‘There’s no one like Dottie’: Stepdaughter offers details on Sunday stabbing of 75-year-old woman

QUINCY — As Dorothy “Dottie” Hankins laid in the driveway next to her truck after being stabbed 12 times on the morning of Sunday, April 21, she convinced herself to get up.

“She told me, ‘I said to myself, you can either lay here and die, or you can get up and go,’” said Bobette Hankins Homan, Dottie’s stepdaughter. “So she said, ‘I got up and I went.’”

The 75-year-old woman drove herself to Blessing Hospital and asked for help from an officer with the Quincy Police Department, who was at Blessing Hospital for an unrelated call. She said she had been stabbed multiple times.  

Dottie was treated at Blessing Hospital for serious injuries. Homan says she’s still hospitalized. 

Officers responded to the location of the stabbing at 908 N. Third, and detectives were called in to assist with the investigation.  QPD detectives joined deputies with the Adams County Sheriff’s Department on Monday to drive to Payson to locate and arrest Thomas Delcour, who now faces an attempted first-degree murder charge.

Homan’s father, Bob Hankins, was married to Dottie for 16 years before dying 10 years ago. Homan says she’s visited Dottie in the hospital every day since the attack. 

“She’s in a lot of pain, but she’s aware and she’s awake,” Homan said.

Homan said she had just picked up her roommate earlier Sunday from the Blessing Hospital ambulatory clinic when she received a frantic call from her aunt, Penny Hankins-Musolino.

“She said, ‘I just got a phone call from the hospital. They got my name out of Dottie. They said she’s been stabbed multiple times. Can you get there?’” Homan said. “I told her I was there already, and I ran over to the (emergency room).”

Homan said she saw Dottie within an hour of the attack. Many of her random wounds — in her side, her collarbone, her arm and her breast — already had been closed by stitches. A lacerated liver appears to be her most serious injury.

Homan said Dottie told her she was at an address on North Third that was one of the many rental properties she owns.

“She was at a tenant’s house to repair the roof,” Homan said.  “She said she had knelt next to her truck, cutting a piece of felt to put up on the roof because there was a leak in the roof. She said this young man walked up behind her and said, ‘Hello, how’s your day going?’ And she said, ‘Fine. How is yours?’

“She said she didn’t recognize him, and he wasn’t one of her tenants. She went to stand up, and she said as she turned to look at him and have a conversation, he just proceeded to stab her. Just out of the blue.”

Homan said she knows one video exists that shows Dottie walking around the front of her truck, holding her stomach and getting in her truck to leave. She also believes another neighborhood camera may have captured the entire attack.

“(Law enforcement officials) took Dottie some photos (in the hospital) to see if she could pick (Delcour) out, and she said, ‘I’ll never forget that face,’” Homan said.

Homan said she since has been contacted by a couple of people who said they had seen Delcour in the neighborhood. One was the friend of a homecare aide who had been in the area the day before to care for an elderly man. She claimed Delcour had approached her while she was in her car, knocking on the window and asking, “How is your day going today?”

Homan said her daughter got a message from a woman who lived in the neighborhood and called Delcour “a nightmare,” claiming he said “awful things” to her children.

“She said, ‘I can’t even let my kids outside,’” Homan said. “She said he puts his hands in his pants, takes his shirt off and says things to her kids. Her husband got into an altercation with him. They had called the police multiple times, but (the police) said there was nothing they could do because he hadn’t done anything.”

Learning that Dottie was about to climb on the roof of a home to do repair work didn’t surprise Homan.

“There’s no one like Dottie,” she said. “She is a go-getter. With her, nothing really surprises me. One of my dad’s favorite sayings was, ‘Dot, are you kidding me?’ 

“She has multiple apartments, and I’m not saying they’re all the nicest, but everybody’s got to have a place to live. She just always does work for people who don’t have much, and she does most of her work herself. If she can’t if there’s something she can’t do or can’t get to, then she will hire some random person off the street who maybe needs to make the money. 

“She’s just that kind of person.”