In September 2012, Cicely Bolden was stabbed to death in her Dallas-area apartment. Her body was left, partially clothed, beside her bed. Her two young children, ages 7 and 8 at the time, came home from school to find their mother's body lying on a blood-soaked bedroom carpet, naked from the waist down, a horrifying scene of violence against a woman that's all two common in America.
Police quickly zeroed in on Bolden's lover Larry Dunn. Dunn was a married man, having a fling with Bolden. Within 24 hours, Dunn was arrested and charged with Bolden's murder. Dallas police released statements that Dunn had murdered the mother of two because he thought she had given him HIV.
"In my mind, I'm already dead," Dunn told a detective after initially denying any involvement in Bolden's murder, and after hours of sitting quietly in a police interrogation room. "She killed me, so I killed her."
Until today, Dunn's interviews and confession have not been seen or heard outside a courtroom. HIV Plus requested the video interview and confession from Dallas Police over a year ago, following Dunn's conviction and sentencing to 40 years in prison.
This is the first of five videos of Dunn's interviews and confession from September 2012. The video has been edited to remove hours of silence and Dunn sitting in the interrogation room. HIV Plus has also edited out video of Dunn having his DNA, fingerprints, and photograph taken as they added nothing to Dunn's initial story or his subsequent admissions.
The knife that ended Bolden's life
We offer this series, not as another salacious traffic grabber, but to remind everyone on the First-Ever National Day of Action to End Violence Against Women with HIV that violence against women in America and abroad is all too common. And this case offers us a chance to address that, surely, but also to deconstruct. Was HIV phobia at the root of Larry Dunn's horrific act of violence — compounded by the stigma, the misinformation around it — or was it a larger culture of violence and misogyny that rationalizes brutality against women with HIV?
Here is the first of this six-part series: three videos of Dunn's interogation, a video of his confession, and a short one of him praying while waiting for police to return. To understand it all, however, you need to read our analysis here, in which we asked HIV experts from Naina Khanna, executive director of the Positive Women's Network and Kyle Murphy of The National Minority AIDS Council to talk about the case and what it means for us.
You can watch the other videos by clicking the links here:
Dunn Initial Interview Part 2
Dunn Initial Interview Part 3
Dunn's Interrogation Room Prayer
Dunn's Confession
What This All Means: An interview with people living with HIV and those that advocate for us.
