Anybody who knows Denise Hess agrees she’s a fighter.
The mother of three in Bayfield is known for being a relentless advocate in the search for her friend’s son, Dylan Redwine. Even after part of his skeletal remains were found, she has worked to keep the case, now a murder investigation, in the public spotlight.
She attributes part of that take-charge attitude to her service in the U.S. Marine Corps from 1985 to 1988, when she was a small-arms weapons instructor at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina.
She also has turned that fighting spirit toward her own case – taking charge of her Stage IV colo-rectal cancer diagnosed in June 2013.
On Veterans Day, she will pause to thank her dad and uncle, both U.S. Navy Veterans, and remember her grandfather, James Fuller, also a Marine veteran in the Pacific in World War II.
Almost two years ago, on Nov. 19, 2012, Hess’ life turned upside down.
A longtime friend of hers, Elaine Hatfield, called her in tears from Colorado Springs and said her son Dylan had gone missing from Vallecito. He had flown in to Durango the day before to visit his father, Mark Redwine.
“I never even thought about it,” she said of her immediate action to help her friend look for her son. “There was no time to think about anything.”
Hess and a group of parents in Bayfield – some of them friends of Hatfield’s, but many complete strangers – began searching door-to-door in Vallecito and Forest Lakes, passing out fliers and asking people if they had seen the then-13-year-old boy. Thanksgiving dinner was eaten at a friend’s house after a day of searching on the mountain.
“I was terrified and heartbroken,” she said.
She helped organized a rally with media coverage, news conferences, kept passing out fliers and rallied volunteers to make blue ribbons with Dylan’s name on them.
A Facebook page she started, Find Missing Dylan Redwine, grew quickly, and now has 29,785 likes. This autumn, she has been helping Hatfield’s fiancé, Michael Hall, get the word out to area hunters about Dylan’s missing hat, cellphone and backpack, which were never found. Some of his bones were found in June 2013 on Middle Mountain, near his father’s house. DNA testing determined they were Dylan’s. The rest of his remains have not been found.
Then six months later, another life-changing event took place. Hess suffered from a lot of abdominal pain and went to see an alternative-healing doctor, who told her not to worry about it. But the pain worsened, and knowing something wasn’t right, she found another doctor who ordered a colonoscopy. The results were not good. She had cancerous tumors in her colon and rectum. One of her grandfathers had died from the same thing.
She cried and was angry, then she moved into action, again. And this time, she realized she couldn’t do it alone. Friends held fundraisers, opened bank accounts, cleaned her house before she started chemotherapy and started yet another Facebook page, Katt’s Warriors, in honor of her nickname. She said it was hard to accept the financial assistance at first. She has been working multiple jobs since she was a kid. But the cancer has left her too weak to work full-time. Friends have established benefit funds at Pine River Valley Bank, First National Bank of Durango and GoFundMe.
She went through two rounds of chemotherapy and one round of radiation. Cancer that had moved to her lungs seemed to be shrinking.
She recently received disheartening news when she learned some of the cancer is back on her lungs.
But once again, she is trying to remain positive and keep fighting. The spots detected in the scan are small.
“I’m feeling OK,” she said. “I’m tired and worn out and really disappointed in the latest news. But I will keep fighting because that’s what Marines do.”
