In early 2003, just a few months before LeeAnna disappeared, she and her parents, along with her sister Karlee, moved 10 minutes up north to Chisholm. For the first few months, everything was as normal as ever.
On the day LeeAnna disappeared, June 14th, 2003, her mom, Kaelin, decided to take Karlee and LeeAnna out to some garage sales. They shopped around for a little while on a nice day out, and they ended up driving over to a friend’s house, where they played and also swam before finally returning home just before 4:30 PM. Both the girls came to her while she was unloading the car, and they wanted to walk over to their friends’ houses.
LeeAnna was begging her mom because she wanted to go to her friend’s house, which was only a block and a half away, so her mother agreed. Her mother told her to be back by 5:00 PM. Karlee also went to her friend’s house; both went to different houses.
At 5:00 PM, only Karlee came back home. At first, her mom wasn’t too nervous because LeeAnna was only 5, and she thought she probably just lost track of time. Kaelin sent Karlee to LeeAnna’s friend’s house, the Cork family. Karlee went there and came back in minutes, saying that nobody was at the Cork family house. They were actually out shopping at a Target 30 minutes away. Regardless, Kaelin went over to that house anyway, but all she found were LeeAnna’s shoes, and the concern was rising.
Kaelin and Karlee started calling LeeAnna’s name around the neighborhood, knocking on doors, but besides the shoes, there were no signs of her. Kaelin called Chris, LeeAnne’s father, who was working for a local ambulance service at the time, and she let him know what was going on.
Just before 9:00 PM, they reported LeeAnna missing to the Chisholm Police Department, and a large-scale search effort kicked off right away. The law enforcement team started looking for LeeAnna, beginning at the Warner home.
Two people said that they witnessed LeeAnna that night. A man who lived next door to the Cork family said that around 5:15 PM, he saw LeeAnna as she walked up to the Cork’s door and began knocking. After that, the man went inside his house, and that’s all he saw.
The second man, who lived across the street, said that he saw LeeAnna around the same time, and he mentioned that after nobody answered the door, LeeAnna crossed the street and started walking toward the man’s house. The man was outside working on his car. He said that when he saw LeeAnna walking toward his home, he was scared that the puppy was going to jump on her, so he went inside to grab the leash, and by the time he came out, she was gone.
The search went on throughout the night, and once it got dark, the St. Louis County Rescue Squad and local fire department were called in to help as well. A state patrol helicopter also joined the search, and they used heat sensors to try to find out if she was maybe somewhere that they couldn’t see in the dark. They also got a bloodhound for the search. The dog did pick up LeeAnna’s scent and led the searchers down by the lake. When they arrived there, they came across a child’s footprint down by the water. Investigators learned from Karlee, her sister, that she and LeeAnna had been down by the water playing the day before, in the exact same spot. So the scent the dog picked up was from yesterday.
As the investigation carried on and LeeAnna was nowhere to be found, everyone started to believe that someone might have taken her, which seemed more likely.
That weekend, there was a jazz festival and a motorcycle rally that had come through Chisholm, increasing the number of visitors and tourists in the area, which raised the number of possible suspects.
Thousands of tips started pouring in, and the investigators were not ruling out any of them. The first thing the investigators did was look into the sex offender registry to see how many sex offenders were in their area. There were 130 of them in a city of less than 5,000. Person by person, investigators corroborated their alibis to see if anyone on that registry was involved, but nobody caught their attention. The investigation never stopped.
Kaelin and Chris were looked into as possible suspects and cleared, which is still true, but they ended up providing investigators with some interesting information about LeeAnna in the weeks leading to her disappearance. A few weeks before her disappearance, LeeAnna came home one day with a case of Barbies and Barbie clothes. When they asked her about this, LeeAnna told them that a little old lady gave them to her. Also, a week before LeeAnna disappeared, she told her family that she was running away. She had actually packed up a suitcase and said that she was going to go live with her new family.
The police took these concerns very seriously, but they could not find any evidence to suggest that LeeAnna had been gone.
That summer, when the investigators were going through the sex offenders registry, another tip came in that caught their attention. The call came from a woman who lived down the street from the Warners, and she said that they needed to look into her son. It turned out that the woman’s boyfriend was using their family computer and found child pornography. Her son was Matthew James Curtis, who had actually already been interviewed by the police, and at the time, he said that he knew nothing.
But with the new information about the child pornography found on the computer, many questions were raised. Investigators got a search warrant for his laptop and charged him with what they found. Again, he was questioned about LeeAnna’s disappearance but again denied being involved in her disappearance. However, he did say something that raised eyebrows; he stated that even if he did something, they wouldn’t be able to find her. In September 2003, the day before he was supposed to appear in local court for the child pornography charges, Curtis’ corpse was found in his pickup truck, a few miles outside of Chisholm. Authorities claimed that Curtis suffocated himself with a plastic bag. The investigation into Curtis’s death was closed and officially ruled a suicide.
Bruce Christenson called the investigators, claiming he was involved and knew where LeeAnna was buried.
Bruce Christenson, who was involved in drugs, robberies, and was known for being mentally unstable, also got into a fight with Chris and threatened to kill Kaelin. He was arrested for the threat and later questioned about LeeAnna’s disappearance. However, he was cleared as a suspect when he was able to prove he was out of town when she disappeared.
Another search began as Bruce led them to where he claimed LeeAnna was buried. However, it turned out to be all a cruel lie so Bruce could see the light of day one last time. Bruce Christenson, who was in jail for another crime, killed his cellmate, giving him more time in jail.
At the time of LeeAnna’s disappearance, numerous witnesses recalled seeing a man in his mid-thirties walking around the neighborhood. Around the same time, witnesses identified a maroon and blue Cadillac that was driven by an African-American man who appeared to be in his twenties or thirties and had a bald or shaven head. None of these men have been identified, and it remains unclear whether any of them had anything to do with LeeAnna’s disappearance.
In 2020, Chisholm Police Chief Vern Manner said, “We still have several persons of interest, but we cannot call them suspects because we don’t have any evidence. But we have people that we can’t clear out either.”
