The ballad of bar owner Dennis Hess started as a love song and ended with his suicide
As the owner of Denim & Diamonds, the popular country-and-western bar at 1725 Swift Avenue in North Kansas City, Dennis Hess was known for his hospitality. When he made the rounds and greeted his customers each night, he could make a patron feel like the most important person in the room.
But when Sgt. Chad Phillips of the Platte County Sheriff’s Office walked into the bedroom of Hess’ Platte City home, 64-year-old Hess was silent.
Hess was sitting upright on the bed, his mouth open and his head tipped back against the headboard. Thin streams of blood trickled down his chin and over his shirtless chest, soaking into the waistband of his jeans. In his lap was a small-caliber handgun. On the ground lay a black-scorched set of false teeth, blown out of Hess’ mouth by the force of the gunshot.
Phillips touched the dead man’s right shoulder. It was still a little warm.
When the emergency responders pulled up in the driveway of 19015 Humphrey Access Road moments earlier on June 15, 2009, Hess’ 36-year-old wife, Lena Hess, was outside with her young daughter. “He blew his brains out,” she told them.
He’d been talking about taking his own life for a couple of days, she said. “I didn’t think he would do it. I should have known.”
Outside, Lena asked Phillips whether the bullet had come out the back of her husband’s head. She asked him again later, and a third time after that. Each time, Phillips told her that he wouldn’t know until the medical examiners arrived to remove the body.
News of Hess’ death made big waves in the small, tightknit community of bars lining Swift Avenue in North Kansas City. Denim & Diamonds was very successful. The owner and his much-younger wife had been having problems. North Kansas City gossips had no trouble connecting the dots.
Platte County Sheriff’s Office investigators would soon find plenty of reading material on the Hesses’ tortured relationship. Between the couple’s 2005 wedding and this summer, the pair filed a dizzying number of legal actions against each other, including police reports, restraining orders and three petitions for divorce. There was more than enough on the public record to suggest that the marriage had been headed for a violent end. On Hess’ request for a restraining order that he sought against Lena on February 8, 2008, for example: “She is buying a gun and has told me it [sic] for me to taste.”
When Lena hears that the Hess family has planned a memorial for Dennis on June 25 — at Bar 12 on Swift Avenue — she schedules a separate event at the bar that once belonged to her husband. Regulars call the place “Denims.” She makes sure that her memorial happens on the same night, at the same time.
At the Denims memorial, Lena sits alone at a cocktail table at the edge of the dance floor, a vast expanse of polished wood hemmed in by railings that give it the appearance of a livestock pen. She’s slim, with high cheekbones. Her earrings, hammered-silver hoops, poke out from beneath her straight dark-brown hair. She has left a few of the topmost, mother-of-pearl snaps on her plaid shirt undone to reveal a hint of cleavage. She wears clear braces on her teeth.
Lena says she was married to Hess for “six amazing years.” No one from Hess’ large, Catholic family has joined her at this memorial. It’s after 9 p.m., and the place is nearly empty.
Lena handled the funeral arrangements. Two of Hess’ older daughters say Lena called from the funeral home 30 minutes before the body was cremated to tell them that, if they hurried, they could see their father one last time.
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In contrast to the lonely scene at Denims, the memorial at Bar 12 is mobbed. In the no-frills dive, Hess’ favorite band, Outlaw Jim and the Whiskey Benders, plays “Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys” as people hug, laugh, and drink to the late Dennis Hess.
A poster-sized portrait of Hess displays the way he’ll be remembered: smiling, raising a glass of Crown Royal in a toast. Several people wear custom T-shirts printed with Hess’ picture on the front and his favorite greeting on the back: “Got a minute?”
Lena’s name is a dirty word here; some people avoid speaking it altogether. Now that she runs Denim & Diamonds, some former regulars vow never to set foot in there again.
A bald, leather-clad biker sums it up: “It stopped being Denim & Diamonds when he left.”
Kris Lane, Hess’ handsome 22-year-old grandson, greets newcomers with his grandfather’s charm. Three twentysomething blond women smother him with hugs. One lingers and breathes into his ear, “Mmm, you smell good.”
A man who calls himself Cowboy Bob walks up to grip Lane’s hand. “I wish there was something I could do,” Cowboy Bob says, glancing up the street in the direction of Denims, “but there’s nothing — short of illegal.”
Lane gives him a warning glance. Across the street, a spotlight bearing the logo of the North Kansas City Police Department bathes the bar’s façade in near daylight. Bar 12 and Denim & Diamonds are less than two blocks from each other along Swift, and the police expect trouble.
Though he’s all manners tonight, Lane had let his emotions get the better of him at his grandfather’s funeral a few days earlier. In front of several hundred mourners, Lane marched up to the enlarged portrait of Hess and Lena on display and ripped it down. The White Chapel Funeral Home erupted in cheers.
“You know how loud it gets at Arrowhead when the Chiefs score a touchdown?” Lane says. “That’s how loud it was.”
Hess intended for his grandson to take over the bar business whenever he retired, Lane says. Whenever it fails on Lena’s watch, as Lane predicts it will, he hopes to buy it back. To him, it will be like reclaiming a birthright.
Hess never set out to be a bar owner. David Cox, who managed Denim & Diamonds in the mid-’90s, remembers when Hess was a patron who played in the bar’s pool league. Even then, Cox says, Hess was a networker; he knew every bartender, cocktail waitress and regular customer by name.
Four partners originally opened the business in the early ’90s as an under-21 dance club called Crackers. But when the New Jack Swing era faded, and artists such as Garth Brooks and George Strait climbed the charts, the partners told the kids to hit the road and changed their format to country. Denim & Diamonds was born.
When business slowed again, the partners hired Hess’ construction and remodeling company, Service World, to give the place a face-lift. Instead of cash, they paid Hess in shares of Denim & Diamonds Inc. The business suited him; by 1997, Hess had bought out the other partners and was listed as president of Denim & Diamonds Inc.
Former employees describe the place as a Cheers for the country set. Customers came in two shifts: an early wave of competitive country-and-western dancers, followed by a hard-partying younger crowd that came late and stayed until close.
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Hess loved his bar, but sometimes he encouraged rumors that it was for sale, says former manager Craig Wolfe, who worked for Hess from September 2001 until 2005 and again starting in 2008.
“He always wanted to make sure people wanted what he had. That’s how I looked at it,” Wolfe says.
Men could want what Hess had, but women were another story. He’d been married three times and had several adult children: Melissa Lane (Kris’ mother), Audra Wyatt, Brian Harris and Michelle Cerruti. After his third divorce, in 1989, he stayed relatively unattached. He told people that he wanted to retire with a woman who had built her own life and didn’t want him for his money.
Hess met Lena Hayes at the wedding of a Denims bouncer. She had a daughter from a prior relationship but had never been married. She was tall, slender and half his age.
Cox and his wife, Tiffany, whom Cox met at Denims, were also at the bouncer’s wedding. They remember hearing Lena talk about her wealthy background. She said her family owned a helicopter and she had grown up wearing mink coats to school. She said she ran a storage-unit business and managed rental properties.
Cox still remembers the excitement in Hess’ voice when he and Lena started dating. “He’d come to me and say, ‘I finally met a good one, I finally met one that’s financially stable, that’s got everything herself.’ “
“I could tell he was just really elated with this woman,” says Deann Leddick, a confidante of Hess’ for 15 years. “He was like I’ve never seen him in my life.”
Hess and Lena wed on December 10, 2005. Hess got down on one knee and “married” Lena’s 3-year-old daughter as well. The reception was at Denim & Diamonds. ena and her little girl moved into Hess’ home in Platte City. Six months later, Lena filed for divorce.
The paperwork she filed on July 26, 2006, included the first of many orders of protection against her husband. On the form provided by the Platte County Courthouse, Lena checked a box indicating that Hess had “caused or attempted to cause me physical harm.” In childlike print, she detailed, “The respondent has made threats he would like to hire a hit man just to take me out so I was out of his life. He has made it very clear on several occasions he doesn’t care what happens to me.”
The cause of the discord was financial. Hess had found out that Lena wasn’t as well-off as she had claimed — a familiar-sounding revelation to Carter Hulet, father of Lena’s child.
Hulet tells The Pitch that he was with Lena for four years. He says her stories about her family’s wealth didn’t add up. For instance, he claims Lena said that her father had set up a large trust fund, which she could access only after she was married. When that story didn’t result in a proposal, Lena got pregnant. Hulet broke off the relationship but retains partial custody of their daughter and pays Lena child support.
Cox says a visibly upset Hess confided in him one night about his early marital problems. “They’d had an argument,” Cox recalls. “He said he found out that it was all bullshit. He’d already been bailing her out [of debt].” Cox says he asked Hess about Lena’s storage unit business, and Hess answered, “She’s losing it.”
Hess slept in the bed that he kept upstairs above the bar to comply with Lena’s restraining order, but she didn’t go through with the divorce.
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The couple’s pattern was set: break up, file paperwork, make up, repeat.
If Lena wasn’t the businesswoman she had pretended to be, Hess decided to help her become one. In 2007, Lena registered the Starting Point Learning Center as an LLC with the state of Missouri, and the couple signed a leasing agreement for office space at 2303 Higgins Road in Platte City. Lena was going to start a day-care business.
Lena hired a director to run Starting Point, but it was never very successful. One visitor recalls stopping by in mid-2007 and seeing only two children enrolled.
That summer, Hess was having difficulty swallowing. Lena told friends she reached her fingers down Hess’ throat and felt a knot. He was diagnosed with throat cancer. Hess smoked two packs of filterless Camels a day, but family and friends recall Hess saying that his doctors blamed the cancer on his beloved Crown.
The radiation and other cancer treatments shut down Hess’ saliva glands, and a feeding tube had to be inserted in his stomach. His diet was limited to canned liquid nutrients injected through a large plastic syringe.
Lena told Hess’ friends that he had three months to live.
He was still undergoing treatment when, on August 27, 2007, his oldest daughter, Melissa Lane, died unexpectedly from an accidental overdose of alcohol and sleeping pills.
At the funeral, Hess looked gaunt and sickly. Wolfe says, “You could just tell he was tired … and to add that on top of it made matters that much worse.”
On October 5, 2007, Hess deeded the building at 1725 Swift Avenue — but not Denim & Diamonds Inc. — to Lena in the event of his death.
But by the beginning of 2008, the cancer was in remission. His throat was still dry and raw, so the feeding tube remained in place.
When he was strong enough, he assessed his financial situation and realized that it didn’t look good. Hess liked to pay for things in cash. Insurance covered his medical bills. Lena, however, was running up credit card debt in their names.
Hess filed for divorce on February 1, 2008, telling people that he couldn’t afford his wife. His petition stated, “Respondent has behaved and exhibited such intolerable conduct that Petitioner can no longer be expected to reside with her.” Accompanying documentation described Lena’s violent behavior: “She has threatened me several times now [and] she is buying a gun from her brother in law. She throws things at me.”
She didn’t take it well. Hess called his manager the night of February 8, 2008, and reported, “Lena robbed the bar.”
Wolfe says he watched the security tapes. He describes the footage as clearly showing Lena and another man emptying the registers.
According to a North Kansas City police report, a man named Joe contacted Hess after the theft, scared that he was in trouble. He told Hess that he had no idea Lena was taking money from the place — she had told him that Denim & Diamonds was hers. Joe also said he had known Lena for 12 years and she had “done this to several other individuals.”
Hess liked to lend money — the walls of his office at Denims were covered with IOUs — and he doled out second chances like candy. Still, his employees and family assumed that this breach of trust would be impossible to forgive.
It wasn’t. On February 12, Hess told the North Kansas City police that he didn’t want to press charges.
Lena’s antics didn’t seem to faze Hess, Leddick says. He’d only shake his head and say, “Unbelievable. Just unbelievable.”
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Hess had a saying about his fondness for making sudden changes: “Watch out when you walk through the front door because you might walk into a wall.” But the decision he made in June 2008 was extreme, even for him.
That March, the Hesses had dropped their petitions for divorce and started seeing a Christian marriage counselor. In those sessions, Lena expressed her insecurity in the relationship, complaining that Hess had all the control because he held all their assets.
“She kept saying Hess didn’t love her, and he needed to prove that he loved her,” Leddick says. “So he proved he loved her by putting everything in her name so that she would have everything he had.”
In June 2008, Hess signed his stock of Denim & Diamonds Inc. over to Lena. The pair visited an estate-planning attorney and had trusts set up in their names. Lena was named the beneficiary of Hess’ trust, which contained $1. Lena’s trust contained Denim & Diamonds Inc., the building on Swift and the property in Platte City. Lena named her daughter as the beneficiary of her trust.
Wolfe was disappointed to hear of Hess’ sudden plans to retire and hand Denim & Diamonds over to Lena. Wolfe had always respected Hess’ business sense. Now, customers were calling Lena a gold digger behind Hess’ back.
“Five months later [after the theft], she’s going to own the place?” Wolfe says. “You’re giving her this, lock, stock and barrel? I’m like, ‘Are you nuts?’ “
Wolfe had trouble accepting Lena as his new boss. For one thing, Hess was still at the bar most nights. He let Lena run Denim & Diamonds the way an adult lets a child drive a car, letting her sit in his lap and pretend to steer.
“The way I always looked at it was that Hess was the puppet master pulling the strings,” says Wolfe, who found himself answering to both of the feuding spouses. “She and I had that conversation. I said, ‘Until you take over and make him stay away, you’re not really running this bar.’ “
What she did handle, she handled poorly. She hid notices for uncollected bills from Hess, Leddick says. Business was faltering. And the couple was being sued.
Alliance Land Holdings, the company leasing the property for Lena’s now-defunct day care, sent the Hesses a notice of default dated March 17, 2008, for $15,954 in unpaid rent, utilities and attorney’s fees. When the notice went unanswered, Alliance filed suit on July 3, 2008, to collect the remainder that they were owed according to the five-year lease: $494,201.
Hess knew that if he went back to running the bar, he could work his old magic and set things right. He asked Lena to transfer some of his assets back to him so they’d have equal shares, an equal partnership.
“He said he told her, ‘Honey, if you decide to pick up and leave me today, I would have absolutely nothing,’ ” Leddick says. “And two weeks later, that’s exactly what she did.”
On February 26 of this year, Denim & Diamonds hosted a concert by country musician Lee Ann Womack. It was going to be a huge night for the bar.
Hess and Lena were bickering from the moment they walked in, Wolfe says.
While Hess greeted customers, Lena fumed, complaining about the attention he paid to other women. “We were in the back room by the ice chest that night, and she’s talking to me about how she’s so frustrated,” Leddick recalls. “She picks up this bucket, this ice bucket, and she slams it against the wall. She was already aggressively mad.”
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Alcohol fueled the tension, Wolfe says. “All night long, there’d been name-calling, him flipping her off from across the bar.”
After the show, the crowd thinned, and the Coxes and Leddick left. Wolfe doesn’t know what made Hess explode, but he was suddenly angrier than anyone had ever seen him. He hurled his drink in Lena’s face, then shattered the glass in the sink.
“She was screaming bloody murder,” Wolfe says. “He threw it right in her eyeballs.”
Hess followed Lena toward the office. “That’s when he attacked her, and I had to pull him off of her,” Wolfe says.
Lena told Wolfe to call the police.
“I would compare it to calling the cops on my dad,” Wolfe says. “He’s standing there, saying that I’m a traitor and that I turned on him.”
The very public fight was just what Lena needed to gain control.
After his arrest, Hess was barred from his home and the bar. With a police escort, he was allowed in his home just long enough to pick up a change of clothes and a few cans of food for his feeding tube. He spent a cold night in his rental car. His food froze. Leddick had to beg a few more cans from Lena to give to him.
“I was being pulled between the two of ’em,” Leddick says. “Tiffany would call me and say, ‘She [Lena] called me 21 times today.’ It was like we had a kid together, and it was Dennis.”
Hess liked having other people in his debt but couldn’t stand feeling indebted to anyone else. He booked a room at a La Quinta motel with his credit card. Barred from Denims, he hung out instead at Bar 12, where he joked that since his marriage, he had spent more nights in hotels than in his own bed.
Lena hired a private investigator to follow Hess. He filed another protection order against her, writing, “She wants me dead so she can have everything I own and not my kids.” The Hesses’ legal wrangling continued into the late spring. Eventually, a court date for the divorce was scheduled for October 7, 2009.
According to Platte County records, a man contacted Platte County investigators to tell them about a brief affair he’d had with Lena. He said Lena’s attorney, Robert Arnold, who also had represented the man in a divorce years prior, called him to say that he had a “younger, attractive female friend that was going through a divorce, owned a bar [and] had some money.” Arnold gave the man Lena’s number, he says, telling him to take her out and “maybe make the husband jealous.”
The man spoke with The Pitch on the condition that he wouldn’t be named. He says Lena told him that she was the owner of Denim & Diamonds and that she’d opened it when she was 22. He told police that he visited Lena at the house in Platte City a few times a week to eat dinner and have sex. The last time he visited, he says, he helped her clean the pool.
“I don’t ever remember telling him to ‘make the husband jealous,’ ” Arnold says. “I’m not a dating service. I gave them each other’s numbers, and whatever they did beyond that was up to them.” He adds, however, that Lena did want to be “seen with someone.”
The man also accompanied Lena to a May 28 hearing, where a judge set the temporary terms of the Hesses’ separation. Lena was instructed to catch up on the house payments, to resume paying Hess’ health insurance through Denim & Diamonds, to pay Hess $900 a month starting June 1, and to give him his Cadillac. Hess was ordered to stay clear of the bar.
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Wolfe was called as a witness at the May 28 hearing. Afterward, he left town for a weeklong vacation. While he was away, co-workers left him messages that said Lena and Hess were back together. When Wolfe returned home, he drove past the house in Platte City. Sure enough, Hess’ white Cadillac was parked in the driveway.
The staff of the Corner Café in Riverside knew something was wrong when the couple came in for breakfast on Monday, June 15. Normally, Hess would kid around, requesting a table in the smoking section. But that day, the hostess later told investigators, he seemed withdrawn, and Lena had a weird look on her face.
After breakfast, they drove back to Platte City and picked up Lena’s daughter from school.
In the early afternoon, Lena called Cerruti, Hess’ daughter who lives in Las Vegas, to report that Hess was being mean. Meanwhile, Hess poured himself a glass of Crown.
According to what Lena told investigators, Hess took his cocktail to the upstairs bedroom, where he emptied two bottles of prescription pills on the bed. He tried to take a handful at once, but Lena, now off the phone, grabbed him around the throat to keep him from swallowing. Hess took the whiskey and left in his Cadillac.
He came home two hours later and, according to Lena, walked straight to the bedroom. Moments later, Lena saw his tan shirt fall from the upstairs deck to the ground outside the living room windows. She went upstairs and found Hess on the bed with a gun in his hand. He asked her to lie down next to him.
“Every time you sleep in this bed, you’re going to think of me,” he said. She reached to grab the gun, but he jerked it away. She got up and ran from the room.
Moments later, there was a pop.
Lena told Wolfe that after Hess killed himself, she invited a priest to the house. The priest told Lena to leave all the doors and windows open to rid the house of Hess’ spirit.
Wolfe has since quit working for Lena.
Hess’ immediate family declined to be interviewed at length. A probate hearing to sort out Hess’ property and heirs is scheduled for November 6 in Platte County. Lena is challenging the paternity of Hess’ children. Her attorney, Arnold, says Cerruti and Wyatt will have to submit to DNA testing to prove that they are Hess’ daughters. “He lived a storied life,” Arnold says of Hess.
A judge has granted Lena an order of protection from Kris Lane. She tried unsuccessfully to file protection orders against Cerruti and Wyatt.
Denim & Diamonds remains open for business. Promotional pictures taken since Hess’ death show Lena and her female staff dancing on the bar and drenching one another with pitchers of water.
“I’ve got 30 more years in me to run this place,” Lena said the night of Hess’ memorial. “Unless I die in a car crash or something, I can guarantee at least 30 more.”
