The Unsolved Disappearance of Diana Leone (Part 2)

Episode #54 Diana Leone Part 2

[Shaun] 

Diana Leone disappeared in February 2000, and the horrific details her young daughter shared with police about the last time she saw her mom left investigators and family members with little hope that Diana would be found alive. 

[John] 

We’ve talked before about how domestic abuse is a pattern, and the same was true of Diana’s boyfriend. 

As the lead detective looking into the case observed, people in the vicinity of David Morgan had a history of just disappearing. 

(Music - Pause for 8 seconds)

[Shaun] 

Hi and welcome to Sins and Survivors, a Las Vegas true crime podcast, where we focus on cases that deal with domestic violence, as well as missing persons and unsolved cases. I’m your host, Shaun, and with me as always, is the one and only John.

[John] 

I am the only John in the room.

[Shaun] 

Last week, we shared the heartbreaking story of Diana Leone, a 36 year old mother of 2 who was last seen in February of 2000. It wasn’t until 6 months later that she was reported missing. And, that report was NOT filed by her live in boyfriend and father of her two children, David Morgan. Her sister filed the report and asked to remain anonymous out of fear of David.

Diana’s 7-year-old daughter told police that David and her mom had a violent fight the last time she’d seen her mom. Her 14 year old said that his dad told him his mom had run off with a man named “Tim”, but according to police, this alleged boyfriend, Tim, did not have a romantic relationship with Diana and he was not responsible for her disappearance.

His business associate Donald Cowan also disappeared in 1982, under suspicious circumstances, and David’s sister, Deloris, told police she believed that David was responsible. 

Police investigated, but determined that they did not have enough evidence to charge David with any crime. 

However, Detective Mark Reddon did not give up on trying to find out what happened to Diana, and just a few years after she disappeared, he was able to corroborate claims that Diana and Donald were not the only people associated with David to go missing. 

And it was quite likely that David was responsible for their disappearances. 

[John] 

In some ways, when we started researching this and uncovering David Morgan’s history, we were surprised. Not surprised that a man like this was possibly responsible for multiple disappearances, but surprised that nothing was done about it for decades.

Last week we mentioned that David was married twice before. His second wife, Marie Bernhardt, was the mother of the two children that were living with David when Diana moved in.

We weren’t able to find much information on Marie. We know that she was born around 1949 or 1950, and as we said, she was the mother of two children with David – Alicia and Nevada Paul. According to reporting, she was a house mom, and a homemaker. 

Their son, Nevada died at age 19, in 1989 in a motorcycle accident. He was laid to rest in Las Vegas and his headstone reads: “In Memory of Our Beloved Nevada Who Remains Forever in the Hearts of his Dad, Brother and Sister.”

We were able to find Marie and Davis’s official marriage certificate in the Clark County archives dated November 25, 1979.

As we’ve said, domestic violence and controlling behaviors are a pattern with abusers, and they don’t just disappear overnight. This is apparent with David, as 20 years before Diana disappeared, Marie also vanished. 

[Shaun] 

She was last seen in 1980, and for nearly 45 years, there’s been no trace of her anywhere. She was 30 years old when she disappeared. We know that she had a sister, Kim Smith, that loved her very much, and we are sure that many other people did as well. 

Just like Diana, David did NOT report her missing, although they were recently married, had been together for at least 10 years, and had two children together.  

She was reported missing by Women’s Crisis Center, one of the first domestic and sexual violence organizations in Las Vegas. As it turns out, David also abused Marie, according to Metro police. Marie left him several times to seek shelter and assistance at the Women’s Crisis Center. 

She was reported missing on June 16, 1980, and the last known sighting of her was on May 10, 1980. 

David told people a story that we’ve heard many guilty partners tell their families and authorities — He said that she had run away with her boyfriend, a man named Gabriel Vincent. 

[John] 

Gabriel Vincent was born in 1924. According to reporting by the Las Vegas Weekly, Gabriel worked as an orderly at Sunrise Hospital, but he was characterized as a drifter. 

He was from California and had a history of moving around and also had an extensive criminal history. He had been arrested 14 times and had been incarcerated for robbery and car theft. 

Gabriel knew David and Marie because he rented a storage unit at Aabacus, the Morgan family trucking and storage business. 

According to Marie’s sister, Kim Smith, Gabriel and Marie were having an affair. But, Gabriel’s motives in the relationship are at best, questionable. It turns out that Gabriel took pornographic photos of him and Marie that left nothing to the imagination about their relationship. 

He also allegedly had recordings of Marie saying that she was going to leave David.

Gabriel showed these photos and played the recordings for David. According to Kim, Gabriel was trying to blackmail him. Kim said that at that point, David became enraged and he told her that all he could think about was killing Gabriel. We can’t know if Gabriel realized what danger he was putting Marie (and himself) in, but we want to point out that this is obviously not okay at all, and is in fact illegal.

She told detectives that David bragged about killing Gabriel. He described shooting him in the groin and torturing him before shooting him in the chest and claimed that an employee of his helped him bury the body out in the desert. 

Detectives considered this statement by Kim, but there was no evidence to back up her story. The employee who allegedly helped him could not be located and once again, police felt there was not enough information to charge David with any crime. 

Gabriel was last seen on November 1, 1979, almost exactly 45 years to the day of this recording. He was 55 years old when he disappeared, and he would be 100 years old if he were alive today. When he was last seen, he drove a 1970 Dodge van and never picked up his last paycheck. 

According to the Las Vegas Weekly, no one reported Gabriel missing when he failed to show up for work, due to his checkered past. They just assume he had moved on of his own accord

As we mentioned earlier, David and Marie were married on November 25,  1979 – less than a month after Gabriel vanished. She was last seen in June of 1980. 

Neither Marie nor Gabriel have ever contacted their families in the last 45 years. They also never renewed their driver's licenses, and there’s been no trace of them in all this time. 

[Shaun] 

If we ended the episode here, you all would be right to email us or message us and say that what we’ve presented here is just a lot of rumor and coincidence, and David being angry after being confronted with evidence that his soon-to-be wife was having an affair doesn’t mean that he did in fact kill either of them. 

You might say that they could have run off together, and David was just running his mouth with a lot of bravado as business associates said he would do. 

Or, you might mention how Gabriel had a significant criminal history and maybe he just drifted out of Vegas and on to another “mark,” or that Marie maybe finally escaped David’s abuse. 

We wouldn’t disagree with your thinking. This is all the information police had in 1980.

However, there was another crucial piece, a statement from 1985, that we haven’t mentioned yet. David’s sister, Deloris, came forward with information about Marie’s disappearance that only added to their suspicion of David. 

According to Deloris, she was always afraid of David. She told police that one day in 1980, he called her and told her to come to his house. He confessed that he had shot and killed Marie because she was going to leave him. 

He told her that he had taken her body out past Indian Springs and buried it along the highway. Indian Springs is a very small town about an hour outside of Las Vegas, to the northwest. 

Deloris said he forced her at gunpoint to drive out past mile marker 124 on the 95, where he showed her Marie’s body, wrapped in a blanket. He then forced her to help bury her further from the highway, in a deep hole. 

Deloris also claimed that a month later he forced her to return to the site and cover the grave with cement. He forced her to lug buckets of water while he carried the bags of cement.

Officers asked Deloris to take them to the burial site, but Deloris could not locate it. Officers searched a 2-mile radius and found no trace. According to the Review-Journal, additional volunteers searched the area as well, but no trace of a gravesite or Marie was found. 

Deloris passed away from natural causes in 1997. 

[John] 

Diana herself apparently also believed that David was responsible for Marie’s disappearance. She told her sister that she thought the first house she lived in with David was haunted because Marie had been buried underneath it. 

As of 2001, that house had been demolished, and only the concrete slab foundation remained. At that time, the police were reportedly planning to use ground-penetrating radar to investigate further, but apparently they never found anything. 

Diana had also told her sister she had turned down David’s marriage proposals because she didn’t want to suffer the same fate as Marie. 

The stories of Kim and Deloris were all the police had, which police felt was insufficient to arrest Morgan or to get search warrants for the house or storage units. Without a body or any other evidence, the police would not be able to convince a jury that a murder had happened. 

At the center of the investigation was Detective Mark Reddon, who continued to work for years to solve the disappearances of Diana, Marie, Gabriel, and Donald. 

In February of 2006, investigators finally got the break they needed. Thanks to improvements in computer technology, they were finally able to identify and track down the employee that Kim said had helped David kill Gabriel Vincent. 

It turned out that his name was Fred Hackett. In the late 70s, he and his wife, Avis, lived and worked at the storage facility. We mentioned last week that the storage business also had some homes on the site along with a junkyard and both families lived there.

Police officers interviewed the Hackets and Fred fully confessed to his involvement in Gabriel’s murder. He told police that he had given David a .38 revolver and that he was there when David shot him. He told police that David shot Gabriel in the groin, and shot him again in the chest as he was attempting to retreat into a storage unit and close the door, according to the arrest warrant. 

Avis told officers that she had heard gunshots from their home that night, and thought, “Oh my God, somebody got killed.” 

Fred also told police that he and Morgan both took Gabriel’s body out towards Indian Springs and buried him in the desert near the turnoff for Mount Charleston. While specific details were not mentioned in the reporting, based on statements from family members, police believed that Gabriel’s body may have been moved and that it was likely buried on the site of David’s moving and storage building, just west of the strip. 

They suspected that was where they would find Marie’s body and Diana’s as well. 

[Shaun] 

In December 2006, Las Vegas Metro Police finally obtained a search warrant for David’s business property. On December 31, they began digging up the property surrounding the moving and storage business in the Southwest part of the valley – in the area of Sunset Road and Polaris. 

This area is about ¾ of a mile west of the strip – on the other side of the I-15 highway from the airport. 

In 2007, the business David was operating at that site was called LT Eventions, and it was an event design, decoration, and production company. 

On January 1, David was driving back to Las Vegas from Los Angeles. He had been in LA dropping off one of his children. Instead of returning to Las Vegas, he drove to Kingman, Arizona and checked into a Budget Inn hotel.

Police suspected he was avoiding returning to Las Vegas since he knew what was happening at his property and that there was a warrant out for his arrest. 

Because of this, and because he had a wife and property in Brazil, officers considered him to be a flight risk. Las Vegas police worked with United States Marshals and Arizona Police Officers to apprehend David at the motel. 

When police confronted David in the doorway of his hotel room, they told him he was wanted for murder with a deadly weapon, and he replied, "I never owned a deadly weapon."

He was extradited back to Las Vegas and his bail was set at $100,000. His attorney argued that he wasn’t a flight risk; that he had driven to Kingman to avoid traffic. 

[John] 

Just a note on the traffic claim here. When you drive from LA to Las Vegas, you typically take I-15 and it takes about 3 ½ hours. If you get off the I-15 and go through Kingman on the I-40, its about a 7 hour trip, and its not something you’d do unless the I-15 was closed, like it was recently when there was a giant Lithium battery fire.

That isnt a detour you take to “avoid traffic”. It’s also unclear why he’d get a hotel room there, though it could be because of the insanely long drive.

The police dug up the property for more than 2 days and used ground-penetrating radar, but no human remains were ever found. Police then reportedly suspected that perhaps the remains were still out in the desert. 

We’ve mentioned a few times that David had a high net worth, and he evidently had a wife in Brazil. After his arrest, he posted bail, and was ordered to be held on house arrest while awaiting trial and was forced to turn over his passport. 

Interestingly, at the time he was reportedly living in a motor home, so in order to keep tabs on him, he was required by the court to have a landline installed at the motor home. 

David’s attorney, Thomas Pitaro, said the case was "laughable" and said that Fred Hackett was a disgruntled former employee who stole from David.

It's a dubious claim at best that a disgruntled employee from 27 years earlier, now in his 80s, would show up with that kind of allegation with that level of detail, which also completely matched what Kim had told officers years earlier. 

[Shaun] 

David’s attorney, Pitaro, appears to have been very strategic about how he handled the case. Specifically, he waived the preliminary hearing. A preliminary hearing is typically held to establish probable cause. The judge would hear the testimony and evidence and decide if it’s sufficient to move forward with a trial. It’s similar to a grand jury proceeding, but the judge decides, not a jury, but also the defense can then cross-examine the witnesses. 

It’s not uncommon for the preliminary hearing to be waived. But, as the trial was delayed for several years, the decision proved to be pivotal.

5 years after David’s arrest, in 2012, Fred Hacket died of natural causes. He was living in Florida at the time. 

Since at the time of David’s arrest, Fred was elderly and in poor health, the prosecution was hoping to preserve his testimony with a preliminary hearing, which as we said, didn’t happen. 

The Review Journal speculated that the 5 years of delays by the defense were a tactic to see if Fred might pass away before the trial began. Without Fred’s testimony, the prosecutors dropped the charges. David had no comment. As of December 17, 2012, he was a free man. He was 81 years old.  

The charges were dropped without prejudice, so if new evidence came to light, he could be charged again.

[John] 

However, David died on November 11, 2018 and was laid to rest in West Virginia. 

On his memorial page, several people have left messages accusing him of abuse and murder, and specifically naming Diana, Marie, Donald, and Gabriel as his victims. While he wasn’t ever convicted in a court of law, there are many people out there who believe he was guilty of murder. 

As of 2024, Diana Leone, Marie Bernahard Morgan, Donald Cowan, and Gabriel Vincent have never been located and there has never been a reported sighting or any trace of them since they vanished. 

We shared their stories on the podcast because as Mark Reddon believed, you never know when new information might come to light or someone may come forward with even the smallest lead. 

Reddon waited 30 years before he was able to find the Hacketts. We are hopeful that someone out there might have a lead to help finally locate one of these 4 missing people. 

[Shaun] 

Gabriel Vincent’s profile is listed on the Charley Project and in Namus. His case wasn’t added to Namus until 2013 – and the height and weight ranges are extreme and it’s difficult to know what his actual stature was. He was a white male with black hair and brown eyes, and we have one photo of him that we will share on social media. 

Marie Bernhardt Morgan was 30 years old when she disappeared in 1980. Today, she’d be 74 years old. A white woman, with brown hair, blue eyes, 5'-6”; 120 - 130 lbs; and a gap in her front teeth. 

[John] 

As a reminder, Donald Cowan disappeared in December of 1982. He was described as a white man, 5’8”, 135lbs with brown hair and hazel eyes. He was 40 years old when he disappeared; he would be 82 today. 

Diana Leone was 36 years old when she was last seen in 2000, she would be 60 years old today. She was 5’5” and weighed 120 pounds, she was a white woman, with blonde or red hair and hazel eyes. She had scarring on the fingertips of her left hand, a scar left cheek, and a scar on her left finger. 

She has not been seen for 25 years, not even resurfacing or communicating with family when her son died. 

Due to the circumstances of their disappearances and the fact that no contact has been made in the decades they have been missing, we are very sad to say that they are all very likely deceased, and these cases have been transferred from missing persons to the homicide division. 

[Shaun] 

If you have any information related to their disappearances, please contact Las Vegas Metro at (702) 828-3111.

As always thank you for listening, and remember what happens here, happens everywhere.