VT Denise Hart UNSOLVED MURDER, Jan 26, 2015 - Sudbury, VT

[Jackie O Reports]

Hey, fellow sleuths!

I am a journalist from Vermont working on a podcast investigating the unsolved murder of Denise Hart. Denise, a black 24-year old mother and student from Hartford, CT was visiting friends in the small southern Vermont town of Sudbury when she went missing. The car she was driving was found engulfed in flames the morning after her family stopped hearing from her, but local police did not share this, or any real information with Denise's mom, she found out on the news.

Vermont State Police made Denise's mom wait 72 hours, after initially telling her incorrectly that she'd have to report her daughter's disappearance to the Hartford Police because she was from there, even though she'd gone missing in Vermont. As the days passed with no search, Vermont experienced multiple snowstorms.

Denise's body was not found for 11 months. Her skeletal remains were discovered on Dec. 22, 2015, on the side of Gap Road in Brandon, 13 miles from where the car was found, by someone walking their dog.

Once her body was found and the investigation moved from missing person to murder, police contact with Denise's family completely stopped. Her family has no answers to what happened that weekend in Vermont, and as her son (now 9 years old) gets older he asks more questions that have no answers.

Vermont is the whitest state in the nation, the town Denise visited is 98.9 percent white. Her case is the most recent unsolved murder in Vermont and one of two from the past 10 years. The area, Rutland county is also one of the biggest opioid hot spots in the nation, and police made assumptions about the killing being drug involved right off the bat, but her family and friends have told me there is no way this is the case.

I am interviewing Vermont State Police on the case this week and will be questioning what work they did to mitigate racial bias in their investigation, and what went wrong in this case. Since it is an open investigation my FIOA requests for her case files have been denied. If you have any ideas, theories or information about the case, or Vermont State Police, please comment or send me a message.

Thank you.

Foul play suspected in case of missing woman

VSP: Human remains found in Goshen

A New Major Crimes Unit Faces a Growing Caseload

 

[Djallal Namri]

who were these friends she was visiting?
the distance between the two cities is apparently 182 miles:
- she may have been followed by her assassin (s)
- she may have had a bad meeting
in both cases the police can find an excuse not to do their job and racism can be one but that would be a very poor excuse because racists are usually stupid and mean people too
however, one should not make the inevitable mistake of overgeneralization: if it is not the police, someone else in the city may have a different opinion on the story.
Since you cannot make enemies in a short period of time, the story may begin somewhere other than in the immediate vicinity of the crime scene.
that's a theory because I'm not American and don't reside in the U.s.a either.

 

[Teamir]

Denise Hart

Whomever wrote the article in the link above got some VERY detailed info! Here’s the text pasted in case the link fails:


“It seems that despite immediate action on the part of Denise's family in reporting her missing, a lot of hangups occurred very early on in the investigation. When Denise's mother had called Rutland PD to report her daughter missing, she was incorrectly informed that Denise would need to be reported missing in Hartford, CT where she resided. After all of the miscommunication with the Rutland Police Department, the very crucial first 48 hours in this missing person's investigation had been wasted. Over the next couple days, a few members of Denise's family would drive to Vermont in search of her, posting flyers and talking with locals wherever they stopped. Through these means and details Denise had shared with her mother the last time they spoke, they were able to piece together a rough timeline of events that took place the last night she was seen. She hadn't been staying in Rutland, but Sudbury, VT, a town of less than 600 residents just a half hour away. It was only after speaking with the friend Denise was staying with and physically searching his residence themselves, that an official investigation would be opened. As Sudbury fell under a different jurisdiction, the case was turned over to State Police on January 31, 2015, a full five days after Denise was reported missing.



Josh Preseau was the last person to see Denise alive on the night of January 25th, and both Denise's family and police would continue to look at him as their only suspect for a great deal of time. It was learned that Denise had been staying with him after initially checking into the Brandon Motor Lodge in Brandon, VT with a man, she told Josh, was her boyfriend. Something happened and she was left alone. She was spooked at the motel all by herself and decided to stay with Josh for the remainder of her time there. As more details emerged, including that Josh and Denise's relationship was not only that of friends, but that Denise had been selling him heroin, the investigation seemed to close in on him. He relayed to police that Denise had been dealing heroin and crack cocaine under the alias Tiffany Robinson. When questioned by Denise's family early on, Josh initially claimed ignorance as he did not know her by her real name. He told investigators that Denise had left to meet someone the night of the 25th and that she never returned. Upon noticing that most of her things were gone, he assumed she had decided to go home. His property and all the land surrounding was searched by police and Fish and Game Services, turning up no leads. Josh submitted to a polygraph test and passed. He was never arrested and police ruled him out as a suspect in an official capacity. In the following months, he would check himself into rehab and get clean, but upon his release, the police would be waiting for him.



Josh had previously reported to police that he heard that two men, Chris Richards and Todd Norris, had told another dealer in the area that they had "gotten rid of his competition" roughly two weeks after Denise's disappearance. The police now wanted Josh, a man that had just gone through a program to become sober, to go undercover in the former drug circles he just escaped in exchange for help in retaining a new driver's license. He declined. It is unclear if any follow up has been done on these other two suspects. “



On December 22, 2015, a dog walker came across human remains in Goshen, VT, just 13 miles away from where Denise's car was found, torched. The remains were determined to be Denise's; her manner of death ruled a homicide. She had been shot in the head. It has been rumored that three separate men were brought in for questioning after Denise's body was recovered, but no arrests have been made.