Our card this week is Leanna Warner, the Ace of Hearts from Minnesota.

Leanna’s case is one of those that once you’ve heard about it, you will never forget

about it.

She was just five years old and not even two blocks away from her family’s house when

she disappeared in the middle of the day.

The mystery has haunted Leanna’s family and hometown for 18 years.

I’m Ashley Flowers, and this is The Deck.

Saturday, June 14th, 2003 was a pretty typical summer day in the small town of Chisholm,

Minnesota.

Kaylin Warner and her five-year-old daughter Leanna spent the afternoon at a community-wide

yard sale in their neighborhood, just going from yard to yard buying stuff.

But by 4.30 in the afternoon, they had pulled into their driveway at home.

After she parked the car, Kaylin grabbed an armful of their rummage sale finds to take

and Leanna asked her mom if she could go over to the Quirks, a nearby family’s house

to play.

You see, Leanna went to the Quirks almost every day because they had four young daughters

close to Leanna’s age, and she loved to hang out with them.

At first, Kaylin said no, but Leanna begged.

And eventually, her mom relented and told her, fine, but you’ve got one hour.

Be home by 5.30.

Leanna walking alone over to a neighbor’s house by herself was not unusual, and anyone

who grew up in a tiny Midwest town might agree.

The walk took less than five minutes.

Here’s Chisholm Chief of Police Vernon Manor to explain just how short of a route Leanna

took that day through her family’s quiet, relatively safe neighborhood.

She walked half a block to the west, a full block south, and then just a couple of doors

down across the street to this friend’s house.

Chisholm’s a small-knit community.

Everybody knows everybody, you know, around 5,000 people.

When 5.30 rolled around and Leanna hadn’t returned home yet, Kaylin sent Leanna’s

older sister over to the Quirks to retrieve her, but she returned within a few minutes

and told her mom that there was no one home at the Quirks.

That news was not what Kaylin expected or wanted to hear.

Immediately, she dropped what she was doing and went outside and started looking for Leanna.

At first, Kaylin figured Leanna was using a different route to walk home, or maybe she’d

stopped at another neighbor’s house.

Between 5.30 and 6.30, Kaylin knocked on every neighbor’s door looking for Leanna, but

no one had seen her.

Now, at that point, Kaylin had not called police or even called her husband Chris to

tell him that his youngest daughter was missing.

Chris was at work for a local ambulance service, and she thought that calling either him or

police would be an overreaction because, truly, she believed any second her baby girl would

walk up and everything would be fine.

As she canvassed the neighborhood, some neighbors out of concern joined to help her search.

So many of Leanna’s neighbors knew her, and specifically, they knew her by her nickname

Beaner.

This is how Vernon Manor described her.

Tomboy, plain as sand, very outgoing, not afraid to get dirty, not afraid to speak to

people, very, very friendly and outgoing.

So as people from the community walked around looking for her, they shouted,

Beaner and Leanna, but they got no reply.

By 7.30, Kaylin was growing really worried about Leanna, and she started to wonder if

her daughter had wandered into the woods and gotten lost, or worse, she knew there was

a lake nearby and maybe something had happened there.

At quarter till 8, Chris Warner returned home.

When he learned what was going on, he immediately joined the search for his daughter.

And finally, at 8.50, that’s when the Warners finally called 911.

They went around, didn’t call 911 right away because they, yeah, she’s got to be somewhere

in a friend’s house in the neighborhood.

So they went around for a little bit before panic started to set in that they hadn’t found

her.

So they called 911 and our officers are first on scene.

Chisholm officers got there about 10 minutes later and immediately started searching for

Leanna.

They started inside the Warner home and worked their way out.

Though it was June in northern Minnesota, by 9 o’clock there was only a sliver of

light left for emergency responders to work with.

So at 10.15, firefighters and scent dogs joined the efforts to try and find Leanna.

From the Warner house, the dogs tracked Leanna’s scent to Longyear Lake, which was a popular

neighborhood lake just two blocks from the family’s home.

It’s the same lake that Kaylin worried about just hours before.

Here’s the thing though, her scent being there didn’t necessarily mean she went there

that day because her mom told authorities that Leanna had just been there on Friday

afternoon with her family.

So there was no telling when her scent was from.

The dogs also tracked Leanna’s scent inside and outside of the Warner’s home.

No surprise there.

But what really surprised everyone was that the dogs did not pick up her scent at all

leading to the Cork’s house.

That made investigators think that she had never made it that far or at least never went

inside their home.

In those first few hours, searchers were trying to stay hopeful that maybe Leanna was just

scared or maybe hiding as a joke.

So one of the first places they did a more formal search of was the Warner property where

Leanna would have felt most comfortable.

Their house was searched, their garage was searched multiple times.

But besides the little girl’s regular belongings and normal everyday things, there was no sign

of her.

Just when police were feeling like they were hitting a wall, they got some helpful information

after regrouping and establishing a timeline of everything they’d learned so far after

canvassing the neighborhood.

Now up until this point, Kaylin thought that she had been the last person to see her daughter

when she walked off from their home that afternoon around 4.30.

But it turns out a few neighbors did lay eyes on her after that.

Two neighbors told police that they happened to be outside around 5.15 that day when Leanna

arrived at the Cork’s front door.

That timeline left police puzzled since it shouldn’t take anyone, not even a five-year-old,

45 minutes to walk a few blocks.

So they make note of the time gap and they conduct interviews.

The neighbors say they saw Leanna knock several times but never saw anyone answer the door.

The witnesses told police that they remember seeing Leanna sort of turn away when she realized

no one was home, but they didn’t actually see her walk home.

Then after that, one more of the Cork’s neighbors said that they saw Leanna walking down the sidewalk.

She knocks on the door, nobody answers.

She walks directly across the street where Wayne Crable is working on his vehicle’s truck.

Wayne has a young black Lab in the yard and the dog is young and aggressive and jumps

on kids, so he’s on a leash.

But as she’s walking up, he walks up and grabs the dog to make sure it doesn’t jump on Leanna

and then takes the dog and brings it back into the yard and change it up short.

He’s the last person to actually ever see Leanna.

So given that information, police decide to search the Cork’s house with their permission.

By the time the search for Leanna was in full swing, the Corks were home and explained to

authorities that earlier in the day they’d been shopping at Target, which was in Virginia,

Minnesota, which is like 30 minutes east of Chisholm.

So that’s why they weren’t home when Leanna had stopped by.

Authorities also searched Wayne Crable’s house because he consented and was fully cooperative

with police.

Despite these two exhaustive searches, police found no trace of Leanna in either location.

Officers even went so far as to interview Wayne more closely, but he said his interaction

with Leanna was brief because he went back to working on his truck after putting his

dog in the backyard.

He said, I didn’t see where she went from after that because I just went back to the

under the hood of my truck.

Did Leanna say anything to him?

Not that I recall.

There were dozens of people canvassing Leanna’s neighborhood well after dark, but eventually

Kaylin, Chris, their friends and neighbors had to try and get some sleep.

As they retreated to their houses late on Saturday night, their hope was fading and

dread really started to creep in.

The Warners left their front porch light on in case Leanna wandered home in the middle

of the night, but she never did.

So it was overwhelming to the citizens and it was a numb feeling that something like

this could happen, just a disbelief.

And yeah, we had great turnout for people to volunteer, but there was also that buzz

of can you believe this is happening here?

A renewed search effort started at 4 a.m. Sunday.

The Minnesota State Patrol got an aerial search underway at first light from a helicopter

equipped with infrared technology.

The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension sent out a statewide alert and the Minnesota

Crime Alert Network faxed out information about Leanna to law enforcement agencies all

around the state.

The bulletin said that Leanna had brown hair cut into a bob and she was wearing just a

denim dress when she left her home that day.

She had left barefoot walking.

Not unusual for her to be barefoot.

Not unusual at all.

It was a fight always for her to put her shoes on.

An amber alert was not issued because at the time, law enforcement had no real evidence

that Leanna had been abducted.

I mean, that was definitely a thought on everyone’s mind.

But in that moment, police did not have enough credible information yet to officially issue

the alert.

Police Chief Manor admits that behind closed doors, investigators were beginning to think

there was a criminal element to Leanna’s disappearance.

With every passing day, our theory just grows on that.

So we prepare ourselves for the worst.

Police and search and rescue personnel did a more formal grid search Sunday after the

sun came up.

Again, starting inside the Warner home, working their way out.

We dove into the parents first.

You look at the last person who saw the person alive and the person who found them.

They had to be ruled out.

The parents obviously had to be ruled out.

There were a lot of rumors in the beginning that the parents did this.

All those were looked into.

Despite those types of rumors that swirl around a small town, Chief Manor said they eliminated

Leanna’s parents of any wrongdoing pretty quickly because Chris had been at work and

Kaylin had not wavered from her original story.

On top of that, their concern for their missing daughter seemed genuine to police.

And then, the Warners told police something that made them wonder if a predator had been

lurking around Chisholm all summer.

The Warners told police that a few weeks before she’d vanished, Leanna had come home with

a new case full of Barbies and Barbie clothes that didn’t belong to her.

And when her parents asked her about it, she said that a little old lady had given them

to her.

And then one night, just before she vanished, Leanna packed a suitcase and said she was

going to go live with her new family at their house.

Chris and Kaylin said that on another occasion, they’d found Leanna sleeping in her closet

because she said there were monsters outside her window.

Investigators took Chris and Kaylin’s information about Leanna’s odd behaviors seriously, but

they also had to consider the fact that Leanna was a five-year-old with a vivid imagination.

But you have to wonder…

Is there any chance someone was grooming her to trust them?

There is.

Obviously, those comments are very alarming to us.

So did she make that up?

Or did she say it was somebody grooming her?

You know, we had the Barbie doll case that showed up.

It was a pink plastic Barbie doll case with some miscellaneous toys and stuff in there.

That showed up.

They had no idea where she got that from.

They figured she stole it from one of her friends.

Chief Manor said that they kept the information in mind as they continued investigating and

took the Barbie case as evidence.

But beyond that, there wasn’t much they could do with the lead.

It was tough to corroborate and, at the time, felt like a dead end.

In 2003, Vernon Manor was a Lieutenant Investigator with the Chisholm Police Department.

The weekend Leanna went missing is etched into his memory forever.

He had been out of town when the 911 call came in that Saturday, so on Sunday, when

he was back in the area and Leanna had still not been found, he was called in to help with

the investigation.

He went straight to the Warners’ home and told her mom, Kalen, that she needed to stay

there in case Leanna came home.

St. Louis County deputies joined the efforts, and state agents also started to trickle in

to help.

Chisholm is in a big iron mining area, so searchers took to wells and abandoned mine

shafts using cameras and infrared technology.

Police set up a command post at an elementary school in town to make sure an organized system

was in place to keep track of what tips were coming in, what search areas had been covered,

and who had been interviewed.

But despite all of this work and coordination, another full day went by with no sign of Leanna.

This really rocked, rocked the town, and everybody kind of held on, especially that

summer held on.

Your kids are a little tighter.

By Monday, things at the command post were in full swing.

Volunteers helped answer phones, and locals dropped off water and food for searchers.

It was around this time that Chief Manor and other law enforcement officers involved began

to internally switch their mindset from a rescue operation to a recovery.

About four or five days into it, you start thinking, obviously she hasn’t appeared.

And as far as the searching of the area, that grid search starts getting bigger and bigger

and bigger as they start moving out.

How far could a five-year-old girl walk out?

More or less, their focus changed from looking for Leanna hiding in a tree to searching for

her body.

As all of that was happening, officers were collecting information about sex offenders

that lived in Leanna’s neighborhood and any others within a five-mile radius.

Other tips had come in suggesting that investigators look into a group of people who’d been in

town for a charity motorcycle ride and concert on the day Leanna vanished.

Some other tips came in about a couple of cars that were seen in the area that locals

didn’t recognize, that they thought could have been related to that event, or maybe

were just totally random sightings that felt out of place.

Police worked these leads for six days, and on Friday, June 20th, they announced at a

press conference that they were looking for specific information about a light blue car

with an antenna mounted in the middle of the trunk.

They didn’t say why they were focused on this particular car, but I have to think that

one or more of those tips that came in they felt were credible and could have been about

these weird cars in the area.

At that press conference, police also adjusted their timeline.

Up until that point, they weren’t 100% certain about when Leanna left home and when she knocked

on the quirk’s door, but they said that after doing multiple interviews with neighbors,

they were confident that Leanna walked away from her house at 4.35 p.m. and knocked on

the quirk’s door at 5.15.

That’s roughly 40 minutes.

Since it didn’t take that long to walk a block and a half, police wondered what took

her so long to get to the quirks.

At the press conference, police asked anyone with any information that could help fill

in the gap of time to call them.

By July 3rd, Leanna had been missing for almost three weeks, and police had investigated 1,000

leads and scrutinized the alibis of 130 sex offenders in the area.

Some of these individuals had been ruled out, but not all of them were cleared.

Later that month, police asked the public for help finding three men who might have

information helpful to the investigation.

They were registered sex offenders who had not yet provided alibis for the afternoon

of June 14th, but ultimately, information did come in and police eventually did rule

them out.

After that, the department expanded its sex offender interviews to include all registered

sex offenders in a 10-mile radius from the Warner home.

And not long after this second round of sex offender interviews got underway, police announced

that they were looking for a white man in his 30s who was 5'10", 155 pounds, with

a dark tattoo of a star or sun on his right arm, who was wearing blue jeans and a white

t-shirt on the day Leanna disappeared.

They said he had blonde, feathery hair and might have been in Leanna’s neighborhood

the day she vanished.

Also around that time, police announced that they were looking for another car of interest

— a maroon and blue Cadillac driven by a black man in his 20s or 30s with a shaved

head.

And finally, officers said that they wanted to find witnesses who might have seen a brown

rusty pickup driven by a white man with black curly hair.

So if you’re keeping track here, that’s three different cars, all of different makes

and models that authorities say they’re looking for that were possibly connected to

the case, and a couple of very different descriptions of men they wanted to talk to regarding the

investigation.

Police relied on the public to help them investigate these angles, but never gave their reasoning

for putting this information out there.

It was obvious they were casting wide nets to get any information they could.

By late July, Leanna’s disappearance had the attention of more than just local reporters.

News crews from around the region and other states came up to Chisholm and stayed there

for weeks, covering every development in the case.

Investigators continued to toss out more names as they ruled out area sex offenders, and

public pressure helped them expedite the process of getting those people’s alibis confirmed.

By August, two months after Leanna went missing, police got their first big break.

That’s when they zeroed in on a person of interest.

Police in Chisholm had been investigating a man named Matthew James Curtis for crimes

completely unrelated to Leanna’s disappearance, but crimes that made them concerned he could

be involved.

They’d been working a case against him for possession of child sex abuse material.

What’s scary is that he was practically neighbors with the Warner family.

He was left a couple houses down on the corner, not the corner she walked by when she left,

the opposite corner.

While executing a search warrant on his house, police found the child sex abuse material,

but they didn’t find any evidence linking him to Leanna.

Police had interviewed Matthew during a neighborhood canvass the day after Leanna went missing,

and again four days later, and he said that he knew nothing about her.

They were able to arrest him and charge him for having the illicit material, but he got

out on bond.

And again, the entire time he denied having anything to do with Leanna going missing.

In mid-September, the day before Matthew was due back in court, three men practicing archery

on U.S. Forest Service land outside Chisholm found him dead in his pickup truck with a

bag over his head.

The coroner said that he died of suffocation and all signs pointed to him taking his own

life.

That news made everyone in the area even more suspicious that Matthew might have been involved

in what happened to Leanna.

But when police got a chance to search his truck and house again, they still found no

evidence linking him to her.

I mean nothing, not a hair, not a fiber, zip.

Authorities had to chalk up the fact that he lived so close to her combined with his

charges as really just a strange coincidence.

North Manor said they never actually ruled Matthew out, but they also could never say

for sure that he had anything to do with her disappearance.

After Matthew’s death, investigators had to move on.

And by that time, they’d developed suspicions about another person of interest, a well-known

local criminal with a violent record named Bruce William Christensen.

Every time we get a lead, even if the lead seems to be regurgitated and the same lead

seems spun off, regurgitated, but a little bit of a twist on it, we investigate it because

it came from someone new, it came from…

So Bruce Christensen’s a great example of this.

Bruce’s name had come in from several tips that people had called into the police department’s

hotline.

The reports indicated that Bruce had seen Kaylin and Chris Warner out one night after

Leanna disappeared, and he screamed at them for people trying to blame him for what happened

to her.

When police tracked Bruce down and questioned him about the incident and what his alibi

was for the day Leanna vanished, he denied being involved, and provided a pretty solid

alibi.

And he was out of town, he was out of state, and family confirmed that.

By October, after getting all the necessary permits needed, investigators partially drained

Longyear Lake, which is where the dogs had picked up Leanna’s scent.

Now, none of the aerial searches had detected a body being in the lake, but to eliminate

the possibility of her having drowned, police wanted to do a really thorough search.

By this time, winter was creeping in, as it does every fall in northern Minnesota, so

they were almost done draining the lake when the water started to freeze over.

Because of that, they had to conduct the search with some water still in the lake, but from

a helicopter investigators could see all the way to the bottom, and Leanna’s body wasn’t

there.

No bodies were.

Because of the cold weather and lack of information coming in, police scaled back the search for

Leanna.

But the investigation into what happened to her continued.

They forged on tracking down and corroborating alibis for area sex offenders, and they worked

diligently to try to confirm all of those.

But around this time, the department got a frantic 911 call that made them pause.

It was from Leanna’s dad, Chris, but it had nothing to do with the disappearance of

his daughter.

When Chris called 911 in late 2003, he told police that his wife Kaylin had just tried

to run him over with their car.

When officers got to the scene, the couple admitted that they had a fight and Chris got

out and walked away.

According to reporting by the Associated Press, Kaylin said that she didn’t actually try

to hit her husband, but that the gear got stuck in the car and it went into him.

But police ended up charging her with a misdemeanor that she later pled guilty to.

Chief Manor said that alcohol was involved in the Warner’s altercation, but that the

incident didn’t change the course of the investigation into what happened to their

daughter.

Kaylin’s arrest was splashed all over the local news with headlines like,

Missing girl’s mom charged with trying to run over her husband.

A lot of people in town started to be less sympathetic towards the family.

But eventually things quieted down, thanks a lot in part to Jacob Wetterling’s mom.

She was quoted in the Minneapolis Star Tribune warning people to stop speculating because

most people don’t understand the toll a missing child takes on parents and marriages.

Police reiterated to reporters at the time that the Warners weren’t suspects in their

daughter’s case, and that incident between them over the car was completely unrelated.

The Warners had made up by the end of 2003 and continued to keep the porch light on at

their Chisholm home, just in case by some miracle Leanna found her way.

An entire year went by with not even a sighting of Leanna.

Around the one year mark, another big search for her was organized.

At least 50 volunteers combed through the woods and tall grasses in a grid search around

Chisholm, looking for any clues they might have missed before, but they turned up nothing.

According to reporting by the Associated Press that appeared in the Minneapolis Star Tribune,

in the fall of 2004 there was another blast of attention on the case when a local candidate

running for commissioner proposed an idea for anyone in the state of Minnesota who was

running for office that election cycle to hand out information and flyers about Leanna

as they campaigned door to door.

The Warners liked the idea, and a lot of political candidates voiced their support, but unfortunately

nothing significant came from it.

Then in 2005, police got what they thought would be their big break.

Hundreds of miles away in Idaho, a violent criminal named Joseph Duncan was arrested

and charged with abducting an 8-year-old and killing her whole family.

When police saw the news about Joseph’s arrest, they started looking into his travel history,

just curious to know if it was possible that he’d ever been anywhere near Leanna Warner’s

home in June of 2003.

He did have ties to Minnesota, but to the far western part of Minnesota.

But interestingly, when police looked into Joseph, they came across a disturbing website.

He kept an online blog where he wrote about the stigmas that came along with being labeled

as a sex offender.

You see, Joseph had spent some time in prison when he was a teen for sexually assaulting

a boy.

In one of his posts on this website from January 2004, he wrote that he was worried he would

be blamed for the disappearance of a little girl from Chisholm, Minnesota.

You know, that helped make people think that, well, here we go and we’ve got a monster we

can pin it on.

But even as good as Joseph looked as a suspect, police in Minnesota couldn’t place him in

Chisholm in June 2003.

They did.

It was actually, he was moved out quite quickly because of FBI and, you know, you had everybody

working that case.

And through travel records, credit card purchases, they were able to substantiate that while

he was in Minnesota, it was just on that western region.

By 2006, tips and leads in this case had crawled to a standstill.

Police released an age-progressed photo of Leanna because they were having a lot of tips

come in from people saying, hey, I saw a toddler at the grocery store who might have been Leanna.

Basically, people were forgetting that if Leanna was still alive by 2006, she wouldn’t

be five years old anymore.

She’d be eight and she would not have looked as young as she did when she disappeared.

The Warners also went on the news any chance they could to keep the public aware of their

daughter’s case.

But by 2008, the case was cold.

If you told me aliens abducted her, I couldn’t prove you wrong at this point.

If you believe in aliens, yep, it could have been.

Because I have nothing, this is the hardest part about this.

Then, out of the blue and to everyone’s surprise, someone confessed.

Someone police had heard of before.

Bruce Christensen.

Bruce was the guy who, years earlier, had been on investigators’ radar for yelling

at the Warners.

But his alibi at the time about being out of state when Leanna disappeared checked out.

Still, police decided to see what he had to say.

It was 2008 and he was in solitary confinement in a Minnesota prison on drug charges when

he was like, you know what, never mind, I actually did abduct Leanna.

Now, it’s important to know that while serving his time, Bruce had actually killed another

inmate.

After that, a judge had re-sentenced him for murder charges and tossed him into solitary

confinement.

Chief Manor said that Bruce was on such strict lockdown at the prison that he didn’t get

outdoor recreation time or any interaction with other inmates or guards.

When Bruce came forward claiming he killed Leanna, he provided specific details of where

authorities would find her body.

And at the time, he says he murdered her and buried her.

So Bruce was actually taken out of prison and brought to the area that he said he buried

Leanna Warner, which was extensively searched thereafter.

The area Bruce said that he buried Leanna was called Maple Hill, and it was in the nearby

town of Hibbing, Minnesota, which is just 10 minutes southwest of Chisholm.

When investigators dug at the spot where Bruce told them to, they found a bag under the soil

with what looked like remains in it.

But when they opened up the sack, what was inside was a huge letdown.

It was just a cat buried in that spot.

Bruce never said whether it was his cat or not.

How did he know about a cat grave?

I’m assuming it was his cat.

Police continued to search the Maple Hill area for more than a week, and they found

absolutely nothing.

In the end, when detectives pressed Bruce about his claims, he broke down and told them

the real truth.

He confessed to he made it all up because he wanted to get out of prison one more time

and see the light of day and smell fresh air.

Investigators were not happy with Bruce.

After all these years of exhaustive searches, a bored inmate who had nothing to lose decided

to send them on a wild goose chase.

The blunder with Bruce was a setback, but it didn’t stall the investigation entirely.

Even though Leanna’s case was still considered cold, detectives looked into every tip that

came in.

And that has been where Leanna’s case has stood for the past 14 years.

Chief Manor says there are no other missing children from Chisholm except Leanna.

She’s the town’s sweetheart and has never been far from everyone’s mind.

Local news outlets run anniversary reports here and there, but for the most part, news

coverage has halted.

The last big wave of media attention in the case was in May 2021, when People Magazine

ran a spread about it.

Chris and Kaylin Warner didn’t feel up to talking with us for this episode, and I can’t

imagine how many media outlets they’ve talked to over the years, and they’ve still gotten

no answers.

For years, people online have criticized them for letting Leanna walk to her friend’s

house alone.

They’ve been parent-shamed like no other.

But Chief Manor cuts them some slack because he says they’ve suffered enough.

It’s a quiet little town where everybody knows everybody, and what we do here versus

what people do in a bigger city are totally different.

The most recent tip Chief Manor’s department looked into came in 2020, when they got a

kind of bizarre call.

It was from a young woman claiming to be Leanna, and she wanted to speak with investigators.

But that girl herself called us and said, I think I’m Leanna Warner.

It obviously turned out not to be her, but that’s why we still have hope.

The woman had been adopted and wasn’t familiar with her lineage.

She said that she’d seen the age-progressed photo of Leanna and realized that she had

similar features to her.

To be absolutely sure, Chisholm Police took a sample of her DNA, and the results definitely

ruled her out as a possible match for Leanna.

As of today, the Chisholm Police Department say they’ve investigated 2,000 different

leads in Leanna’s case, but they’re waiting for the right one to come that will help them

make significant progress.

Somebody out there knows something.

Somebody knows a piece of information that will steer us in the right direction and bring

peace for this family.

And that somebody might be Leanna herself, without even knowing it.

Not a lot of cards that we come across give room for hope.

Usually it’s pretty clear what happened to the person, and now we’re just seeking justice.

But this case, you guys, in this case, I can’t shake the feeling that Leanna could really

be out there.

You know, they say that the most simple explanation is often the correct one.

Someone gave her that case of Barbie’s.

She talked about another family, and there were potentially people looking in her window.

Over the years, authorities have tried every avenue to try and get answers.

They even sent off that mysterious Barbie doll case to try and get DNA evidence, but

nothing has come from it.

Leanna would be 24 when this episode is released.

If you’re listening to this, please take a moment and go to thedeckpodcast.com and

look at the picture we have of Leanna.

Does that child resemble you or someone you knew as a child?

I know this sounds wild, but just last year, another case like this got solved because

a grown woman saw a picture of a child who went missing years before and thought, wow,

that really looks like I did as a kid.

Chief Manor says they won’t stop until Leanna is found, and they’re willing to look into

any tip, big or small.

Like I said, Leanna Warner would be in her mid-20s today, and despite the nonstop investigation

that’s been going on since 2003, police have no idea if she’s dead or alive.

A sweet little girl who had her whole life still ahead of her was taken, and the police

and the people of Chisholm, Minnesota, including her parents, won’t rest easy until they learn

her fate.

If you know anything about the 2003 abduction of Leanna Warner, please call the Chisholm

Police Department at 218-254-7915.

The Deck is an AudioChuck production with theme music by Ryan Lewis.

To learn more about The Deck and our advocacy work, visit thedeckpodcast.com.

So what do you think, Chuck?

Do you approve?