For over 18 years, the disappearance of a little girl has mystified a small, northern Minnesota community. With few leads, and even fewer witnesses, it’s as though LeeAnna Warner simply vanished into thin air.
LeeAnna Warner was born on January 21st, 1998 to parents Kaelin Whittaker, and Christopher Warner. They nicknamed her Beaner. She reminded them of a little bean pod when she was born, earning her the moniker. All of her friends and family called her Beaner.
Kaelin and Christopher had met in 1996, and quickly moved in together. Both had been previously divorced, but felt drawn to one another due to their shared experiences.
In early 2003, the family moved to the northern Minnesota community of Chisholm. Chisholm was a quiet, intimate community, known for it’s iron ore minds which surrounded the town. The neighbourhood where five-year-old LeeAnna lived with her parents also bordered a lake where the locals often liked to spend their time off. Longyear Lake was known as a local swimming hole, where LeeAnna was known to spend time with her parents.
She was described as a vivacious, bubbly, outgoing, friendly, and brave young girl. She was also fiercely independent, and had highly developed survival instincts. She enjoyed riding her bike, playing with her dolls, and making the short walk from her house to her friends’ house, by herself, to play with her friends.
On June 14th, 2003, Kaelin, Christopher, and LeeAnna returned home after a day exploring the Side Lake Rummage Sale, and swimming at Longyear Late. LeeAnna napped in the car, and when they returned home, she’d apparently caught her second wind, asking her mother if she could go see her friends down the street. Kaelin was wary, but let LeeAnna go, making her promise to be back within half an hour.
(The timeline tends to get a bit muddled, so I’ll refrain from going into those details until relevant.)
Kaelin watched LeeAnna take off down the street, and then turn a corner. Next, LeeAnna was seen by witnesses knocking on the door of her friends’ house, but she didn’t enter the house. She seemingly turned around, and headed back home.
As Kaelin noticed that LeeAnna hadn’t returned home, she began feeling anxious, but didn’t let panic overtake her. Instead, she sent her older daughter, Karlee, who was ten at the time, to fetch LeeAnna from her friends’ home. Karlee returned, stating that no one was home, and LeeAnna wasn’t there.
Kaelin and Karlee then set off again together, back to the friends’ house, and they found LeeAnna’s shoes sitting on the stoop, which was highly unusual. Kaelin, with Karlee in tow, then set out canvasing the neighbourhood looking for LeeAnna. They knocked on doors, and asked friends and neighbours if they’d seen LeeAnna. They hadn’t.
Christopher had been called away on a volunteer ambulance run in nearby Hibbing, Minnesota, and had no idea that his daughter was even missing. When he returned home after the run, he joined the search, while comforting a more-and-more panicked Kaelin.
After the community search had failed, Kaelin called the police and reporter her five-year-old daughter LeeAnna Warner missing.
Chisholm Police arrived shortly thereafter. Though they hadn’t found any evidence of foul play in the neighbourhood, they launched an intense search of the area. They also alerted the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Investigation, who sent out a statewide alert about the young child being missing.
LeeAnna’s disappearance did not fit the criteria for an Amber Alert. As such, none was issued.
Police were initially a little flummoxed at the beginning of the investigation. The timeline simply wasn’t adding up, and kept changing. At first, Kaelin indicated that she’d seen LeeAnna walking down the road at around 4:30 PM. Then, she remembered it being 5:30 PM. One witness had even reported seeing LeeAnna walking barefoot down the street at around 6:00 PM. But these times were guesses at best.
As police were searching the area, they were joined by local firefighters, neighbours, friends, the community at large, and even bloodhounds. Every inch of the town was being searched, from top to bottom.
That weekend, two events had also invited roughly a thousand visitors to the area. A jazz festival was taking place in town, and a motorcycle rally had invited groups of bikers to the town as well. Any remaining visitors were also questioned, and their motel rooms or campsites searched. But there was no trace of LeeAnna.
Kaelin and Christopher had made public appeals for LeeAnna to either come home, or for her to be brought home. The police were wary of making any hasty statements. However, a few days later, they were ready to hold their first press conference.
They asked the public to call in if they had any information in regards to a light blue, mid-size sedan which had a radio antenna installed in the middle of the trunk. They appealed to the public for any information whatsoever, but also announced that they were following up on any and all leads that were coming in.
On June 24th, 2003, an official timeline of the events of June 14th was published in the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
Between 4:30 and 5:00 PM, LeeAnna left the Warner home in order to go play with her friends. She made it to the house, as two different neighbours saw her knocking on the door of the house at 5:15 PM. Neither neighbour saw her leave.
At around 5:30 PM, Kaelin noticed that LeeAnna hadn’t returned home. She sent Karlee to go fetch her, only to have Karlee return without LeeAnna. Between 6:00 and 6:30 PM, Kaelin and Karlee began canvasing the neighbourhood, asking neighbours and friends if they’d seen LeeAnna. During this time, Christopher received a call at 6:21 PM to go on an ambulance run to Hibbing, Minnesota. At this time, he was not aware that LeeAnna was missing.
Around 7:00 PM, neighbours friends joined in the search for LeeAnna, looking through the neighbourhood, and the town at large. When Christopher returned from his ambulance run at 7:47 PM, he joined the search for his daughter.
At 8:48 PM, Kaelin called the Chisholm police and reported her daughter missing. At 9:00 PM, the Chisholm police arrived, and began their search. Around 10:15 PM, Search and Rescue, as well as bloodhounds, arrived on scene to assist in the search for Kaelin. At 4:00 AM, they were joined by a State Patrol helicopter, searching overhead.
The bloodhounds contradict this timeline slightly. They managed to pick up LeeAnna’s scent, and traced it back to Longyear Lake, where the family had been earlier that day, and then to the edge of a road, where the scent seemed to have simply stopped altogether. At no point did the dogs track the scent to the house where LeeAnna was seen knocking.
Either the two witnesses, who had no reason to lie, were lying. Or the dogs weren’t nearly as effective at scent tracking as police had been led to believe.
Two weeks after LeeAnna had vanished, Chisholm Police told the media that they believed that LeeAnna had been abducted. Though this was their primary theory, they did not discount the fact that LeeAnna may have wandered off.
She was known by locals and neighbours to have free reign of the neighbourhood, running to and fro. She was also known to wander down to Longyear Lake by herself, though usually not for long. It wasn’t completely implausible that she may have gotten turned around, or had gotten distracted, and then lost.
Many extensive searches of the neighbourhood and surrounding areas were conducted. When a child’s footprints were found on the shore of Longyear Lake, Chisholm Police drained the lake, and searched extensively, thinking LeeAnna may have fallen in and drowned. This search, like all the others, proved fruitless.
After two months of investigation, searches, following up on 1300 tips, and interviewing over 100 witnesses, the official search for LeeAnna Warner came to a close. Though the case remained open, Chisholm had no other avenues of investigation to pursue. The trail had gone cold.
However, investigators still had a handful of suspects that they needed to thoroughly investigate and clear.
As with all cases such as this, the first point of focus was with LeeAnna’s family. Though they were never officially considered suspects, Kaelin and Christopher had to be vetted and cleared.
When asked if they knew of anyone who had wanted to hurt LeeAnna, or take her, Christopher informed them of an altercation with his ex-wife. Just after LeeAnne was born in 1998, Christopher’s ex-wife had made threats of violence against Kaelin and LeeAnna. The altercation had resulted in Christopher and his ex-wife both taking restraining orders out on each other.
Even knowing this, the police felt that she was not a threat, as the altercation had happened five years prior. They concluded that she could not have been involved in the disappearance.
Though Kaelin, Christopher, and Karlee still reamin very active in the investigation, and continue to make appeals to the public, the family left Chisholm years later for a fresh start.
After clearing the family, police honed in on another suspect by the name of Matthew James Curtis.
Matthew James Curtis was a 24-year-old local man who was interrogated by police on a couple of occasions. During one of the questionings, police were suspicious enough to put in the paperwork for a warrant.
When they executed the warrant, police found child pornography on his computer. The warrant also granted them access to Curtis’s pickup truck, as well as his DNA. Police found nothing that could connect him to LeeAnna’s disappearance. However, they did charge him with the possession of child pornography.
In September of 2003, police searched for Curtis when he failed to appear in court for the charges. The search led them to Curtis’s body. The autopsy showed that’d he’d committed suicide by self-asphyxiation with a plastic bag.
The suicide sparked the rumour mill around the area, with many believing that he was responsible for the disappearance of LeeAnna Warner.
In 2004, Joseph Edward Duncan III came to the attention of police when it was discovered that he kept a diary both online and on his computer that made reference to LeeAnna’s disappearance. He expressed that he had been afraid that police would suspect him, with his history as a sex offender, and tried to recall his alibi for the day she disappeared.
Duncan was being investigated for the kidnapping of two children in Idaho when his online and personal diaries came to light. It was shown that he had knowledge of LeeAnna’s disappearance, and an investigation into his involvement was launched. There was nothing concrete to tie him to the disappearance, and a timeline of his activities showed that he could not have been in Chisholm when LeeAnna vanished.
A less likely theory was the “little old lady” theory. A few weeks after LeeAnna’s disappearance, Kaelin and Christopher remembered some of LeeAnna’s odd behaviour.
They detailed how LeeAnna had returned home from playing with her friends one day with a new case full of Barbies and Barbie clothes. Neither Kaelin or Christopher had purchased the toys for their daughter.
When they asked LeeAnna where the case had come from, she told her parents that a “little old lady” had given it to her to play with.
A week before she went missing, LeeAnna packed a suitcase, full of all her favourite things, and tried to leave home. She told her parents that she wanted to live with her “new family”. When they pressed her, LeeAnna didn’t offer them any details.
One night a couple days later, the found LeeAnna sleeping in her closet. She told her parents that she was scared that the “monsters” outside of her window were going to get her.
Police looked into LeeAnna’s odd behaviour, but found no evidence that could lead to a substantial suspect, or suspects. The information wasn’t necessarily dismissed, though it was filed away.
Over the years, law enforcement have been unable to find any evidence that LeeAnna was lured away by any “monsters”, “new families”, or “little old ladies”.
A number of unidentified suspects were also named in the course of the investigation.
Multiple witnesses described seeing a white male in his mid-thirties, approximately 5 ft 10 in (or 178 centimeters) with a dark star tattoo on his right arm walking about the neighbourhood around the time of LeeAnna’s disappearance.
Witnesses also told police that they saw a maroon and blue Cadillac being driven by an African-American man with a bald head. The car was unfamiliar to the area. There were also accounts of an unfamiliar rusty, older, brown pickup truck being driven by a white man with curly black hair.
However, there were two events in town on the day that LeeAnna disappeared. It’s entirely possible (and most likely) that these men were in town for either the motorcycle rally, or the jazz festival, and had nothing to do whatsoever with LeeAnna’s disappearance.
None of the these men have ever been identified, and, if possible, police would like to speak to anyone who may have information as to the identities of these men.
On June 14th, 2003, LeeAnna Warner was around 3 ft (91 centimeters) to 3 ft 2 in (97 centimeters) tall, and weighed approximately 48 pounds (21.8 kilograms). She was white, with brown hair cut into a bob haircut, and brown eyes. She was wearing a sleeveless blue denim dress with a belt, orange underwear, and a flower earring with a garnet in her pierced right ear.
Anyone with any information as to the identities of anyone involved with LeeAnna’s disappearance, or with any information about the case at all, is encouraged to call the Chisholm Police Department at 218-254-7915.
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Sources:
People Magazine Investigates: Parents of Missing Minn. Girl Still Seeking Answers 18 Years Later – Elaine Aradillas – People.com
The Tragic Disappearance of LeeAnna Warner – Jenn Baxter – Medium
True Crime Garage podcast – Episode 516: LeeAnna Warner Part 1 and Episode 517: LeeAnna Warner Part 2
Disappearance of LeeAnna Warner Wikipedia page