hard to believe. he lived in what i understood to be a very nice home. drove a late model suburban. that s hard to do on 6,000 a year. so debbie asked the court for