Pushkin. Just to warn you before we start. This episode contains descriptions of sexual assault and violence. Last time on Where's Dia?
We were pushing ardently to have or removed as trustee because to me and to my sister, we felt that it was quite obvious that he had some involvement in DIA's disappearance.
He had every reason to harm her, but so did Chrissara and Clinton just because so much money is involved.
They please, they.
They believed she was hurt.
In the fall of twenty twenty one, a woman named Jody Newkirk was working on the Benita Vista ranch. This was over a year after Deer was last seen. It seems like Jody was a kind of jack of all trades. She handled the horses, cleaned and did general handy woman stuff for Keith Harper.
Or you think by taking this and I could really a concept where nothing dead young.
A right, Yeah, this is super cud.
This is a video from a local photographer who Jody took on a tour of the ranch. As far as I can tell, the photographer is shown in adylic setting with no hint of what's happened here before or what is soon to come. In the video, Jody is wearing a strapless red, white and blue striped tank top, baggy jeans, and chunky work boots, and her skin has a nice natural tan. Jody and the photographer walk up a gravel drive. There's a white Rvy parked underneath a pine tree, a
large metal butterfly seat, and an outdoor gym. They go up to an old log cabin. The entrance is flanked by wooden horseheads. Inside the cabin is dark and crowded, teeming with trinkets.
So yeah, it's got a barbecue, ANIFI outdoor fireplace.
It's got a great view.
God, I love it here, Jody says. She offers to cut the photographer a deal on rent in exchange for new photos to advertise the ranch for events. There was a lot going on up there, renovations, a new bridge being built, and Harper was even hosting wedding ceremonies.
So yeah, it's always good to have kind of like yeah, yeah, yeah.
You know style.
Yes.
Around three months after this video was taken, Jody was found dead on the ranch. Before I get too deep into who Jody was and how she ended up dead on Benita Vista Ranch, I want to explain why I'm telling you about her. It's not just because this is another tragic, unexplained event that deserves some airtime, or because it provides another shocking twist in this strange story. I'm telling you about her because it's a chance to peer
inside Harper's relationship with another woman. In fact, that's really what this whole episode is about. Harper's relationships with other women. Their stories made me question whether Harper and DEA's relationship was really as picture perfect as he said it was. I haven't been able to speak with Dea. She can't tell me what Harper is like as a lover or a partner or even a friend. But these other women they can. I'm Lucy Sheriff, and this is where's Dea?
Episode four, Don't Go there Alone. Kelly Berkowitz Trotter is Jody Newkirk's sister.
Oh hi, sweetheart, and I'm talking to my friend Lucy. We're talking about Auntie Jody.
Kelly explained to me that Jody hadn't always been the happy and confident woman I'd watched in the photographer's video. For years, Jody had struggled with drug addiction, in particular, meth and she'd done some things that strained her relationship with Kelly.
My sister stole my identity many years ago, and she actually was arrested for it, and not by my doing at all, but she was caught and she was going to have to serve like jail diamond stuff.
But Kelly says that Jody was working on trying to get clean and it's crazy.
I digress a little bit here, but on the twenty third of December twenty twenty, she and I had a very loving, healing conversation about all of that, where she apologized to me.
Harper told me he'd hired Jody to work on the ranch because she was renting out one of DEA's properties and she was behind on payments. Jody could do some work to make up the missing rent. But Kelly told me that Jody and Harper met through a dating site, which I found interesting because that's how Harper said he met Dea. Regardless, by the time Jody was working at the ranch, it seemed like she was on track.
You were on such good terms and so much closer, and there was like a Jody was a hardcore drag addict, so as close as one can be with someone who is who is in that kind of state of mind. And she was trying a lot, you know, of different things to get herself clean, as she always had ben since she was fifteen years old.
The day Jody died, Kelly was on holiday in a remote cabin in the woods, and so it took her a while to get cell service.
It was driving rain that day, just such a terrible storm, and I saw that I had a bunch of missed calls from my brother in law, Lindsay.
Lindsay is Jody's ex partner, and Kelly told me that he and Jody were best friends, ride or die friends.
So when I saw that, I immediately knew something was wrong. And I was able to call him from my daughter's phone, and basically I just remember standing there in this cabin with my daughter and one of my closest friends.
Sorry, okay at your time.
Oh and yeah. Lindsay said that Jody had been in an accident. She rolled over in an ATV. And I was like, oh, my god, is she okay? And he said, no, she's not.
Lindsay had heard the news about Jody from Harper.
We didn't know anything about Dea. We didn't know anything about Harper. We were kind of on this crazy spin we are spinning.
Kelly would soon come to learn a lot about Keith, Harper, and Dia Abrams, in part because Jody kept a detailed journal during those short few months she was living at the ranch. After JODI's death, Kelly sent me pictures of the journals she'd found in Jody's belongings. Jody's journal entries are written like letters. A lot of them are addressed to Harper. The first entry that Kelly sent me is strangely written to Harper and Dea. I asked my producer Daphne to read some extracts.
Dear Dea and Harper. So, even though we never met, I really feel a bond with you. I hope, from the bottom and all of my heart that you realize that I truly have you and yours, all of your animals, friends and home possessions, and even Harper's best interests at heart. I do honestly think you will be coming home. I hope you like me.
Jody's handwriting is erratic. It's big, looping, and in the same journal entry she'll use two or three different pens, red bull point and then a thick black sharpie. There are a lot of capital letters and exclamation points. The rest of her letters are all addressed to Harper, and from Jody's writing, it sounds like her relationship with Harper was more than professional.
I need event I'm losing my mind. I realize that you sure can act like you like me a whole lot when you want me, But I really don't matter that much to you. I feel like you're a dog, a high class jiggalow. Anyhow, you really do sleep with as many females as you can, and you tell all girls what they want to hear, and you tell them all basically the same thing. I really am feeling very strange about the always going to miss me comment in
the text a few days ago. I don't like the way that sounds, not a bit.
It's weird.
Fuck you, Harper. What we had wasn't really all that to you. I know, Anna or Patricia, but you know what, I would have killed, died given my right arm for you, even if you don't deserve it. I know who you are. I loved love you anyway. You will see when I'm gone, and I'm already gone, goodbye.
I don't know how Much of what Jodie writes is objectively true, but Harpistol things differently.
She came and rented a place on Toolbox, and I'd met her, and she was having trouble pain for her rent, and she asked if she could come and more to help cover it from the expenses of her.
And then, what was your relationship like with Jody? And I asked, course, because obviously she had the journal entry which suggested that you may have been in a romantic relationship with her.
No, not even God and Robert, if we're close to that.
But what what was your relationship like with her? It was a working relationship, that's what it was.
The journal entries aren't dated, so I don't know exactly when Jody was writing those entries. It seems clear to me, though, that things weren't great up at the ranch, at least from Jody's perspective, and on the twenty third of December, they got much much worse. Sometime around five pm, half called nine to one one. I have the coroner's report that explains what happened. Next. An officer with the California Highway Patrol arrives at the ranch. He finds Harper giving
CPR to Jody. She's lying on the ground, pinned down by an ATV. The paramedics arrive, but it's already too late. They declare Jody dead at the scene. The highway patrol officer noted that there didn't seem to be any trauma or injuries consistent with a rollover traffic collision. He found Harper's account of what had happened to Jody suspicious. Harper's version goes like this, On that day, December twenty third, Jody decided to go out on an ATV to cut
down a Christmas tree. It was raining really hard that evening, but according to Harper, Jody went out anyway, and we.
Had had eleven inches of rain that day. I said, that's a his poor idea.
I said, the trails are extremely muddy, slick, but she was very persistent.
She wanted it. So she goes up, she comes back, there's.
An actual circle you can see the machine makes and then it tips.
Over and then Harper says he found Jody lying in the mud, pinned down by the off road vehicle.
We do CEPR.
I do CEPR in her for about twenty minutes until they actually show up with the paramedics.
Kelly, Jody's sister, told me that at some point Harper managed to reach Lindsey, Jody's ex. Lindsay then relayed the tragic news to Kelly. Kelly called around hospitals, trying to find out where Jody's body was and what exactly had happened. She reached the coroner, who told her that Jody was still on the dirt track lying next to the ATV. In fact, the responders left Jody's body outside covered by a top paul in for hours.
They told me that they were still up there because of the sleep and the hail. It was so bad up there that they couldn't move her body, and I was freaking out.
Kelly was desperate for more information. Finally she tracked down someone at the Riverside Sheriff's office.
And I'll never forget that. She just immediately went on the defensive about how it's an open investigation, they don't know anything yet and it could jeopardize things to tell me anything.
The details were still so murky. Eventually she heard from Lindsay, Jody's ex partner, that there might be more to the story, and so they began their own investigation.
Lindsay had said that he went on the internet and he found a thing about the ranch that Jody worked on, and he told me the story of Dia, and I was like, what the actual fuck.
Kelly got Harper on the phone. She wanted answers, and Harper gave her a disturbing account.
So he was like in the conversation telling me exactly what she sounded like as he was trying to like it was fucked up.
I'm sorry, I didn't realize that she was still alive when Harper got there.
I don't know if she was or not, but he said that she made like a gurgling sound when he was giving her soupr But you can't trust anything the man says at all, Like you can pretty much just you know, just take out a sharpiet and just cross out every damn thing he says, like literally, he just he's allergic to the truth anyway. Not I don't want to get into into the weeds on the conversation with him, but I got off the phone going, Okay, this guy killed my sister.
To be quite clear, there is no evidence proving this, and Harper has denied having anything to do with Jodie's death. But it was this feeling that Kelly had about Harper that made her determined to get hold of the autopsy report, which the cops didn't want to release, but she continued pressuring them. It took nearly a year, but the cops finally unsealed it. We'll be right back. In the fall of twenty twenty two, the Riverside Sheriff's Department finally unsealed
Jody Newkirk's autopsy report. You might remember Harper had said that Jody was crushed by an ATV, a story that seemed suspicious at the time to the highway patrol officer who attended the scene. When Jody's sister, Kelly finally got ahold of the report, she learned what the coroner had found to be the cause of Jody's death, acute methamphetamine toxicity,
in other words, an overdose of myth. The coroner found a glass pipe in Jody's pocket, but for the manner of death, the coroner wrote undetermined because there was quote no evidence to deter herman if Newkirk administered the drugs to herself or if someone else administered it to her. So we know what killed her, but we don't know how the meth got into her system. I did find one other interesting thing in the report. Alberto Lrero, the
lead investigator on DEA's case, makes an appearance. He tells the coroner that he couldn't rule out foul play either. The cops questioned Harper, but he was never arrested, and as far as I can tell, there was no further action over Jody's death. Jody's sister, Kelly, joined the growing list of people frustrated with Riverside Sheriff's lack of action.
Oh, they didn't care. They didn't even want her cell phones. What Nope, they didn't even do a search for it.
Kelly did find out the police had interviewed Jody a couple of weeks before she died. Kelly said Jody had filed a police report claiming her horse had been stolen. It's a weird, complicated story, surprise, surprise, But Kelly said, investigator Alberto Lorero later told her what had happened.
And the police told me that she came down there and they took her into an interview room with a camera and they filmed the whole thing, and that's when they were telling her about Dia and Harper and telling her to leave, and Lorero said she was told. I don't know if he's told me that he had told her directly, but he told me. I don't understand why she wouldn't listen. Why didn't she leave? I don't understand she was told.
I asked Lorero if this interview with Jody had ever taken place. He told me he didn't remember. Eventually, Kelly held a memorial service for her sister. She hasn't gotten the answers she was looking for, and it's something she still struggles with today. During our last phone call, right before we hung up, Kelly gave me a piece of advice. I had told her. I'd been considering going up to the ranch before Jodi had died. He's invited there, and I almost went.
Or don't go alone. If you go, bring men with you.
I had been so curious to see the ranch, to get a feel of where Deer lived and who she was, and now I felt like I'd be taking this risk going up there alone. I felt like I couldn't shrug off my reservations anymore, so I decided not to go. A couple of months after Jody's memorial service. In May of twenty twenty two, Harper appeared in court in Colorado.
It had nothing to do with Jody or Deer. In fact, it was over an incident that had taken place about ten years prior, and Harper was appearing in court because he wanted to be removed from the sex offender registry. In twenty eleven, Harper was convicted of groping two women on a snowmobile tour he used to run an outdoor adventure business in Colorado. Harper pled not guilty to the charges. He spent a year in a county jail, had to complete a sex offender treatment program, and register as a
sex offender until twenty twenty five. Harper went to the Colorado court in twenty twenty two to see if he could be removed from the registry a few years early. He maintained his innocence and said he grabbed the women because they were about to fall off from the snowmobile, but his court petition went nowhere. I wonder what else was in Harper's past. So I dug around, and it turns out there is more, a lot more. That's after the break. I'm going to tell you about two other
women who Harper had relationships with. The first woman is someone will called Sarah to protect her privacy. In two thousand, an investigator with a local dat's office in Colorado filed an affidavit to obtain an arrest warrant for Keith L. Harper. The investigator said he had probable cause to believe Harper had committed four felonies, including first degree sexual assault and second degree kidnapping. In his report, the investigator wrote up
a detailed description of Sarah's allegations. I got a copy of it through a public records request. Sarah accused Harper of physically and sexually assaulting her One time, during an argument, Harper allegedly grabbed her by the throat and threw her to the ground. Sarah described another disturbing incident that culminated
in rape. There's one other part of the report I'm going to read where the investigator summarizes a third incident Sarah told him about the report, says quote, she stopped resisting because she knew if she continued, Harper would kill her. She told me that she could not breathe and that Harper was so angry she believed that he would kill her and then tried to cover the whole thing up somehow. Harper then began pushing her down the hall, still holding
his hand over her mouth and nose. When they arrived near the bedroom, she told me she stopped struggling completely because she thought to herself, I'd better stop fighting or I'm going to die. According to court records, she got a restraining order against Harper. There were multiple hearings before the trial. From what I can gather reading through the court documents, Sarah, the main witness, tried to withdraw the charges, but by that point it was in the DA's hands.
They were the ones filing the charges against Harper. Sarah stopped cooperating. The DA's prosecutors tried to subpoena her to appear in court. Eventually, the judge decided Sarah shouldn't testify the doing so would cause her quote permanent impairment. I reached out to Sarah to see if I could speak with her, but didn't hear back. The prosecution's case fell apart. Eventually, Harper was only charged with third degree assault. He pled
guilty and was convicted on that charge. He was put on probation for a year and had to enroll in domestic violence classes. I asked Harper about all of this.
It was dropped, and the court finally relief the fact if I would agree to just take a class at the end, that those charges would be dismissed.
Okay, okay, So are you saying that you got to realize that what's that?
No?
Carry on, I'm going to say, you got to realize that there was I had a business involved that she was going after.
You're thinking she would stabricating what happened because.
She wanted to get oh wellout a question.
That's how she would have gotten a access to the business.
I felt uneasy after talking with him. He always sounded so sure, so convinced of his narrative, Like when you explain what happened to Jody, it was like there was no room for any other perspectives or possibilities. It was his truth or nothing. And then I found another woman, someone who was in a serious relationship with her for many years. She told me she wanted to share her experience, but to protect her identity, we're not disclosing her name,
and we've distorted her voice. When they first met, Harper was charming, flirtatious, cheeky. She told me he had a charisma which was almost impossible not to fall for. I wondered if this had been DEA's experience. Too long story, sure, he warned me, how does it feel talking to me about him?
Do you talk about him much? What you went through? And I get them and a lot. I'm shaking all over.
She told me in deep detail about her relationship with Harper, how they met, how he courted her, and then how the relationship soured. There was one particular fight she told me about.
He chased me through the house. He got up and would run some more, and he backed me against the wall with his forearm in my throat. Well, and that he was very angry, And that's the closest was too close, you know?
Yeah.
Yeah, he's so much bigger than I am.
Yeah.
He is not a man that takes no. Mmm, he does not accept a no.
Does he tell the truth?
Is he?
Is?
He a trustworthy person? He and I had that conversation a lot about telling the truth. I have to say no, no. I don't know if it's Marcius, but for the longest time he told me he was a Dea agent. He told me that too. Actually, when I first started speaking to him, he wished therefore ding.
I couldn't help going over those words. He is not a man that takes no. He does not accept a no. It reminded me of how much Harper had pested me and Kelly Snyder to take on DEA's case.
I have spoken with former partners of yours who have described instances of you allegedly being violent. And then you put that together with whatever happened on the snowmobile, plus the fact that Dea is missing, plus the fact that Jodi Nwkirk died on the ranch, and I'm sure you can understand that there is a pattern.
Of events, and you have you have proofs that those of pants, even though they are spoken of, they're true.
I was not there, so I cannot say.
No no, if there's violence, what what proof did you have that violence occured? There's actually please reports? You have those in your hands?
Yes, I have a police report in my hands.
And what does it say? Specifically?
It said that you were sexually violent. It said that you grasped somebody around their neck.
Okay, and that went to court and what happened with it.
We spend some time going back and forth on this He continues to deny that there's any truth to the allegations of violence, that the court didn't hold him accountable for all the charges and therefore they're not true.
I mean, well, then stick with the facts and don't stick with accusations.
I was intrigued whether Deer knew about all of this. Of course, there's no way to really tell, but I did ask Harper, so.
Was your relationship that you had with the different from the previous relationships you've had.
I don't understand that question.
What would be different in the relationship.
We had an excellent relationship. That's all I can tell you.
Okay, okay, And is there anybody else?
What the no?
No, no, carry on.
No?
I said, Dea was well aware of my past.
We discussed that in full detail not long before we started dating.
To be clear, even with all this information about Harper's past, there's nothing that holds him responsible for anything that may have happened to Dea. And while I was busy digging around in Harper's past, events in the present day were still unfolding. You might remember from the last episode that Abram's kids sued Harper to get him removed from Deer's trust well. In December of twenty twenty two, a judge appoints a guardian, an independent, objective legal guardian, to represent
DEA's interests in court. Although Harper still remains a trustee of her estate, and the judge also passes a settlement agreement between and the two kids. It feels like an uneasy sort of truce. It's all based on the fact that in California, if someone is missing for five years,
they can be declared legally dead. And so on sixth of June twenty twenty five, five years to the day that Deer was last seen, the state of California will presume her dead, and when that happens, all of her assets, the Benita Vista Ranch, her antiques, her jewelry will be divided into three parts. Twenty five percent will go to Clinton, twenty five percent to Chrissara, and fifty percent to Harper. Yes, Harper would get double what each of Deer's kids receive. There's just one.
Caveat one of the parties, damn or me, the kids or me would found guilty of her disappearance or had anything to do, whether disappearance or dead, we would get nothing.
If the kids are found to be involved in DEA's disappearance, they get nothing, and if Harper is found to be involved, he gets nothing. This language in the court settlement, which was drawn up and agreed to by all three of them, almost seems to incentivize Harper, Chrissara, and Clinton to pin
DEA's disappearance on each other their narratives. Their version of events becomes worth something because there's a reward for having one version of this story being held up as the truth, a multi million dollar award, because if one of them is found responsible for DEA's disappearance, the others walk away with everything.
You know, when the outcome gets known, it has the making of them.
Next time on WES DIA.
I don't give too much credit to Keith Harper. I don't think he's a criminal mastermind.
The consensus was among my staff it was like, look, I think we just got called over to put all kinds of footprints everywhere, to just damage the crime scene.
Basically, WES is written and hosted by me Lucy Sheriff. 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