Her Own Mother Wrote Her Obituary After Murdering Her

Her Own Mother Wrote Her Obituary After Murdering Her

PART1

Hardy Quinn Rena Hill was born on October 11th, 2012 in Abilene, Texas to mother Dawn Faith Hill Flesner. Hardy, as everyone called her, had a brother who was 2 years older. As he’d still be a minor as of the date of this recording, we’ll be referring to him by the pseudonym Tyler for the remainder of the episode.

 The family settled in Brownwood, a town of about 20,000 people in Central Texas. Hardy’s family described her as always curious and full of energy. She loved animals and always wanted to bring them home. She also enjoyed unicorns, scary movies, and the family’s annual trips to Padre Island in San Antonio. Hardy had a special bond with her brother.

 The two of them enjoyed making forts and playing Minecraft together. She also loved to play hide and seek. She was so tiny, so she could always find the best hiding spots. While most kids loved Christmas, Hardy couldn’t wait for October to roll around. She loved Halloween, skulls, and trying to scare people.

 Hardy was described as a tough cookie. According to Dawn, there were many times she might trip on air, fall out of nowhere, and jump up and say, “I’m okay.” and keep going. It was a running family joke how often she would tumble and then immediately declare she was fine. That’s just who Hardy was. She was also close with her Grandma Susie Wilson, who lived about 90 miles away in Abilene.

 Hardy enjoyed when they all lived together and Susie would take them night fishing. She also had a little ritual where they would watch television, order pizza, and sing Jesus Loves the Little Children before drifting off to sleep. At 9 years old, she would have been starting fourth grade. >> Hardy’s mother Dawn had been married to a woman named Sarah Flesner.

 The marriage lasted several years, during which Dawn had Hardy and her brother Tyler. Sarah helped raise both kids, but in 2020, Dawn and Sarah separated. Dawn took the kids and moved out, after which she stayed briefly with her mom, Susie, in Abilene. Sometime in 2020, Dawn started dating Jamie Faith Anderson.

After about 6 months of dating, Dawn moved with both children into Jamie’s home in Brownwood. The move put distance between the kids and their grandmother. According to Susie, Jamie always insisted on being in the room whenever Dawn spoke to her family. Susie would arrange to see Hardee and Tyler, but Jamie would cancel the plans.

Eventually, Jamie barred Susie from seeing the children entirely. Neighbor Abby Wallace would later share that, “You would not even believe they had kids because you never saw them.” The house where the couple and the children lived was a two-story building that was falling apart. When Susie first visited, she was horrified.

 There was no running water, no electricity, and no central heat. The stove and the refrigerator didn’t work, and there was a portable toilet on the front porch because the plumbing inside didn’t work, either. The family disposed of human waste by throwing it in a dumpster next to their neighbor, Tim Corley’s house. He owned the dumpster and described the stench from the family home as extending well past the front door, saying that it was so bad it would knock you down.

 He called the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, or DFPS as we’ll refer to them for the rest of the video, twice in 2021. However, the agency told him that the family not having indoor plumbing and dumping feces outside wasn’t a problem. Investigators who eventually entered the house and saw both floors said that the upstairs looked like a completely different house than the downstairs.

Downstairs, Hardee and Tyler shared a single mattress covered in trash and urine. The appliances were padlocked, as were the cabinets. The refrigerator and freezer downstairs were also locked so the children couldn’t access them. Hardee and her brother were not allowed any food without permission.

 They had to work for it. But upstairs, where Dawn and Jamie stayed, it was clean, it was air-conditioned, and it was stocked with food. >> During the summer of 2021, Dawn drove then 8-year-old Hardee to Trickham Cemetery in neighboring Coleman County and left her there alone in the dark at midnight.

 Trickham is located roughly 20 miles from Brownwood, and it’s barely a town. As of 2020, only 12 people live there. It has no post office and no street lights, just a highway, a church, a historic marker, and a cemetery. That cemetery is where Dawn left her daughter. According to Tyler, it wasn’t even the first time. Hardee walked roughly half a mile in the dark to the nearest house to find help.

A woman named Vicki Rice answered the door and found the little girl on her porch. When asked how she got there, Hardee told Vicki that her mother left her there because she was being bad. >> We have a nightlight that lights up a lot of the yard, and she said she saw the nightlight from the cemetery. That she went to this house first, but they have a lot of dogs, and she was afraid.

 And she came down, saw the light. We had a light on on the front porch like we do every night, and that’s why she came to the house. Is why she’s what she said. She has told us that she’s lost, that her mother left her at the cemetery in Trickham. The mother came into the house after we had already called the police. And so, we clearly told her, “I mean, she’s not leaving until they get here.

We’ve already called the sheriff’s department, and we’re not going to allow her to leave because we’ve already called.” She said she had wandered off from them in the cemetery. Um that’s not what the little girl told us. I mean, we never saw any of that that night. We saw a very frightened, very young child that was very hungry.

And dirty. She ate everything that we had. Um, we had made her sandwich and she ate it and said she was still hungry and we made her hot dogs and she ate those and she drank milk, about three glasses of milk. But she said she was hungry. And we fed her. >> DFPS refused to send someone to Vicki’s house that night, but the Coleman County Sheriff’s Office did respond and they pushed to prosecute Don.

She eventually pled guilty to second-degree felony child abandonment and endangerment and was convicted and placed on probation starting in 2021. When Social Services did eventually investigate, they found that Don had neglectfully supervised her daughter. However, they closed the case before the criminal prosecution was even finished and without providing any services.

PART2

>> In June of 2022, another investigation was opened after the police responded to a report of family violence between Don and Jamie. Don and Jamie refused to let the case workers into the house claiming that they were worried about being exposed to COVID. So, instead of entering the house where the two children were living, the agency met with Don and Jamie in a public space.

That’s when they submitted a video to Social Services showing the interior of a clean, livable home, but there was just one issue. That video was fake. According to reports, Don and Jamie had filmed it in a home adjacent to theirs. The agency accepted the video as real and closed the case. Several of the reports were routed through Alternative Response, a system Texas uses for cases deemed lower risk.

 Not every report requires a full investigation and some families just need support. The Hill case was routed through Alternative Response and the case worker interviewed Hardy and Tyler at a nearby park. Their mother was present during this interview. Case worker also never entered the family home and instead they spoke with Don’s landlord.

 However, Don’s landlord was her girlfriend Jamie. The case was closed after Jamie told the case worker over the phone that everything was fine. Attorney Lindsey Dion, a former DFPS attorney who now works in private practice, claimed that routing cases like this to alternative response was problematic. She said, “The first thing I do as a defense attorney is ask the department, is this an alternative response case? Because what that tells me is they don’t care and they’re not going to do anything to my clients.

” Frank Vandervort, a law professor at the University of Michigan who studies child welfare systems, also criticized the system saying, “Children are dying because of differential response.” >> Because of these repeated failures, on August 22nd, 2022, at approximately 5:10 p.m.

, first responders in Brownwood were called to a house located on the 700 block of Avenue C. It’s unclear who, but someone inside the home had called 911 to report an unresponsive little girl. When responders arrived, they found Hardi Quinn Hill. She was emaciated and had no vital signs. Paramedics transported Hardi to a local hospital where life-saving measures were performed, but she never regained consciousness.

That evening, Justice of the Peace Harold Hogan pronounced her dead. She was only 9 years old. The police showed up on Susie’s doorstep in the middle of the August night and told her that her granddaughter was gone. When investigators finally entered the house, they found conditions matching everything that everyone had been trying to warn social service about for years.

They found exactly what we described earlier. Hardi’s brother was found in that same downstairs area where Hardi was found. A case worker would later testify that Tyler was very skinny and dirty with a sunken-in face. The case worker said that little boy was so malnourished that he was too weak to walk on his own.

 Tyler was removed from the home within hours of finding Hardi dead and was placed in temporary foster care while suitable family member was identified. Hardi’s full autopsy report has not been publicly released, but court documents and press releases indicate that her cause of death was acute malnutrition and neglect. Because of this finding, her death was ruled a homicide.

She also had multiple bruises on her body that showed she was the subject of physical violence. >> On September 27th, 2022, 5 weeks after Hardi’s death, Dawn Faith Hill Flesner and Jamie Fay Anderson were arrested. They weren’t immediately charged with murder though. They were charged with tampering with physical evidence and fabricating evidence with intent to impair.

 This charge was related specifically to the fake video they submitted to the case worker in June showing a clean house. Both women were booked at the Brown County Jail. December of 2022, the grand jury handed down indictments against both Dawn and Jamie and served them on December 17th at around 4:30 p.m. Each faced four counts: capital murder of a person under 10 years of age, tampering with physical evidence, and two counts of injury to a child with intent to cause serious bodily injury.

 On June 1st, 2023, Dawn appeared at the 35th Judicial District Court with Judge Mike Smith presiding. She pled guilty to one count of capital murder. And Judge Smith then sentenced her to life in prison without the possibility of parole. The state agreed not to seek the death penalty in exchange for the guilty plea. Like in many cases where there was a minor surviving witness, the prosecution did not want to force Hardi’s brother to testify against his own mother.

DA Michael Murray explained his decision saying, “The need to protect a young child from suffering more through a trial of his biological mother was a critical factor in reaching this decision to accept Hill Flesner’s plea to life without the possibility of parole.” Dawn is currently being held at the Dr.

 Lane Murray Unit in Gatesville, Texas. November 7th, 2023, Jamie also appeared in 35th District Court. She pled guilty to capital murder and Judge Smith also sentenced her to life in prison without the possibility of parole. By also pleading guilty, she avoided the death penalty as well. She wasn’t Tyler’s biological mother, so the same reasoning didn’t apply to her directly.

Jamie is currently being held at the Christina Melton Crain Unit, also in Gatesville. Hardy’s family watched from the gallery including her grandmother Susie. At the end of the hearing, she delivered the victim impact statement on behalf of the family which read in part, “The family lost a beautiful 9-year-old girl.

 We were denied access to her and she lost her life and her brother went through so much trauma.” Susie later spoke to reporters about social services saying, “Nobody went to that house until that child passed away. Why didn’t they walk through the front door before? They didn’t do their job. And I don’t care how many times they want to say they did, they did not do their job.

” Neighbor Tim Corley also spoke out after Hardy’s death. He told Texas Public Radio, “I don’t think they did their job. I think that girl would be alive if they had done it.” >> After Hardy’s death, her uncle Devon started a Facebook page called Justice for Hardy. By October of 2022, it had more than 2,000 members and became a gathering place for people following the case.

People who were outraged by what had happened to her. On November 12th, 2022, the community held a memorial motorcycle ride to honor Hardy’s memory. Riders met at the Stripes gas station located on US 377 South at 11:30 a.m. At noon, they rode together to Trickham Cemetery. According to 102.3 KXYL, five people were injured around noon when they collided.

 Three of the bikers were transported to Hendrick Medical Center in Brownwood, while the other two refused treatment. The community left mementos at the house located on Avenue C, turning them into makeshift shrines. That house itself was eventually demolished in May of 2024. Hardy Quinn’s case became the central example in a major investigative series by Texas Public Radio and the Pulitzer Center.

 When Home Is the Danger documented how Texas’ alternative response system was failing children. The series included a searchable database of more than 1,200 child fatalities from 2018 to 2023. >> Hardy was buried in Trickham Cemetery, same cemetery where her mother had abandoned her in 2021. The headstone bore a last name that devastated Suzi.

 She told Texas Public Radio, “The last name that shows is Anderson. That is not her last name. She was never adopted. She was never anything. Anderson was the family name, which is the family of one of her two murderers.” Suzi refused to accept it. Every few weeks she made the two-hour drive south from Abilene to Trickham to visit her grave.

 She referred to the grave as “the one with all the little thingies on it.” She’d always wanted to move Hardy’s remains from that cemetery. So, in late October of 2024, Suzi and other family members arranged for Hardy Quinn’s remains to be exhumed and moved. It required paperwork, but Suzi was determined to bring Hardy home, and she eventually did.

The re-interment finally happened on a weekday morning, and only a small group of family members attended it. >> You know, it’s all a waste, and we look at it that way. This should never ever have happened in the first place. But, we accomplished getting her home. >> Thank you for getting her home. >> You’re welcome.

>> [snorts] >> She should be happy right here. You know. >> You know, it’s it’s the end of a long trial, so to speak. She is now where she should have been, you know, when this happened. In other words, we don’t get any do-overs, unfortunately, but at least she’s home. She’s home. >> Hardy’s obituary ended with these words, and I quote, “She will always be remembered for her curious nature.

 She will never be forgotten.” It’s just too bad that the monster who murdered her got the final say on the words in which we remember her by. That’s right. The mother, Dawn, the woman who murdered her, was the one who wrote Hardy’s obituary. “She’ll never be forgotten.” Well, I sure hope that you never forget what you did to her, Dawn.

If Hardy’s case resonated with you, then please click here to check out the case of 5-year-old Kinsley Wealthy of Indiana. Kinsley died in April of 2024 from severe malnutrition and neglect after being locked away in a closet. Social services had been involved in the family’s life, and six separate reports had been made about Kinsley’s well-being.

But in the end, none of it was enough to save her.