Cold Case Files - REOPENED: A Family Secret

Episode Date: March 9, 2023

A Kentucky teenager goes missing before school. Her bed is unmade, her car is in the driveway, and in the front seat is her purse, one shoe, and her cell phone with the numbers "9" and "1" entered on the screen. Her disappearance ignites a manhunt, a feud with a neighbor, and a family torn apart. Even with the help of the FBI, it will still take fourteen years to figure out what happened to Jessica Dishon.

Hey, Cold Case fans, we have something special for you. We're bringing you double the episodes every week. We know you dedicated fans need your fix in between new episodes. So every Thursday, we are back bringing some of our best episodes from previous seasons. Let us know which classic episodes you'd like to hear again in the comments. And don't worry, we'll see you back here every Tuesday for all new episodes of Cold Case Files 2. Now, on to the episode. It's hatred of somebody taking your 17-year-old kid and killing her.

Jessica's murder became the biggest unsolved murder case in the state. The shocking thing about this case was that it was right there in front of them. Nobody did a thing about it. It was early morning in Bullitt County, Kentucky. The Deshawn family went about their usual routine. Edna was ready for work a little after 5.30 a.m. Mike, her husband, got their two boys up a little after that.

They had to catch the bus to school at 6.30 a.m. He looked in on his daughter, Jessica. She was still sleeping. He let her sleep, though, because she was 16 and able to get herself to school. When Jessica's mother, Edna, got home around 1 p.m., she noticed that Jessica's car was still parked in the front of the house. But Jessica wasn't home. Inside of her car, Edna found Jessica's purse, phone, and a single shoe.

The phone had the number 9 and the number 1 dialed in, but the call hadn't been sent. Jessica was missing. The dark secret to Jessica's disappearance wouldn't be uncovered for 14 years. There are 120,000 unsolved murder cases in America. Each one is called a cold case, and only 1% are ever solved. You're listening to Cold Case Files, the podcast from A&E. Edna did everything she could think of to look for her missing daughter. She talked with Mike. She talked with the school.

She even went to the restaurant where Jessica worked and talked to her best friend, Sarah. But she didn't find Jessica. Jessica hadn't even made it to school that day, and Sarah hadn't seen her. The numbers on the telephone gave Edna a bad feeling, so she and Mike went to the police to report her missing. Here they are to tell us about that experience. He told me, he said, well, maybe she's a runaway. I said, no, she's not no runaway with one shoe on and one shoe off.

He makes a good point. Edna was understandably upset about her daughter's disappearance, but she couldn't understand the police's response. They told us to go home and come back that next morning. Like, someone's got to help, you know. Our daughter's missing and no one wants to help. What does a person do when the people they trust to protect them aren't helping? In this case, they went home with the intentions of returning the next morning.

Feeling restless, Edna made Jessica's bed and straightened up the room while Jessica's little brother, Chris, went outside to feed the dogs. He came running back into the house, exclaiming that he had just heard Jessica's voice. Mike sprang into action. I got my gun, and out the door I went. I went to kill. When we run out the door, my brother Stanley was pulling in the driveway, and he asked me, he said, what's going on? I said, Chris said he thought he heard Jessica Holler help me. And he said, well, come on. We jumped the fence.

We went up on the hills. We start looking around the pond. There's somebody burning a bunch of clothes up on the hill. And it was Bucky Brooks. Bucky Brooks was a member of the family who lived next door to the Deschamps. Mike, his brother Stanley, and two sons, Chris and Mike Jr., asked if they could look around. Bucky asked Mike and company to leave. With little other option, the Deshawn's went back to the police. For the first 24 hours of Jessica's disappearance, the time period that experts have labeled as the most crucial, law enforcement did nothing. It wasn't until after that second

visit that law enforcement took any sort of action. Two officers went to the house. They looked through Jessica's room, and they searched her car without gloves. After that, you know, they sent some cops up here. I figured they'd swore misplaced, you know. But only two officers pulled up. He searched Jessica's car, no gloves, no nothing. If there were any fingerprints on the car before,

he had messed them up because his hands was already all over the car too. It turns out the police officer wasn't the only one who rifled through the car without gloves. Bullock County was small, and word of Jessica's disappearance spread fast. People came to look at Jessica's car, check out the scene, and give their opinion. Among the spectators was a news reporter who actually went through Jessica's car on camera. Any evidence that might have existed was compromised. The family, feeling helpless, went out to search for Jessica. Mike's brother suggested that they look at a place called the River Bottoms.

The Salt River surrounds Bullock County, and the area referred to as the Bottoms was a dried-up spot with a bridge. Kids would go there to party, but it's described by locals as spooky and eerie. Mike tells us how that search went. We wanted to search, even though it was rough, on a family. Stanley, my brother, he got sick, and they had to take him home because he started vomiting. We all looked. We didn't find nothing out there. It was kind of hard to come back home when Jessica was still missing. Jessica disappeared on a Friday. On the following Monday, the Deshawn family, more desperate than ever for answers,

was looking everywhere for leads. They heard from other neighbors that there had been another fire at the Brooks home, and Bucky had been the one tending to it. Because of a burn ban in place, this was the perfect opportunity to call police to the Brooks home. So officers went to investigate the fire. Something about the Brooks place made the police suspicious. They searched all the fields on the farm and even brought in cadaver dogs. Using the clothes Jessica was wearing, the dogs went to work. They picked up a scent in Bucky's fire pit. It was two pairs of gardening gloves. Mike felt like this was enough evidence to arrest Bucky, but the police disagreed. So Mike called the FBI. The FBI said the only time that we can come in here is if the Sheriff's Department

invite us or if one of the parents. I said, well, I'm Mike Dish and I'm Jessica's dad. I'm inviting you in. When the FBI arrived, I looked at the Bullitt County Sheriff's Department and I said, look, all you little Keystone cops can go back to Shepherdville now. I got the big dogs in. The search for Jessica finally seemed to have started. The FBI took Jessica's car and some things from her room. They searched the Brooks farm again, but this time they found something else.

A picture of Jessica. Evidence against Bucky Brooks was piling up, but Jessica was still missing. On September 27, 1999, 17 days after Jessica went missing, an unsuspecting woman drove over the bridge at the river bottoms. She glanced out her window and saw something or someone leaning against a tree. Detecting some distress, she called the police. This is Lynn Hunt, a cold case detective. She says that she thinks she's found a body.

The FBI forensic team arrived on the scene. The body was decomposed. It was completely unrecognizable. Part of her limb was gone, some of her fingers. It was determined that Jessica probably wasn't killed on the first day, but more likely it was the third day. There were 72 hours in which Jessica could have been saved. I wonder at what point she lost hope. The scene was horrific. Jessica's body was in advanced stages of decomposition. She was missing four fingers.

Her jaw was broken, and there was rope around one of her ankles. Her body was so decomposed they weren't able to determine if she was assaulted, but they did label the cause of death as strangulation. The loss of a child is overwhelming for any parent, but having to identify your child under the conditions I just described is unimaginable. Mike wasn't able to bring himself to do it, so Edna identified her daughter. I got there and fell on my knees. I couldn't really tell it was her from her face.

But then I seen her butterfly tattoo on her side. And I knew that was her. And I was just devastated. Pressure was rising to find the culprit in this crime, so investigators turned back to their only suspect, Bucky Brooks. He told police that he saw Jessica walking up the road the morning she went missing, but lied about his alibi. He told investigators that he was alone with his wife at the time, but she later denied it.

Bucky told police a lot of things that turned out to not be true. Before the FBI made their exit from Bullitt County, they gave Bucky a polygraph test. He failed. Polygraphs aren't allowed in court, as evidenced, and their accuracy is called into question by a lot of types of experts. But in this case, the prosecutor used Bucky's failed exam as reason to prosecute him. He was charged with murder and facing the death penalty. The prosecution started strong. They wanted Bucky to pay for his crime.

The defense attacked the integrity of the investigation. They pointed out that evidence, for example, the body parts, had been mishandled. They were left out to further decompose. Across the top in red letters it says, Keep frozen. And here it says, Keep frozen. Keep frozen. Was it ever kept frozen?

No, sir. The defense intensely questioned Charlie Mann, a local detective. Detective Mann held his own on the stand for a while, but eventually he was worn down. Frustrated, or maybe just exhausted from the continual stream of questioning, he made an utterance on the stand that changed everything. I failed a polygraph I think they issued to me. Check. Polygraphs aren't admissible in court. Investigators frequently try to elicit confessions during the course of a polygraph. In those cases, only the confession is admissible.

It's not okay to even mention the test in court, but it's even less okay to tell whether a person passed or failed. They failed the polygraph. The court immediately declared a mistrial and the jury was dismissed. Mike and Edna were left without answers and without justice. So they waited, full of anger and grief. It took a toll on their lives and on their relationship. She just come told me she wanted a divorce. I said, okay.

I couldn't take it anymore. I lost my kid. I lost my wife, too, you know. We still don't talk. Our story will return right after this word from our sponsors. In June of 2012, 13 years after Jessica was murdered, the county sheriff's office hired Detective Lynn Hunt. Her job was to look at cold cases, and Jessica's became the first.

This is Detective Hunt. When I started the investigation, I had such little paper information there in the sheriff's office. Mostly it was just loose-leaf paper thrown in boxes, napkins, sticky notes, no phone numbers of individuals that they had interviewed, no birthdates, no addresses, no nothing. Soon after that, I went to Mike Dishon's home and sat down and met with Mike and Bubby just to tell them that I was going to reopen the case.

Mike's son, Mike Jr., was affectionately called Bubby by the family as to not confuse the two names. Mike Jr. took Detective Hunt to Jessica's bedroom, a room that had remained untouched for all those years. Inside a hat box in the closet was Jessica's wallet, shoe, and cell phone, The evidence from her car. Detective Hunt's next step was to get all of the case files from Bucky's trial. She looked through boxes on boxes of evidence to see if she could discover anything that might help her solve Jessica's case.

She found some information that was important to the case. But it wasn't about Jessica. It was about Bucky Brooks. I found Bucky's mental evaluation. It stated that he had an IQ of 61. Bucky Brooks never should have been given a polygraph exam with that low of IQ. Just as a point of reference, an IQ of between 90 and 115 is considered average. There's no way they can understand the questions, let alone understand how they're answering.

I wasn't 100% sure if Bucky was innocent. But if Bucky didn't do it, I needed to prove who did. Detective Hunt started to feel like she might never find Jessica's murderer. Then one day, a former co-worker of Detective Hunt called her with some information. He told her that a prison informant had some information about Jessica's case. Actually, the inmate had said he knew who killed Jessica. Though wary of the prison informant's credibility, she wanted to speak to him. He stated that he had Jessica for a couple of days and then he took her life. The reason he did a mutilation to her, he was trying to make it look like some drug dealers or a cartel done that to her.

Why was he pissed off again? She was having a relationship with a boy her own age, someone that she had found that she liked. He kept calling that boy a little bastard and a little bitch and calling her names. Then he told her. He told Detective Hunt who killed Jessica Deshawn. Stanley Deshawn was Mike's brother. Jessica's uncle, Stanley Dishon, committed the murder. The informant spilled out more details about Jessica's case. He said that Stanley tortured Jessica in a barn near where she was found.

At one point, Mike and Stanley were so close to Jessica's body that Stanley became physically ill, and he advised Mike to just quit looking. One of the most vital things that the informant told Detective Hunt was that some of Jessica's things, like her missing shoe, were buried under a fallen tree near the scene. Detective Hunt and Jessica's brother, Mike Jr., went back to the river bottoms and they started to dig. They dug under fallen trees for six or seven hours, but it started to rain and they were forced to give up. On the way home, Mike Jr. pointed out a barn, stating that Jessica used to go party there. We walk in the first building. It's dark. Half of the roof is missing, so it was only part of the light that we had. And I see a piece of material sticking out from mud and sand and all kinds of junk just thrown on top of it.

And so I start pulling it out, and I said, That looks strangely like your sister's comforter that's on her bed. I said, What are the chances it's the same pattern? We drive as fast as we can with the sheet in the car directly back to his house because her room hasn't changed since the murder. Pull the comforter back, pull the blanket back, and guess what's not there? The fitted sheet. Nothing but the mattress.

The killer had been in the home. He'd taken Jessica right from her bed. I feel sure of now that Stanley D been abusing Jessica for years. He was a member of the family. He knew when the parents went to work. He knew when the boys caught the school bus. He knew when Jessica would be home alone. On that particular morning, Jessica had had enough. She told Stanley to leave her alone or she'd tell her new boyfriend what he'd done to her.

Stanley was afraid. He knew Mike would kill him. So he knocked Jessica out. He broke her jaw. He wrapped her in the fitted sheet from her bed and took her to the barn. For three days, he tortured her. For three days, he helped the family search. For three days, Jessica was alone, wondering what her fate would be.

I was upset, yeah. I was devastated. How could someone that, you know, that's lived with you and you've taken care of, how could they do that? Lynn Hunt told me, she said, you know, I'm going to indict your brother. I said, well, if he done it,

I went to death penalty. I didn't believe it. He was my brother. I gave him a home. I fed him, got him a job. It's hatred, you know what I'm saying? Somebody taking your 17-year-old kid and killing her and raping her. It turns out, though, Jessica wasn't Stanley's only target for abuse.

Detective Hunt had questioned several family members throughout her investigation. She discovered three other family members that had been abused by Stanley. One of his victims had been so traumatized by the experience that she passed out at the mention of his name. Stanley was charged with Jessica's rape and murder, but in the interest of minimizing the trauma to his other victims, the prosecution made a plea deal. He pled guilty to four counts of rape and one count of manslaughter for Jessica's death. As a result of this plea, Stanley Deshaun was sentenced to 20 years in prison. There is one more thing before we end, a fact that will haunt the Deshawns forever.

When I went through the defense files, I pull out the seventh box, and inside the box was a letter from a second informant, 2002. The letter said, I am an inmate, and I was in the cell with Stanley Disham, where he admitted he killed his niece, and he dumped the body in the river bottoms. Bucky Brooks was tried for Jessica's murder in 2002. If he was convicted, he would have been sentenced to death. A mistaken judgment on the part of the investigators to ignore the letter could have ended with an innocent man's death. It seems, though, that a mistake on the part of Detective Mann, mentioning the polygraph, was also what saved him. What I can't help but wonder is if the police would have removed their blinders and investigated the letter in 2002, where would Stanley be now? Would there be fewer abuse victims?

Would there have been a plea? Though Detective Hunt's efforts and resolution of this case are admirable, did Jessica receive justice? I wonder at what point does justice cross over and turn into revenge. Sitting in prison is not justice. I have to work every day to pay taxes. For him to be able to stay in prison after what he did to my Jessica, that's not justice. Stanley will be 77 years old when he gets out, is hosted by Brooke Giddings.

Produced by Scott Brody and McKamey Lynn. And our executive producer is Ted Butler. We're mixed and distributed by Podcast One. Cold Case Files, the TV show, is produced by Blumhouse Television and Ample Entertainment. Check out more Cold Case Files at aetv.com.