Western Courier

Issue date: 7/10/03 Section: Sports

Media Credit: Baylor University Baylor University basketball player Patrick Dennehy, shown in this 2002 school photo, has been missing for almost three weeks.

WACO, Texas (KRT) - As the broiling summer sun finally set on this high plains college town Wednesday, Baylor student Chris Johnson sat at a picnic table and popped open another beer while his friends lounged around the pool and played volleyball at the Sterling University Parks apartments.

The apartment complex, with its manicured lawns and its well-maintained buildings, was the center of missing Baylor basketball player Patrick Dennehy's world in Waco. It's a short walk to his classes and a three-point shot from the Ferrell Center, the golden-domed basketball palace where Dennehy practiced and worked out. It's where Dennehy shared an apartment with former teammate Carlton Dotson, one of his closest friends, and the man a police informant says shot the missing ballplayer during a heated argument. It's where Dennehy left his two pit bulls and a pair of basketball sneakers.

Johnson says Dennehy's disappearance is disturbing, but just as troublesome is the way the police and the university have handled the case.

"Everybody is speculating before they know the facts," Johnson says. "In the process, lives are being ruined. Maybe Dotson shot Dennehy, maybe he didn't. But you shouldn't accuse the guy of something like that until you know the truth."

It is hard to know the truth in a case that has taken so many bizarre twists and turns, and the facts behind Dennehy's disappearance remain as elusive as the identity of the person who killed JonBenet Ramsey in Boulder, Colo., in 1996. In many ways, the two whodunits are similar - like the Ramsey case, the Dennehy investigation has been marred by police missteps, angry fingerpointing and contradictory accounts. Both cases were set in communities that felt insulated from big-city crime.

"People say they're shocked that something like this could happen at a Baptist college, but this is not a perfect place. There are 14,000 students here, and not all of them are nice, religious people," senior Scott Mauldin says.

This much is known: Baylor, which is undertaking an ambitious 10-year program to turn the nation's largest Baptist school into an Ivy League-caliber academic power while maintaining its deep religious roots, has suffered a devastating blow. So has its athletic department, which has been plagued by losing teams and scandal in recent years, and its basketball program, which seemed to be finally heading in the right direction after coach Dave Bliss was hired in 1999.

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