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Sub-headline: Twenty years after slaying of the married mother of 2, no suspects have been identified

Author: Jeff DAlessio

The one-floor house off Bardstown Road near Boston, Ky., is gone, leveled over time and replaced by a new structure.

What has not gone away after two decades is one of Hardin County’s murder mysteries: Who killed Elena Sanchez Hawkins, a 29-year-old married mother of two boys, on January morning 20 years ago today?

“It’s a pretty baffling case,” said retired Kentucky State Police Detective Rob Foster, lead investigator in the 1992 case.

No arrests have been made.

With a 3-year-old child at home with her on the morning of Jan. 8, 1992, Hawkins was sexually assaulted, had her hands tied behind her back and her throat slashed in the living room of the home. She died as a result of excessive blood loss.

There was no forced entry into the house and no obvious signs of a struggle, said Foster, who retired from KSP in 1994.

All signs pointed to this: “Someone either could have walked in the house or it was someone that she knew,” Foster said. “We had no reason to believe somebody broke in.”

For Detective Jason Propes, who is investigating the case for KSP, the mystery surrounding the slaying is troubling for many reasons. He said someone who committed such a vicious and hideous act should be brought to justice.

“It was horrendous the way she was murdered,” he said. “There possibly is someone walking among us somewhere who did this.”

JAN. 8, 1992

For January, even in unpredictable Kentucky, it was a warm day. Temperatures on the mostly overcast day were in the low 50s.

It was a Wednesday morning when someone killed Hawkins. It’s a date Foster won’t forget: It’s the birthday of one of his sons.

In police work, you never know what the next call may bring.

“The call came in and a group of us headed out to the home,” Foster said.

When police arrived late that morning, Michael Hawkins, Elena’s husband of nearly 10 years, was there. He had returned home after the youngest of their two sons answered the phone when he called that morning and said, “Momma’s bleeding,” Foster recalled.

“Mike just had a blank look on his face when we got there,” Foster said.

Foster said Michael Hawkins had arrived for work at a convenience store on Dixie Avenue in Elizabethtown and called to make sure the couple’s oldest son was awake and on the bus to Lincoln Trail Elementary School.

When he got no answer, he called again. Finally, their 3-year-old answered.

Elena Hawkins had made sure her son was on the school bus around 7:30 a.m. Between then and about 9:50 a.m., someone entered their home and committed the crime.

Police stayed at the house for “hours,” Foster said. “We did what we would do at any scene like that.”

He said police talked to neighbors, rooted through the garbage to see if anything had been dumped in a bag after the attack and worked the crime scene.

Foster said Michael Hawkins was one of the first to be questioned about his whereabouts at the time of the assault.

“In a case like this, it is natural to look to the husband,” Foster said. “We truly did eliminate him fairly soon in the investigation. I believe then and now that he had nothing to do with what happened.”

Propes came to the same conclusion.

Elena Hawkins worked as an attendant at a gas station on West Dixie Avenue. Foster said through interviews police found she kept to herself.

“She was kind of a loner,” he said. “She didn’t have any close friends; she stuck with her family.”

THE INVESTIGATION

Within days of the killing, police set up a road block near a stretch of road by the Hawkins’ home to see if anyone who regularly drove the road in the morning may have seen anything suspicious Jan. 8.

Few leads developed. One woman said she had seen a black Datsun truck at the house and that set off a massive search for vehicles matching her description.

It turned up nothing.

Days turned to weeks and weeks to months in the investigation with no answer in sight and frustration mounting.

“You want to see it come to a conclusion and to catch the person who did this, so it does bother you,” Foster said. “We never were able to develop a significant suspect. Everything we looked into became constant dead ends.”

The child in the home, Foster said, talked about “the man.” Police never were able to get any type of description of the person the child saw.

As years passed, leads occasionally came into the post. Propes took over the case in 2004 and has had a part in the investigation since then. He said there hasn’t been any sort of lead in the case for more than a year.

Propes said there is only a small amount of evidence that remains. Evidence that existed was tested and consumed long before current advances in DNA testing. He now remains fearful of testing remaining evidence and possibly losing any potential link to the person who committed the killing.

“There is new testing on the horizon to test without consuming (evidence),” he said. “It may be better to wait for the testing methods to advance. You try and balance everything. If all the evidence becomes consumed and two years later new testing is available, then you have nothing to test. If you wait, the case may remain cold.”

Propes said he has made contact with Commonwealth’s Attorney Chris Shaw to look into submitting the remaining evidence for testing.

“You just want to see justice for all crimes, but one like this, there is nobody to talk for the victim,” he said. “You’re the only people to bring someone to justice.”

THE AFTERMATH

Michael Hawkins left Hardin County and went to work at Toyota in Georgetown. Active in youth and high school football in Scott County, he remarried.

Foster said Hawkins remained actively concerned, calling him about once a year about the case. Foster said almost all the calls were about a similar crime he may have heard about in Kentucky or a surrounding state that matched what happened to his wife years earlier.

A sexual attack and near killing of a Breckinridge County woman in August 2008 was strikingly similar. Former Elizabethtown resident Ernest D. Pine was sentenced to 20 years in the brutal attack that Propes called the worst he has seen in his years as a detective.

Pine accepted a plea deal less than a year after the attack that will keep him jailed for at least 17 years on charges of first-degree rape and sodomy, attempted murder, second-degree assault, burglary and criminal mischief.

Propes said there are similarities in the cases: There was a child in the home when the attack happened, there was a sexual assault and the method of attack was with a knife.

Propes, who worked that case, calls Pine “someone of interest.”

“I can’t outright name him as a suspect,” he said.

Propes said Pine has not been interviewed about the case at this point.

Propes said working a cold case is challenging as each year passes. He said time to devote to a cold case is limited as more pressing cases overshadow crimes that haven’t been solved over time.

He said he reviews case files from when the case was “hot.”

“I try and see if there is anything today that we could do that wasn’t done when it happened,” he said.

Michael Hawkins died April 25, 2004. He was 42.

Contacted family members of Michael Hawkins did not return messages seeking comment. The family of Elena Hawkins, who was from Texas, could not be located.

Elena Sanchez Hawkins is buried at Elizabethtown Memorial Gardens. On both sides of the light brown headstone, artificial flowers sat this week, sun beaming down on an inscription reading that she was a beloved wife and mother.

Asked if the person who killed Hawkins ever would be found, Propes said, “I hope so … I really hope so.”

Jeff D’Alessio can be reached at (270) 505-1757 or jdalessio@thenewsenterprise.com.

