The Courier-Journal from Louisville, Kentucky • 7

1 THE COURIER-JOURNAL FROM PAGE ONE MONDAY, FEBRUARY 3, 2003 A7 Brooks trial illuminates probe that was rocky from start hi 3 ft h' 'J1 'Vl lis a- i yi: nil i-3 il.l.m!!iLipl? BY BILL LUSTER. THE COURIER-JOURNAL Edna Dishon walked out the back door of her Bullitt County home in 2000. The car in the background belonged to her daughter, Jessica, who was abducted from her family's driveway and was killed in September 1999. v-- 4 LJL i.v.i.mvv.j.w.i If SPECIAL TO THE COURIER-JOURNAL Former Bullitt Detective Jim Adams put up crime tape in September 1999 around the wooded area where Jessica's body was found. Adams said he left the department in part because of how the investigation was handled.

SPECIAL TO THE COURIER-JOURNAL FBI investigators in September 1999 went over the area where Jessica Dishon's body was found. The FBI worked on the teen's case because of fears that Jessica had been kidnapped and taken across state lines. Hears To You Continued from Page One tion that is now being harshly criticized for its mishandled and misplaced evidence, its ignored suspects and its lack of communication within the sheriff's department and with outside police agencies. A clearer picture of the troubled investigation emerged during the three-week trial that ended last week in a mistrial when Mann told the jury that Brooks had failed an FBI lie-detector test. The results of polygraph tests are not admissible in trials in Kentucky.

Some of the problems: Pictures that Greenwell said he took of Jessica's car as well as his interviews with the teenager's family and co-workers were lost after being turned over to the FBI and sheriff's detectives. i A videotaped interview with a friend of Jessica's who told police he saw her in the company of two men the night before she disappeared was lost for more than two years by the department. It surfaced just before the trial's original scheduled date in August. Sheriffs deputies kept a piece of Jessica's thigh muscle in a box in a warm property room for two years even though the box was marked on all sides that it should be kept frozen. i.

"James Wilder, a former Shep-herdsville police officer who worked as a school resource officer at Bullitt Central High School where Jessica was a senior in 1999 testified that' he received several tips from students about what had happened to the teen. Wilder said he passed along what he believed were credible leads to Bullitt County detectives, but he never got any response. Investigatory notes, reports and photos compiled by former sheriffs Detective Jim Adams disappeared from the case file sometime after he left the department in September 2000. "I have no idea why it wasn't in there," Adams said, adding that the remaining information was crammed sloppily into a cardboard box. "There wasn't anything left in there with my handwriting on it." Adams was out of town the weekend Jessica disappeared and joined the case Monday, Sept.

13. Sheriff Paul Parsley said last week that mistakes were made in the investigation. A lot of important information notes, interviews and pictures is missing, he acknowledged. The department needs changes, Parsley said. "(Detectives) interviewed people he said.

"And where it's all at I can't tell say they gave everything to (Commonwealth's Attorney) Mike Mann and Mike Mann says he doesn't have it." 7 Mike Mann would not comment for this story. "I'm very disappointed right now," Parsley said.c 4 n- Case mishandled from the outset The shoe left in Jessica's car should have immediately alarmed investigators, police experts say. That "would certainly be indicative that this person didn't leave voluntarily," said Vernon Geberth, author of "Practical Homicide Investigation," a reference work for police. He also is a former commander of the Bronx Homicide Task Force in New York. "I don't see many women walking down the street with one shoe on and one shoe off," Geberth said.

At that point, the area should have been treated as a crime scene, with Jessica's car sealed off, he said. "Any cop in his or her right frame of mind would realize the potential for a felony abduction and immediately secure the entire area and the vehicle." Jessica, who was 17, was found dead on Sept. 27, 1999, in woods seven miles from her home in Cedar Grove. She had been beaten and strangled. The first 48 hours are the most important in a missing-person case, said Robert Snow, who is the captain of the Indianapolis homicide department and the author of several books on police procedures.

"A lot of times there is crucial evidence left behind and sometimes it's very small evidence that can solve the crime for you," he said. "So the first thing to do is rope off the scene and not let anybody in. Period." Parsley, in a 2000 Courier-Journal story, defended not sealing off the car. By the time sheriff's detectives arrived at Jessica's car, Parsley said then, it would have been pointless to seal it off because "everyone in the neighborhood had been all over (it)." Jessica's family has claimed that deputies with the sheriffs department mistakenly put yellow evidence tape around a car next door to the Di-shons' home instead of around Jessica's car. On Thursday, Parsley denied that the sheriffs department had roped off a neighbor's car.

Charles Mann, who has been demoted to a nondetective position and is facing a contempt of court hearing for his testimony last week, acknowledged in a 2000 Courier-Journal interview that foul play was not on his mind when the Dishon case began. The department, he said then, really wasn't "geared in that particular mode." Mann did not return phone calls to comment for this story. Snow agreed that few police departments in the country do much investigating in the first few hours of a missing-person case. "That's just a fact of life," he said. "There are so many children running away every year that a lot of depart- Discount Prices on Siemens, Starkey and other manufacturers.

Over 14 yrs FAMILY owned and operated. Payment plans In-home testing available. M-F 9:004:30 Evenings Sat by Appointment NEW LOWER PRICES ON OUR CUSTOM MADE 2" WOOD ALLOY, 2" WOOD, 1 MINI-BLINDS, VERTICAL BLINDS, SYMPHONY CELLULAR SHADES LIMITED TIME 1 1 177 BLUEGRASS PARKWAY 266-0079 FREE IN-HOME CONSULTATION Jessica Dishon was 1 7 when she was killed. One of her shoes was found inside her car after she was abducted before going to school, ments simply won't do anything for 24 to 48 hours, unless they think foul play was involved." Sightings of Jessica muddled the probe Complicating the sheriff's department's belief that Jessica was only a runaway were the more than two dozen sightings of the teen received by police in the days after she disappeared. Several were in connection with a black car.

One of those, just 18 hours after Jessica disappeared, was confirmed as being good enough to call off the massive search for her. Belinda Kyle, an acquaintance of the Dishon family, said she told someone with the sheriff's department that she was positive she saw Jessica a little before midnight on Sept. 10, 1999, sitting in a black car parked by a pay phone at a Shepherdsville gas station. "She looked like she was upset," Kyle testified last week. "You could tell she had been crying." Kyle said she called Jessica's mother, Edna, the next day, after seeing a poster with a picture of the missing teen.

The county's Disaster and Emergency Services director, Larry Stewart, then temporarily called off the search for Jessica at the urging of Charles Mann, who had confirmed the sighting, according to court documents. But besides her one phone conversation, no one from the sheriff's department contacted Kyle again. Charles Mann testified that he didn't remember whether he talked to Kyle or not. He also testified that he talked to a man working at the gas station and "he didn't see anybody. Others also mentioned a black car to investigators.

Jessica's brothers said they saw a black car parked near their home as they boarded the school bus on the morning their sister disappeared. Barbara Young, who works as a lab technician in Louisville, called the department to say she saw Jessica on Interstate 65 in a black car with three teenage boys about noon Sept. 10. The manager of a Louisville nightclub said he saw Jessica reaching into a dark car in the parking lot of the nightclub on Sept. 12.

But the sightings generated little interest from detectives even when a friend of Jessica's said he saw her. Her friend Jason Krages told police in a February 2000 videotaped interview that Jessica was at a gathering with two men in a black Camaro the night before she disappeared. And, Krages said, the two men, James Coulter and Jason Dunford, had scratches on them the next day. But that interview was lost until July 2002, when detectives came across it lying unmarked in a box with other tapes while preparing for a different trial. The discovery forced the Brooks sonally asked for and received assistance from the state police.

"We asked the FBI and the state police and everyone around here to help us," he said. The FBI and Bullitt County Sheriffs department each worked on the case separately. The FBI started work on the case on Sept. 13 because of fears Jessica had been kidnapped and taken across state lines. When Jessica's body was found Sept.

27, 1999, about seven miles from her home, the sheriffs department took over, using the FBI only for evidence analysis. Parsley said he is most upset with the missing information and mishandled evidence, such as Jessica's thigh muscle not being properly frozen in the warm property room. "I agree it shouldn't have been sitting over there," Parsley said. "I wasn't aware it was over there. I didn't know we had any body parts.

Period. We should have gone to the judge and gotten an order to have that disposed of." Parsley said he understands the criticism of his department, and acknowledges there were plenty of mistakes made including his own. "I trusted my people and let them do the investigation," he said. "In hindsight, I certainly wish I had had more control." In the future, he said, "I'll make sure somebody's there that's going to document everything." Parsley pledged to fix problems in the department but offered nothing specific except to say that Jim McAu-liiffe, the department's other detective, will work with the sheriff to "make the department better every way we can." McAuliffe, Parsley noted, has worked in the state attorney general's office and Louisville Police Department. "Mac has been everywhere and done everything," Parsley said.

"I have the utmost respect for him and I believe he's going to get this situation under control. I put it in his ballpark to be the lead back there and get things under control and make sure the investigations are done like they are supposed to be done." McAuliffe did not return a phone call to his office. "If we have anything else like this," Parsley said, "it will definitely be different." Greenwell, the rookie deputy who arrived first to the scene of Jessica's vanishing, said he understands the criticism of the department but says he, like many of the other Bullitt sheriffs detectives, takes pride in his job and does the best he can. "We have some very devoted, good people that do a fine job," he said. "It's a very sad situation, the way it turned out.

I'm very proud of the way I did with the limited amount of schooling I had at that point." trial to be postponed from its original August date to last month. Evidence pointed to Brooks' farm Despite the sightings, both the FBI and sheriff's department were concentrating almost exclusively on David Brooks and his family's farm, which is next to the Dishons' home. The sightings of Jessica were scattered and hearsay, and all of the best evidence at the time led to the Brooks family, former Detective Adams said. "It was the FBI's opinion that (David Brooks) was. the last person to see Jessica sure he was a suspect," Adams said.

"All the evidence collected to that point connected Jessica to the farm." Adams cited the FBI's interviews with Brooks in which he changed his story repeatedly on where he was the morning Jessica disappeared, the failed lie-detector test and the rope found on Jessica's body that was similar to one on the Brookses' farm. Charles Mann also testified that David Brooks was the only suspect, claiming the FBI told detectives that Brooks was the last person to see Jessica alive. But none of the evidence connected Jessica directly to David Brooks, Adams said. So when he left the department in September 2000, Adams said, he thought investigators did not have enough evidence to arrest Brooks. "It was a place to start and focus (originally), but there wasn't a conclusion in my mind," Adams said.

"I don't think that they (the department's officials) looked at anybody else," he said. Still, four months later, on Jan. 18, 2001, Brooks was indicted and arrested, accused of murdering Jessica. "If the decision were mine, I would have waited before we charged Bucky," Adams said. Some jurors in Brooks' murder trial said afterward that they were outraged by the sheriffs department's investigation.

The department blew the case from the beginning and then tried to make Brooks the scapegoat, five jurors said after the trial. "And the disgusting part is that nobody's getting punished for their inadequacies," said juror Janis Press-ley- Turning to other agencies for help Adams said he left the Bullitt County Sheriffs Department in part because of the Dishon investigation. The department is overworked, underfunded and understaffed, Adams said. There also isn't enough equipment or training, he said. Those in charge of the department kept officers from working closely and communicating with the FBI or asking the state police for help in the investigation, he said.

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