VII.

The Fifth Estate has learned that Hillier-Penney was living in fear around the time of her disappearance. And that fear came from her estranged husband, Dean Penney.

“She feared for her life, I feared for her life,” Burden said.

This fear made her friends want to take steps to keep track of Hillier-Penney.

“Jennifer told me … that he said that he would make away with her. And they would never find her. Like she knew that. So yeah, it's why we had a safety plan. So she had that fear, whether it was real or not, but it was real to her.”

Burden and Elliott came up with a safety plan, where they had her check in with them before she went anywhere, they said, and they took turns checking in with her — if one didn’t hear from her, the other would check.

Hillier-Penney would text her friends when leaving work, and if she didn’t text them a half hour later when she should have arrived home, one of them would reach out to her to make sure she made it there OK.

Elliott says when she got the call the morning of Nov. 30, she had a bad feeling.

“I was trying not to be alarmed but inside I was trembling ‘cause my gut told me, I mean this is what we've been planning for months to avoid, safety plans, daily. And she's gone.”

Hillier-Penney’s friends say she’d been willing to stay with her daughter at her estranged husband’s house that week because he was out of town, though she still had lingering fears that Penney might stop by the house.



“The night she dropped me off at the hospital, we drove from Dad's up to the hospital and on the way up she was saying, ‘Vonnie I'm scared.’ I said what are you scared of? ‘I'm just afraid,’ she said, ‘Dean is gonna come back in the middle of the night.’ I said yeah but Jennifer, Dean wouldn't do nothing to you, you know? She said, ‘You don't know, Vonnie, you don’t know.’ ”

On the advice of his lawyer, Dean Penney has declined The Fifth Estate’s requests for a formal interview.

Dean Penney, shown here with his daughter Deana, says he has no knowledge of what happened to his wife and that he wouldn't do anything to hurt her. (Facebook)

Dean Penney, shown here with his daughter Deana, says he has no knowledge of what happened to his wife and that he wouldn't do anything to hurt her. (Facebook)

The Fifth Estate approached Penney at his home in St. Anthony in May 2018. Without knowledge that he was being recorded, Penney said that he wouldn’t do anything to Hillier-Penney and that he loved his wife and two daughters.



“The three of my girls [were] everything to me, and still are,” Penney told The Fifth Estate. “That’s all I really work for and function for is for the girls.”



Penney said he has no knowledge of what happened to Hillier-Penney and that he was out of town the week she disappeared.

“I wasn't in town … I was down at the cabin down in the Northwest Arm. I was down for a full week. Hunting, duck hunting, right. And it's just, just really strange.”

Since then, The Fifth Estate has learned that on that Wednesday night — Nov. 30, 2016 — Penney came back into town from his hunting trip.

“He came to the house that night to get something out of the garage, he said he had to come back for his [hunting] decoys,” Marina Penney said. “My sister told me that he called her when he was coming back into St. Anthony that night just to be like 'Hey, what's up, I'm going to be stopping into the garage and grabbing my decoys' and stuff like that. When she heard him out there she just went out in the [door of] the garage and said 'Bye, goodnight.’”

The Fifth Estate decided to approach Penney again to clarify some facts in the story.

The estranged husband of Jennifer Hillier-Penney talks to The Fifth Estate nearly two years after she disappeared.

In that second conversation outside of his home in August, he told The Fifth Estate he was home that night.

“I came back here but my daughter was here in that house at that time,” Penney said.

“But you did come back here to get your decoys?” The Fifth Estate’s Mark Kelley asked.

“Yes, I told the police that.”

Penney says that as far as he knows, Hillier-Decker was the last one to see her that night.

To Hillier-Penney’s family, the fact that he returned to the house late at night to get decoys after he’d already been hunting at his cabin for days doesn’t make sense.

“He was out there … and didn't have decoys to go duck hunting?” Glen Hillier said. “You'd think he'd have them the whole time he were hunting, wouldn't you? You would think. You'd think he'd take them even is he didn't need them. That's suspicious, too, right? There's a lot of things that don't add up.”