Sins & Survivors: A Las Vegas True Crime Podcast - The Unsolved Disappearance of Diana Leone (Part 2)

Episode Date: November 26, 2024

Diana Leone disappeared in February 2000, and the horrific details her young daughter shared with police about the last time she saw her mom left investigators and family members with little hope that Diana would be found alive. We’ve talked before about how domestic abuse is a pattern, and the same was true of Diana’s boyfriend. As the lead detective looking into the case observed, people in the vicinity of David Morgan had a history of just disappearing.https://sinspod.co/54sourcesDomestic Violence Resourceshttp://sinspod.co/resourcesClick here to become a member of our Patreon!https://sinspod.co/patreonVisit and join our Patreon now and access our ad-free episodes and exclusive bonus content & schwag! Get ad-free access for only $1 a month or ad-free and bonus episodes for $3 a monthApple Podcast Subscriptionshttps://sinspod.co/appleWe're now offering premium membership benefits on Apple Podcast Subscriptions! On your mobile deviceLet us know what you think about the episodehttps://www.buzzsprout.com/twilio/text_messages/2248640/open_sms Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/sins-survivors-a-las-vegas-true-crime-podcast--6173686/support.

To listen ad-free, visit Zinspod.co slash subscribe. Starting at $2.99 a month, you'll also get access to our exclusive bonus content episodes when you join through Patreon or Apple subscriptions. Thanks for supporting the show! Diana Leone disappeared in February 2000, and the horrific details her young daughter shared with police about the last time she saw her mom left investigators and family members with little hope that Diana would be found alive. We've talked before about how domestic abuse is a pattern, and the same was true of Diana's boyfriend. As the lead detective looking into the case observed,

people in the vicinity of David Morgan had a history of Jess disappearing. Hi, and welcome to Sins and Survivors, a Las Vegas true crime podcast, where we focus on cases that deal with domestic violence, as well as missing persons and unsolved cases. I'm your host, Sean. And with me, as always, is the one and only John. I am the only John in the room. Last week, we shared the heartbreaking story of Diana Leone, a 35-year-old mother of two who was last seen in February of 2000. It wasn't until six months later that she was reported missing. And that report was not filed by her live-in boyfriend and father of her two children,

David Morgan. Her sister filed the report and asked to remain anonymous out of fear of David. Diana's seven-year-old daughter told police that David and her mom had a violent fight the last time she'd seen her mom. Her 14-year-old son said that his dad told him his mom had run off with a man named Tim, but according to police, this alleged boyfriend, Tim, did not have a romantic relationship with Diana, and he was not responsible for her disappearance. David Morgan's business associate, Donald Cowan, also disappeared in 1982 under suspicious circumstances, and David's sister, Dolores, told police she believed David was responsible.

Police investigated, but each time determined they did not have enough evidence to charge David with any crime. However, Detective Mark Redden did not give up on trying to find out what happened to Diana, and just a few years after she disappeared, he was able to corroborate claims that Diana and Donald were not the only people associated with David to go missing, and it was quite likely that David was responsible for their disappearances. In some ways, when we started researching this and uncovering David Morgan's history, we were surprised. Not surprised that a man like this was possibly responsible for multiple disappearances, but surprised that nothing was done about it for decades. Last week,

we mentioned that David was married twice before. His second wife, Marie Bernhardt, was the mother of the two children that were living with David when Diana moved in. We weren't able to find very much about Marie. We know that she was born around 1949 or 1950, and as we said, she was the mother of the two children with David, Alicia and Nevada Paul. According to reporting, she was a house mom and a homemaker. Their son Nevada died at age 19 in 1989 of a motorcycle accident. He was laid to rest in Las Vegas, and his headstone reads, In memory of our beloved Nevada, who remains forever in the hearts of his dad, brother, and sister. We were able to find Marie and David's official marriage certificate in the

Clark County archives dated November 25, 1979. As we've said, domestic violence and controlling behaviors are a pattern with abusers, and they don't just disappear overnight. This is apparent with David, as 20 years before Diana disappeared, Marie also vanished. She was last seen in 1980, and for nearly 45 years, there's been no trace of her anywhere. She was 30 years old when she disappeared. We know that she had a sister, Kim Smith, that loved her very much, and we are sure that many other people did as well. Just like Diana, David did not report her missing,

although they were recently married and had been together for 10 years and had two children together. She was reported missing by Women's Crisis Center, one of the first domestic and sexual violence organizations in Las Vegas. As it turns out, David had also abused Marie, according to Metro Police. Marie left him several times to

seek shelter and assistance at the Women's Crisis Center. She was reported missing on June 16, 1980, and the last known sighting of her was on May 10, 1980. David told People a story that we've heard many guilty partners tell their families and authorities. He said that she had run away with her boyfriend, a man named Gabriel Vincent. Gabriel Vincent was born in 1924. According to reporting by the Las Vegas Weekly, Gabriel worked as an orderly at Sunrise Hospital, but he was characterized as a drifter. He was from California, and he had a history of moving around and also an extensive criminal history. He had been arrested 14 times

and been incarcerated for robbery and car theft. Gabriel knew David and Marie because he rented a storage unit at Abacus, the Morgan family trucking and storage business. According to Marie's sister, Kim Smith, Gabriel and Marie were having an affair, but Gabriel's motives in the relationship were, at best, questionable. It turns out that Gabriel took pornographic photos of him and Marie that left nothing to the imagination about their relationship. He also allegedly had recordings of Marie saying that she was going to leave David. Gabriel showed these photos and played the recordings for David. According to Kim, Gabriel was trying to blackmail him.

Kim said that at that point, David became enraged, and he told her all that he could think about was killing Gabriel. We can't know if Gabriel realized what danger he was putting Marie and himself in, but we want to point out that this is obviously not okay at all and is in fact illegal. She told detectives that David bragged about killing Gabriel. He described shooting him in the groin and torturing him before shooting him in the chest and claimed that an employee of his helped him bury the body out in the desert. Detectives considered this statement by Kim, but there was no evidence to back up her story.

The employee who allegedly helped him could not be located, and once again, police felt that there was not enough evidence to charge David with any crime. Gabriel was last seen on November 1st, 1979, almost exactly 45 years to the day from this recording. He was 55 years old when he disappeared, and he would be 100 years old if he were alive today. When he was last seen, he drove a 1970 Dodge van and never picked up his last paycheck. According to the Las Vegas Weekly, no one reported Gabriel missing when he failed to show up for work due to his checkered past. They just assumed that he had moved on of his own accord.

As we mentioned earlier, David and Marie were married on November 25, 1979, less than a month after Gabriel vanished. She was last seen in June of 1980. Neither Marie nor Gabriel have ever contacted their families in the last 45 years. They've also never renewed their driver's licenses, and there's been no trace of them in all this time. If we ended the episode here, you all would be right to email us or message us and say that what we've just presented here is a lot of rumor and coincidence. And David being angry after being confronted with evidence that his soon-to-be wife was having an affair doesn't mean that he did in fact kill either of them. You might say that they could have run off together and David was just running his mouth with a lot of bravado as business associates said he would do. Or you might mention how Gabriel had a significant criminal history and maybe he

just drifted out of Vegas and onto another mark. Or that maybe Marie finally escaped David's abuse. We wouldn't disagree with your thinking. This is all the information police had in 1980. However, there was another crucial piece, a statement from 1985, that we haven't mentioned yet. David's sister, Dolores, came forward with information about Marie's disappearance that only added to their suspicion of David. According to Dolores, she was always afraid of David. She told police that one day in 1980, he called her and he told her to come to his house. He confessed that he had shot and killed Marie because she was going to leave him. He told her that he had

taken her body out past Indian Springs and buried it along the highway. Indian Springs is a very small town, about an hour outside of Las Vegas to the northwest. Dolores said he forced her at gun point to drive out past mile marker 124 on the 95, where he showed her Marie's body wrapped in a blanket. He then forced her to help bury her further away from the highway, in a deeper hole. Dolores also claimed that a month later, he forced her to return to the site and cover the grave with cement. He forced her to lug buckets of water while he carried the bags of cement. Officers asked Dolores to take them to the burial site, but Dolores could not locate it. Officers searched a two-mile radius and found no trace. According to the Review Journal, additional volunteers

searched the area as well, but no trace of a grave site or Marie was ever found. Dolores passed away from natural causes in 1997. Diana herself apparently also believed that David was responsible for Marie's disappearance. She told her sister that she thought the first house she lived in with David was haunted because Marie had been buried underneath it. As of 2001, that house had been demolished, and only the concrete slab foundation remained. At that time, the police were reportedly planning to use ground-penetrating radar to investigate further, but apparently they never found anything. Diana had also told her sister that

she turned down David's marriage proposals because she didn't want to suffer the same fate as Marie. The stories of Kim and Dolores were all the police had, which they felt was insufficient to arrest Morgan or even get search warrants for the house or storage units. Without a body or any other evidence, the police would not be able to convince a jury that a murder had happened. At the center of the investigation was Detective Mark Redden, who continued to work for years to solve the disappearances of Diana, Marie, Gabriel, and Donald. In February of 2006, investigators finally got the break they needed. Thanks to improvements in computer technology, they were finally able to identify and track down the employee that Kim said had helped David kill Gabriel Vincent.

It turned out that his name was Fred Hackett. In the late 1970s, he and his wife Avis lived and worked at the storage facility. We mentioned last week that the storage business also had some homes on the site, along with a junkyard, and both families lived there. Police officers interviewed the Hacketts, and Fred fully confessed to his involvement in Gabriel's murder. He told police that he had given David a.38 revolver, and that he was there when David shot him. He told police that David shot Gabriel in the groin, and shot him again in the chest as he was attempting to retreat into a storage unit and close the door, according to the arrest warrant. Avis told officers that she heard gunshots from their home that night and thought, oh my god, someone got killed. Fred also

told police that he and Morgan both took Gabriel's body out towards Indian Springs and buried him in the desert near the turnoff for Mount Charleston. While specific details were not mentioned in the reporting, based on statements from family members, police believe that Gabriel's body may have been moved and that it was likely buried on the site of David's moving and storage building just west of the strip. They suspected that was where they would find Marie's body and Diana's as well. In December 2006, Las Vegas Metro Police finally obtained a search warrant for David's business property. On December 31st, they began digging up the property surrounding the moving and storage business in the southwest part of the valley in the area of Sunset Road in Polaris. This area is about three quarters of a mile west of the strip on the other side of the I-15 highway from the airport. As of 2007, the business David was operating at that site was called LTE Ventures, and it was an event design, decoration, and production company.

On January 1, 2007, David was driving back to Las Vegas from Los Angeles. He had been in LA dropping off one of his children. Instead of returning to Las Vegas, he drove to Kingman, Arizona and checked into a budget-in hotel. Police suspected he was avoiding returning to Las Vegas since he knew what was happening at his property and that there was a warrant out for his arrest. Because of this, and because he had a wife and property in Brazil, officers considered him to be a flight risk. Las Vegas police worked with United States Marshals and Arizona police officers to apprehend David at the motel. When police confronted David in the doorway of his hotel room,

they told him he was wanted for murder with a deadly weapon, and he replied, I never owned a deadly weapon. He was extradited back to Las Vegas, and his bail was set at $100,000. His attorney argued that he wasn't a flight risk, that he had driven to Kingman to avoid traffic. Just a note on the traffic claim here. When you drive from LA to Las Vegas, you typically take the I-15 and it takes about three and a half hours. If you get off the I-15 and go through Kingman to get back to Las Vegas on the I-40, it's about a seven hour trip and it's not something you would do unless the I-15 was completely closed, like it recently was when there was a giant lithium battery fire.

That's not a detour you take to avoid traffic. It's also unclear why he'd get a hotel room there, although it could just be because he took an insanely long route back to Las Vegas. The police dug up the property for more than two days and used ground-penetrating radar, but no human remains were ever found. Police then reportedly suspected that, perhaps, the remains were still out in the desert. We've mentioned a few times that David had a high net worth and he evidently had a wife in Brazil. After his arrest, he posted bail and was ordered to be held on house arrest while awaiting trial and was forced to turn over his passport. Interestingly, at the time, he was reportedly living in a motorhome, so in order to keep tabs on him, he was required by the court to have a landline installed on the motorhome. David's

attorney, Thomas Pitaro, said the case was laughable and said that Fred Hackett was a disgruntled former employee who stole from David. That's a dubious claim at best, that a disgruntled employee from 27 years earlier, now in his 80s, would show up with that kind of allegation and that level of detail, which also happened to completely match with what Kim had told officers years earlier. David's attorney, Pataro, appears to have been very strategic about how he handled the case. Specifically, he waived the preliminary hearing. A preliminary hearing is typically held to establish probable cause. A judge would hear the testimony and evidence and decide if it's sufficient to move forward

with trial. It's very similar to a grand jury proceeding, but the judge decides, not a jury. And also the defense can then cross-examine the witnesses. It's not uncommon for the preliminary hearing to be waived. But as the trial was delayed for several years, the decision proved to be pivotal. Five years after David's arrest in 2012, Fred Hackett died of natural causes. He was living in Florida at the time. Since at the time of David's arrest, Fred was elderly and in poor health, the prosecution was hoping to preserve his testimony with a preliminary hearing, which, as we said, didn't happen. The Review Journal speculated that the

five years of delays by the defense were a tactic to see if Fred might pass away before the trial began. Without Fred's testimony, the prosecutors dropped the charges. David had no comment. As of December 17, 2012, he was a free man. He was 81 years old. The charges were dropped without prejudice, so if new evidence came to light, he could be charged again. However, David died on November 11, 2018, and was laid to rest in West Virginia. On his memorial page, several people have left messages accusing him of abuse and murder, and specifically naming Diana, Marie, Donald, and Gabriel as his victims. While he wasn't ever convicted in a court of law,

there are many people out there who believe he was guilty of murder. As of 2024, Diana Leone, Marie, Bernhardt Morgan, Donald Cowan, and Gabriel Vincent have never been located, and there has never been a reported sighting or any trace of them since they vanished. We shared their stories on the podcast because, as Mark Redden believed, you never know when new information might come to light, or someone might come forward with even the smallest lead. Redden waited 30 years before he was able to find the Hacketts. We are hopeful that someone out there might have a lead to help finally locate one of these four missing people. Gabriel Vincent's profile is listed on the Charlie Project and in NamUs.

His case wasn't added to NamUs until 2013, and the height and weight ranges are extreme, and it's difficult to know what his actual stature was. He was a white male with black hair and brown eyes, and we have one photo of him that we will share on social media. Marie Bernhardt Morgan was 30 years old when she disappeared in 1980. Today, she'd be 74, a white woman with brown hair, blue eyes, 5'6", and between 120 and 130 pounds, and a gap in her front teeth. Donald Cowan disappeared in December of 1982. He was described as a white male, 5'8", 135 pounds, with brown hair and hazel eyes. He was 40 years old when he disappeared, and he would be 82 years old today. Diana Leone was 36 years old when she was last seen in 2000.

She would be 60 years old today. She was 5'5", and weighed 120 pounds. She was a white woman with blonde or red hair with hazel eyes. She had scarring on the fingertips of her left hand, a scarred left cheek, and a scar on her left finger. She has not been seen in 25 years, not even resurfacing or communicating with her family when her son died. Due to the circumstances of their disappearance and the fact that no contact has been made in the decades they have been missing, we are very sad to say that they are all very likely deceased, and these cases have been transferred from missing persons to the Homicide Division. If you have any information related to their disappearances, please contact Las Vegas Metro at 702-828-3111. As always, thank you for listening, and remember what happens here, happens everywhere. Thanks for listening. Visit sinspod.co slash subscribe for exclusive bonus content and to listen ad-free. Remember to like and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and Threads

at Sins and Survivors. If you're enjoying the podcast, please leave us a review on your podcast platform of choice. You can contact us at questions at sinsandsurvivors.com. If you or someone you know is affected by domestic violence or needs support, please reach out to local resources or the National Domestic Violence Hotline. A list of resources is available on our website, sinsandsurvivors.com. Sins and Survivors, a Las Vegas true crime podcast, is research written and produced by your hosts, Sean and John. The information shared in this podcast is accurate at the time of recording. If you have questions, concerns, or corrections, please email us. Links to source material for this episode can be found on our website, sinsandsurvivors.com.

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