What happened to Dammion Heard? Part 2
The body of Dammion Cain Heard was found hanging from a tree on April 2, 2014. In the six months that followed, police would conduct interviews with more than 45 people known to have been with Dammion in the days and hours leading up to his death. Many of them were friends with the cocky college wrestler, whom they described as "one of the happiest guys" they knew. The investigation was far from clear-cut, but police ruled his death a suicide and closed the case on Oct. 21, 2014. This story relies on police documents, private investigator interviews and medical records, as well as reporting done by "48 Hours" producers Claire St. Amant and Alec Sirken.
Part two of a three part series.
Part one was posted on Monday, Aug. 17, 2015.
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THE SURVEILLANCE VIDEO
At 1:38 a.m. on Sunday, March 30, 2014, Dammion is seen on video surveillance putting $25 worth of gas into his car at City Market shopping center. That's the last time anyone can say for sure that he was alive. In the video, he's wearing a large camouflage hooded sweatshirt that would later be identified as belonging to Andrew Morris. In all the descriptions party attendees gave police of Dammion that night, he was wearing either a T-shirt or a tank top. But after a sleepy conversation with Alison and Torrie, two female friends, Dammion put on Andrew's sweatshirt and left the house.
THE HIKER
Dammion's father, Gary, had spoken on the phone to Dammion that Saturday, and all was well. They planned to talk again Sunday. But when Sunday afternoon came and went without a phone call from his son, Gary started getting concerned. He texted Dammion; he messaged him on Facebook. Then he started calling his friends.
"Each one of them told me something different," Gary says, "Some said they were looking for him, some said they didn't know where he was. Some didn't seem to want to talk to me at all. I knew something was wrong."
Meanwhile, unaware that anything was amiss, a local citizen, who also happens to be the Gunnison County Finance Director, Linda Nienhueser, pulled up to Cabin Creek road to go for a hike around 10 o'clock Sunday morning.
The hiking trail is about seven miles from the campus in Gunnison. As she parked her Mercedes at the head of the trail, she noticed two other vehicles nearby - a black Saturn SUV later confirmed to be Dammion's, and a white truck with a white camper "topper" and a breast cancer awareness license plate.
The trail started near the road and went downhill for about two miles toward an old rock quarry. Along the trail, Nienhueser spotted a pair of bicycles locked to a fence post. As Nienhueser was walking back up the trail, thinking she was alone in the crisp morning air, she was singing loudly to herself. But suddenly as she was looking up, she saw what appeared to be two people on higher ground, near some trees.
Embarrassed that others had observed her singing at the top of her voice, she stopped singing and kept walking. She had only taken a quick glance up at the observers, and the people seemed to be looking at her, which "creeped her out" she later told police.
Oddly, the feet of one of the people, who was dressed in camouflage, seemed to be pointed in "the wrong direction," and she remembered thinking, "it didn't make sense to me."
She also reported that the second person on the scene appeared to be "staring at her through binoculars." The second person seemed to be squatted down, as best as she could tell.
Feeling self-conscious and frightened, Nienhueser averted her gaze and went on her way. The once-frozen ground had turned to mud and she was preoccupied as she climbed into her car and left the trail, completely oblivious that she may have seen a dead body and landed right in the middle of a complicated missing persons case.
POTENTIAL DAMMION SIGHTINGS/THE KEY CARD CONTROVERSY
By Tuesday, Dammion's father had reported him missing and the police had issued an "attempt to locate" bulletin. Gary also contacted the Vice President of Student Affairs, Chris Luekenga, on Tuesday. He reassured Gary, telling him that Dammion had been in class on Monday - Luekenga said he had gotten email confirmation from Dammion's professors. Gary says around 11 a.m. Tuesday, Luekenga also told him that he had just gotten confirmation that Dammion's electronic meal key card had been used to enter the cafeteria that day - further proof of Dammion's presence on campus. The university issues key cards to all students to track their use of facilities electronically.
Devon Zavala, a fellow wrestler, told police that Dammion's meal key card was attached to his car keys. And he said the magnetic strip on Dammion's key card was damaged, so Dammion had to enter the number on it manually to gain entry to the dining hall.
Dammion's car may also have been sighted near the university in the days following his death. Two fellow wrestlers, Travis Bradford and Collin McNally, told police that on Monday they were eating at a sandwich shop in downtown Gunnison, and thought they saw Dammion's black Saturn "speeding out of town" though they could not identify the driver.
On Wednesday, following the discovery of Dammion's body, Luekenga retracted his statements to Gary about Dammion's key card having been used and the professors having confirmed Dammion's presence in class.
"I kept asking him," Gary says, 'how did you get it wrong? The key card is on a computer system, you said it registered that his card was in the cafeteria. How could that be a mistake?'" Gary says Luekenga did not give him an answer.
If indeed Dammion's key card was used on Monday, that would suggest someone may have tried to establish that he was still alive.
CBS News contacted Luekenga for an explanation, but he declined to do an interview. In response, the university issued a statement on his behalf that said in part, "Subsequent fact checking later determined that some of the early information was inaccurate and we communicated that as we learned it."
The university declined our requests for a record of the electronic surveillance or emails from professors stating that Dammion had been in class Monday or Tuesday.
So the mystery remains: Did someone use Dammion's key card number, and also orchestrate his presence in class that week as a deception?
Gunnison Police Detective Chris Danos, the lead investigator in the case, dismissed that theory. He told CBS News that the information from the university was simply inaccurate. "In any investigation, you get people who just get things wrong," Danos said.
At 10 a.m. on Wednesday, April 2, a patrol officer spotted Dammion's Saturn SUV parked in Cabin Creek, about seven miles east of Gunnison. He identified the vehicle by its Texas plates, and peered inside the windows while he waited for backup to arrive. He noticed the driver's seat was reclined, and there was a disassembled cell phone sitting on the passenger seat. The battery had been removed. Police analyzed the phone and found only Dammion's DNA on it.
Three more officers arrived, and they started searching the area. About 100 yards away, they found Dammion's lifeless body hanging in a noose made from red jumper cables. His skin was blue, and the hood of Andrew Morris' camouflage sweatshirt was pulled up over Dammion's head. His shoes were untied, and his pants were unzipped. Nearby, an orange and gray sleeping bag lay unfurled against a rock. There were no tire tracks or footprints around the vehicle, which would be consistent with snow melting at the scene after Dammion had already arrived. But it doesn't help establish whether or not Dammion was alone when he died, as police would later assert is proven by physical evidence.
After hearing that a missing college student had been found Wednesday off the Cabin Creek Trail, Nienhueser called police to report what she'd first observed that Sunday morning. Furthermore, she told police she drove past the site several times later in the week, and noticed only the black SUV remained there through Wednesday.
In retrospect, both police and Nienhueser believe that the person in camouflage that she described as having his feet "in the wrong direction" was indeed Dammion, hanging from the tree. There has never been any revelation as to whether there actually was a second person at the scene - one that Nienhueser perceived as someone squatting and staring at her through binoculars. In an interview, Nienhueser said that police pointed out to her that there was snow on the ground and there were dark rocks near the spot Dammion was found, and suggested to her that what she perceived as another person might have been an illusion. Interviewed recently, she said it's possible that there was no other person there. She cannot be sure of what she saw.
Danos believes Nienhueser could have seen someone beside Dammion on Sunday, but he doesn't think that necessarily indicates anything sinister took place. "That area is extremely popular," Danos said. "It's a shed hunting area, where people go to look for antlers, and it's also a popular hiking area. I'm confident there were lots of other people there that weekend."
But if someone had been close enough to Dammion to realize he was dead and they weren't involved, wouldn't they have called police right away?
ODD QUESTIONS - NO MONEY, EARRINGS
There are several circumstantial pieces of evidence that are curious. Dammion had no cash in his wallet and no jewelry on. But ATM records show he had taken $100 cash out of his account on Saturday afternoon and photographs from the party depict Dammion wearing his signature diamond stud earrings. They were fakes, but looked like the real thing. And he was rarely seen without them.
Danos said he wasn't aware that Dammion customarily wore earrings but even if they were missing, it doesn't prove foul play. As for the lack of cash, Danos said he traced two drug purchases Dammion made that weekend, which led to criminal charges.
"There was no evidence that he had been robbed. There were no injuries, nothing, just the ligature marks around his neck," Danos said.
AUTOPSY REPORT
On July 28, 2014, the medical examiner released its autopsy and toxicology report, stating that Dammion had LSD and marijuana in his system - but no alcohol. This is surprising because one of the few consistencies across all the student interviews is that Dammion was drinking the night he disappeared. The autopsy report ruled Dammion's death as a suicide by hanging, but police kept the investigation "open and active" and reissued a public call for information. Meanwhile, Dammion's family made arrangements for an independent toxicology report to be completed in Texas. The results caused even more questions when they came back clean for all substances.
Another element of the autopsy that troubles Dammion's family is the presence of an unidentified long blonde hair on Dammion's hand. It's visible in the autopsy photos, but it was never submitted for DNA testing.
"I don't have that hair. I have no ability to collect that hair. I have a photograph of it and that's it, and I can't go back and collect that hair," Danos said. "If we had evidence of a homicide, I would agree that the hair would be of evidentiary value, but we have no evidence that anything happened to Dammion other than what he did to himself."
Police began their investigation by interviewing more than 45 people, almost all of them students who had been at the party that night or seen Dammion in recent days. Most of the interviews were videotaped. Police also wrote 187 pages of reports about their interviews.
Police did check Dammion's car for fingerprints, and reported that they found none that were identifiable. But unlike Dammion's father, Gary, Danos wasn't troubled by that fact.
"There was lots of evidence of hand grease and latent prints but nothing that we could pull and submit for identification, and that's not uncommon on something that is used multiple times, like a steering wheel," Danos said, adding that they didn't look at "every square inch of the car."
"The areas that we processed were common areas where we thought a passenger would have touched," he said.
Police also examined Dammion's car for DNA profiles, and they were able to link some DNA to Dammion, and identify other "mixture" profiles that were not attributed to anyone in particular.
"It appeared he loaned his car out to friends," Danos said.
THE WHITE TRUCK
Gary Heard wanted to know more about the white truck that Linda Nienhueser had seen parked at the trail that Sunday morning. According to Danos, the police were also intrigued by the possibility that another vehicle had been at Cabin Creek the same time as Dammion's.
"We did a lengthy canvas of our community for that truck and any that were remotely similar," Danos said. "We had some pretty good possibilities but none of them panned out to belong to anyone who reported being in the area at the time in question."
Unsatisfied by this response, Gary placed his own ad in local newspapers. He received six responses from sympathetic citizens, who sent him photos of similar white trucks they had seen in the general area of Gunnison, along with license plate numbers. Gary asked a friend who was a private investigator to run the plates. One of them came up registered to the family of Kyle Piatt and Gary relayed this information to police. Though registered to other members of Piatt's family, Gary says the car was seen parked in front of Piatt's house in Gunnison after Dammion's death and he has the pictures to prove it. But he says that truck did not appear to have the breast cancer logo on the license plate.
Danos acknowledged that Gary shared this information with police, but Danos disagreed that Piatt's family truck matches Linda Nienhueser's description for one simple reason: the license plate.
"The one piece of information she was 100 percent confident of was the breast cancer ribbon on the license plate," Danos said.
Danos said police looked at Colorado records and the truck registered to the Piatts had a standard issue Colorado plate. "It was inconsistent with the description that Linda provided," Danos said.
"I understand why Gary is upset, but he seems to want to point a finger at a lot of us who were with Dammion that night. We lost a friend too," Kyle said in a brief telephone interview with CBS News. "I just don't know what happened to him. He was a happy guy, he didn't seem like the kind of person who would harm himself."
THE DEPRIVATION MASK AND...KYLE PIATT'S CONFUSING TIMELINE
Another curious bit of information to come out in the interviews with police was the presence of an odd device at the party.
Courtney Burch and two other students told police that Kyle Piatt was playing with an "oxygen deprivation mask" around 1:45 a.m.
Described as a training device that "limits your intake of air so it's harder to breathe," the mask came up in three separate interviews. Kyle, however, never mentions it and police never question him about it.
Kyle says he left his house around 1 a.m. to go to another party and returned around 3 a.m. But several people contradict Kyle's timeline and say that he did not go to another party at all.
Courtney told police she and Kyle stayed up talking until 2:30 a.m. She didn't see Dammion at that time, though she says she never went to Andrew's bedroom so she wouldn't know if Dammion was back there or not.
Police did not follow up on Kyle's statement to confirm that he attended another party or whom he was with. Danos said that was because he didn't find Kyle's account of his own timeline to be credible - but he said that did not matter.
"I was confident I could account for his whereabouts. All of the people that had been at the house, including his roommates, had Kyle at the house. His recollection of leaving and going to the football players' party was inaccurate," Danos said.
When Danos asked Kyle if he had any questions about Dammion's death, there was only one. And the detective didn't like it.
"Does it look like someone hurt him?" Kyle asked.
"Am I interrogating you for a homicide?" Danos snapped back, then apologized. "Well, I mean, I don't know. Anything is possible. I can't rule anything out. I apologize for the flippant remark."
Kyle pressed the detective more. "Do they have anything on his body that would show it?"
Danos demurred, saying it could jeopardize the case.
"The best way to get to the truth is not to spoil anybody's memory with what we think might have happened. All I really need from you is what you remember and you've done a great job of telling me that," the detective said before ending the interview.
Part 3 of the Dammion Heard story will run on Crimesider on Wednesday, Aug. 19th.