Episode 3: “Inside Information”

Pushkin last time on Wednesday.

From the outside looking in, she had the perfect life.

She got this money thing where it was everything everything to her, and it just created a monster.

We were so on Harper the place, and we took them down the road and looked, and he just thought dollar science.

She turned to me and she said, if anything ever happens to me, Clinton did it.

In the aftermath of DEA's disappearance, Keith Harper wrote letters to local police the Riverside County Sheriff. He was trying to persuade them to keep looking for her. And he also tried something unexpected or at least surprising to me for a guy like Harper. He caught up psychics across the country to try and persuade them to.

Look for Dea.

Yes, psychics, and that's how a guy called Kelly Snyder got pulled into all of this.

Keith Harper, who stated he was the fiance of Dea, contacted our organization. I believe it was in February or March of twenty twenty one, which was about eight months after Dia went missing.

Kelly worked for the DEEA, the Drug Enforcement Administration for two decades, but now he runs a missing person's nonprofit called find Me. They mostly work on cold cases and they try to find people who've been missing for years, sometimes decades. They have search teams, divers, cadaver dogs, the works. Oh and they also work with all kinds of psychics.

Almost all of them have the clairvoyant and the clare statient, you know, all the c and then some of them are mediums so they're actually able to talk to the dead person.

Then we have remote viewers.

Kelly says they've had a lot of success using his team of around one hundred psychics who live all over the world. He tells me they've helped solve one hundred and twenty one cases, and it seems like they've gotten some attention over the years. Bruce Willis once attended a find Me fundraiser.

I think I've only had two people currently in the group that do channeling.

But anyway to how Kelly got dragged into all of this, Harper had reached out asking for help.

And he asked us to investigate it using our methodologies, and unbeknownst to me at the time, he was already contacting various psychics around the country.

Was his behavior kind of normal for someone in his situation.

Actually, he was an incredible pain in the ass. He would constantly call me, constantly text me, when do you think you might be able to do this? And what kind of information are you getting? Is the dead? Is Dea alive? This kind of crapple.

Harper was convinced that Kelly, with his crew of psychics, could uncover what happened to Dea. Before Kelly decided whether to get involved, he called Riverside Sheriff's Department. He always contacts local law enforcement before taking on a case. He wanted to know if they'd be interested in receiving any information he might find. Kelly says he spoke to a Riverside sergeant.

They were and he immediately started telling me that Keith Harper was one of the people that they had as a person of interest. And he said, there are others that I will not name to you, but since Keith is asking for your help, I wanted you to know that he is a person of interest in the case.

By the way, the cops wouldn't confirm that with me. They also won't share names of official suspects, but Harper did tell me that they've questioned him multiple times After his call with the sergeant, Kelly brought up what he'd learned with Harper and he.

Said, yes, I'm aware that I am a person of interest and I'm probably their primary suspect. And I said why do you say that, and he goes, well, shortly after Dia went missing, I had to go out of town. And that raised a lot of eyebrows. And I said, well, when did you leave? And he said it was about two and a half days after she went missing. And originally he told me he had something that he had to do in New Mexico and here in Arizona, but I forget what he told me he had to do.

And there's that probation story again. You might remember from our first episode. A friend of DearS also said that Harper talked about leaving town with Deer's dog Ruby to check in with a probation officer. Harper denies saying that, though, and still insists to me that he was heading to Arizona to pay a tax Bill, What were some of your thoughts at the beginning of all this towards Keith and towards what might have happened.

Well, yeah, I mean I originally I just had him labeled somewhere in the seventy five to ninety range as far as being guilty, and he had every reason to harm her, but so did Chrissara and Clinton, just because so much money's involved.

Clinton and Kassara de as children.

So that's always been on my mind, and I've talked touring numerous times about it, confronted him on numerous occasions, and I just get the feeling that he knows a little bit more than he's trying to share with me. But then I don't, I don't have that eighty ninety percent feeling anymore. If anything, he's probably fifty percent involved in some capacity. But you know, all three of them have a reason to have her deceased. They're going to be incredibly wealthy.

You might remember, just two weeks before Deer went missing, she revised the details of her trust. She put Keith Harper and her friend Diana Fetta in charge should anything happen to her. That meant the ranch, her assets, everything she owned was legally in their hands. So while Harper was hounding Kelly, the cops and all those psychics, Clinton mounted his own search. He recruited lawyers to fight Harper and Diana in court, and he hired private investigators to

Yeah, there's so many unknowns and ups and downs in this, and it literally all surrounds the fact that she was so wealthy. Money talks and bullshit walks.

I'm Lucy Sheriff, and this is Where's Deer? Episode three Inside Information. When I first get in touch with Harper a few months after Dear's disappearance, he bounces all these theories off me of what might have happened. But after a while he whittles the theories down to two main possibilities.

She either taken or she leaves on our court.

If she was taken, you now, she shins over and over over and over again to me and others that if I disappear and if my son's doing.

He's convinced that in either scenario, it all leads back to Clinton. If deer ran away, it was because she was scared of him, and if she was kidnapped, it was on Clinton's orders. And then at some point Harper even starts to believe he's in danger.

I've always still at risk at all the time. They you can die if they did, I just.

So.

And when you say when you say they, you're talking about her family, Yes, okay.

He goes back and forth between these two theories, between wanting to believe dear is still alive and having this hunch that's something terrible has happened to her. It can get a little confusing.

So who's I don't want it, not trying to lead in the wrong world, But I'm going through a logical explanation.

As time goes on, Harper's search intensifies, and so do his calls to me. These are just some of the voice fails he left me.

Anyway, this story is getting ready to blow wide open.

If you want some information.

We can talk somewhere.

In all of the conversations, I realized he was becoming quite the regular presence in my life. Just checking in with you, and I was starting to feel a little uncomfortable with that he catches me while I'm out driving, cooking dinner, or out with my friends.

Thank you for all the service that you do, and keep ling and you're dead.

Thanks why?

Oh, and he thinks my name is Lacy, despite my repeated attempts to correct him.

Give me your name one more time so I can put a name with a number.

My first name is Lucy, l U see why.

And my surname is Sheriff, like the cop, but with two r's and two shy. He never got it, and he still calls me Lacy. At one point, the calls got so bad that I had to take a break.

A Harber.

Just starting a test BASI, you said it'd be about ten days before you got back.

I'll try to call you maybe later in this afternoon.

Remember how Kelly said Harper was really persistent. Yeah, I knew exactly what he meant. It felt like Harper was trying to pull me in as a teammate an ally.

I think the kind of the idea that you're too busy for this story. If that's true, let me know and we'll see. What are you to correcommend somebody, but veins are starting to happen. I'll bet I need you onboard for.

It all got to be too much.

I didn't speak to him for a good few months, and to be honest, it was great to have a break. But then I got this nagging feeling like I had to find a way to finished the story. And there was something else that happened, which be warned, is a little la woo woo and definitely not.

Very British of me.

I often have incredibly detailed, insightful dreams, and I had one of those dreams. I was hiking on a narrow switchback path, ducking under branches, heading towards the mountains. It was sunny and I felt at peace, and then I heard a voice, a male voice, and it said, just.

One thing, find dear, And then I woke up. The next day.

I took a deep breath, picked up my phone and I dialed Harper's number.

Thank you, how are you?

Oh God, Spenna? Hell of a rats?

For a year, a lot had happened since we last spoke.

They have now almost pinpoint where she is.

What sat.

Do they think she's alive?

Now? They blease steps, They believe that they believe that she was correct.

And why do they think that, Well.

Uh, hey, they just have some inside information that they're the ones.

I'm going to pause here for a minute and talk about this inside information, which came from Kelly's psychics. After Kelly finally agreed to help Harper, he put his psychics on the case. Oh and by the way, Kelly doesn't get paid by Harper or the cops. Anyway, Kelly sent an email to his entire network, all one hundred or so of them, asking who was interested in helping, and he gave them some basic information.

Every time we receive a missing person case like THEND them a photograph, the address or GPS coordinates the last place the person was seen, and then I say, what happened, what are the circumstances surrounding the disappearance, and where is that person right now?

I just want to say, I've lived in LA for long enough now to just accept that this guy, this x DEA agent who is a gruff, meat and potatoes kind of guy, uses psychics to find missing people. Generally speaking, it's hard to say how seriously law enforcement takes psychic information. A lot of departments categorically say they don't use them. But I did find a rather amusing report from the

So there's that. But back to Kelly.

After he wrote to his psychic network, more than half responded saying they had information about Dea.

So where do you think dear is.

Here? Asking the question dead or alive to de Seed.

This is the first time I've heard someone definitively say they think Dea is dead. And yes, I know this information is coming from a team of psychics, but Kelly takes it at face value. And just to be clear, the psychics don't receive names from Kelly of any possible suspects, and they're told not to confer with each other either. The psychics who responded to Kelly's call out shared information

They were all saying the same thing independently, which was that she was murdered. She was murdered by three people through males and a female.

She was taken and you know, killed and buried, and basically that was it.

Some of the psychics also shared specific coordinates of where they thought DEA's body could be buried. One coordinate was on DEA's ranch, two were nearby in Lake Hemmett, a large reservoir in the mountains, and a fourth option was in the middle of nowhere in the Arizona Desert. Kelly writes all this up and shares his report with the Sheriff's department. He won't send the full thing to me, he says it's confidential and could jeopardize the case. But remember,

Well, yeah, And that's probably the most puzzling thing is if you're guilty, you can still pret that you care and pretend that you're, you know, trying to find out where she is, even though you know where she is because you're the one that killed her and buried her. But why keep going to different people?

It's not just me.

The moment the psychic's weigh in seems to be the point that Harper gives up hope Dear is alive. He uses some of the details from Kelly's report to further back up his theory that Clinton is involved, and he never ever sways from that.

Conviction.

They have a lot of information about what may have gone down ah and who may be responsible for.

Harper actually starts talking about all of this as the truth. And it's so crazy for me to watch him go through this process of not knowing and stumbling around in the dark with all these different theories. So then grasping onto this vague information that's fed to him by psychics and holding onto it as a pure, hard fact, as the ultimate truth. He confused me at first until I understood what was happening.

You looked at how she's killed and how he's been placed.

That's a that's a professional kill. That's not somebody her know, and Kane bearing and extensively scared the hyder.

Wait, who are you talking about now, Dieta.

You said, if you if you look at how she's been killed.

If you look at how she has been killed at place in the lake, she's been weighted down.

There's all kinds of evidence to hide her.

But you don't know for sure that she's.

Well.

I don't know. I'm sure she's there, but I think we'll find out.

Harper believes that what Kelly's psychics are coming up with is enough to prove his innocence, although to be clear, there is no actual evidence, just narratives provided by the psychics.

I hate to ask you this, but if they do find her and she's not alive, do you anticipate the police coming to question you again?

You know, I think what Kelly has accumulated that it points away from me and points towards.

The other side.

After Kelly sent his report to the cops, Harper was texting and calling me excitedly. He was convinced they were going to find Deer's body imminently, but it would be months before the cops acted.

We'll be right back.

While Harper is out consulting psychics. Clinton has a more grounded approach on that weekend in June twenty twenty, when he got a call from one of DEA's neighbors to say his mother was missing, he sprung into action right away.

She said, Diaz missing.

You know, I'm really really worried that something happened to her, that that Harper or somebody else harmed her in some way, and.

You know, you got to come up here right now.

He immediately went into high alert mode, even if he still wasn't really sure what was going on.

I didn't know if you know, this was being blown out of proportion or understated, or if she had had a migraine and was you know, got a hotel somewhere, or if she had been murdered, or just kind of Fogle war type of situation.

To Clinton, it didn't matter that he didn't know all the details. He felt he was going into battle and he was going to take precautions.

What I did was I immediately called a private investigation company and I paid the deposit right there for.

Dogs, dogs as in search dogs.

I don't know the precise terminology, the proper nomenclature for these type of dogs, but essentially kadab or dogs or bloodhouse dogs or you know, some type of dog that could find her.

Harper had been with DEA for at least two years, but Clinton says he'd never met him despite this. On his way up to the ranch, Clinton says, he calls Harper.

But I did get to, you know, instill a little fear into him, and I told him to bring me some clothes that Dia had worn recently, so that the dogs had to send a reference scent to go off of.

Clinton arrived at the ranch and almost immediately he said, any hope he had that Dea maybe alive vanished because he felt like Harper was acting suspiciously.

You said some weird stuff about you know, if you go up the hill and you find a corpse, you know, don't touch it because it might be a crime scene or some such very strange commentary.

Did you think that there was any chance that Dea had left on her own?

I did not.

I thought, pretty much automatically, based on how people were behaving, that she was gone.

Clint to notice some odd things around the ranch too, things Harper hadn't mentioned to me.

The second story balcony door was kicked in from the outside, and there was trim splintered trim throughout her master bedroom. That was the only sign of forced entry that I saw. I also saw a bunch of notes around the room that kind of were very repetive.

In what they said.

I don't particularly want to go into the specifics of that, because the investigator said that, you know, that's information they don't really want to reveal.

But they were in your mother's handwriting.

They were in my mother's handwriting, written multiple times over and over basically the same message. And also amongst those papers, there was a piece of paper that said that she feared for her life.

So in the months after DIA's disappearance, Clinton not only hires a private investigator, he tries playing detective himself. He starts calling up all these people who lived in Idle World and questioning them in great detail. He compiles a cache of recordings and documents they will later send to me, and he starts developing his own thingies of what happened.

Harper would call Feedder Die you know, short for Diane, obviously, but you know it's a very It was if they had known each other for years.

Harper and Diana adamantly deny all of these accusations, and Diana said she'd only met Harper a couple of times before Deer went missing. Clinton's PI turns up something else, something noteworthy. When Harper traveled to New Mexico and his r V two days after Dea disappeared, he used his cell phone to make calls. Clinton's PI told me that he managed to track down the cell phone towers that Harper's phone pinged off, and they showed Harper in the middle of Arizona, not too far from one of those

They filed.

They want Harper kicked off the ranch, and they want him and Diana removed as trustees of DEA's estate.

We were pushing ardently to have and removed as trustee because to me, and to my sister and to everybody, we felt that it was quite obvious that he had some involvement in DEA's disappearance.

In their court case, the kids claim Harper isn't taking proper care of the ranch, he isn't being a good trustee. For one, they say that Harper was pouring concrete over the ranch to create an RV park, and they accus Harper of not taking care of DEA's beloved animals.

And he was allowing the animals to get eaten either by mountain lions, or they would be hit by a car, or they would magically disappear.

And what would that have meant your mother.

If she would have been devastated, and I mean it's impossible to describe how she would have felt.

Clinton and Krassara's lawsuit drags on for years, by the way, with Harper and Diana maintaining their innocence. Diana actually removes herself as trustee and relocates to Georgia. When Harper isn't dealing with court summons from Clinton, he's hounding the police. He even addresses a letter to the sheriff of Riverside County complaining about their incompetence and urging them to keep searching for Deer. He's also completely fixated by Kelly Snyder's psychics.

In November of twenty twenty one, three months.

After Kelly files his report, Alberto Lorero, the lead investigator on the case, sends out divers to search the lake with sonar equipment.

Harper watches the entire thing.

I just watched the lake. When they showed up, I went and took pictures of all of it.

And then at the end, Lorero comes to me, takes my camera, reaches in and takes the card out and says, we're keeping this is evident.

Why would he do that. I had the right to take pictures and I was not interfering with anything they were doing.

This whole scene is just so utterly bizarre. Harper camped out somewhere on the shores of this lake there's used for normal activities like hiking and boating, snapping away with his camera, and the cops confiscating his SD card just what. I asked the Riverside Sheriff's department about all of this, but they didn't respond. And after all of that, the divers don't find anything.

And that's when I called Kelly and I said, Kelly, they didn't find it. I'm confused. And later on that they believed that she was made note.

Just prior to the.

Search, Harper and Kelly come up with this new theory that Deer's body was in Lake Hemmytt. But somehow the information from Kelly's report was leaked from the Sheriff's department, and they think that in that three month period between Kelly filing his report and the cop searching the lake, the killer came and moved Dear's body. The speculation just seems to grow wilder and wilder. Dredging a body from a lake and moving it. I don't know, it just

You know, I'm not opposed to him.

And you come back to the ranch yin Oh that would be great, actually, because then I can kind of really get an idea of the layout run and what's around?

Yeah, you know what, I'll take you upstairs and show you the cameras. How how they do not see what happens is beyond me and lie.

So I'm planning this trip against my boyfriend's advice. And then I get an email. It's a Google alert that I'd set.

Up on Deer's name.

It was a link to a news story on CBS.

Forty six year old Jody Nukirk died on the Benita Vista Ranch near Idlewild just after her sunset on December twenty third, twenty twenty one.

Someone a woman had been found dead on DEA's ranch. Next time on Weds Dear.

You can pretty much just take out a sharpie and just cross out every year thing, he says Lake. Literally, he just he's allergic to the truth.

Where's Dear is written and hosted by me Lucy Sherriff. Our producer is Daphne Chen, editing by Karen Shakerji, production assistance from Joey Fish, ground fact checking by Lauren Vespoli. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Original score, sound design and mastering by Echo Shaw's. Where's Deer is a co production of Pushkin Industries. And iHeartMedia. Where's Deer was originally developed with Truly*Adventurous.