Pushkin.
Hey guys, it's Lucy here with a bonus episode of Where's Dear. Today, I'm going to share an update on where things stand.
More than a whole.
Year after we release the series, A pretty significant date in the Dea Abrams investigation has now passed, and I've been in touch with my sources about their reactions to that and the podcast. I'm also answering questions from listeners and getting into some of the details that we couldn't quite fit into the series. And here to help me out is my amazing producer, Daphne Chen.
Hey, Licy, how's it going good?
Thank you?
It's been a while. It has been so what have you got to ask me? Lots of questions, lots of updates, and I definitely want to talk to you about the important deadline, But let's start with the general reactions from the people you interviewed after the series came out. Do you hear back from them about anything?
I did have one message from Clinton saying how disappointed he was in the reporting. That was after the first episode came out. I encouraged him to listen to the entire podcast, but I didn't hear any more thoughts from him. On that, I had a few messages from Peggy saying how grateful she was that we had covered her sister's disappearance, and so that was quite nice. And then I did have a couple of people get in touch with me asking me to investigate certain angles. One was a lawyer
that Dia had actually approached before she went missing. She didn't ever officially retain this lawyer because she disappeared, and the lawyer wouldn't speak to me because of client attorney privilege, so I couldn't get a lot of information.
Out of her.
But she did tell me that I and the police should be closely looking at the case that Dea had in the courts with her two kids over her late husband's estate. I had done quite a lot of research into that, but I never really came up with anything that I thought was.
Substantial, and she kind of loved it at that. She didn't want to do an on record interview now at the time.
No, unfortunately not. But again, it's it was the same kind of thing that I found throughout the series, which is people had all these experience, says of interacting with Harper, but none of it was ever a smoking gun. There was never any hard evidence, and that's why there's never been any charges brought against anybody.
Mm hmmm, Yeah. I feel like we talked about that a lot. Was just the difference between you know, characterizing somebody, which we did a little bit in the series, that's different from evidence for a case or like anything like that that might be helpful in you know, a police investigation. So hopefully we told that line, but it is really hard to differentiate between the two of them sometimes.
Yeah.
So, and there was one other person I think you heard from after the series aired, and it was a woman who came across something from DIA's estate. Can you talk about that?
Yeah? So, I received an email from a woman who said that she had in her possession a pair of DEA's cowboy boots. And this was particularly interesting because there was a little thread that we decided not to include in the podcast just because we already had so much information. And it was again another court case that Harper had filed trying to get reimbursed for a pair of cowboy
boots that Dea had bought and never picked up. And this was I believe this was actually how I found Harper's details because when he logged this complaint in the courts. All of a sudden, it kind of flagged him as a person, and then you're able to trace somebody because it's public record. And so the fact that, by the way, that court case never went anywhere, it was thrown out of court, and it was just such a strange little twist, and the fact that this woman was emailing me saying, oh,
I have a pair of DEA's cowboy boots. I was, Yeah, that was quite curveble, and I did look into it. It turned out that it wasn't anything significant, and she had come across them completely legally. And unfortunately that was another rabbit hole that didn't go anywhere, which is kind of how I felt a lot of the reporting when on the series. I would go down all these different rabbit holes and they just wouldn't go anywhere.
But once once in a while something did. Yeah, you never know.
Yeah, that's kind of why I felt like I had to just follow all of them.
Right. So we ended the series on a major deadline that everyone was waiting for. This date of June twenty twenty five, can you just give us a quick recap of you know what this statement?
So Dea Abram disappeared on June's sixth, twenty twenty and in the state of California, if you've been missing for five years, you are considered legally dead.
Right, So we were waiting for June sixth of twenty twenty five, which has come in passed and what happened.
So Dia has never been found, her body has never been found, and as a result, she is now considered legally dead according to the state of California, and her assets are going to be divided up in three ways. Half is going to go to Keith Harper, who says that he was engaged to Dia Abrams, although this was always contested by both of her children and her friends. And the other half is going to be split equally between her son Clinton and her daughter Chrissara. Two of
her properties have already been sold. Benita Vista, where she primarily lived and was last seen, is on the market for around three million dollars, and the total value of her estate is over five million dollars. So there's quite a bit of money involved, and I'm sure that the parties are pretty interested to get this all wrapped up.
Yeah, So they're basically in the middle of evaluating her estate. But even before this deadline passed, Harper was kind of looking to try and get some money. Can you talk about that and what was happening there.
Yeah, so he has had a pattern of filing quite a lot of petitions throughout DIA's disappearance, and in April twenty twenty four, he filed another petition looking to be reimburseed for half a million dollars for the work he says he did on the ranch. He claimed he worked ten hours a day, seven days a week to just
make sure that it didn't fall into disrepair. But I can't imagine that the judge is going to grant that petition considering that in the past, all of these similar kind of actions that he's brought into court have been dismissed.
So since this deadline has passed, you've also reached out to many of those involved who you were in touch with for the series. What are some of the reactions from them.
Yeah. So, I did reach out to most of the people that I spoke to for the podcast to see if they wanted to share any thoughts, any feelings, and a few people got back to me. I was texting with Clinton the three hundred thousand dollar reward that he organized is still active and they are looking for information about her disappearance. He unfortunately didn't get back to me
in time with an on the record quote. He did forward me an email saying that he has been harassed incessantly since his mother went missing, and since his last media into view it has increased one hundredfold, and he's convinced that he is being stalked and he's going to end up being charged with something. And again this is I received a lot of emails like this from him. In fact, I received almost one hundred emails in the duration of my reporting that he had sent to police
and other people. He was just completely convinced that there was some kind of group that was after him, and he still, unfortunately seems to believe that. He did tell David Godfredson, the reporter from CBS, that he thinks Keith Harper got away with murder, and that not only did
he get away with murder, but he's profiting tremendously. I also spoke with Kelly Snyder, who, if you remember, is the former DEA agent who runs a miss persons organization and had conducted two searches with Keith Harper looking for Dea, and he sent me quite a long quote that I'm
going to paraphrase. He still believes he knows where Dea is buried, and he believes that his search dogs alerted to this area, which is up in the Idle World area, near where Dea owned her Beneatha Vista ranch and where she lived. And he expressed his frustration that the police hadn't searched this area properly, and he called it laziness and incompetence, and so he said he's not going to be searching again unless he gets written permission from the police,
which is very unlikely to happen. So unfortunately that was a bit of a dead end with him.
He never really means his words. I think around how he feels about the police and life.
Now he doesn't.
And we'll talk a little bit more about, you know, the Riverside Sheriff's apartment later. But you also heard from Peggy DIA's sister.
I did, and it was really lovely being back in touch with her, because she really, out of everyone, seemed to be the one that hadn't well. She was the one who had nothing to gain from DEA's disappearance, and she really genuinely just wanted to find out what happened to her sister. I'm not going to read out everything she says because I think some of it is quite defamatory and our lawyers may not be very happy with it. So I again, I am going to paraphrase, but she
did say this, My sister has never been found. She has the most beautiful granddaughter she will never meet, and the baby will never know her Grandma. Peggy believes that Harper knows what happened to Dia, and she expressed her anger that Harper was going to be financially benefiting from DIA's disappearance.
Right, So, I mean, speaking of Harper, did you reach out to him after this deadline?
I did. I messaged him a few times. He never responded to me. In fact, after my final interview with him, where I confronted him about his behavior and about his unreliable narrative, he sent me a string of texts basically breaking off contact with me, and that was the last day I ever heard from him. And just he is just a very short excerpt from one of the texts he messaged me. There was a time I trusted you
with information not openly shared. You have betrayed the trust and failed to do any info on the info given on Clinton. I thought you were non partial, but you are swayed by all speculations. So that gives you a sense of how he feels about me. So I wasn't really surprised that he didn't respond to me reaching out right right.
And then we also heard some from listeners, including some questions after we asked for some. You also didn't ask me anything on Reddit, So we will talk about some of those questions after we take a short break. We're going to answer some questions from listeners, but I want to start with a bit of background about you, Lucy. So in the first episode of the series, you talked a little bit about what legie to do a story, but people might not know that you have a different
beat as a reporter usually. Can you talk a little bit about that.
Yeah, I am a climate reporter and I primarily work for the BBC, And it's quite funny because this is so out of my wheelhouse, and my colleagues at the BBC were quite amused to find out that I was doing a true crime podcast and actually asked me to host a storytelling session for them about reporting that kind of big story and you know what, what tips and tricks they could take from it. So maybe maybe I'll find a niche in environmental crime or something somehow find a way to cross them over.
But yeah, I've had this a lot.
Yeah, yeah, I know there is there is that. Yeah, it's it's not normally what I do. And it was a real learning curve just dealing with the courts and police and getting sources to talk to me anonymously, and even in the whole world of audio because I'm usually a print reporter with some video thrown in. I don't usually record podcasts. So yeah, it was a very interesting process and I learned a lot.
Well it was most different or what do you think was like the most difficult thing.
I think it was making sure that I that I walked the line of impartiality. I think it's very easy or tempting to get wrapped up in someone else's narrative and making sure that I kept pulling back and saying, Okay, as this person a trustworthy source, can I find anyone else else to back up what they're saying? You know, you kind of really have to go back to journalism one O one and just strip everything back to the basics. And I think the hardest thing for me was making sure the.
Story was.
Entertaining and engaging, but not sensationalizing. Anything that was really important to me that I didn't I didn't include something because it was really sensational. It was juicy tail, you know. I really wanted to find out what happened to Dea, and it was always coming back to the fact that this is a woman who went missing and may have been really scared when she went missing, or if she is indeed dead, was probably really scared in the last
few moments of her life. And it was always remembering that and staying true to that and not getting carried away with anybody else's version of events.
Mm hmm. Yeah. Also shout out to Kiara and our editor, who's so good at being like do we need this detail, Like is this relevan this person? Uh huh uh huh. That's so hard, especially when so many people had such compelling, you know, narratives and stories. Yes, you know, because there are real people too, and that totally makes sense. Yeah.
Everyone had their own idea of what happened, and I tried my best to investigate everybody's idea of what had happened. But some of you know, sometimes you just can't, like the trail just stops and you can't follow it any further.
You know. At the beginning, when I first started talking to Keith Harper, he told me that he had spoken to a fireman who had seen Dea out hiking shortly after she went missing, and that he thinks she had met somebody from where she used to live in La Joya in San Diego, and they had met her in a van, and she had voluntarily gone off somewhere on her own, and she was waiting somewhere for you know, the coast to be clear, and then she was going to call Harper and they were going to go off
and get married. And I really followed that trail to try and find that fireman and to try and find that van, and to track all these people down that he had mentioned, because at the time I didn't know that he was going to be a potential suspect, And so I did spend quite a lot of time looking into that, and for a for a bit of time I thought that, yeah, she had gone off on her own.
Right, that was a genuine theory. Yeah, because for many people, I think, at least really on who you spoke to mentioned that too, right, like the possibility that she could have left on her own or maybe run away or something like that.
Yeah, there were all of these court proceedings going on with her kids, and so many people said to me, she was so over whelmed by that, and so it was you know, it wasn't It wasn't an outlandish theory at the time, But now I look back on it and I think, yeah, no, she that she definitely didn't just trot off on her own, accord.
M m M. So I feel like related to some of what you're talking about in terms of like first getting in touch with everybody, I think a lot of listeners were really curious about, like how you got people to speak with you, especially you know on Mike. What was that process Like was that hard or difficult?
It was really hard, yeah, because you you are asking people to publicly say what they think happened to somebody and point the finger at someone else, And a lot of people wouldn't talk to me because they were too scared. And I never was able to speak to DEA's daughter, Chrissara, and I tried very hard to speak to her. She didn't respond to me, but she would never go on record. There was also someone else mentioned in DEA's will, a former personal trainer of hers, and he wouldn't speak to
me either. A lot of DEA's friends in Idlewa wouldn't speak to me. So it took. Yeah, it took quite a while to find people. And you know, you really have to exercise all of your investigative skills and just track, just be relentless and trying to track people down.
And you also, I think for a lot of people, you had a lot of conversations before you did, like a formal interview yea on the record, right.
Yeah, there was a lot of background chatting and explaining who I was and what my intentions were, and the fact that I just wanted to tell the story and I wasn't really interested in taking sides. And I think a lot of people responded to that, And you know a lot of people wanted Dea to be found, and so I wanted to help and thought that perhaps if they appeared on the podcast, it might jog somebody's memory about something, or it might encourage someone else to come out.
Out of the woodwork, and.
Unfortunately, there wasn't any kind of massive breakthrough that I'd hoped.
For, you know, so far.
Yeah, it hasn't happened yet.
Yeah yet. So another listener question was specifically I think about Harper and why he focused so much on the Psychics Lake theory and not the Arizona theory. And I guess, just to recap, you know, the psychics that worked with Kelly Snyder had pinpointed a few possible coordinates that they thought that DIA's body maybe a few of them, or in this lake in Idlewild near Idlewild that they ended up searching. But there was also this coordinate in Arizona
that we also touched on in our series. Yeah, I mean, do you have a sense of why Harper focused so much on one another other?
I honestly don't know if he even remembered so it was an Arizona coordinate. It's so hard to know. With him. Sometimes I felt like he was genuinely confused. Other times I felt like he was trying to shape a very specific narrative, and then we just lose track of what he told me. So I never really quite got down to what the truth was with him. Or at least
what he believed the truth was. And that was frustrating for me because I would never be able to get at answer, and so I could just never put him down on that.
Yeah, and I think the Arizona coordinate we mentioned sort of talking to Kelly a little bit more about and you know, about why he hadn't searched shit. Did you hear anything else from him about that?
I kept pushing him on that. I kept saying, please please go and search it, Please let me come with you, and he won't. He won't search it until he's got written permission from the police, which, like I said earlier, thinks very unlikely to happen. Right.
So, one of the last listener questions that we got was about DIA's dog Ruby. What updates did you get about her?
So unfortunately she passed away under Harper's care. I did get some correspondence from Clinton a few years ago go about DEA's horses and the fact that Harper wasn't looking after them properly, and he sent me some quite upsetting photos about their hoofs being horribly overgrown. So it was really it seemed really tragic because Dea was such an animal lover, and for that to happen just felt like an added insult to everything else that had happened.
So, in general, have there been any updates from Riverside Sheriff's Department or Detective Lrero on the case?
Oh? No, it's been really Again. Another thing that's been really frustrating is that there's just been nothing. I've been asking. The only thing that they tell me is that the case is still active and they're still investigating. I have been told by somebody I considered to be a reliable source that they're going to search the ranch again, but I don't quite know when that's going to happen, considering that it's up.
For saf So I think we should just talk about maybe like your last thoughts and feelings, like how are you feeling now that the deadline has passed, now that the series is out? About everything?
It was this weird sense of anti climax. It was like everybody was working towards this deadline of when she was going to be declared dead and her assets divided, and then it came and went, and I felt sad that this date had passed and she still hadn't been found, and nobody knows what happened to her, And yeah, it was just sad, I think, because you realize how many other people go missing and that's it. Nobody ever really knows. And then you think about the people left behind and
how they reckon style that never knowing. And I'm still, you know, I'm still hopeful at some level that either she'll be found or we'll find out what happened to her. And maybe it did jog somebody's memory listening to it and they went straight to the police, and you know,
you never know. And I think that, especially when it comes to missing women, and I know that there are a lot of missing women cases, especially that it's really important to tell these stories because they obviously don't have a voice when they go missing, and hopefully stories and podcasts like these give them a voice in some sense, even if we don't directly hear from them.
Well, thank you so much, Lucy, and think thank you to everybody who wrote in with a question or joined Lucy's asked me anything on Reddit, or even to everyone who just listened to the series. We really appreciate it.
Yeah, thank you. Where's Dear is written and hosted by me Lucy Sheriff, Our producer is Daphne Chen, editing by Karen Shakerji, fact checking by Lauren Vespoli. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Original score by Echo Shaw's mastering by Sarah Bruger. Where's Dear is a co production Pushkin Industries and iHeartMedia and was originally developed with Truly Adventurous. You can listen to all of Where's Dea right now ad
free by becoming a Pushkin Plus subscriber. Find Pushkin Plus on the Apple show page for Where's Dea or at pushkin dot fm slash plus