Britt (9:51)
No. Everyone kind of fears the worst. But honestly, Hawkins or no Hawkins, the worst case scenario was already playing out in the minds of Dawn's family, because they know it's not like her to just disappear and not contact them. I mean, it took them only hours to report her missing, because even though dawn was 23, she had some learning differences. She actually lived at home with her mom and her sister. Now, she's described as high functioning but developmentally delayed. And her sister Cath told us that because of this, dawn followed a pretty strict schedule, and if anything changed, she would always, always let her mom or her sister know. So that day that she went missing, her sister Kath said that dawn was supposed to come home after work, let the dog out, and then her plan was to either walk the 20 minutes to her boyfriend Dan Kolb's apartment in Wayne, Pennsylvania, or maybe just hop on, like, another bus over there. Now, Dan also had some learning differences, and the two of them had been dating for, like, three years. They were both super dedicated to the Special Olympics. Dawn actually won medals in, like, all these different events. And the Special Olympics was something that she really took seriously. So when she was going over to his place, the two of them were supposed to be, like, getting together so that they could go to a practice together down at the local ymca. But when Cath got home from work early that evening, she noticed that the dog had not been taken out. And there were like, half a dozen voicemails from Dan asking why Don hadn't met him, why she hadn't come to practice. So all that to say, Dawn's family was adamant that something was wrong when they filed a missing persons report and police actually heard their concerns. They took the report and then immediately started looking into where she could be, who she could be with all of that, which is how they. They wound up at Tom Hawkins. And now that he has been ID'd by their witness, the detective on Don's case gets a search warrant for his apartment in Philadelphia. Now, there's nothing they find there that directly ties him to Don, but they do seize a stack of detective magazines. And it's interesting because they say that they're all underlined and, like, dog eared on articles about new police practices and tactics, stuff like that. So Detective Lucky thinks that maybe this guy was, like, making notes on how to get away, studying with murders, right? Now, fast forward a little bit. They end up connecting Hawkins to the murder of his niece, and he finally gets arrested and taken to trial on that, which only makes everyone more suspicious of him in connection to Don's disappearance. So much so that Don's family attends every single day of the court hearings because they are fully convinced that Hawkins did something to donate. And if police can't get him on that, at least they hope he'll go away and pay for this crime. Right? He'll be off the streets, which he does. The jury convicts Hawkins of first degree murder, which, like, in my mind, you must have been a terrible study of those magazines, which, by the way, they fully brought up at trial because his DNA and fingerprints were all over the crime scene. And so after the verdict, Hawkins is sentenced to. To death. And this gives Detective Lucky an idea. He sees this as kind of a unique opportunity. He basically goes to the prosecutor, Bruce Castor, and says, look, I think this is our guy, but I got nothing. Would you be open to taking the death penalty away if he gives us information about Don? Like, her family just wants some closure. And Bruce agrees, which to me, like, this is an offer that even the dumbest criminal would Take if they could. Like, if I was facing the death penalty for a case where they have me dead to rights. Like, forget appeals, like, I tried to be confessing to anything. But I don't think it's just like a confession they want. Right. What they said is they want information. I think they want to know, like, where she is, what happened. But he says he has no information to give because he had nothing to do with Don's disappearance. He's sticking to that. Now, Hawkins, to this day is still sitting on death row because Pennsylvania's governor put a moratorium on the death penalty. But in all this time, he has never come close to confessing to anything relating to Dawn's disappearance.
