Robert Dunn’s own family won’t weep if he is put to death

For years, she tried to tell authorities about the bodies in the Las Vegas storage unit, but she said no one believed her.

Maybe Joy Bligh wasn’t convincing because frequent psychological abuse and death threats had evoked her bi­polar disorder. Maybe the facts were too horrifically unthinkable.

“Eventually, I gave up on everything,” she said. “You try to move on. Now I can’t move on because I have to remember everything.”

And when the federal agents knocked on her door in late April, she knew they wanted to talk about Robert Dixon Dunn.

“I just knew,” she said. “Finally, someone had actually listened.”

Dunn has been indicted on two counts of murder, two counts of robbery and 11 counts of theft.

Prosecutors say Dunn killed an elderly couple, stuffed their bodies in garbage bins and kept them in a 5-foot by 10-foot unit at All Storage at The Lakes for a decade while he collected their Social Security benefits.

He is accused of killing Eleanor and Joaquin Sierra in 2003 and writing more than 100 checks — spending upward of $200,000 — in the couple’s name long after they were dead. Forged checks from their account were even used to pay for the unit where their bodies were stored.

Dunn first met the Sierras at an assisted living facility in Anaheim, Calif., where his mother also stayed, in the late 1990s. He convinced them to move to Reno and later Las Vegas.

Living under the alias Robert William Bligh, he even told his wife about the Sierras’ bodies, saying they were his “rich aunt and uncle” who had killed themselves by taking prescription medications, according to a police report.

He took her to the storage unit, but she could not see the trash bins buried behind stacks of boxes and books and furniture. To mask the stench, Dunn had poured cat litter into the wax-sealed trash bins, which were wrapped in duct tape, court transcripts say. His wife’s sinus trouble meant she couldn’t smell anything unusual.

She said she didn’t really believe that the bodies were there.

“I didn’t think that someone would be that horrible of a person to do that to people,” she said.

As she moves on with her life, she wants to rid herself of the name “Bligh,” which only serves to remind her of the trauma he put her through and the things he is said to have done. She’s since taken steps to reclaim her maiden name, Joy Marie Ike.

“I feel like an idiot for falling in love with him and for not realizing,” she said. “But I also feel like there’s a purpose. That it was meant to be, and I was meant to stop it somehow.”

A CHARLATAN

Ike and others once close to Dunn describe him as a charlatan, a phony, a fraud and a gypsy.

Throughout the 1990s, Robert Dunn ran scams with his mother, Beverly Dunn, but when she didn’t get money fast enough, he beat her up and broke her arm, according to his brother, Tom Dunn, a California lawyer. In one incident, their mother required medical attention, and Robert Dunn spent five years in an Oregon prison for the attack.

Immediately after he was released, he moved back with his mother.

Tom Dunn met the Sierras at a Tony Roma’s restaurant near Disneyland in the late 1990s. They even snapped a photo, with a heavyset Robert Dunn leaning over a seated Eleanor and Joaquin Sierra next to Beverly Dunn, Tom Dunn and his wife, Marcy.

Their mother said she and Robert Dunn were taking care of the Sierras.

“I remember thinking they were nice folks,” Tom Dunn said.

Now he wonders how they were killed.

“This could have been something that my mom even had a hand in,” he said. “I hate to think that. But I do wonder whether she was involved in it. Something was going on.”

Their mother died at Sunrise Hospital and Medical Center in 2005 from diabetic complications after injuring her leg and developing gangrene.

Even Robert Dunn’s marriage to Ike in May 2008 was essentially a scam. The couple had met online only two months earlier. He was 20 years her senior. They filled out a Clark County marriage application and got hitched at Chapel in the Clouds at the Stratosphere.

Not only was the name phony, but he also lied about his birth date and the names of his parents. The Social Security number he used was that of a boy who died at age 11.

Dunn and his wife moved around the country, living in California, New York and Pennsylvania, while the Sierras were left in storage.

A federal investigation into fraud against the couple ultimately led authorities to the 52-year-old Dunn, who is facing capital punishment on two counts of murder, two counts of robbery and 11 counts of theft.

“If he does get the death penalty, I would like to be there to see it — so I could know that everything is done,” Ike said

His brother is a former district attorney who now works as a criminal defense lawyer handling capital cases. He selects clients he thinks are innocent or over-charged.

“If Robert came to me with his case, I’d tell him ‘good luck to you,’ ” Tom Dunn said. “I don’t think I’d take his case, because I don’t believe in him.”

Though Robert Dunn weighed well over 300 pounds at the time he met the Sierras, his brother thinks he had the ability to bury them in the desert.

Authorities suspect that the storage unit was about control. If he didn’t dig a deep enough hole, someone might find the bodies.

As long as Robert Dunn knew that only he could find the trash bins, as long as he could pay the rent, he could continue to cash the checks. That is, until Ike led authorities to the west valley facility.

The couple separated on bad terms. She hated him, and her family hated him.

“He knows he’s told Joy about the bodies,” Tom Dunn said. “Why would he not move them?”

Between 1995 and 2011, the brothers mostly kept out of each other’s lives, said Tom Dunn, who is the elder by eight years. Robert Dunn and his mother were “kind of a tag-team fraud team.” They ran scams in Nevada, Arizona, California, Oregon and Washington.

At some point, he created a profile under the alias Robert Bligh on Linkedin, where he listed his specialties as credit, collections, financing and legal. The profile states that he started working as a law clerk for his brother in January 2006 and attended Biola University from 1981 to 1986.

“I have over twenty years experience in various areas of collection and customer service,” he wrote. “I am also experienced in skip tracing and the legal end of collections. I am well versed in computers and work well with people.”

At his first Clark County court appearance, Robert told a judge that he had attended “some college,” but Tom Dunn thinks that, too, was a lie. His brother earned a GED in an Oregon prison.

UNRAVELING

In April 2011, while living in New York, Dunn swallowed a handful of his wife’s Adderall, a combination of central nervous system stimulants used to treat narcolepsy and attention deficit hyper­activity disorder, police said.

After days without sleep, Dunn wrote a long letter offering to be a neighbor’s sex slave, and taped it to her door, Ike said.

He was arrested on harassment charges and told his wife to use a signed check from the Sierras to pay his bail.

As soon as he got out, she said, he canceled the check and left town.

“I wouldn’t go with him,” Ike said. “I was tired of him. I had the chance to get away from him, and I took it.”

She has not seen him since, but from 2,500 miles away, she read news reports about the charges in Las Vegas and saw pictures of him in court. He appeared to have lost more than 100 pounds, she said.

She focused on his face.

“He looks evil,” she said. “He used to look nice. He used to have pretty eyes.”

After separating from Ike, Robert Dunn arrived at his brother’s doorstep in tears.

The family took him in for a bit, and he lived rent-free while Tom Dunn offered him work in debt collections.

In 2012, Robert Dunn convinced his brother’s former client, Lynda Jones, that Tom was abusing him and kicking him out of the house. He told her he could help anyone in need.

“He is so smooth,” his brother said. “He can be so persuasive and so convincing.”

Jones introduced Robert Dunn to an elderly woman named Mary Pendergast, and her ailing husband, Mark Joseph Taylor.

Within months, Taylor was dead.

In August 2013, during the last days of his life, Taylor cashed out thousands of dollars in gold, wrote checks and signed over a vehicle to Dunn, prosecutors said. The circumstances surrounding Taylor’s death were never investigated.

Eventually, Dunn tried to move in with a friend of a friend, who kicked him out after one day.

That’s when Tom Dunn found his name forged on a bunch of loan guarantees. Robert Dunn had rented a new house with fake letters of recommendation, promising his brother’s law office as collateral.

Then Tom Dunn discovered things had been stolen from his home. The first was his son’s guitar. Robert Dunn had pawned it for $400. He also had taken a $3,000 clarinet from his other nephew, a Marine, and pawned it for $300.

A coin collection Tom Dunn started when he was 8. Prescription medication. Gone. A client who owed him $4,000 said he had paid his brother cash six months earlier.

“I don’t even have time to find out the breadth of what he’s done to me,” Tom Dunn said.

He pressed charges for residential burglary, commercial burglary and grand theft. Robert Dunn eventually pleaded guilty but skipped bail.

He was arrested in Las Vegas and extradited to California.

“We brought him in because we were convinced he was trying to turn his life around,” Tom Dunn said. “And in return, he turned around and did everything he could to hurt my reputation and stomp on us. People have to be protected from him. He’s a sociopath.”

While Robert Dunn sat in the Orange County jail, federal agents investigated fraud against the Sierras. It wouldn’t be long until authorities found their bodies.

Dunn is slated for trial in October 2016. A jury could decide on execution.

“It’s appropriate,” Tom Dunn said. “You have no idea how strange and awful it feels to say that. He’s nothing but a danger. Everything he touches seems to get hurt. I’m 100 percent behind those who are trying to do their job to protect people from him. It’s devastatingly heart­breaking. I can’t even explain how awful I feel. But facts are facts.”

When Robert Dunn was first arrested, he tried reaching out to his brother and apologizing. They haven’t spoken since.

“I always try to follow the biblical teaching that you forgive people 70 times 7,” Tom Dunn said. “But I got to 70 times 8 with him. I decided that the best thing for me to do is to stay out of his life, and not have any contact with him until the next life, or until I get subpoenaed.”

Contact David Ferrara at dferrara@reviewjournal.com or 702-380-1039. Find him on Twitter: @randpoker.