The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Mom’s Boyfriend ‘Person of Interest’ in Texas Cheerleader’s Disappearance

Posted on | January 22, 2011 | 3 Comments

This is one of those missing-girl cases that Nancy Grace is always covering. If you’ve seen enough stories like this, the patterns become familiar, and this one’s starting to look like a murder investigation:

Dogs searching a landfill in Abilene, Texas, found evidence in the case of a missing 13-year-old girl from West Texas, a spokesman for the investigation told the Associated Press.
Authorities did not elaborate on the evidence discovered and why the investigation led them to a vast landfill in the town, which is 70 miles east of Colorado City, where Hailey Darlene Dunn went missing last month.
Hailey was reported missing by her mother on Dec. 28. . . .
Authorities have said that her mother’s live-in boyfriend, Shawn Casey Adkins, is among several “persons of interest” in the case.
According to a police affidavit filed in the investigation, Adkins remarked to a relative that hurting a teenager would be “like killing a deer.”

Police say both Adkins and the girl’s mother lied on polygraph tests. Here’s a clip from a recent Nancy Grace show that includes video footage of Shawn Adkins:

Of course, Adkins is merely a “person of interest” and we don’t know how this case will turn out, but as I’ve warned before the most dangerous man in the world is “mom’s boyfriend.”

“[S]exual abuse does not randomly occur throughout the child population. Rather, it occurs more often in single-parent or reconstituted families. . . .
“Virtually all studies of child sexual abuse report that girls living with stepfathers are at high risk. . . .
“In sum, mounting divorce rates, soaring nonmarital births, and the ubiquity of cohabitation combine to create a profoundly negative consequence for young girls: the prospect of sexual exploitation.”

Robin Fretwell Wilson, “Children at Risk: The Sexual Exploitation of Female Children After Divorce,” Cornell Law Review, 2001

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