LeeAnna "Beaner" Warner: Missing Since June 14, 2003

On the afternoon of June 14, 2003, in the Iron Range town of Chisholm, a 5-year-old girl set out on a walk that should have taken no more than a few minutes. Leeanna Warner left her family’s gray stucco duplex around 4:30 p.m. to visit a friend who lived a block and a half away. She was barefoot, wearing a sleeveless denim dress. She carried nothing with her. According to investigators, there was no indication that she felt unsafe or that anything about the walk was unusual. Children in the neighborhood routinely moved from house to house. It was a warm Saturday. By all accounts, it was ordinary.

Leeanna arrived at her friend’s home and knocked on the door. No one answered. The family had gone out. Two neighbors later told police they saw Leeanna walking westbound on Southwest Second or Third Street sometime between 5:00 and 5:15 p.m., heading back toward her own home. That was the last confirmed sighting of her. By 5:30 p.m., her mother, Tiffany Kaelin Whittaker, known as Kaelin Warner, began to worry when Leeanna failed to return. She asked neighborhood children to help look. They checked yards, porches, and nearby houses. The search widened as time passed and daylight faded. When there was still no sign of the child, Warner called police between 8:40 and 9:00 p.m. By then, investigators would later conclude, whatever had happened to Leeanna had likely already occurred.

Law enforcement responded with an urgency that reflected both the child’s age and the narrowing window of time. Officers, volunteers, helicopters, and bloodhounds were deployed. Tracker dogs picked up Leeanna’s scent and followed it through the neighborhood to the edge of a roadway. There, the scent ended. There were no signs of a struggle, no discarded clothing, no witnesses who reported seeing Leeanna enter a vehicle or interact with an adult. The abrupt disappearance troubled investigators from the outset. In cases where children wander, officials say, they are typically found quickly. Exposure, drowning, or injury usually leave a trail. In this case, there was none.

Authorities initially focused on nearby Longyear Lake, a shallow body of water close to where Leeanna was last seen. Divers searched it repeatedly. The water was clear. Nothing surfaced. Over the following weeks, the theory that Leeanna had simply wandered off grew increasingly difficult to sustain. Investigators began to consider a far rarer possibility: a stranger abduction. Statistically, such cases account for a tiny fraction of missing-child reports nationwide, but officials privately acknowledged that the absence of evidence pointed away from accident and toward intervention by another person. As one investigator put it, what was missing had become the most significant clue.

The investigation expanded rapidly. Neighbors were interviewed, some multiple times. Homes and vehicles in the area were searched. Authorities from the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension joined local police and sheriff’s deputies. Tips poured in, eventually numbering in the thousands. Officers identified and sought to interview more than 130 convicted sex offenders across northeastern Minnesota, emphasizing that they were not suspects but potential sources of information. None yielded a break in the case.

Investigators also asked the public for help identifying several individuals seen in the area around the time Leeanna disappeared. One was a white man in his mid-30s, about 5 feet 10 inches tall and 155 pounds, with bleached blond hair and a dark tattoo of a star or sun on his right arm, seen walking in the neighborhood. Another was a Black man in his 20s or 30s with a shaved or bald head driving a two-door Cadillac described as navy blue or maroon and blue. A third was a white man with curly black hair driving an older, rusty brown pickup truck with a topper. Authorities repeatedly stressed that these individuals were not suspects and may have had no connection to the case. None were ever identified.

As weeks passed, scrutiny inevitably turned toward Leeanna’s parents. Investigators examined their backgrounds, including past domestic disputes involving Leeanna’s father and his former wife that had occurred years earlier. Mutual restraining orders had been sought at the time, and allegations were made on both sides. Law enforcement officials said the incidents raised no red flags and were not considered relevant. Leeanna’s parents were interviewed multiple times and were never asked to take polygraph tests. Authorities said they were not suspects. Still, the scrutiny was intense, and the family faced persistent public questioning over why police had not been called sooner that evening, a delay the parents attributed to the norms of small-town life and the belief that their child had simply wandered to another familiar place.

In August 2003, the investigation took a turn that would further complicate the case. Matthew James Curtis, 24, a Chisholm-area man who sometimes stayed near Leeanna’s neighborhood, was arrested on unrelated child pornography charges. Because of the nature of those allegations, police questioned him multiple times about Leeanna’s disappearance and processed his pickup truck for DNA. No evidence linked him to the child. In September 2003, the day before he was scheduled to appear in court, Curtis was found dead in a gravel pit several miles outside town with a plastic bag over his head. The medical examiner ruled the death a suicide by asphyxiation. The timing fueled widespread speculation that Curtis had been murdered and that his death was staged. Authorities said there was no evidence to support that theory. The death investigation was closed, and Curtis was ruled out in Leeanna’s case.

As the months wore on, frustration mounted. Authorities returned to Longyear Lake in late October 2003 and began pumping water out in an effort to expose shoreline areas that had previously been submerged. Winter conditions forced the operation to stop before it reached its intended depth. Nothing of evidentiary value was found. A renewed search in the summer of 2004 also produced no results. After that, large-scale search efforts ceased. No further operations were scheduled.

The case remained open, but inactive. Leads dwindled. Public attention faded. Leeanna’s parents continued to say they believed she was alive, possibly taken for the purpose of illegal adoption, a theory investigators said was unsupported by evidence but also impossible to disprove. Leeanna, described as outgoing, fearless, and unusually independent for her age, became a memory preserved in photographs and missing-person posters. What has never changed is the narrowness of the window in which she disappeared. Somewhere between the moment she turned back toward home and the time her mother began searching, a child vanished from a residential street in daylight without leaving a trace. More than two decades later, investigators still cannot say how, or why, or by whom. The case of Leeanna Warner endures not because of what is known, but because of what is not, and because modern policing, with all its resources and reach, has never been able to fill in the silence left behind by a five-minute walk that never ended.