She has plenty of theories about what really happened to Trenton Duckett when he disappeared five years ago from today from his Leesburg home.
Liz Lennon of Ocala contends the police’s lone suspect in the child’s disappearance, Trenton’s mother Melinda Duckett, was not only made a scapegoat in the case, but was killed and didn’t commit suicide.
Police say Lennon has no evidence to back up her theories about what happened to Trenton. They add her website (http://duckettbucket.blogspot.com/) and blogging is only causing a bigger rift between the families of Trenton’s parents.
“She is doing nothing to help solve the child’s disappearance,” said Brian Cash, the Leesburg police detective in the case.
Lennon disagrees.
“The public needs to see the truth,” Lennon says on her website. “Melinda was set up. Now it’s time to look in a different direction to find Trenton. A special thank you to the readers of this blog. Maybe together we can solve this mystery.”
Josh Duckett, Trenton’s father and Melinda’s former husband, has even tried in a futile attempt to get law enforcement’s help in shutting down Lennon’s website. But Lennon remains adamant that’s she onto something.
“Everything points to the fact that she (Melinda) was a loving mother who would have never killed her child,” said Lennon in a telephone interview with the Daily Commercial.
According to Leesburg police, Melinda told detectives she has just laid her son to sleep in bedroom of their Leesburg home on Aug. 27, 2006, before entertaining some friends outside the room. When she looked into the bedroom a short time later, the child was gone and there was a rip in the bedroom window screen.
Police added that Melinda killed herself with a shotgun in her grandparent’s home in The Villages two weeks later, a day after news host Nancy Grace grilled the 21-year-old Melinda on national TV about her son’s disappearance.
Lennon said she has been researching the case for five years and has received 93,000 hits on her website, entitled “Was It Really Worth It,” which lists her theories through 150 articles. It also has Florida Department of Law Enforcement documents, a 60-page Leesburg police interview with Melinda, personal letters and pictures, and more than 60 copies of police reports on the case.
She claims Melinda couldn’t have shot herself because detectives found the magazine in the shotgun to be upside down.
Cash maintained on Friday that Melinda was the lone suspect. He said police investigations point to that she either killed Trenton or handed him off to someone.
Lennon has other theories, which she says law enforcement stubbornly refuse to consider.
Police have received hundreds of tips in the case. A few more tips came in after the Lifetime television network show “Vanished with Beth Holloway” aired a segment about Trenton in June.
“It’s still an open investigation,” Cash said.
Lennon said she has interviewed several people for the case, including James Duckett, the grandfather of Trenton.
She has not talked with the two men she believes may have had a hand in Trenton’s disappearance. But, she plans on getting her private investigator license to give her more skills in solving the case.
Josh Duckett said he plans on holding an annual candlelight vigil for Trenton tonight at 8 p.m. in front of the downtown Leesburg City Hall on Main Street.
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