Mind of a Serial Killer - Campus Crimes: The Murder of Patrick Dennehy

Episode Date: August 30, 2026

The fourth and final episode of Campus Crimes examines the 2003 murder of Baylor basketball player Patrick Dennehy, who was shot and killed by his own teammate... but the crime that followed may have been even colder. Head coach Dave Bliss, facing exposure for recruiting violations, launched a calculated scheme to brand Dennehy a drug dealer after his death, recorded in his own words on a hidden tape. One young assistant coach risked everything to stop it.If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Serial Killers & Murderous Minds to never miss a case! Want all 2 parts of every case all at once? Join Crime House+ and get both parts of each case dropped together on Monday ad-free. Join at crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. Serial Killers & Murderous Minds is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios.🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of Reddit, Murder True Crime Stories, Crime House 24/7, and more wherever you get your podcasts!Follow me on SocialInstagram: @CrimehouseTikTok: @CrimehouseFacebook: @crimehousestudiosYouTube: @crimehousestudios

Hi listeners, it's Vanessa. Are you the type to fall down an internet rabbit hole and not come up for hours? You'll love Crimes of Reddit, a new crimehouse original with Sabrina Deanna Roga and Alexis Linkletter. Every week, one host brings real true crime stories from Reddit, while the other reacts completely blind. No prep, no spoilers, then they swap. It's the feeling of sending your group chat a threat at 2 a.m. that starts with, You have to see this. Except Sabrina and Alexis. are in the chat with you. Follow Crimes of Reddit on Apple Podcasts and Spotify or subscribe

at Crimes of Reddit Pod on YouTube. This is Crime House. In the summer of 2003, a 21-year-old college basketball player disappeared. He was six feet 10 inches tall, a gifted forward with a real shot at the NBA, and he vanished without a trace from a university town in Texas. His car turned. up hundreds of miles away in Virginia, with the license plates stripped off. His dogs hadn't been fed in days. For six weeks, no one knew where he was. Then, six weeks after he was last seen, they found him in a gravel pit outside of town. When the answers started coming, they were almost

too sad to believe. He'd been shot by his own teammate, a friend, a young man he'd trusted. That would be enough for most stories, a promising life ended by someone close to him. But this story doesn't stop there, because once the investigators started pulling on the threads of that killing, they found something underneath it that was even uglier. Not a crime of rage or fear, but a crime of calculation, a cover-up, and at the center of it, a man in a position of enormous trust, caught on a hidden tape recorder coldly working out how to protect. protect himself. His plan was to lie about a dead man who could no longer defend himself.

And in his own recorded words, the plan had a name. What we have to do, he said, is create the reasonable doubt. This is serial killers and murderous minds, a crimehouse original. I'm Vanessa Richardson. And for the last month, I've been spending my Sundays with you on the American College campus in a four-part special. special. Today we come to the end of it. Thank you for being part of the crimehouse community. Please rate, review, and follow the show. If you're a Crimehouse Plus member, all four episodes of campus crimes are available right now completely ad-free. If you haven't joined yet, go to crimehouseplus.com or tap try free on the serial killers and murderous minds show page on Apple podcasts. Along with early access to this series, you'll also get every episode of this show

and the rest of the crimehouse lineup, ad-free and early. A campus is a place of enormous promise. It's where futures are built and young minds are nourished, where people arrive to become who they're going to be, but that same place can also become the setting for something monstrous. During this series, we've looked at crimes that erased the very futures a campus exists to create. Bright lives cut short in the place that was supposed to launch them. And in each one, when the worst happened, the people in charge had to decide what they would protect, the people who were harmed, or the institution's good name.

Before we begin, a warning. This episode describes a shooting death and gun violence, and it touches on serious mental illness. Please take care while listening. Our first three stops were about institutions that hid an ugly truth. A poisoning covered up, a killing filed away as an accident. A murder left unsolved so a reputation could stay intact. Today's story follows that same instinct, taken to its cruelest extreme.

Because this time, the people protecting the institution didn't just stay quiet. One of them tried to rewrite the story of a murdered young man, to paint him after his death as a criminal so that the truth about the program he played for would never come out. His name was Patrick Denahey. He was a college basketball player with a future in the game, and in the summer of 2003, he was shot and killed by his teammate. That alone made national news, but what turned it into one of the most disgraceful scandals in the history of college sports was what his head coach did next, a scheme so cold it was caught, word for word, on a hidden tape. In this episode, I'll introduce you to Patrick Denehy and the dream he was chasing.

We'll talk about the summer he disappeared, the terrible thing that happened to him and the cover-up underneath it all, a coach's plan to protect himself by smearing a dead player, and the one man on his staff who refused to go along. And it brings us one last time to the question that has run beneath this entire series. When an institution is faced with something terrible, who does it choose to protect? And what happens to the person who decides to speak the truth? truth. Patrick James Denehy grew up in Santa Clara, California, in the heart of what's now Silicon Valley. From a young age, he was an athlete, and not just any athlete. By the time he finished high school, he'd grown to six feet ten inches tall, with the kind of size and skill that makes

college recruiters take notice. He was a forward, big and mobile and quick for his size, and he had a dream that felt for someone with his gifts entirely within reach. Patrick Dennehy wanted to play in the NBA. The people who knew him describe a warm, easygoing young man, well-liked and close to his family back in California. He loved his dogs. He was exactly the kind of young man a college is supposed to take in and send back out into the world better than he arrived.

For a kid with professional ambitions, every step along the way matters. Which school, which coach, which system, how much you play, and who's watching when you do. do. Denahee started his college career at the University of New Mexico, where he spent two seasons and showed real promise. But by 2002, he wanted more, a bigger platform, a program that could put him in front of the scouts who decide who gets a shot at the next level. So he transferred after a coach at Baylor University came calling. And that decision is what brought him to Waco, Texas. The coach's name was Dave Bliss. He was a

veteran of the college game, man with hundreds of career wins and a long resume. He'd come up in the sport under famous names and had run programs at several schools. Baylor, a private Baptist university, had never been a basketball powerhouse, but Bliss had been hired to change that. In big-time college basketball, that kind of mandate comes with enormous pressure and temptation. Winning brings money, attention, and job security. Losing ends career. and the men who thrive in that world are often the ones willing to do whatever it takes to land the players who win the games. Dave Bliss wanted Patrick Dennehy to help him win, and he went after him hard. According to Denahe's own family, the coach lured him to Baylor

with the full package, a scholarship, a place to live, even a brand new Chevy Tahoe to drive. For a young man chasing a professional career, it was a compelling offer, a signal that this program believed in him and would take care of him. Later, that detail would take on a much darker meaning. But at the time, it looked like nothing more than a school going all in on a player it wanted. Denahey accepted and transferred to Baylor in 2002. Under NCAA rules, a player who transfers has to sit out a year before he can compete. So Denahey spent the 2002-2003 season as what's called a red shirt,

practicing every day with the team, learning the system, staying in shape, but not playing a single game. By the summer of 2003, the waiting was nearly over. He was preparing for the upcoming season, one that was finally going to be his. Somewhere in that time, Denahey grew close to another player who had taken a similar path to Baylor. His name was Carlton Dotson. Dotson was a junior, a forward like Denehy, and he had transferred in from a junior college in Paris, Texas. The two of them had a lot in common, both transfers, both new to the program, both outsiders finding their footing in a new place far from where they'd grown up.

They became fast friends. By that summer, they were close enough that people thought of them as a pair, teammates, roommates at times, and genuine friends. And that's what makes the next part so hard to comprehend. In the early summer of 2003, something began to begin. to go wrong. Though no one has ever fully untangled what it was, both Dennehy and Dotson started telling people around them that they felt unsafe. They said they'd been threatened. According to later accounts, the threats came from other players on the team, and they were serious enough that the two young men became convinced they needed to protect themselves. So they did something drastic. They bought guns, two pistols, and a rifle. The two friends would

drive out to open land north of Waco to practice shooting them. A friend of Denaheys would later say that he'd spoken to Dennyhee by phone in the middle of June and that Denahey told him he was worried, specifically about threats that had been made against Dotson. Picture it for a second. Two young athletes supposedly living the dream at a Division I program, and yet they were supposedly so afraid of their own teammates, they were arming themselves and learning how to shoot. Whatever was really happening that summer, the situation seemed like it would end dangerously. And it did. The last time anyone saw Patrick Denahey was on June 12, 2003. At first, no one realized anything was wrong. It was summer. Players came and went, sometimes home for the break or off on their own. But then the small signs came.

Denahey and Dotson had both told people they would be at a party, and neither one showed up. Denahe's family back in California grew uneasy when Father's Day came and went with no phone call, which was not like him at all. And then Denahe's roommate came home from a trip out of town to find that Denahe's dogs had not been fed in days. Patrick loved those dogs. He would never have left them like that. Not willingly, something was wrong. On June 19th, a week after Denahe was last seen,

his mother, Valerie, and his stepfather Brian, filed a missing person report with the Waco police. Their son, the 6'10 basketball player with the NBA dream, had simply disappeared. As the police began to search, the case took an ominous turn. On June 25th, Patrick Denahey's car was found, not in Texas, but nearly 1,500 miles away in Virginia Beach, Virginia. The license plates had been removed. This was no longer the case of a player who had wandered off. Something had happened to Patrick Denahey, and the search was about to lead investigators

to the last person anyone ever suspected, his good friend. For weeks, the case of Patrick Dennehy was a national news story. It had all the elements, a gifted young athlete, a mysterious vanishing, a frantic search,

A famous university. The morning shows covered it. The cable networks covered it. Reporters descended on Waco, and Patrick's face was on TV night after night. Behind the scenes, investigators in several states were chasing the one lead that mattered most. Where was he and what had happened to him?

The break came from far outside Texas. An informant contacted the police with a chilling second-hand account. He said, that Carlton Dotson, Denahey's friend and teammate, had said something to a relative that he could never take back, that he and Deney had gotten into an argument while they were out shooting their guns, and that Dotson had shot him.

For the people who knew the two young men, it was almost impossible to absorb. Dotson was not a stranger or a rival. He was Patrick's friend, one of the closest people to him at Baylor. By this point, Dotson was no longer in Texas. he had left Waco and gone home to Maryland, and his behavior there was, by every account, troubling. He reached out to the authorities himself. He told them he thought he needed help. He said he needed

counseling, and he told them he was hearing voices. This is a thread that runs through the rest of Carlton-Dotson story, and it has to be handled with care because it is real and it is serious. By the accounts of the people around him and the professionals who would later examine him, Dotson was a young man in the grip of a genuine mental health crisis. That fact does not excuse what he did, and it does not lessen what was taken from Patrick Denehy. But it is part of understanding how this happened, and it would come to shape everything about the legal case that followed. On July 21, 2003, based on the informants account and the mounting evidence,

Carlton Dotson was charged with murder and taken into custody in Maryland. But there was still one piece missing. The investigators had a suspect and an account of a shooting, but what they did not yet have was Patrick Denehy. That changed five days later. On July 25th, in a gravel pit in the countryside just beyond Waco, searchers found a body. It had been there for weeks through the worst of the summer heat.

Two days later, it was confirmed to be Patrick Denehy. On July 30th, his death was officially ruled a homicide. He'd been shot twice in the head. In the weeks that followed, the people who loved Patrick Denehy gathered to mourn him. There was a memorial service near his family's home in California and another on the Baylor campus. There, the university came together to grieve a young man

who had never gotten the chance to play a game for them. He was remembered as a son, a teammate, a friend, and a kid with a future that had just been stolen. Dotson's account was that he'd acted in self-defense. He claimed that Denehy had pointed a gun at him and pulled the trigger and that the gun had jammed. Only then had Dotson fired back to save his own life. It's the kind of story that if true would change the meaning of everything. But the physical evidence did not support him. it. The autopsy showed that Dennehy had been shot twice at close range in the temple.

Medical examiner said that is not consistent with a man firing to defend himself against someone aiming a gun in his face. The self-defense story didn't hold up. What followed was a long and complicated legal road, and much of it turned on Carlton Dodson's mental state. In October of 2004, more than a year after his arrest, a judge declared him incompetent to stand trial and sent him to a state mental hospital. This is a specific legal finding, not a verdict on guilt, but a determination that a defendant is too impaired to understand the proceedings against him or help in his own defense. The purpose of committing him was to treat him, to stabilize him, and to see whether he could be restored to the point where the case could go forward.

Over the following months, he was. All told, nearly two years passed between Carl's Dotson's arrest and any resolution of the charges against him. Two years in which the Denehy family waited with no trial and no answers for the case to reach some kind of end. And then on June 8, 2005, before his case ever reached a jury, Carlton Dotson pleaded guilty to the murder of Patrick Denehy. A week later, he was sentenced to 35 years in prison. There would be no trial, no parade of witnesses, no cross-examination.

The friend who had shot Patrick Dennehy in a field outside Waco had simply stood up in open court and admitted it. It is, by many accounts, the only case in the history of American college sports in which one player was convicted of murdering another. In the years since, there have been suggestions that Dotson may not have acted entirely alone. To be clear, these theories have never been corroborated and have never resulted in a charge against anyone else. But they have inferred that others connected to the team knew more than they let on. This is just speculation. No evidence has ever substantiated it, and I'm not going to point a finger at anyone.

Carlton Dotson pleaded guilty to this crime, and in the eyes of the law, he is the person who committed it. But the questions have lingered. There also have been rumors that Dotson's plea deal suited more than just him that a public murder trial with all of its testimony and scrutiny was something certain people hoped to avoid. People connected to the university itself. Again, this is alleged, not proven, but I will say this. By the time Carlton Dotson pleaded guilty in 2005,

Patrick Denehy's murder was no longer the biggest scandal at Baylor. something else had come out, something that had nothing to do with Dotson at all. In the very first days after Patrick Denehy was reported missing, before his body was even found or anyone was charged, investigators looking into his life had found something. A simple matter of paperwork, really, but it had to do with how exactly Patrick Denehy had been paying to attend Baylor. When investigators looked into it, they found something that didn't add up. Dennehy, it turned out, had not actually been on a full athletic scholarship during his redshirt year, and yet his tuition had been getting paid. So where was the money coming from?

The answer was that the head coach had been paying for it. Dave Bliss had quietly covered part of the tuition for Patrick Denahey, and for at least one other player named Corey Herring, out of funds Bliss himself controlled. The total came to somewhere around $7,000.000. which wasn't a lot, but under the rules of the NCAA, it was flatly forbidden. Coaches cannot pay players. It's one of the brightest lines in all of college sports, the kind of violation that can bring an entire program down. Dave Bliss had crossed it, and he knew it.

Now, a coach caught making improper payments like this can face real consequences. Things like suspension, sanctions, the possible ruin of the program. he'd spent years building. Bliss understood exactly how much trouble he was in. And so, rather than come clean, he came up with a plan. It was not a panicked spur of the moment lie. It was, as the recordings would later show, something he thought through, and he tried to get the people around him to help. The plan was to lie about where the money came from. Specifically, it was to construct a false story that would explain Denahey's finances in a way that pointed anywhere except his coach. And the story Bliss chose was this, that the reason

Denehy always seemed to have money was because he was selling drugs, and that this, not any payment from his coach, was how he had paid his way through school. And Denehy wasn't even alive to defend himself. But Bliss didn't just tell this lie himself. He tried to get his players and staff to repeat the drug dealer story, too. Specifically to the sheriff's investigators and to the NCAA as if it were an established fact. He was trying to recruit the people around him into a conspiracy to frame a murder victim. Even worse, most of them were young men who depended on him for their futures in the game. Going along with the head coach was the safe thing to do if you wanted a career. And that's why the next part of the story takes some real guts.

Abar Rouse was a young assistant coach and Baylor graduate himself. He'd been to on Dave Bliss' staff for less than two weeks when Patrick Denahey disappeared. Coaching at this level was Rouse's dream. He'd spent years climbing the ladder at smaller schools to earn this one shot. And now, almost before he had unpacked, the head coach was pressuring him to take part in this diabolical scheme. And he made it clear, if Rouse would not go along, he would lose the job he had worked his whole life to get. made a different choice. He went out and bought a small tape recorder for about $25. He hid it under his shirt, and he let Dave Bliss talk. On those tapes, Bliss can be heard laying out the plan in his

own words. He points out coldly that the one person who could contradict the drug dealer story is gone. And so Bliss concludes with, quote, what we have to do is create the reasonable doubt, end quote. The tapes caught something else too, something that had nothing to do with money. In working through his cover story, Bliss made it clear that he had known all along that Denahey and Dotson had been genuinely afraid that summer, that they'd been threatened by other players. Apparently the two of them had even asked for help, and Bliss, it seems, had buried that as well. As the investigation closed in, his behavior grew more desperate. Bliss flew to New York City without telling anyone, including his own wife, to try to convince the mother of

the other player, Corey Herring, to lie about the tuition payments. On another occasion, he called Baylor's financial aid office pretending to be Herring's father. He was trying to find out what evidence the investigators might already have. For a while, Bliss publicly insisted that he and his program had done nothing wrong, that they had followed the rules for decades, but the walls were closing in. Confronted by Baylor's own investigators, Bliss finally confessed, and on August 8, 2003, the president of Baylor University forced Dave Bliss to resign. The athletic director resigned the same day, taking responsibility for what had happened on his watch, though there was no evidence he had known. The reckoning didn't stop there. After its own

investigation, the NCAA handed Dave Bliss a 10-year show-cause penalty. It's a formal warning to every school in the country that hiring him means taking on his punishment, too. Basically, a career death sentence for a coach. In fact, Baylor's entire basketball program was placed on probation for years and stripped of games and scholarships. And here's the thing that needs to be said plainly. In all of they're investigating, the authorities never found a shred of evidence that Patrick Denahey had dealt drugs to anyone. His friends said it was not true. His family said it was not true. His roommates and teammates said it was not true. The people who actually knew him were left not only to grieve his murder, but to defend his name against a lie told by the very man who

had recruited him and promised to look after him. Abar Rouse had done the right thing, the brave thing. He had refused to help frame a dead man. He had risked his job, and then he handed his tapes over to an investigative reporter named Danny Robbins, who made their contents public. Rouse had done something honorable, something the profession should have respected. Instead, it ended his career. In the strange, closed world of big-time college coaching, A-bar Rouse became known, not as the man who told the truth,

but as the man who had secretly taped his boss. And that, it turned out, was the unforgivable sin. He was never hired for another full-time college coaching job. Prominent, respected coaches said openly that they would never employ an assistant who had done what Rouse did. That loyalty to the man above you came first. even, apparently, over exposing a plot to slander a murdered young man. So, Abar Rouse left coaching.

He became a teacher. For years now, he's been educating incarcerated men. And Dave Bliss? For a long time, his story ran in the opposite direction. He wrote a book. He gave speeches about redemption and second chances. He appeared at Christian athletic events, presenting himself as a man who'd fallen and found his work.

way back to Grace. He eventually returned to coaching at a small Christian university as though the whole thing were safely behind him. Then in 2017, a documentary called Disgraced brought the case back into the light. Its filmmakers interviewed Bliss at length and gave him every chance to show the remorse he had been preaching. In an irony, almost too neat to be real, they ended up doing to him exactly what Rouse had done years before, because in a moment when he seemed to believe the cameras were off, David Bliss said the quiet thing out loud again. 14 years after Patrick Denahey's murder, he insisted the young man really had been a drug dealer, claiming Denahey had sold, in his words, to all the white guys on campus. He described his own conduct with a chilling image,

saying that he had got in the mud with the pigs. He was still, after everything, repeating the lie. Within days of the documentary airing, Bliss resigned from his coaching job. And to be fair, at another point in that same film, he does say of himself, quote, of course I shouldn't be forgiven, end quote. But which of those two men is the real Dave Bliss, the one asking for forgiveness, or the one still smearing the death? That's the question the film leaves hanging in the air.

The program Bliss left in ruins was slowly rebuilt by a new coach, Scott Drew, who took a job almost no one wanted. And 18 years later, he led Baylor to its first national championship. As for Carlton Dotson, the friend who fired the shots, he served his time. He was denied parole several times over the years. Then, quietly, he was granted release. In November of 2024, after roughly 19 years in prison, Carlton Dotson walked out on parole. He is today a free man living in Texas.

Patrick Denehy was 21 years old when he died. He was a son, a friend, a young man with a dream that was finally within his reach. He'd done everything a college athlete is supposed to do, worked, transferred, waited his turn, gotten himself ready for the season that was going to change his life. And he was killed before he ever got to play it. By someone he trusted. That would be tragedy enough. But it's the second wound in this story that I can't stop thinking about.

Because after Patrick Dennyhy was murdered, after he lost his life and his future, the man who was supposed to be his mentor tried to take the one thing he had left, his good name. Dave Bliss looked at the first. the death of a young man he had recruited, and he saw not a person to be mourned, but a problem to be solved. A dead man who couldn't talk back and could therefore be made to carry a lie. Create the reasonable doubt. There may be no colder sentence in this entire series. And that's why this story is where we end, because over these four Sundays, we've watched the same thing happen again and again in different decades and different places.

a university that hid a poisoning to protect its founding, a city and a school that let a killing be called an accident, a campus that let a murder go unsolved rather than face what it knew, and now a coach who tried to frame a murdered player to save his program. Four campuses, four bright futures, erased, and in every single case, when the truth was ugly, someone with power decided that the institution mattered more, more than the person who'd been harmed.

But running through these episodes is another thread. The people who refused to look away, the scholars who kept asking what really killed Jane Stanford, the citizen investigators who spent years chasing the truth about Betsy Ardzma, and a young assistant coach named Abar Rouse, who hid a tape recorder under his shirt because he could not stomach hearing someone slander a dead man. They remind us that institutions don't actually do the look

away, people do. And people can do otherwise. That choice is always there. That's where we'll leave campus crimes. Thank you for spending these four Sundays with me, and you'll still get all our normal episodes every Monday and Thursday. Serial Killers and Murderous Minds is a Crimehouse Original, powered by Pave Studios. Here at Crime House, we want to thank each and every one of you for your support. If you like what you heard today, reach out on Instagram. at Crimehouse. Don't forget to rate, review, and follow serial killers and murderous minds wherever you get your podcasts. Your feedback truly makes a difference. And to enhance your serial killers and murderous minds listening experience, subscribe to Crimehouse Plus. You'll get

every episode of this show and the rest of the crimehouse lineup, ad free and early, plus at least two bonus episodes every month. To join, go to Crimehouseplus.com. Or if you listen on Apple podcasts, tap try free at the top of the serial killers and murderous minds show page. Serial Killers and Murderous Minds is hosted by me, Vanessa Richardson, and is a crime house original powered by Pave Studios. This episode was brought to life by the serial killers and murderous minds team. Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Benadon, Lori Maranelli, Natalie Pertsovsky, Sarah Kamp, Alyssa Fox, and Carrie Murphy. Thank you for listening. Hi listeners, it's Vanessa. Are you the type to fall down an internet rabbit hole and not come up for hours?

You'll love Crimes of Reddit, a new crimehouse original with Sabrina Deanna Roga and Alexis Linkletter. Every week, one host brings real true crime stories from Reddit, while the other reacts completely blind. No prep, no spoilers. Then they swap. It's the feeling of sending your group chat a thread at 2 a.m. that starts with, You have to see this. Except Sabrina and Alexis are in the chat with you. Follow Crimes of Reddit on Apple Podcasts and Spotify or subscribe at Crimes of Reddit pod on YouTube.