A media company approached longtime CBS News journalist Claire St. Amant about doing a true-crime podcast. The company pitched her on several cold cases, but none stuck out to her. Then she remembered a fat folder in her desk on the story of Dammion Heard. She responded that his was the case she wanted to explore.
Three years later, St. Amant and PodcastOne have debuted the first season of “Final Days on Earth.” Heard’s death is the subject of the entire season. The first of 12 episodes became available for download on Tuesday.
Heard was a freshman at Western State Colorado University, now Western Colorado University, when he was found dead near Cabin Creek east of Gunnison. He was a member of the wrestling team. A hiker spotted his body hanging from a tree not long after he had attended a party with his teammates. Law enforcement concluded his death was a suicide, but members of Heard’s family were never convinced that he had ended his own life.
St. Amant said her goal in the podcast is to provide closure for those who knew Heard.
“I believe victims’ families deserve closure, and I think we can give that in this case. But we have to give them answers to questions that were just skirted” in the investigation, she said. “It matters to his family, to his friends, and I think it should matter to the university.”
Western provided public records for St. Amant’s reporting, though the institution declined interview requests. She also drew on Gunnison Police Department records, a 200-page law enforcement report, 47 interviews with witnesses and reporting by the Gunnison Country Times.
St. Amant believes that she’s pieced together a clearer picture of Heard’s final moments, as well as the time immediately after his death.
“I used cell phones, bank records, surveillance video, other records from the university, as well as people’s recollections and put them in a timeline that says, ‘this is what his final days on earth looked like, when he was a missing person these are the things that happened,” she said.
The journalist looked into how Heard’s car and identification were used after his death.
At Cabin Creek, “he was there and he was dead,” St. Amant said. “Everything that happened after that, to me, was extremely interesting. Dead people don’t move cars, they don’t go to class, they don’t go to the cafeteria. So who was doing these things, or were all these people suffering from a mass delusion? That seems unlikely to me.”
St. Amant said she is “not definitely saying that it was a homicide.” But she thinks more investigating needs to be done. The podcast provides “clear directions and avenues” for where law enforcement should take the case if it is reopened.
“Final Days on Earth” is available for download on Apple Podcasts. A new episode will drop each week through July.
(Sam Liebl can be contacted at 970.641.1414 or editor@gunnisontimes.com)
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