The Kid Who Knew Too Much

Her lock of blond hair half hides her face and it's probably better that way. Dylan Redwine has no desire for his mother to notice that he has been crying… On November 18, 2012, the 13-year-old boy is about to board a plane to join his father in Durango (United States). The teenager tried for weeks to convince his mother not to send him there. But when his parents separated, after six years of marriage, the court ruled: Dylan must spend half of the school holidays with his father. And it's non-negotiable.

Elaine Hall hugs her son for a long time and repeats to him that everything will be fine, that he will soon be back home. After a final hug, she watches him go through the security gates and disappear into the crowd of travellers. She doesn't know it yet, but this is the last image she will have of her living son...

A few hours later, Elaine receives a call from Mark Redwine, her ex-husband.

“Dylan ran away, I think he ran away,” he tells her point-blank and in a completely detached tone. He's probably gone fishing... or hiking in the mountains. You know him…

Dylan is not the runaway type

Precisely, Elaine knows her son better than anyone. He's not the runaway type. Something bad must have happened. The young mother hurriedly hung up and got into her car without waiting. Six hours later, it is 2:30 a.m. when Elaine Hall arrives at the Durango sheriff's office. The next morning at dawn, the search to find Dylan begins...

Mark Redwine is obviously the first person interviewed. He says that the day before, as soon as they returned from the airport, he and his son argued because he refused that Dylan go to sleep with a friend. The teenager locked himself in his room without dinner. It was only around 10 p.m. that his father realized that he had left through the window, located on the ground floor of the house. A study of the missing man's phone confirms he was still at home at 9.37pm when he texted one of his friends, Ryan, to confirm their meeting the following morning. Appointment to which he never showed up. When the investigators ask Ryan if his friend had told him about a plan to run away, the teenager answers in the negative but specifies:

"What I know is that he didn't want to stay with his father...

Because, between Mark Redwine and his son, relations are far from being in good shape. Asked about the subject, Elaine Hall specifies that it is especially since the summer of 2011, on the return from a father-son road trip in California, that their relations have deteriorated. After that and without giving a reason, Dylan no longer wanted to talk to his father, let alone go stay with him. So inevitably, the hypothesis of a runaway seems credible. Except that running away does not mean evaporating...

The search notice across the country did not turn up anything

The days pass. Weeks, then months. No news from Dylan, no trace of him. The wanted poster broadcast across the country came to nothing. No more than the many hunts conducted around Durango. In the spring of 2013, with the melting snow, Sheriff Patterson and his men invest the surrounding mountains to widen the field of research. On June 25, in a small steep ravine located 500 meters from the Middle Mountain Road, a path well known to local hikers, a series of objects was discovered. We discover a sock, a piece of torn boxer shorts, headphones, a trainer… but above all a tibia, a collarbone and a fibula! The bones are in poor condition and show traces of animal bites, but the DNA is definite, they are indeed Dylan's remains.

For his mother and the rest of the family, a black curtain has just closed on hope. Was Dylan attacked by a bear or a puma during his runaway as the bite marks might suggest? Elaine doesn't believe it for a second. She, from the start, suspected her ex-husband. Because not only is he the last to have seen Dylan alive, but he displays a quiet nonchalance and invests little, if any, in research. Elaine is convinced that he is responsible, in one way or another, for the death of their son. Alas, she has no proof. Mark Redwine is a bad father? Maybe, but that doesn't make him a killer and his resume has no history of violence, domestic or otherwise. And then what would be the motive behind this infanticide?

The file is too thin for a murder investigation to be opened. But the discovery of the victim's skull on November ¹ , 2015 will relaunch the investigation. This time, it is hikers who fall on it, three kilometers from the bones found previously. And there is no longer any question of an accident or an attack by a wild beast: the skull has two depressions characteristic of trauma linked to the impact of a stubborn object. In other words, Dylan Redwine had his skull shattered. It was indeed executed...

Redwine is as bad a father as he is a householder.

Luck finally begins to lean on the side of the investigators. Now in charge of a homicide investigation and armed with a search warrant, the sheriff's men tumble at Mark Redwine's the next morning. Luckily, their suspect is as bad a father as he is a householder. Three years after the events, the blue light of the luminol reveals numerous traces of blood – poorly cleaned – in several places and in particular under a carpet, on the leather sofa, above the washing machine and in the kitchen! With the results of the DNA analysis, there is no longer any doubt: it is indeed Dylan's blood. He never ran away. He was slaughtered here.

A trial nine years after the start of the case

Repeatedly postponed due to administrative complications and then due to the Covid, Mark Redwine's trial only opened last June in the La Plata court, nine years after the start of the case. The accused, now 60 years old, never admitted the facts. On the stand, his speech has not changed. He still maintains that Dylan must have had a "bad encounter" during his runaway.

"Why would I kill my kid?" he blurts out, shrugging his shoulders. I had no valid motive.

Very sure of himself, the man observes, impassive, the various experts, witnesses and police succeed one another at the bar. But it is the testimony of a young man of 21 who will make him instantly lose his beautiful confidence. Seeing him walk into the room, Mark Redwine understands that he is screwed. Cory, his eldest son and Dylan's half-brother, knows his secret. For almost ten years, out of shame or perhaps fear, he had never found the courage to reveal it. What he is about to tell will rock the trial. And plunge the entire audience into absolute horror.

— Dad, Dylan and I went on a road trip in the summer of 2011. One night during the trip, Dylan took our dad's computer while he was sleeping. And while opening files by chance, he came across photos. How to say…

The young man is uncomfortable, he searches for his words.

- We locked ourselves in the bathroom and watched ... It was really disgusting. We took pictures with our cell phones. Dylan wanted to spread them to the rest of our family. He was blackmailing dad. I think it was because of those photos that he killed him.

Photos that would have pushed a father to massacre his son? But what exactly are we talking about? It will take a few hours of negotiations and the agreement of the president so that Cory Redwine can present the pictures in question to the court. And when the first image appears on the screen of the room, a same movement of recoil seizes all the assistance. Some people get up and go out, overcome with nausea. Others hide their eyes with their hands… Mark Redwine himself took this series of selfies. He is seen dressed in women's underwear, his chubby torso squeezed into a bra. His mouth and his face are smudged with a dark material... And, on the next shot, everything is explained. Redwine holds an adult diaper stained with feces in her mouth. The third photo shows him, all smiles, feasting on this filthy "food". And the rest is the same.

While the clichés, each more horrible than the other, continue to scroll on the screen, all eyes turn to the accused, head down in his cubicle. So it's to hide this abominable vice that this big disgusting thing took the life of a 13-year-old kid? Because he knew too much? Mark Redwine refused to answer questions, preferring to remain silent until the verdict was announced. On October 8, the pervert was sentenced to forty-eight years in prison for the murder of his son. And no one will move a finger to get him out of his shit. After all, he loves it so much...

An investigation by Axelle Winieux