Dennis Hess died June 15. Three months earlier, he'd been hospitalized. According to his widow, Lena Hess, and her lawyer, Robert Arnold, Hess tried to commit suicide by mixing prescription drugs and alcohol. But his friends and family say the March incident was an accident.
In an interview with Sgt. Chad Phillips of the Platte County Sheriff's Department, Lena Hess described what her lawyer characterized as Dennis Hess' first suicide attempt. Lena said she received a call from Hess, who was staying in a hotel while the couple's divorce was pending. Lena said Hess told her he loved her and was going to kill himself. Lena said she called David and Tiffany Cox, Hess' friends, and asked them to go check on him. Arnold told Phillips that Hess left a suicide note, but that the Coxes ripped it up.
But that story differs from what a source very close to Hess tells The Pitch. Hess had recently been prescribed 10mg of Xanax and a steroid called prednisone. The source says that Hess wasn't accustomed to taking pills, having been healthy up until a cancer diagnosis in 2007. Additionally, Hess was weakened by the cancer treatments that required him to eat through a feeding tube attached to his stomach. The Xanax he was told to take three times daily was too strong a dose for him, the source says.
"He was fine," Hess' friend Deann Leddick told The Pitch in an earlier interview. "He just drank too much, [combined with] the pills and the anxiety ... he wasn't trying to off himself."
The afternoon before Hess was hospitalized, Hess had gone with the Coxes and Leddick to Bar 12 for a couple drinks. When the friends dropped Hess back off at the hotel, the source says, he talked with Lena over the phone, then called his daughter Michelle Cerruti in Las Vegas. He told Cerruti that he felt strange, and then it sounded as though the phone dropped from his hands. Cerruti called the front desk of the hotel, and the employee who picked up the phone knocked on Hess' door. Hearing no response, she called 911. Cerruti, meanwhile, asked David and Tiffany Cox to go check on her father.
Tiffany Cox tells The Pitch that when they got inside Hess' hotel room, they found him curled up in the fetal position, unresponsive. She thought he was dead. "He's not waking up," she says. "My husband's jumping on the bed, I'm freakin' out, she's (Leddick) trying to wake him up. It was a mess."
When the Coxes and Leddick arrived at the hospital, following Hess in an ambulance, Lena was already waiting there. Hess' friends confronted her, Tiffany says. "Everyone's yelling. ... We're like, 'Stop this now, the man can't take anymore. Enough.' And she says, 'This is the end, I'm going to give him all his [assets] back, he can come back home.'"
But the next day, nothing changed, Tiffany says. Hess was still barred via an order of protection from entering his home and his bar. "It just went downhill from there," Leddick says. Hess died on June 15.
On July 31, Jackson County Deputy Medical Examiner Laura Knight ruled Hess' death a suicide, caused by a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. His left hand tested positive for gunshot residue. A test for gunshot residue on his wife's hands came back negative, according to the sheriff's department.
Questions about Hess' death still linger in the minds of his family and friends. Daughters Cerruti and Audra Wyatt told investigators that when they each talked to Hess just a few hours before his death, he sounded upbeat and happy. Former employees say that he was dominantly right-handed and couldn't possibly have pulled the trigger with his left. Sources with access to the investigative report point out that the gun was positioned strangely in Hess' lap, sandwiched between the back of his left hand and the palm of his right. A source close to Hess says that he loved Lena's young daughter dearly and would never have committed an act of violence with her in the house.
Former Denim & Diamonds manager Craig Wolfe may have said it best: "There's three people who know what happened in that house that day: Dennis, Lena and God."
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If Arnold really believed that, it's because Lena fed it to him. Just like she's tried to feed crap to others.
(Lena said she called David and Tiffany Cox, Hess' friends, and asked them to go check on him. Arnold told Phillips that Hess left a suicide note, but that the Coxes ripped it up).
Here is a perfect example of how it's obvious that facts are not being told straight.
We(Dee,David& Tiffany) had been at Lena's dads funeral earlier in the day and when we came home we went to Bar 12 for a few drinks. We were only there about an hour when Dennis said he was feeling tired so David took Dennis back to the hotel in the car he had to rent because he wasn't allowed to have one of the three cars he owned. I followed to pick David up and bring him back to bar 12. We had been back about an hour when Lena called me(DEE) and told me that she had just gotten off the phone with Dennis and something was wrong. I grabbed my husband and the Coxes and we went to check on Dennis. Meanwhile Dennis had also called his daughter and told her how he was feeling. His daughter had the hotel call the police, but they where not there by the time we got there. I went into that hotel room first with Tiffany right behind me, the only letter there was from his daughter. It was a letter stating where she went because she had been staying at the hotel with Dennis and she had gone home while he was gone consoling Lena over her fathers death (I know this because I was there when he read it earlier, when we had stopped there to change clothes after the funeral before we went to bar 12). I told Lena about the letter at the hospital, and what it said. The police were also informed of where they could find the letter. The Coxes did not tear anything up, that is a big fat lie. How the hell does Arnold know Dennis left a suicide note? Was he there? NO. I mean really this is coming from the same guy who set one of his other clients up with Lena to make Dennis jealous. What kind of shit is that. So as you can see the facts are being stirred up with a bunch of lies, and not because of the reporter who is writing this story, but because of those telling the lies. AND JUST THINK DENNIS WAS DEALING WITH THIS SAME BULLSHIT EVERYDAY, DAY IN AND DAY OUT.
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