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Author Topic: Samuel Bryan Dennis 29, vanished 10/7/2000 Fort Wayne, IN  (Read 3287 times)
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Nut44x4
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RIP Grumpy Cat :( I will miss you.


« on: February 14, 2010, 06:33:02 PM »

Sam Dennis

Classification:  Endangered Missing Adult 
Alias / Nickname:  Sam 
Date of Birth:  July 26, 1971 
Date Missing:  October 7, 2000 
From City/State:  Fort Wayne, IN 
Age at Time of Disappearance:  29 
Gender:  Male 
Race:  White 
Height:  71 inches 
Weight:  160 pounds 
Hair Color:  Brown 
Hair (Other):  Bald spot on crown of head. 
Eye Color:  Hazel 
Complexion:  Medium 
Identifying Characteristics:  Tattoo of a "Heart" with the name "Wendy" on right shoulder, tattoo of a "Tasmanian Devil" on left shoulder, tattoo of a "snake" on one forearm, surgical scar on right knee. 
Clothing:  Dark long sleeved shirt, blue jeans, "Nike" athletic shoes. 
Circumstances of Disappearance:  Unknown. Sam was last seen in the vicinity of the 1100 block of Swinney Ave., riding a red moped with a torn seat. 
Investigative Agency:  Fort Wayne Police Department 
Phone:  (260) 427-1202 
Investigative Case #:  007123370 
NCIC #:  M-371104326 
http://www.theyaremissed.org/gallery/listview/profile_all.php?A200300940W

http://www.fwpd.org/missing.html
no copy/paste allowed
http://www.charleyproject.org/cases/d/dennis_samuel.html
« Last Edit: February 14, 2010, 07:12:13 PM by Nut44x4 » Logged

Brothers and Sisters, I bid you beware/Of giving your heart to a dog to tear  -- Rudyard Kipling

One who doesn't trust is never deceived...

'I remained too much inside my head and ended up losing my mind' -Edgar Allen Poe
Nut44x4
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RIP Grumpy Cat :( I will miss you.


« Reply #1 on: February 14, 2010, 06:38:31 PM »

  sad....

Years later, mom pines for lost son

Although her adult son Dennis has been missing since 2000, Betty Boulware imagines him returning someday.


Betty Boulware knew in her heart she was asking the impossible, but she did it anyway.

At night she’d ignore the television in the tiny room at the back of her home, close her eyes and ask God about her son. Then she’d look out the window into the blackness, out in the direction of the cornfields surrounding her home.

In the morning, she’d say another prayer walking out the front door on her way to work: Where is he, she’d ask the Lord.

Where is my Sam?

She’d open her eyes to cars zipping up and down U.S. 30 and she’d turn to the cornfields, visible now in the daylight. Sometimes they’d be barren, allowing a view to the horizon in every direction. And though she could imagine it – it was so vivid – she never saw what she was desperate to see.

“In my mind, I put it there, that one day I’m going to look across those fields and see him coming back,” Boulware said.

She knew, deep down, it was never going to happen. This past summer, police confirmed that it wouldn’t.

Samuel Brian Dennis disappeared in October 2000 at age 29, one of the roughly 1,200 missing people reported to Fort Wayne police annually.

Most of those cases end happily and involve teenagers who regularly run away from home. Some are child custody disputes – parents who take their children when they’re not supposed to have them. Others are men or women who simply move away, eschewing communication with relatives for peace and quiet elsewhere.

Then there are those like Sam Dennis – cases that go on for years, with detectives exhausting leads and tips and eventually just hoping something substantial comes up.

Factors such as a person’s age, behavioral and mental health histories, and the chance he or she is in danger all play a part in whether police decide to actively pursue a case or wait to see whether the person turns up on his or her own.

A case involving a missing 11-year-old honors student gets treated differently from a 16-year-old habitual runaway or a 45-year-old man who left home after a fight with his wife.

Meanwhile, people like Boulware don’t get the happy ending. They sit, wait and wonder. Where did their loved one go? What happened?

The questions linger, and even though police told Boulware in July that someone had confessed to killing her son, they have yet to find a body or charge anyone. It remains a missing person case, and Boulware is still awaiting closure.

‘Going to kill me’

Samuel Dennis sat at his mother’s kitchen table and admitted he smoked pot.

It was September 2000, the last time Boulware saw her son. He drove his red moped on back roads from downtown Fort Wayne to her home in Monroeville. He wanted to mow her lawn for money and made the admission about his drug of choice – and about something else.

“He said, ‘Mom, when I go home, they’re going to kill me,’ ” Boulware said. “I thought he was just messing around. He said, ‘Yep, they’re going to kill me.’ ”

He did not say who “they” were or why they would kill him. Boulware asked Dennis to come back home and live with her.

She did not trust the people he lived with, anyway. Boulware felt his roommates were using him for the little money he’d earn at his various jobs, as a tow-truck driver sometimes, as a carpet cleaner other times.

They also used him as a baby sitter, she said, and that was what he was doing Oct. 7 when she talked to him on the phone for the last time.

When she went to visit her son days later, he was gone. Nobody at the home knew where he went, she said. From the moment she walked into the home that day, she doesn’t know why, but she felt her son was dead.

“Something came over me, and I knew right then,” Boulware said. “That’s a mother’s intuition.”

Police were called and a missing persons report was filed, Boulware said. She and her daughters then made fliers with Sam’s picture to post in the surrounding neighborhoods.

Variety of cases

Deputy Chief Karl Nib-lick of the Fort Wayne Police Department said the “vast majority” of missing person cases involve children and end happily. Usually, how to approach such cases is easy to determine.

If there’s a missing teen who habitually runs away from home or sneaks out of the house, police will tell parents to be patient, Wilson said. The child will usually show up.

A person younger than 12, though, or a child who has never run away prompts an immediate response. Patrol cars circle neighborhoods, police go door-to-door and detectives visit the scene as part of department policy.

Officers investigating a missing child case have an extensive checklist of questions to ask parents in each squad car. Most children are found, Niblick said; they turn up at a friend’s home or are even hiding in their own home.

In other cases, police find out the parent of a split family took the child, usually stemming from a custody battle. In one case, a parent took children to Mexico, Niblick said. City police are working with the International Criminal Police Organization to get the children back to Fort Wayne.

Missing adults can be trickier. Someone with dementia or Alzheimer’s disease who might wander is treated like a missing child.

Police encourage people with relatives at risk of wandering off to call the Allen County TRIAD office and register them in its SAFENET program. The free program, which also takes autistic children, gives an enrollee an identification bracelet and puts the enrollee’s picture into a police database.

If that person ever goes missing, officers can call up the photo on the computer in their squad cars.

“You’d be surprised how many people in this city with Alzheimer’s can still drive,” said Fort Wayne Police Detective Dale Wilson, who handles missing persons cases. “They end up in Michigan, or run out of gas somewhere or go back to a childhood home.”

Wilson stresses that police are not a locating service for out-of-touch relatives. One missing-person case involved a man who was looking for his brother but had no recent address for him. Wilson said that fact suggested that the brothers really didn’t keep in touch and that one of them might be homeless.

One woman lost track of her uncle when he moved to the West Coast. After not talking to him in six months, she wanted police to make contact with him. Police found he wasn’t interested in talking to her.

Sometimes, Hispanic people reported missing who turn up unharmed are afraid to talk to police because of fears they could be arrested for illegal immigration. Wilson said his department will not arrest someone for such a charge, saying the department does not have the power to enforce immigration laws.

Currently, Fort Wayne police have 29 active missing adult cases, five of which they believe are homicides, Wilson said.

A recent missing persons case turned into a homicide investigation when the body of Rene Hernandez, who was reported missing Dec. 19, was found frozen in a wooded area of Whitley County.

With little evidence someone is in danger, police find it hard to pursue such a case.

Samuel Dennis, like Hernandez, was not mentally ill and had no real reason to quit talking to his friends and family. There was nothing major on his criminal record: some arrests for drunkenness, criminal conversion and driving while suspended.

In February 2001, police released details of Dennis’ case to the media, hoping the public would help find him.

Unexpected visit

Betty Boulware spends some of her time helping an elderly neighbor with household chores or groceries. When she pulled into the woman’s driveway last July, she thought the woman was dead. Waiting there was a crowd of detectives.

The officers told Boulware the woman inside was fine; they were there to discuss the Dennis case. They were now considering it a homicide, they said.

“I lost it,” Boulware said. “I lost it right there. Oh man, I’m still crying.”

Detectives said a man serving time in an Indiana prison for a murder wrote a letter to a court and confessed to killing Dennis, according to Boulware. The man claimed Boulware’s son had molested his 3-year-old child, and that led him to kill Dennis.

“I never saw any sign of pedophilia in Sam ever,” said Boulware, adding that her son had been married at one time.

Boulware, her two daughters and her stepdaughter were brought to a police station to look over a photo array. One of the photos showed the man who confessed, a man Boulware had never met. To this day, she doesn’t believe the smallish man in the picture killed her 6-foot-1 son.

“In my heart, when I seen that guy’s picture, I never would’ve thought he’d be the person,” she said. “And I still don’t.”

Police took the suspect at least twice to the spot where he claims to have buried Dennis, according to Boulware. Dogs have been used in the search, and at one point police were going to use machines to dig, she said.

Boulware doesn’t know where the spot is, but she wonders why it’s taking so long for her son’s body to be found.

Niblick, the deputy chief, remained mum on details of the case, other than police believe it is now a homicide. He would not say why police believe it to be a homicide, adding that investigators do not know where the body is.

“We do take it serious,” Niblick said. “We have put a lot of time and manpower into that case, and we hope we can get some more leads to bring it to a conclusion.”

Moving on

Joseph, Betty Boulware’s oldest son, died in a LaGrange County car wreck 10 years before Sam Dennis disappeared. It took Boulware years to come to grips with the loss of Joseph, she said. During that time, Sam went missing.

There’s an empty plot at Lindenwood Cemetery next to Joseph’s grave. She has the money to buy it, she said, and someday she will. She’ll put a tombstone there, she’ll put Sam’s picture with it and she’ll take flowers.

But until she has her son’s body, she can’t bring herself to do it. “Until I get something, I just can’t let it go,” Boulware said.

She cries when she opens a yellowed envelope to dig out drawings and poems her son sketched for her during a short stint in a Muncie reformatory school when he was in his teens. He was into drawing tattoos, she said, and she shows a drawing of a cross and sun with the words “Love Mom” as an example of him honing his art.

She sobs when she holds the last gift he ever bought her – a heart-shaped ceramic container decorated with an angel on the lid. It stays on her dresser all the time.

Boulware said she can’t talk to her husband about her son. He isn’t Sam’s father and doesn’t understand, she said. She has a brother who listens to her, but she fears he might be tired of hearing about it.

So she still goes to the tiny room in the back of her house, one decorated with posters of religious sayings. She ignores the TV, closes her eyes, prays and looks out the window until she can’t stand it anymore.

It’s getting harder to look out into the blackness, though, knowing no one will ever stare back.
http://www.journalgazette.net/article/20100214/LOCAL/302149910
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Brothers and Sisters, I bid you beware/Of giving your heart to a dog to tear  -- Rudyard Kipling

One who doesn't trust is never deceived...

'I remained too much inside my head and ended up losing my mind' -Edgar Allen Poe
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