‘Mystery makes it worse’: Omaha Police need public’s help to solve 17-year cold case
By Bill Schammert
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OMAHA, Neb. (KETV) — The pain of the unknown never goes away.
Christopher Dickson’s family has known that pain for 17 years.
“I look at my kids’ faces every day, so I can’t help but think about him,” said Deborah Taylor, Dickson’s widow.
Dickson was shot and killed in a robbery at Dailey’s Liquor in July 2009. He managed to get in his car, but crashed about a block away.
“Everybody has theories,” Taylor said. “You hear stories.”
Omaha Police homicide detective Derek Mois has theories, as well. Mois was a detective assigned to Dickson’s murder in 2009.
A few years ago, he joined the Omaha Police Department’s cold case unit.
“So when I came on the cold case squad, it was one of the first cases I picked up,” Mois said.
Mois keeps many of the case details close to the vest, but believes Dickson could’ve been targeted on that summer evening 17 years ago.
“There’s information that he had a large sum of money on his person that night,” Mois said.
Police have identified several persons of interest from that evening, but no arrests have been made.
“We know there were a number of people outside the liquor store during the confrontation that night,” Mois said.
Dickson was a father of seven, including Deborah Taylor’s daughter Chrisha Dickson. Chrisha was six the night her father died.
She was at a sleepover.
“I heard [a woman] on the phone when I woke up, like, ‘Oh my gosh, no’—so I knew something happened, but I didn’t know what,” she said.
Now she’s stuck with a core memory that no child should ever have. And the search for justice doesn’t stop.
“Whether the person is living or not, whatever the case may be, because it’s the mystery that makes it worse,” she said.
But for a cold case that’s starting to heat up, detectives still need evidence that can be proven in court.
“Suffice to say, we have developed enough information to know confidently there are people out there we have yet to talk to,” Mois said.
Mois knows it takes courage to come forward.
“And what we hope is that they’ll contact us and give us a chance to make the circumstances right for them,” he said. “For them to feel safe and comfortable in communicating with us what they saw.”
It’s a breakthrough that could come from a single conversation.
“I don’t think it’s fair to him or his family,” Taylor said. “We just want closure.”
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