He denies to investigators, for example, ever knowing that Dennehy had reported a threat. In another meeting, Bliss tells Rouse that Thomas would back up their stories about Dennehy dealing drugs. At one point, Bliss assures other players that Dennehy won’t be able to deny their statements because “he’s dead.”After investigators requested his bank statements, making clear that he’d been caught violating NCAA regulations by paying Dennehy, Bliss resigned from Baylor. Three psychiatrists, including one appointed by the court, said that Dotson appeared to be suffering from hallucinations and psychosis, but that he could regain competency to stand trial in the future.
Patrick James Dennehy (January 28, 1982 – June 12, 2003) was an American All Rights Reserved.Sorry, we’re unable to find an account with that username and password. “I mean, I said bad things about their kid.” In another part, when Bliss seems close to taking some responsibility, he casts it as still not quite his fault: “I had allowed the world of competitive athletics to take me to a place that was so dark.”Still, Bliss seemed to quickly move past that darkness. When Dennehy’s girlfriend confesses that Bliss was paying for Dennehy’s tuition, rent, and car, Bliss denies these claims as well.But after Abar Rouse, an assistant coach for Baylor at the time, began secretly recording meetings with players and coaches, the extent of Bliss’s involvement is made clear to investigators. At Baylor, concerns quickly shifted from that summer’s basketball scandal to issues with Robert B. Sloan, Jr, then president of the university. He simply wanted to reexamine one of the darkest moments in the history of Texas athletics.“There’s a reason why nobody’s done anything on this and it’s because nobody talked,” Kondelis told a SXSW audience after the premiere of The documentary begins in June 2003 with the disappearance of Patrick Dennehy, a junior on the Baylor basketball team, not long after Dennehy reported to his coaches that he and teammate Carlton Dotson were receiving threats from another player, Harvey Thomas. What a 2003 basketball scandal can tell us about sports culture at Baylor.Photograph by Damon Winter, Pool/Dallas Morning News/Getty ImagesBut Austin director Pat Kondelis hadn’t counted on any of this when he started working on the documentary two years ago. There was a feeling among audience members that much like Dennehy’s death, it won’t take long to forget.“Thank you for telling this story,” one audience member said to Kondelis. “Carlton wasn’t the cancer,” Irvin said. Almost from the beginning, after the search for Dennehy began to uproot deeper issues in Baylor’s basketball program, it’s Bliss who orchestrates a cover up. “I didn’t do anything,” Bliss said. After Baylor basketball’s Patrick Dennehy was killed, Coach Dave Bliss claimed he was a drug dealer. The official Men's Basketball page for the Baylor University Bears
Baylor University also held a campus-wide memorial for Dennehy on August 28, 2003, in the Paul W. Powell Chapel.
In the summer of 2003, reports surfaced that Dennehy and Dotson were concerned about their safety. A Baylor teammate of Dennehy’s, Carlton Dotson, confessed to the murder and was sentenced to prison. If you are an existing subscriber and haven't set up an account, please Enter your email below to send a password reset email. Do you … anticipate [Baylor] attempting the same type of cover up in this rape scandal?”Baylor’s sexual assault scandal was not mentioned in the documentary, because Kondelis believed the issue was too complicated to tack on to the end of the 2003 scandal.