Laura Bruce was speaking from a hospital room in Shreveport. She said an 18-wheeler hauling a wide-load collided with the driver side of the vehicle she was in and that after having tests, she learned she had sustained damage before the accident. “They did an MRI, and all that stuff of my head and my brain and said it looks like I've been having mini-strokes from what I've been going through for the last few months.”
Throughout the past 15 weeks, Laura has been providing all the information she can to the Hope Police Department and keeping up a steady stream of postings on her Facebook page to keep Destinee’s case in the public eye. But the grief and the stress are obviously taking their toll. She described those weeks as “Pure Hell,” saying “All we do is cry.”
Destinee’s father, Danny Robinson has also said the uncertainty has taken a physical and mental toll and said that almost four months after Destinee’s disappearance he continues to look for her. “Sometimes I'd be just driving, and I'll just stop and just get out and just start hollering her name and just looking. Man, I don't know where to start or stop.”
Laura described the day she last saw Destinee. “She left our house Saturday on the 30th with this black gentleman. I didn't hear from her for two days, and she usually tells me where she's going and when she's coming back, or she'll be back the next day. They just left, so I hoped everything would be okay--she left with him before--and then when she didn't show back up by Sunday, Sunday evening or Monday morning, my son, her dad, told me ‘you need to file a report on her.’”
Since then, Laura said the only information she has heard so far has been unreliable, and there’s even been an attempt to use Destinee Bruce being missing to con her family members. “We hear so much different stuff. People are always saying hearsay. Somebody tried to call us from somewhere, saying they need $1,000 to get her out of jail. And that was people from across the world.” Laura explained that police had traced this call and found it had come from a foreign country. Her granddaughter was not found to have been arrested or to have been placed in any jail.
As for the question of whether Destinee was carrying a phone when she left, the answer for Laura Bruce and Danny Robinson is that she gave Danny an old phone of hers and apparently did have a new iPhone with her. The two believe Destinee’s new phone ended up being found in a burn pile.
“She gave her phone to her dad because he didn't have one, probably a couple months before she disappeared, and then she had had an iPhone that she had gave a friend of hers. Then, after all this is going on, we find out that this guy has burned the iPhone and another phone in his yard,” Laura said, adding that this person has left his residence and has not been found yet.
“He's really running from the police, and he's doing a really good job of it.”
Her father said he didn’t know whether Destinee had a cell phone when she left her grandmother’s house the evening of August 30th but, like Laura, he referred to cell phones being found in a burn pile in the yard of a house where Destinee had been. He keeps the phone Destinee gave him in his pocket now. It doesn’t have cellular service but can be used with Wi-Fi and still has photos from when Destinee owned it.
Laura describes Destinee as very smart. She frequently helped her grandmother with research: “She didn't have a high school diploma or anything like that, but anything you wanted to know in the past, anything that I didn't know anything about, she did all my stuff for me. She looked up everything on the websites, my medicines, anything I didn't know. She always went to the phone for me. I know nothing about anything about that stuff now. She did it all for me. She just looked everything up. I’ve never been that way.”
She was raised at first in Hope, attending Clinton Primary School. When the family moved to Texarkana for a while, she went to school in the Liberty Eylau School District. At 17, Laura said, Destinee moved away from Texarkana to Irving, Texas. Living there for three years, she and a boyfriend had a son, but she lost custody of him. Laura said the boyfriend, who still lives in Dallas, has been questioned and is apparently not considered a suspect.
By this time Laura was living in Bentonville. She said she drove to Irving to pick Destinee up but would make many return trips there: “We'd go to Irving every week for almost a year, because [we were]] trying to the baby back. We couldn't … We've been back to Hope four years now as of the end of September.”
Asked about Destinee’s work history, Laura said Destinee had a lot of trouble getting and keeping jobs. “She’s not a people person,” Laura said. The job she held most recently was for a wooden pallet-mill company in Gurdon while she was attending rehab there, but the job only lasted a few months.
Laura describes Destinee as a fan of television reality shows and said she especially enjoyed watching Duck Dynasty with her father. On Destinee’s Facebook page, her last post, from this past February 16th, is a selfie in which her and her grandmother’s faces are side by side. They both have the same closed-mouthed, eyes-sparkling smiles. Both Laura and Danny describe Destinee as a doting aunt with her sister’s children.
Other photos can be seen of Destinee on Laura’s Facebook page. We publish some here with Laura’s permission. In some of them, she is usually wearing her strikingly thick, wavy light brown hair down and projecting an upbeat attitude toward the photographer.
Detective Eric Green, from the Criminal Investigative Division of Hope Police Department, confirmed that Laura Bruce reported her granddaughter missing a few days after she was last seen. It was mid-afternoon of Tuesday, September 2nd. Green said investigators did talk to the man Destinee left with.
“The person that she left with, the person that we last know saw her, I've talked to him. He's provided me information about their day being together, and that was all verified. But it hasn't led us to anything to locate Destinee,” Green said.
The investigation started with Green talking to the family and has included gathering of electronic data as well as field work. “We've conducted numerous, numerous interviews, searched different properties. I've done probably a dozen search warrants to Facebook accounts and phone accounts, and we've had no luck finding her,” Green said.
The search has gotten help from several other agencies, including Sheriff’s Offices in Hempstead, Miller and Nevada Counties as well as Prescott and Texarkana police. Green has interacted with the Arkansas State Police and with federal agencies, too: “[I’ve talked to] US Marshals. I've talked to the FBI about it. I wouldn't say that the FBI is actively involved, but if I reach out needing some help or have questions, they always help.”
Green said the pace of the investigation is slower than he would like but that he still learns something new every day. In getting to know Destinee through talking with family members, Green said she was very close to her grandmother and was a bit of a homebody but did have friends she would visit. Before she vanished, Green said she was working on an art project, a collage to give to her father.
When asked about the similarities between Destinee Bruce’s case and that of Madeline Tomlin, another slim, light-brown haired young woman in her 20s who disappeared from Hope ten years ago with no clues about her whereabouts emerging since, Green began to list the points of comparison.
“A lot of the circumstances are kind of the same, because they essentially just vanished without a trace. Both of the girls lived a high-risk lifestyle that that may have played a role in this happening to them. I don't know that, but it sure didn't help. The initial investigator that worked Madeline's case isn't here any longer, but [Hope Police] Chief Kim Tomlin was very involved in that, and she and I have discussed in detail the similarities.” So far, Green said, none of the persons who have turned up in the Bruce investigation have been the same as those who turned up in the investigation of Tomlin’s case.
The early report that Bruce was seen walking down Highway 67 between Hope and Prescott or even going as far as Gurdon has not yielded any further information, Green said, and is now regarded as dubious and possibly based on a mistaken identity by the person reporting the sighting. “People are calling in weekly about this girl in the same spot in Gurdon, and they finally made contact with the young lady, and it wasn't Destinee, but apparently they must have favored a whole lot,” Green said.
The calls Hope PD receives offering tips in the case were coming at a high volume when the case was first publicized and Green reports that at one point about a month and a half back he was doing four or five interviews a day. “That's trickling down, but people are still talking about it,” Green said. “I've told the family, if we can just keep people talking about it, then eventually we're going to get that piece. That's why I appreciate you doing what you're doing, because that also keeps people talking about it. When everybody quits talking about and forgets about it, that's when it goes real cold.”
Green said Destinee’s family members, her mother, father and sister have all taken part in the search effort themselves. Laura Bruce, meanwhile, he has high praise for: “They are very good. Her grandmother has pushed and questioned and provided information more than anybody in any case I've ever heard.”
Green offers advice to those who may be frightened by hearing of the disappearance of another young woman in Hope to be aware of their surroundings. But he is also keen to continue receiving tips about the case:
“However small or minor detail they think they may have, it may be what we need to break this open, so I encourage them to call me or send the Police Department a Facebook message, anything.”
If you have any information about where Destinee Bruce might be, please contact Green at 870-722-2563. Bruce is 5’ 7” and weighs about 110 lbs. She has blonde hair and blue eyes. Her family misses her.
