A 13-Year-Old Vanished… 10 Years Later, They Found the Truth | True Crime Documentary

A 13-Year-Old Vanished… 10 Years Later, They Found the Truth | True Crime Documentary

I’m just I’ve been staying out of the way of law enforcement all this time. I thought I was doing the best thing by and not coming down on law enforcement. And I’ve just it’s been too many years of no action. Nothing has been done. So, I’m tired of waiting. Um I had I The investigator over the case right now at Scurry County, he told me one time he said he doesn’t care if it takes 20 years.

Let’s do this. And I do care if it takes 20 years. I don’t want the person that hurt my kid that doesn’t need to walk the street for 20 years. There is a moment in every true crime case, one single moment where everything changes, where the truth stops hiding and starts bleeding through the cracks. In this documentary, that moment comes early and when it does, it will stop you cold. December 27th, 2010.

Colorado City, Texas. A quiet, tight-knit town of barely 4,000 people sitting out in the wide-open stretch of West Texas, about 230 miles from Dallas. The kind of town where folks leave their doors unlocked, where neighbors look out for each other, and where the biggest drama on any given Tuesday is usually just high school football.

Nobody in Colorado City had any reason to believe their town was about to become the center of one of the most disturbing and heartbreaking true crime investigations the Lone Star State has ever seen. But on that cold December morning, something happened inside a modest home on Chestnut Street that would shatter this community to its core and leave a father desperately searching for his daughter for years.

13-year-old Hailey Dunn was a cheerleader. She played saxophone in the school band. She competed in volleyball, basketball, and softball. She loved school, loved her friends, and without fail, every single day, she walked across the street to say hello to dad. She was bright. She was full of life and by every account from everyone who knew her, she was exactly the kind of kid who makes a small town feel like home.

And then, just like that, she was gone. No goodbye, no note, no confirmed sightings, nothing. But here’s the detail that separates this true crime case from almost anything else you will find in the documentary world. When investigators sat down with the one person closest to this disappearance and asked him, point-blank, where they should be looking for this missing 13-year-old girl, he gave them a specific county.

A remote stretch of land more than 20 miles outside of town. He named it without hesitation. And years later, that is exactly where her remains were found. Then investigators asked him one more question. They asked who they should be paying attention to. Who did he personally consider a suspect in the disappearance of this child? And his answer, delivered without flinching, was just four words long.

Both of us. This is the true crime documentary record of Hailey Dunn. A case full of unanswered questions, staggering investigative failures, and a father whose love for his daughter refused to let the world forget her name. A case that stretched over a decade, produced one arrest, and still, to this day, has not delivered the justice this family deserves.

Stay with us. Because before this documentary is over, you are going to be asking yourself the same question this entire community that never stopped asking. How does something like this happen right in the middle of a town where everybody knows everybody and still go unsolved? To understand what happened to Hailey Dunn, you have to go back to the morning it all began.

Not the morning her father realized she was gone. Not the morning the police were called. But the actual morning, December 27th, 2010, the last day anyone who loved her ever saw her alive. Hailey had spent most of Christmas Day and the day after Christmas over at her dad, Clint’s house, right across the street.

Her grandmother, Connie, later said the girl was in a genuinely great mood those days. She was excited, happy, and especially thrilled about the brand new iPod she had received as a Christmas gift. That was Hailey, full of energy, full of life, the kind of teenager who could light up a room just by walking into it.

That night, December 26th, Hailey’s older brother David, who was 16 at the time, went to a friend’s house to stay overnight. Hailey stayed home. She played video games late into the night, completely relaxed, completely normal. There was absolutely nothing about that evening that suggested the next 24 hours would change everything.

Then came December 27th. At 5:30 in the morning, Shawn Adkins, the boyfriend of Hailey’s mother, Billie Jean Dunn, left the house for work. He was heading to Snyder, Texas, roughly 50 miles away, where he was employed at the time. About an hour later, Billie Jean herself got up, got ready, and left for her own 12-hour work shift.

Before walking out the door, she stopped by Hailey’s bedroom and looked in on her daughter. Hailey was still asleep in her bed. Everything looked completely normal. Billie later said she assumed that once Hailey woke up, she would probably just do what she always did, walk across the street and spend some time with her dad.

Billie also left her personal cell phone at home so the kids would have a way to reach someone if they needed anything. So, as of that morning, Hailey Dunn was home alone. And that is where the straightforward part of the story ends. Because across town in Snyder, something unexpected and odd is already happening.

Shawn Adkins arrived at his job site at approximately 6:00 in the morning. According to his own account, just 10 minutes after he got there, he had a heated argument with his boss and quit on the spot. He said he was fired. He said his boss let him go. The story changed depending on who was asking, and then but his supervisor told investigators something very different.

According to the supervisor, Shawn walked in, bought a drink, turned in his work uniform, and walked right back out. By 6:10 in the morning, he was already gone. No argument, no confrontation. He had simply decided to leave. So, now, just over 30 minutes after Billie Jean left for work, Shawn Atkins was unemployed, unaccounted for, and heading back in the direction of Colorado City with the entire day in front of him and a 13-year-old girl home alone on Chestnut Street.

What happened next is where this true crime case begins to crack wide open. According to Shawn, after leaving Snyder, he drove directly to his mother’s house in Big Spring to use her computer and apply for unemployment benefits. He said he stayed there for several hours before eventually heading back to Colorado City.

He claimed he arrived back home around 3:00 in the afternoon and that he personally saw Haley at approximately 3:15, just before she supposedly walked over to her father’s house. That was his story. And on the surface, it might have sounded reasonable enough, except for one thing. Cell phone records do not lie. Tower data from Shawn’s phone told a completely different story.

Between 6:35 and 6:56 that same morning, his phone was connecting to a cell tower located in Colorado City, nearly 50 miles from Big Spring, and just minutes away from the house where Haley was home alone. The records did confirm he eventually made it to Big Spring, but not until 9:38 in the morning, nearly 3 hours after he claimed he went straight there.

And he did not leave Big Spring until 2:40 in the afternoon. Now, do the math. If Shawn left Big Spring at 2:40 and Colorado City is nearly 40 miles away, there is simply no version of events in which he was standing in front of Haley Dunn at 3:15. The timeline does not work. It never worked. And investigators knew it from almost the very beginning.

Meanwhile, back in Colorado City, Haley’s father, Clint, was going about his afternoon the way he always did, expecting his daughter to come knocking on his door at any moment. She did it every single day. Sometimes before school, sometimes after, sometimes just to drop by and say hello. It was their routine.

It was something Clint counted on. But on December 27th, his door never opened. His phone never rang. And as the afternoon turned to evening, that familiar, comfortable silence started to feel like something else entirely. Around 2:00 in the afternoon, a text message was sent from the cell phone that Billy had left at home for the kids.

The message went out to one of Hailey’s friends. Just four words. “What are you doing?” The friend never replied. That may have been the last communication ever sent from Hailey’s direction on that phone. At around 4:00 in the afternoon, Hailey’s brother David came home. He tried the front door. It was locked. He knocked.

He knocked again. Nobody answered. So, David did what any teenager would do. He found a window and climbed inside. And when he got in, he found Sean Adkins standing in the hallway. David later described the look on Sean’s face as pure shock. Like a deer caught in headlights. Confused, startled. Like a man who had not expected anyone to walk through that door.

That evening, Sean picked Billy up from work. When they got back to the house on Chestnut Street, Hailey was not there. Billy asked Sean where she was. He told her Hailey had left on foot, walked over to her dad’s house, and then planned to spend the night at her friend Mary Beth’s place. Clint Dunn said that was not true.

Haley never came to his house that day, not once. That was my day. And then I came home uh around I guess like 3:00 I got there. And Haley was there watching TV in the living room. And I went to me and Billy’s bedroom. And she came in there and told me that she was going to her father’s house and that she was staying the night with a friend.

And then she left. And then I was there by myself for maybe an hour at the most. And then David and a friend came over and I went to his room and they were playing video games and so forth and Billie called me and told me that uh that her relief got there and that she’s going to get to leave a little early so I was up there at the hospital in uh Snyder around 6:00 to pick her up and then we came back.

And then we went to bed shortly after that. And this whole time you were thinking Hailey was at a friend’s house? Yes. About what time did she say she was leaving then? Uh what time Hailey was leaving? >> Mhm. Uh I guess it was sometime in between 3:00 and 3:30 when she said she was leaving. It was like shortly after I got there.

I’m not real sure about the time. Does she normally call and check in every so often or is it normal to not hear from her for so long? Uh it’s pretty normal for her just uh not call cuz she usually does that though cuz she does stay the night at a friend’s house, she’ll be back the next morning. And when Billie called Mary Beth’s family the following morning, Mary Beth’s parents confirmed the same thing.

Hailey had never been there. No one had been expecting her. There were no plans. And when investigators looked inside Hailey’s bedroom, what they found made the whole story collapse completely. Nothing was missing. Her clothes were still there. Her belongings were still in place.

Everything a 13-year-old girl would naturally take if she planned to spend the night somewhere. All of it was right where it had always been. Hailey Dunn had not packed a bag. She had not said goodbye. She had not made any plans. She had simply vanished. The missing person report was not filed until the afternoon of December 28th. A full day after she was last seen.

And when police first received the report, they initially classified it as a runaway case. That decision would later draw serious criticism from investigators, journalists, and the community alike. Because Hailey Dunn was not a runaway. She was a 13-year-old girl who loved school, loved her dad, and had not missed a single day of stopping by his house across the street until the day she disappeared forever.

When a child goes missing in a small town, the reaction is immediate. It is personal. It is collective. And in Colorado City, Texas, uh it happened almost overnight. The moment words spread that the 13-year-old Hailey Dunn had not come home, this tight-knit community of 4,000 people did exactly what small towns do.

They showed up. Neighbors, strangers, local business owners, high school students, all of them poured out into the streets ready to help find her. Volunteers organized search parties. Flyers went up on every telephone pole, every storefront window, every bulletin board in Mitchell County. People walked the roads, checked the empty lots, and covered ground that law enforcement alone simply could not cover fast enough.

And it was the kind of community response that reminds you why small towns still matter in this country. Everyone wanted to find Hailey. Everyone wanted to bring her home. Everyone, it seemed, except the two people living in the house where she was last seen. Hailey’s father, Clint Dunn, was out there every single day, absolutely relentless.

He checked dumpsters. He walked the alleys. He searched every corner of Colorado City he could reach on foot. People who were there during those early days later said Clint’s pain was visible in everything he did. In the way he moved, the way he looked at every passing car, the way he refused to stop even when his body had nothing left to give.

That man was not going to rest until he found his daughter, and everyone around him knew it. But observers quickly began to notice a sharp, sudden, deeply troubling contrast. Billie Jean Dunn, Hailey’s own mother, was willing to talk to the media. She gave interviews. She appeared on camera. She handed out flyers in town.

But when search efforts expanded into the wider, more remote areas surrounding Colorado City, the open fields, the brushland, the stretches of West Texas terrain where a child could disappear without a trace, Billie did not participate. She later explained that she could not bring herself to search those areas because it forced her to confront the possibility that people were looking for her daughter’s body rather than a living, breathing girl.

Some people accepted that explanation, many others did not. And then there was Shawn Adkins. He did not hand out a single flyer. He did not join a single search party. He did not knock on a single door asking if anyone had seen Hailey. While an entire community was turning itself inside out looking for this child, the man who was the last known person to see her alive was nowhere to be found in those efforts.

He stayed away from the searches. He stayed away from the volunteers. And for the most part, he stayed away from investigators, at least willingly. That absence was noticed. It was talked about. And it would not be forgotten. Into day nine in the search for Hailey Dunn and there’s still no sign of her. When I visited with the Dunn family this morning, I saw Texas Rangers scouring through Hailey’s room.

If we take a look over here, this is the window to her bedroom. Now, Texas Rangers, I’m told, have not found anything and no sign of foul play or any sign of her packing her bags and running away from home at this time. More than a week later and still no sign of Hailey, her mother says it’s frustrating but she remains hopeful.

But I have to do nothing but hope that she left by herself and that she’s going to come back to me because if I don’t cling onto that hope, I don’t have anything. Now, local authorities tell me they’re following several tips at this time. Several agencies have stepped in and the reward once again is $25,000 for tips that lead to Hailey.

Four days after Hailey was reported missing on New Year’s Eve, something happened that genuinely stunned the people of Colorado City. A party took place at the house on Chestnut Street, the very house Hailey had vanished from just days earlier. People gathered, music played, the celebration went on late into the night.

Billie Jean later said she had not even realized it was New Year’s Eve, and that friends and family had simply come over to offer support. But across the street, Clint Dunn was standing on his front porch in the cold with a pair of binoculars scanning the darkness for any sign of his missing daughter. He watched the lights.

He heard the noise. And in one of the most heartbreaking moments of this entire true crime case, he later told reporters exactly what was going through his mind. He said he simply could not understand how anyone could celebrate anything while his daughter was still out there somewhere, unaccounted for, in the middle of a Texas winter.

That image, a grieving father on his porch with binoculars while a party carried on inside the house across the street, became one of the defining moments of this case in the court of public opinion. Meanwhile, the formal investigation was moving quickly. On January 4th, 2011, both the Texas Rangers and the FBI officially joined the investigation into Hailey’s disappearance.

That level of involvement signaled clearly that local law enforcement was no longer treating this as a simple missing person’s case. More than 100 billboards carrying Hailey’s photo and case information went up across Texas and into neighboring states. The story caught national attention when television host Nancy Grace covered the case on her program and interviewed Billie Jean Dunn on air.

Overnight, the disappearance of Hailey Dunn became a story the entire country was watching. was on national television, and Nancy Grace seemed to be a little hard on you. What was that like hearing her question Billy like that? Uh I heard about it. I wasn’t there when Billy was getting interviewed by her.

I was talking to the Texas Rangers, but I heard about it, and it’s frustrating, you know, what she said about me, and but it really doesn’t bother me cuz, you0 know, my main focus is just Hailey. We want her to come home safe. Does it hurt to think people would point fingers at you, the person who cares about her? Yeah, it hurts.

It does. Describe to me the relationship between you and Hailey. Uh it was real really good relationship and you know, I love her with all my heart and I believe she loves me with all her heart. We get along just fine. See, is there anything else um you want people to know about you and your relationship with the family at all? Cuz it seems like a lot of people are buzzing on the internet about it.

Yeah, as far as me, Hailey, and Billie and David, you know, we all get along just fine. And I would never do nothing to that little girl. I love her with all my heart and I just wish for her safe return. On January 5th, just 1 day after the Rangers and FBI stepped in, Billie asked Shawn to leave the house.

People close to the situation said that was not entirely unusual. The two of them had a volatile relationship and had separated and reconciled multiple times before. But this time, the circumstances were different. The investigation was closing in and the details emerging about the home life on Chestnut Street were painting a picture that was far darker than anything the public had initially been told.

Reporters and investigators began learning that the environment inside that house had been complicated for a long time. There were accounts of heavy drinking, frequent parties involving adults, and an overall atmosphere that was difficult for two teenagers to grow up in. One journalist who covered the case closely later recalled receiving reports that described a home where the lifestyle of the adults often overshadowed the needs of the children living there.

And then investigators started looking into the history between Billie Jean Dunn and Shawn Adkins more carefully. What they found was not new to local law enforcement. Roughly 10 months before Hailey disappeared, police had already been called to that house on Chestnut Street to respond to a domestic disturbance between the couple.

Both Billy and Shawn had called police on each other the same night. Officers who arrived on scene described the situation as aggressive and emotionally volatile. Threats had been made. The situation had escalated significantly before police arrived to diffuse it. I reported on somebody.

What exactly happened? I broke up with this guy a couple of days ago and then he told me that he’s going to kill me and that it’s going to be remembered for a long time. I got a situation on my hands. I have a ex-girlfriend. She’s taking a whole bunch of society pills that I take. So, I guess she got them from me.

She said she like took a bunch of her pain pills, too. And she’s saying that she wants to die. So, she filed a report on me, you know, for threats and stuff like that. So, she was upset about it. She’s just, you know, not being herself right now. Threatening to kill her. Damn it. What has Billy done? Oh god. He’s been going all day. All right.

And yet, just like every time before, the couple eventually reconciled. Shawn moved back in. Life on Chestnut Street went on. People who knew Haley personally began coming forward during the investigation with details that made the picture even more concerning. Several of them said that Haley did not feel comfortable around Shawn Adkins.

She did not see him as a stepfather or any kind of parental figure. According to those close to her, Haley was genuinely uneasy in his presence. Haley used to tell me about the man. What kind of things? She didn’t like him. She didn’t trust him. She was afraid of him. I don’t want to be here right now. I’m going to be here with you cuz I don’t feel right with Her grandmother, Connie, later revealed something particularly disturbing that Haley had confided in her.

That on multiple nights, sometimes late at night, she had noticed the shadow of a person standing near the door of her bedroom, and it frightened her. Billie Jean, for her part, described the relationship between Haley and Shawn as more of a friendship than anything else. But, the people closest to Haley told a very different story.

Investigators then turned their full attention to the cell phone records and bank activity connected to both Shawn Adkins and Billie Jean Dunn. And what they found in those records began to tear apart nearly every element of the story that had been presented to them. First, there was the matter of Shawn’s job.

He had told police he was fired from his workplace in Snyder. But, his supervisor directly contradicted that claim, telling investigators that Shawn had arrived that morning, bought a drink, turned in his uniform, and simply walked off the job on his own. By 6:10 in the morning, he was gone. When confronted with this, Shawn admitted he had lied about being fired.

He said he did not want to get into an argument with Billie Jean over losing his job, one lie explained. But, the cell phone data revealed something far more serious than a story about getting fired. Those records showed that between 6:35 and 6:56 that morning, Shawn’s phone was pinging off a cell tower in Colorado City, the same town where Haley was home alone, not Big Spring, not the road between Snyder and Big Spring, Colorado City.

And while the records did eventually place him in Big Spring later that morning, he did not arrive there until nearly 9:40 in the morning, and he did not leave until 2:40 in the afternoon. Beyond that, additional cell tower data still placed Shawn’s phone in the vicinity of Scurry County at some point during that same day.

That detail on its own might not have meant much to an outside observer, but investigators were paying very close attention. Because weeks earlier, when detectives had sat down with Shawn and asked him where he thought Haley might be, he had answered without hesitation, Scurry County. He had named it before anyone had searched there, before any evidence pointed there, before any remains were found there.

He named it first. And then, when those same investigators asked Shawn directly who they should be looking at, who he personally believed was responsible for Hailey’s disappearance, he gave an answer that stopped the room cold. Both of us. Polygraph examinations were administered to both Billy Jean Dunn and Shawn Adkins during the early weeks of the investigation.

The first round had to be redone entirely because both subjects were under the influence of substances at the time of testing. Billy attributed her condition to prescribed anxiety medication. The second round of testing showed indicators of deception on multiple key questions from both individuals. Shawn, for his part, walked out of the polygraph process on at least two occasions, refusing to complete the examination. He called it a witch hunt.

He said investigators were trying to force a confession out of him for something he did not do. But even in the moments when he did engage, the answers he gave, the ones that registered as truthful, were the ones that should have kept everyone up at night. Scurry County. Both of us. And still, at that point, there was not enough evidence to make an arrest.

So, the searches continued. The community kept showing up. The billboards kept going up across Texas. And somewhere out in the cold, flat stretch of West Texas land, the truth about what happened to Hailey Dunn was still waiting to be found. Everyone for coming this afternoon and giving me an opportunity to make a statement.

First, I want to speak directly to Hailey in case she’s listening. Um wherever you are, Hailey, I’m looking for you. Hundreds of people are looking for you. We all want you home safe. Um I just want to see and touch your beautiful face. Um I really love you. I desperately need you home. And um there’s not a minute goes by I’m not crying for you or crying wishing you were in my living room.

Um I can’t handle not knowing where you are or if you’re safe. You’re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever laid my eyes on and I’m very proud that God chose me to be your mother. Next, I want to say if someone out there has Hailey, please let her go. Just turn her loose. Drop her off at a church, a school, police station, anywhere that she can get to a phone and call police or call her family.

I’ve been flat-out called a liar by some people. Others speculate on my possible involvement in Hailey’s disappearance or wonder if I’m covering up for somebody. Some people accuse me of withholding information and not cooperating with law enforcement. These things are not true, but I now feel that I have to defend myself from ridiculous accusations, slander, or defamation of character.

In every true crime investigation, there comes a moment when the case stops being about missing pieces and starts being about the pieces that were there all along, hiding in plain sight, waiting for someone to look close enough. In the case of Hailey Dunn, that moment came in the form of what investigators found when they finally got inside the homes connected to the two people at the center of this story.

And what they found did not just raise questions, it fundamentally changed the entire direction of the investigation. As the weeks pressed on into January and February of 2011, detectives were quietly and methodically building a picture of the world Hailey Dunn had been living in. On the surface, the house on Chestnut Street looked like any other home in Colorado City, modest, unremarkable, the kind of place you would drive past a hundred times without giving it a second thought.

But behind that front door, investigators were uncovering a reality that was far more disturbing than anything the neighborhood could have imagined. During the search of the residence, law enforcement came across printed materials that immediately caught their attention. Billy Jean Dunn and Shawn Atkins had printed out hundreds of internet articles.

The subject matter of those articles was not casual reading. The materials focused heavily on serial killers, acts of extreme violence, and the targeted harm of family members. Investigators documented and collected everything they found. When Billy was later asked about those materials, she told police that both she and Shawn simply had a personal fascination with dark and disturbing subject matter, and that a lot of people who follow true crime are interested in the same kinds of topics.

That explanation did not sit well with the investigators working the case. But as alarming as those printed materials were, they were not the most significant discovery law enforcement made during this phase of the investigation. That came on February 24th, 2011, nearly 2 months after Haleigh disappeared. When authorities made a find that sent shockwaves through the investigation and left the community of Colorado City stunned.

On a USB flash drive recovered from inside the Chestnut Street home, and separately on a computer located at the residence of Shawn’s mother, investigators discovered a collection of images so deeply troubling that the details of this discovery were immediately escalated to the highest levels of the investigation.

The total number of images recovered across both locations came to more than 100,000. The content of those images involved the exploitation of minors. The sheer volume of what was found was staggering by any measure. Not dozens, not hundreds, but more than 100,000 individual files stored and accessible inside environments where children had been living.

Let that number sit with you for a moment. 100,000. Despite the magnitude of that discovery, no criminal charges were filed in connection with those images at that time. The materials were forwarded to a grand jury for review. The local sheriff publicly acknowledged the complexity of the situation, noting that because more than one person had been living in each location, investigators had to determine and confirm exactly who was responsible for the presence of those files before any arrest could be made.

It was a legally sound position. But for the family and community watching from the outside, the absence of immediate accountability was deeply painful and profoundly difficult to accept. There was another detail connected to those discoveries that Hailey’s father, Clint, later shared publicly, one that added yet another layer of frustration to an already agonizing situation.

After investigators took a laptop computer into evidence and secured it at the local police station, Shawn’s stepfather reportedly went directly to that station and demanded the laptop be returned. And according to Clint, it was. That piece of evidence stored at a police station in the middle of an active murder investigation involving a missing child was handed back.

Whether that decision had any impact on the overall case has never been fully clarified publicly. But for the people who had been fighting for Hailey from the very beginning, it was one more moment in a long line of moments that made justice feel impossibly far away. The investigation pushed forward and on March 17th, 2011, it produced the first actual arrest connected to the case.

Though not the one the community had been hoping for. That morning, law enforcement officers went to the home where Billie and Shawn were residing to speak with Shawn in connection with the ongoing investigation. When officers arrived, Billie Jean told them Shawn was not there. But when investigators entered the property with a warrant, they found Shawn Adkins inside the house, out of sight.

He had been there the entire time. And Billie had looked officers in the face and told them he was not. Billie Jean Dunn was arrested and charged with providing false information to law enforcement. In June of 2011, she received a suspended 90-day jail sentence along with one year of probation for lying about Shawn’s location. She served her probation more than 250 miles away in Travis County, where she and Shawn had relocated together following the events in Colorado City.

The fact that the two of them had moved away from the town at the center of an active investigation into a missing child—a child who was Billie’s own daughter—did not go unnoticed by investigators or by the public watching this case unfold. The couple eventually separated in 2012. And in the years that followed, Billie Jean Dunn began to distance herself from the position she had taken in the early days of the investigation.

She later told reporters that over time, as the evidence mounted, and as both local police and the FBI continued to name Shawn as their primary person of interest, she herself had started to believe that Shawn likely had something to do with what happened to Hailey. She said she could not fully explain why she had stayed with him after her daughter disappeared, but she said she was no longer surprised by what investigators believed about him.

The Relentless Search and Discovery

Back in Colorado City, Clint Dunn never left. He never stopped searching. He never stopped making phone calls and sending messages to investigators, demanding that they keep working the case. He posted about Hailey on social media constantly, not just on anniversaries or during media cycles, but regularly, consistently, month after month and year after year.

He refused to let his daughter’s story fade into the background noise of cold case archives. He was determined that her name would not be forgotten. And in a way that no one could have fully anticipated at the time, that determination would eventually produce one of the most unexpected developments the investigation had seen.

But before that development arrived, there was one more chapter of waiting. One more stretch of painful, long, exhausting silence. Because as 2011 turned to 2012, and 2012 turned to 2013, Hailey Dunn was still out there somewhere. And the question of where was the one thing every person connected to this case—every investigator, every volunteer, every neighbor, every friend—was still carrying with them every single day.

And then, on March 16th, 2013, a hiker walked into a remote field in Scurry County, Texas, near a reservoir called Lake J.B. Thomas, located more than 20 miles outside of Colorado City. And they found her.

Local authorities were notified of human remains located near Lake J.B. Thomas in Southwest Scurry County. The remains were sent to the University of North Texas Center for Human Identification for DNA analysis. On April 26th, 2013, the Scurry County District Attorney’s Office received written confirmation that the remains had been positively identified as those of Hailey Dunn.

Skeletal remains were recovered from that location and submitted for forensic analysis. DNA testing conducted through the University of North Texas confirmed what investigators had feared for more than two years. The remains belonged to Hailey Dunn. She had been out there in the exact county that Shawn Adkins had named before any search had ever been conducted there since the day she disappeared. The medical examiner ruled her death a homicide.

Clint Dunn later shared that investigators told him the most likely cause was blunt force trauma to the head from an unknown object. No weapon was ever publicly identified. No direct forensic link to a specific individual was announced. But the investigation now had something it had not had before: a confirmed crime, a confirmed victim, and a confirmed location.

And the community of Colorado City, Texas, which had spent over two years hoping against hope that Hailey might somehow still be found alive, finally had to face the truth that the people closest to this case had feared from the very beginning. Hailey was gone, and someone had taken her.

For Clint Dunn, the discovery brought a grief so deep it was almost impossible to put into words. But it also brought something else: a renewed and unshakable determination. Because now this was not just a missing person’s case. This was a murder investigation, and Clint Dunn was not going to stop—not for a single day—until the person responsible for his daughter’s death was held accountable.

Years of Waiting and Suffering

Tragically, the family had to wait an additional four years before they were even able to lay Hailey to rest.

“His mother, desperate to find her daughter’s killer, is speaking out. It was six years ago when 13-year-old Hailey Dunn went missing after leaving her father’s home in Colorado City, that’s west of Abilene. Her remains were found three years later, but her killer remains at large. Her mother, who is from Austin, says she has hope justice will be served…”

Due to the extended legal and forensic processes connected to the case, Hailey Dunn was not buried until January of 2017, more than six years after she disappeared. Six years, and still no arrest had been made.

There is a particular kind of suffering that belongs exclusively to the families of unsolved cases. It is not the sharp, sudden pain of immediate loss, though that pain is there, too. It is something slower, something that settles into your bones over months and years and refuses to leave. It is the suffering of waiting, of watching the calendar turn again and again while the person responsible for destroying your family continues to walk free, of picking up the phone to call investigators and hearing the same non-answers you heard the last time, and the time before that, and the time before that.

For Clint Dunn, that suffering became the defining reality of his life from 2013 all the way through the better part of a decade. His daughter had been found. Her death had been confirmed as a homicide. The investigation had a clear and undisputed prime suspect. And yet, year after year, the case sat without movement, without charges, without justice.

“I’ve been staying out of the way of law enforcement all this time. I thought I was doing the best thing by not coming down on law enforcement. And it’s been too many years of no action. Nothing has been done. So, I’m tired of waiting… The investigator over the case right now out of Scurry County, he told me one time, he said he doesn’t care if it takes 20 years to do this. And I do care if it takes 20 years. I don’t want the person that hurt my kid to walk the street for 20 years.”

New Leads and the Arrest of Shawn Adkins

Clint never stopped pushing. Not for a single day. He kept calling investigators. He kept sending messages. He kept showing up and demanding answers. And when the phone calls and messages did not produce results fast enough, he took his fight somewhere else entirely: the internet.

He began posting about Hailey regularly on social media. Not just on the anniversaries of her disappearance or on her birthday, but consistently, week after week, month after month. He shared photographs of her, updates about the case, and wrote openly about his grief and his refusal to let his daughter’s story be reduced to a cold case file collecting dust in a county archive somewhere in West Texas.

Those posts reached thousands of people over the years. And in 2019, they reached exactly the right person at exactly the right moment. An anonymous individual—someone who had been a high student back in the spring and early summer of 2011—came across one of Clint’s posts online. And something about it triggered a memory.

A memory of something they had found years earlier, not long after Hailey disappeared. At the time, this person had no idea who Hailey Dunn was. They had not connected what they found to any investigation, news story, or missing child. To them, it had simply been a random discovery that seemed unremarkable and unimportant in the moment. So they had never reported it, never mentioned it to anyone, and never thought about it again—until that day in 2019 when Clint’s post stopped them cold.

Suddenly, the memory of that old discovery took on an entirely different meaning. This person reached out to Clint directly and told him what they had found all those years ago. The exact nature of those items has never been publicly disclosed; investigators have kept those details confidential as part of the ongoing case. But what Clint later revealed to reporters was deeply significant: the items had been found in an area that search teams had covered multiple times during the earliest and most intensive phases of the investigation—an area that volunteers and law enforcement had walked through, searched, cleared, and somehow missed.

Around the same time, private investigator Erica Morse had been working quietly and persistently in the background of this investigation for years. In the fall of 2019, she began receiving messages from women living in West Texas and surrounding areas describing a pattern of disturbing online contact from a man introducing himself as “Casey” (Shawn’s middle name). Convinced the person in the images was Shawn Adkins, Erica accompanied one of the women to a local police station on October 28th, 2019, to file an official report. The officer refused to accept it, accusing the woman of fabricating the story.

Erica responded by publishing an open letter warning law enforcement and the public that if Shawn Adkins was not taken into custody, there would be more victims.

Indictment and Legal Proceedings

In early 2021, District Attorney Ricky Thompson of Mitchell County reached out to a specialized division: the Texas Rangers Cold Case Unit. After reviewing the full scope of evidence, cell phone records, bank activity, polygraph results, and timeline inconsistencies, they requested a warrant to collect a DNA sample directly from Shawn Casey Adkins.

On June 13th, 2021—more than 10 years after Hailey Dunn was first reported missing—Shawn Casey Adkins was placed under arrest and formally charged with the murder of Hailey Dunn.

The news traveled fast across Colorado City, Texas, and the true crime community. Clint Dunn finally had the moment he had been fighting for, expressing hope that real justice would finally be served in a courtroom. Billie Jean Dunn also responded, stating she was grateful an arrest had been made and that Shawn would now be required to answer for what happened.

In December of 2021, a grand jury formally indicted him on charges of murder and evidence tampering, alleging that he struck Hailey and then took deliberate steps to conceal her body. He was held on a $2 million bond.

The Dismissal and Current Status

In the world of true crime, an arrest is not a conviction, and the road to justice is often painfully long. In June of 2023, prosecutors in Mitchell County made the decision to dismiss all charges against Shawn Casey Adkins due to insufficient circumstantial evidence—specifically noting the lack of eyewitnesses, no recovered physical weapon tied directly to a suspect, and the high burden of proof required in a criminal courtroom.

The dismissal was filed without prejudice, leaving the door to future prosecution open. Shawn Adkins walked out a free man, and the case returned to an active cold case listing with the Texas Rangers.

Despite the setbacks, the fight is far from over. Private investigator Erica Morse continues her work, the Crime Stoppers reward remains open, and Clint Dunn is still posting, still calling, and still fighting for his daughter every single day.

Hailey Dunn was born on August 28th, 1997, in Colorado City, Texas. She was a cheerleader, played the saxophone, loved school, and crossed the street to say hello to her father every single day. The case remains open, the suspect is named, and the family’s search for true accountability continues.