To most who knew her, Hailey Dunn appeared to be a happy, wholesome all-American kid who loved to play sport and make people laugh.
Then one day, she vanished without a trace.
The 13-year-old cheerleader was last seen alive on December 27, 2010.
Her mother’s live-in boyfriend, Shawn Adkins, told police Hailey had left their home in Colorado City, Texas, to walk to her dad’s house half a block away and was then planning to visit a friend to stay the night. But she never made it to either.
It would take another two years and three months before her remains were finally found around 30 miles from the missing teen’s home in March 2013.
A local man had been out searching for fossils close to the remote Lake J. B. Thomas when he stumbled across a human skull. Soon, he found other bones and items of clothing that he quickly realized matched the description of what the missing teen was last seen wearing. It took four days for investigators to collect all of Hailey’s scattered remains from the area.
An autopsy determined the eighth-grade student had suffered a ‘catastrophic’ injury after being struck in the head with a blunt object.
There has only ever been one named suspect: Shawn Adkins. He was arrested and charged with her murder more than eight years after Hailey was found. He pleaded not guilty. But the case was sensationally dropped in June 2023, just weeks before he was due to stand trial due to a lack of evidence.
Hailey Dunn, an eighth-grade student and cheerleader, vanished on December 27, 2010. Her remains were found three years later
Hailey Dunn with her mother Billie Jean Dunn and her mother’s boyfriend Shawn Adkins (left to right) on December 25, 2010, in Colorado City, Texas. Two days later, Hailey disappeared
Now, nearly two years on, Hailey’s grieving father Clint Dunn tells the Daily Mail a crucial new piece of information could finally lead to a break in the case.
In the prosecution’s motion to dismiss the charges against Adkins, the state made it clear that he remained the ‘primary suspect’ in Hailey’s murder but said ‘additional work must be done before the case can proceed to a jury trial’.
Court documents also pointed to a series of missed opportunities that could have proven critical.
Evidence collected from both the suspect’s vehicle and from the scene where Hailey’s remains were found had never been forensically tested.
The same was true of inside the home where Hailey lived with her mom and Adkins, the documents stated, despite this being the suspected crime scene.
Law enforcement officials have long been dogged by accusations of mishandling and botching the investigation.
But it was revealed last month that the Texas Rangers Cold Case unit has officially taken up Hailey’s case with a new ranger assigned to lead it in the hope of finally solving it once and for all.
Daily Mail has also learned that, during the original investigation that led to Adkins’ 2021 arrest, a single hair was found in the trunk of the prime suspect’s vehicle.
Prosecutors had originally stated that no testing was carried out on the contents of the car.
But Hailey’s father and Erica Morse – the private investigator working with him on the case – claim they have received new information that this hair sample may have undergone testing after all and that the results were just not passed on to investigators.
‘Is it something we can use? That could be some hardcore evidence,’ says Dunn, talking exclusively to the Daily Mail.
Morse adds that advances in technology mean both this hair sample and other evidence not previously tested could now undergo more thorough analysis.
‘A lot of those materials are microscopic and so some advancements in the field might allow for more thorough testing,’ she says.
So as part of the new probe, investigators are now reviewing testing previously carried out and also conducting tests on evidence that was overlooked, she adds.
Shawn Adkins (seen in mugshot) is the prime suspect in the case. He was charged with murder in 2021 – but the case was later dropped
One of the key pieces of evidence against Adkins in the original case was a soil sample collected from his work boots. However, two separate tests uncovered opposing results.
One, using Near Infrared Spectroscopy (NIRS) technology and carried out by the state of Texas, found that the soil sample matched those collected from the scene where Hailey’s remains were found.
The other, conducted by the FBI Crime Lab which discredited NIRS testing, found the samples did not match.
Morse says the new lead investigator has vowed to look for new testing methods that were not available in 2013.
‘That mud contained everything from bacteria to bugs to feces to plant DNA and all of those tests are now individualized,’ she explains.
Dunn adds that he now has faith the new investigator may finally get justice for Hailey.
‘He’s pulling all the strings and he’s using all the resources he can and he wants to put Hailey’s killer behind bars,’ he says.
‘He told me he’s not going to leave this case worse than it was… He has really given me a lot of lift and restored my faith in law enforcement that they’re going to bring justice to Hailey.’
For Clint, any justice for his daughter would be almost 15 years in the making.
He still remembers the call he received from Hailey’s mother Billie Jean alerting him that his little girl had not come home like it was yesterday.
It was early afternoon on December 28 and he had taken the day off work because of a back injury when the phone rang.
‘Billie Jean said Hailey was supposed to go to my house the day before and then to a friend’s house and she asked “have I seen her?”’ he says.
Dunn says he didn’t know what she was talking about.
Hailey had never showed up at his house the day before and, as far as he knew, was never planning to. And here was Billie Jean now telling him their daughter had never returned home.
‘What the hell are you talking about?’ he remembers saying.
Dunn recalls telling Billie Jean to hang up the phone right away and call the police.
Clint Dunn (pictured) is hopeful that new information could finally solve his daughter’s case
‘And so she called the police and filed a missing person report, called me back and told me our daughter was missing. I changed in that very moment,’ he says.
‘I instantly lost a piece of me, and I was trying to find it. And so I got my family and my girlfriend and her son and my daughter [Hailey’s half sister], who was only three months old then, and we started going through alleys and just looking in trash cans and ditches and garages searching the town as we just didn’t know what to do’.
He continued searching for the next six months, walking the streets and driving around handing out flyers to people.
Dunn says he knew from the get-go that something was terribly wrong because Hailey would never have run away.
By the time she had been missing for a year he was desperate.
‘You’re thinking, man, you know, maybe it’s better that she’s dead than being treated horribly or being trafficked across somewhere. I don’t want her to be treated worse than an animal somewhere and just the emotions and feelings and the thoughts that go through my head, just got worse and worse for two and a half years until her remains were found,’ he recalls.
Dunn describes the moment Hailey’s remains were eventually found in March 2013 near Lake J.B. Thomas in Snyder as ‘almost a little bit of a relief’
‘I knew that she wasn’t suffering no more. I knew that she hadn’t been suffering all that time and that she was in heaven with God now,’ he says.
‘Then it became about finding out what happened to her and who did this to her and that’s been my focus since.’
The home in Colorado City, Texas, where Hailey Dunn lived with her mom Billie Jean Dunn and her mom’s boyfriend Shawn Adkins. Court documents show the home was not forensically tested after Hailey’s disappearance
As the last person to see Hailey alive, Adkins became a person of interest, and then suspect, very early on. At the time of Hailey’s disappearance, Adkins lived with Billie Jean, Hailey and Billie Jean’s son David, 16, who was Hailey’s half-brother, at their home on Chestnut Street.
Adkins walked out of two polygraph tests and failed a third in January 2011, in the weeks after Hailey’s disappearance.
Child pornography was then found on multiple electronic devices Adkins allegedly had access to – including computers at Hailey’s home, Adkins’ mom’s property in Big Spring and Adkins’ grandmother’s house in Dunn, a small community about ten miles south of where Hailey’s remains were found in Snyder.
It was also discovered on his cellphone and memory stick, according to court documents. However, Adkins never faced charges over the child porn found during the search for Hailey.
A search of Hailey’s home also uncovered a box containing hundreds of documents about serial killers and sexual sadists.
Billie Jean – who brushed off the discovery of the box as ‘a hobby’ – also aroused suspicion and was charged with lying to police about Adkins’ whereabouts when Hailey disappeared. She pleaded guilty and was sentenced to one year probation.
Despite investigators focusing on Adkins, he remained a free man for a decade until he was charged with murder and tampering with evidence in 2021.
But Adkins never made it to trial. After several delays, prosecutors made the bombshell move to dismiss the charges without prejudice (meaning they can be refiled) in June 2023.
More than 18 months later, Adkins has not been hit with new charges and remains free. He also never faced charges over the child porn found during the search for Hailey. The Daily Mail has approached Adkins for comment.
Hailey’s mom Billie Jean (left) also aroused suspicion and was charged with lying to police about Shawn Adkins’ (right) whereabouts when Hailey disappeared
Billie Jean Dunn seen being escorted from the Mitchell County Jail to a nearby courthouse for her arraignment in 2011
Dunn claims law enforcement mishandled the original investigation from the start, with issues such as the lack of testing of evidence hampering the case.
The Daily Mail contacted the Texas Department of Public Safety and Colorado City Police for more information about the case but did not receive a response before publication.
‘Personally I believe they dropped the ball on it from the very beginning and have been covering up for each other,’ Dunn says. ‘They messed up evidence.’
For this reason, Dunn is pushing for new legislation that would hold police departments accountable for mistakes and give families of missing and murdered people greater transparency around their cases.
‘I really think there should be a public outrage over the injustice here,’ he says. ‘Law enforcement needs to man up and admit their mistakes.’
‘Hailey was just the all-American kid. She was old-fashioned, she played in the dirt, she was hilariously funny, she was a comedian. She lit up the room. She wasn’t shy. She really made people feel good,’ he continues.
A missing persons poster for Hailey Dunn. Now, the Texas Rangers Cold Case unit is taking on the case
More than 14 years on, Hailey Dunn’s father is still fighting to get justice for his daughter
‘She did really good wholesome things that a 13-year-old should. She was just a good, average American girl. She was a cheerleader. She played softball. She played all the sports… She had a good life. She was a very happy person. And she was well-loved’.
But spending more than 14 years fighting to get justice for his daughter has taken its toll on Dunn and his family.
He has suffered two heart attacks, battled addiction, suffered depression and PTSD and says he has ‘walked away from every single family member and friend that I had’.
‘It’s messed me up in the head, messed me up physically. It’s messed up my family dynamics… I have trust issues. I don’t trust anybody. I don’t want anybody around my daughters. and that’s basically what it’s done to me,’ he adds.
‘They stole my life from me, man.’
But he is not going to give up.
‘I’ve been all the way down to the bottom of the barrel and, you know, screaming for justice the whole freaking way. And I’ve crawled out of the bottom of the barrel and I’m on top of the barrel and I’m still screaming for justice.
‘I’ve got to find out what happened to my daughter.’
