Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford - Cautionary Tales Presents: You Cannot Save Me From All Things

Episode Date: September 17, 2024

In the beautiful mountain town of Idyllwild, a wealthy widow named Dia Abrams suddenly vanishes from her home. She leaves behind her idyllic ranch, estranged children and a messy legal battle. Two men in her life, her son and a man who claims to be her fiance, launch public campaigns to find her. But soon, their efforts – and stories – begin to unravel.  Enjoy this episode from Where's Dia? -- available wherever you listen to podcasts.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hello, Tim here. I want to introduce you to a new true crime series that is perfect for binging. In the summer of 2020, in the small mountain town of Idlewild, California, five women disappeared over just a few months. The journalist Lucy Sherriff was able to find out what had happened to all of the women. All that is but one. Wealthy widow Lydia Abrams, known as Deah. Friends and family ran through endless theories. Was Deah hurt? Did she run away? Had she been kidnapped? As Lucy discovered over the four years she's been investigating the mystery,

everyone it seems has a different version of events. You can hear them all in Where's Deah from Pushkin Industries and iHeart Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. But for now, sit back and listen to this preview. And soon, like me, you'll be wondering, where's dear? I found out about the missing women through a Facebook post. I hike a lot, mostly around Los Angeles, and always alone. I don't like to talk when my heavy boots are rhythmically pounding the switchback trails. I use Facebook groups called things like Girls Who Hike and Ladies Who Hike LA for trail recommendations and safety tips. Sometime in the summer of 2020, someone shared a news article in one of these groups and warned us all against hiking alone.

In Idlewild, a mountain town about 100 miles from me, five women had gone missing in the past two months. Idlewild is a really small community and a lot of people know each other there. So when people ended up going missing, it was just kind of, it was odd. This is Diana Fedder. She knows a thing or two about crime. She worked as a Secret Service agent for 23 years, investigating financial fraud. Diana was living in the Idlewild area when the disappearances began. So when that started happening, you know, all of us girls were kind of saying, OK, well, we're not going to go anywhere without somebody else if it's dark outside.

Just, you know, bring somebody with you. Idlewild is nothing like L.A. The town is tucked away in the San Jacinto mountains. Its official mayor is a golden retriever named Maximus Mighty Dog Mueller, the third. Really, that's the kind of town it is. A tourist playground, a mile high paradise, offering an idyllic escape from the city. Its main street is lined by ice cream shops, kitsch gift stores, and cute carved wooden bears. So all these women disappearing was pretty big news.

And because I'm a journalist, and because I just really wanted to know what happened, I figured I'd just start making some calls. It took me months, but eventually I managed to track down a friend, a granddaughter, a mother, of every single missing woman, and I found out what happened to them. One woman was elderly, with dementia. She got unlost and her car was found abandoned on a steep mountainside. Her remains were later discovered nearby. Three women were battling meth addictions. They'd run away from trouble, just packed up and left. There was an explanation for all of them.

Except for one. A woman named Lydia Cinchelot Abrams, who was known as Dia. When Dia went missing, it was a whole other ballgame. I'm like, this is one of our own. Dia was a woman whose story refused to be tied up in this neat little ending. She was a glamorous 65 year old widow of a millionaire with two kids in San Diego, horses and a ton of property. Oh, I admired the heck out of her. Let me tell you, she's a woman who was confident about herself,

always giving compliments to others, always telling other people they were beautiful and how wonderful they were. But at the same time, this petite woman could open up a can of whoop-ass like no one I've ever seen. She had no problem calling the people out. If she felt they were lying to her or they were doing something wrong or not being good people, if that makes sense. They seemed an unlikely pair. Diana is a motorbike-riding, leather-wearing Southerner who also calls herself Lady Fed,

and Dia the blonde, blue-eyed Californian. But when they met, Diana says they clicked immediately. She was a private person, and she wasn't one to make friends with a lot of people easily. So if she allowed you in her little circle, then she felt that you were worthy, you know? When Dia went missing, Ida Wilde wasn't the same. Not for Diana or another woman in town, Julie Stanford. Along with Dia, they've made this little trio, this sort of girl gang,

like the kind you'd see at high school. Julie and I have spent hours and hours and hours going over every scenario that it could possibly be, and we came down to the same thing. She did not leave over on a court. I've spent the past four years investigating what happened to Diya, and if there's one thing I've learned, it's this. We don't like unanswered questions.

When someone goes missing, they leave a vacuum, and everyone left behind scrambles to fill that space with reasons why or explanations of how. To make sense of things. Anything to achieve that neat little ending that I too was looking for. When Dia went missing, she didn't get to tell her own story. Her narrative has been crafted by friends, family, lovers, and yes, even enemies. And it's left to us to decide whose version of events we believe. This isn't just a story about Dia. It's also a story about everyone she left behind. I'm Lucy Sheriff. And this is Where's Dia.

Episode 1, You Cannot Save Me From All Things. There wasn't much about Dia Abrams out there. Like her friend Diana said, she seemed to be a private person. But I did come across a video by a local CBS reporter, David Godfredson. He'd interviewed a man named Keith Harper, who said he was Dia's fiance. It's a bit hard to make out David's questions in the video. It was 2020 after all, so he was wearing a mask. But Keith diligently responds with short, to-the-point answers. And you had plans to marry her? Yes.

24th of July. And where? Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Keith and the reporter were sitting across from each other at Bonita Vista Ranch, Dia's sprawling home. Bright green trees and sunshine filled the frame around Keith. He had a craggy, rugged face. The face of someone who'd been out in the sun his whole life.

Why do you want to marry her? She's an awesome person. She's the person that I have looked for all my life. I watched his body language. His bright blue eyes flitted around as he described his efforts to look for deer. The interview was posted on YouTube. There were a lot of comments, and many of them were not sympathetic. Here's a couple. He knows way more than he's letting up. I don't trust that old man. And even, this guy has the perfect opportunity to get away with murder. The reporter asked Keith if he had anything to do with Deer's disappearance.

Absolutely not. How can you prove that? I can prove that because I love the woman. I have no reason to bring harm to her. I love that woman. I had to speak with Keith Harper myself. I struggled to find his contact details online. And eventually I went up to Idleworld and asked around.

There were a bunch of missing persons posters on wooden notice boards around the town. One of them had Diaz' face on it. There were two numbers listed, one for a Julia and the other one for a Harper. Oh, hi. Is that Mr. Harper? Yeah.

Hi. My name's Lucy Sheriff. So I called him. And I wondered if you would be willing to talk to me quickly. What questions do you have? Obviously, I had a lot. We talked for almost an hour. I found out he likes to be known as Harper.

And so from now on, that's what I'll call him. He told me he was still searching for Dia, and he was worried that she was going to be forgotten by the police, that she'd just become another cold case. The hardest part, he said, was not knowing. You can deal with death if there is a death. Or you can deal with she left on there is a death. Or you can deal with, she left on an old court, it's her choice. You know, I can deal with that. I can deal with all of that.

But not knowing, it's a hollow. You have a hard time feeling it. Harper was an open book. He didn't seem to be anything like the guy who'd appeared on the CBS interview. I remember feeling this immense sympathy for him. He sounded so heartbroken. I can't imagine how difficult it must be to not know. And unless you've been through something like that, you'll never know.

You'll never, ever, ever know. Because it leaves a pit in your stomach and in your heart that never gets healed. Halpa told me, D.N. knew how to use a gun. I keep going back that she was independent, she was capable. You know, I watched her kill ravelers, I watched her kill five ravelers on day and she has no fear. I mean, the girl stand next to one and shoot it. A glamorous blonde who carried a gun, shot at rattlesnakes and ran a sprawling ranch. I mean, Dea kind kinda sounded like a badass.

But over these years I've peeled back these layers. And she was a complicated character. Even now, it's like Deer refuses to be summed up in one neat sentence. She doesn't fit into any classic archetypes or tidy clichés. Every new person I've spoken to opened another door to another possibility about what might have happened. Every conversation raised another version of events that didn't quite add up, another puzzle piece that didn't seem to fit. Dear disappeared on Saturday, June 6th, 2020.

I've revisited that one weekend over and over because everyone has their own account of how things went down at Benito Vista Ranch, Dia's 115-acre gated mountain paradise. I'm going to come back to these couple of days a lot throughout the season. So pay close attention. The timeline of the day Dear went missing is spotty to say the least.

But there's one thing we know for sure. Around 9am on Saturday June 6th, Dear went over to a neighbour's house to deliver cinnamon rolls. The door cam footage was later leaked to CBS. — Now for the first time we are seeing video of the former La Jolla resident recorded just hours before she vanished. — I watched the grainy picture in its eerie silence. Dia wearing an oversized chunky black shirt, her long blonde hair loose,

ringing on the doorbell, a box of rolls in hand. When Dia realizes her neighbor isn't going to answer, she puts the box on some kind of ledge next to the door. The whole scene is ringed with a black circular border, like I'm looking through a fisheye lens, watching Dia's final known movements. Deer walks away, and that's it.

The one other thing I know for sure from that day is that around 2.30pm Deer texted Diana, her motorcycle riding friend, about window cleaner recommendations because she was renting out some of her properties. She was happy as heck. We had her house lined up for Airbnb and we were getting hits on it. You might be wondering, why would the widow of a millionaire be doing the Airbnb hustle? And that's a great question, with a pretty complex answer that I'll fully get into later.

All you need to know for now is that Dia felt she was not in a good place financially, or by some accounts emotionally. She was in a dispute with her children over the estate of her husband, who had died a few years prior. So on June 6th, Dia texted Diana, and I've seen those messages. And then it all goes dark. That's the last evidence I have of what Dia did that day, because everything that happened on Saturday after that string of texts is according to Harper. You know, it seemed to be a typical day, but I was pushing hard to get ready to go to Colorado. And so, you know, we were making sure that everything was being prepared. And I remember

I was down in the meadow, mowing the meadow, and at lunchtime, which was two o'clock for us because we didn't eat breakfast until probably around 10. I think in at two, we had lunch and she said, have you got a minute? I can talk to you. And I wished that I had listened because, you know, she had talked about how she felt there was a risk with her children. According to Harper and Diana, Dia was scared of her children. It was all to do with this battle over her late husband's estate. The kids wanted it all, and they might go to extreme lengths to keep not only all of their father's money, but

Dia's multi-million dollar ranch too. Also, her friends told me. And if anything, I kind of passed that off thinking that her children would not do anything to her. And she said, do you have a minute? I can talk with you. And I said, hon, can we talk this evening? I said, I've got the meadow to do, and it's going to take me till dark before I get done. I leave, go back to the meadow. And at 430, I did not get this text because I was on the tractor, and I did not hear it.

But she texts me at 43030 and what she says is, Harper, you cannot save me from all things, even if you believe you can, you can. You cannot save me from all things. Even if you believe you can, you can't. I've never seen this text. I've asked. But Harper told me the police took his phone and won't give it back. According to his version of events, he came in from mowing the meadow at 7.15pm and dear was nowhere to be seen. He thought she was out exercising her horses.

You know, I thought, well, I'll just call her and see what else she has. I called and then I could hear her phone ringing upstairs. So I go upstairs thinking she was up there because sometimes she gets migraines and she'll lay down. But she was not anywhere in the house, but her phone was plugged in. Her purse was sitting on the kitchen counter. He says he then went to see if Deah's truck was outside. And when the truck was still parked where it was, then I started to do a search of the properties.

Harper told me he searched other cabins and various sheds and storage units on the property and that in the early hours of the morning, he stopped searching and went to bed. The next day, Deer was still nowhere to be found, making Harper the last person to see her alive. You know, obviously, when you're the last person to say it, I've always become the Sustah.

We'll be right back. Early on Sunday morning when Harper woke up, Deer was still missing. Her phone, purse and truck were all at the ranch. Harper says he continued his search immediately. And that's when I went and I talked to the highway controlman. He said, Harper, do you call the sheriff? And he said, I'll tell you what, they're not to do anything for probably 70 hours before they act because people show up. They just disappear. And many of them come back within that time frame so they don't get really excited.

Before we get into what happened next, I want to take a minute to address the idea that you have to wait a certain amount of time to report someone missing. You've probably heard of it on a TV show or in a movie, but it's complete rubbish. You can report someone missing right away. After Harper spoke to the California Highway Patrol officer, news began to spread. Diana Fedder, Dia's friend, got wind that Harper was trying to get in touch with her. So I was able to call him and I said, what's going on?

He goes, well, she didn't come home last night. Is she with you? I said, no, she's not with me. But that's typical of Dia. If she didn't want to go home, she'd either spend the night with a friend or she'd spend the night at her Garner Valley house. At 8.24 am on Sunday, a call was made from the ranch to the cops to report a missing person. I'm not sure who made that call, But the cops don't show until later the following day. Meanwhile, Diana rallied a search party.

Army veterans who belonged to her motorcycle club, Dears Idlewild friends, and neighbours from a Christian youth camp across the road. So it was pretty quick when people all started showing up. We all started making phone calls, trying to get people to come over and help. Some of the people who were searching assumed Deah had gone off hiking and just hurt herself.

She's either up the hill, you know, walking up the hill and she got lost, or she hurt herself and she can't come down. But there was a growing list of clues that made this seem unlikely. Her phone and her guns were at the house, things she always took hiking. And there was something else that was very off. Dears dog Ruby was still there. Ruby was a mixed mutt, white with black spots and corgi-sized. She was ill too, on a very specific diet and lots of medication. And that was the number one thing. She would never have

left Ruby at all. She always took Ruby everywhere. I don't care where she went. Even to her attorney's office she brought Ruby. If she went to the store she brought Ruby. If she was going to Lowe's she brought Ruby. The search was well underway when Dia's's 30-year-old son, Clinton Abrams, showed up at the ranch with some friends. — And I had never met him before. And all I could think about is I'm looking at this young guy that, you know, looks like a college frat boy.

He's not crying. He's not like overly emotional. Everybody went searching for Dia. He didn't do anything. He just stood there. So it was, it was like, well, if my mom or my dad or my child or whoever was missing, I'd be out there. I'm not going to just stand here and wait for somebody to bring me news. But he just stood there.

Like he wanted people to pity him. You know, he, he didn't act like an individual who was worried about their mother's welfare, period. I've spoken with Clinton, by the way. act like an individual who was worried about their mother's welfare. Period. I've spoken with Clinton, by the way. He described his actions that day very differently. You'll hear from him later on. But in the meantime, the search party had no luck finding any trace of Dia. Soon, people began to disperse. Later that night, Diana says she got another call. I had gone home and Harper was calling and he was upset. I said, are you going to be okay?

He's like, no. I said, do you need me to come out there? He goes, do you mind? I said, no, that's fine. So I came out and I sat at the house and he was kind of like a zombie, you know? Like, acted the part of like something's wrong. That night, Diana stayed over at the ranch. It's now Monday, June 8th, two days since Deah was last seen

and there was no sign of the cops. Any officer will tell you that the first 48 hours is crucial in a missing persons case. It's when investigators have the best chance of following up on leads, because the information is fresh in everyone's minds. It's the best chance you have of finding somebody. And yet, the cops wait until Monday afternoon to arrive on the scene. And before they even get to the ranch, Harper says they called him to say they were coming. They call me and they tell me that they are going to be there at 8.30 in the morning.

When they get there, they said, we're shutting the ranch down and we will take over the search. If you've got anything, you may want to get it moved, because anything that's on the property will stay there. I talked to three people who were there that day, who all said the cops didn't show up until the afternoon. And when they finally did show, Diana says they made some frustrating decisions.

Well, they immediately came onto the property and kicked everybody off, you know, didn't look around at anybody or say, okay, well, who's the person that contacted the sheriff's department or, hey, who's Diana or, hey, who's this person? They didn't even take my name. Diana was especially upset because people started leaving without being questioned by the police. You know, yes, I was never a police officer, but I was a federal agent for 23 years. And I felt that the investigation could have been handled better. By the way, I've spoken with other people who were on the ranch the day of the search

and who said it took the Riverside Sheriff's Department three years to get in touch and ask them what they saw. Anyways, when the cops called off their search that night at 10.35pm, they handed over the keys to the entire ranch to Clinton and Crisara, Dia's children. The cops left behind an affidavit and a search warrant for the ranch. I found something surprising in those documents. A second address was listed. Diana Fedder's house. I haven't been able to confirm with the cops whether they searched her property.

She says they didn't. It did make me wonder though, why would they want to search her house? I also read through the list of all the items, the potential evidence that the cops had confiscated. There was a Netgear router, which, among other things, would have info about which cell phones were connected to the Wi-Fi, and any activity from security cameras. There was a piece of toilet paper, a band-aid, and tan bedsheets, which the cops noted

might have blood stains on them. There were spent bullet shell casings, and lastly, two handwritten notes. I was desperate to know more about this evidence. Spent bullet casings, handwritten notes. It felt tantalising to be this close and yet not know the significance of it all. But the police won't share any more information. In fact, I've had little luck getting much out of the cops at all. I've emailed, called, texted, and they've been so tight-lipped

about what happened that weekend and their investigation at large. It's been incredibly frustrating. You'd think the first person the cops would question would be Harper. After all, as he said himself, the last person to see a missing person alive is usually a suspect. But they didn't.

Actually, let me make that clear. They couldn't question Harper. Because sometime on Monday morning, before the cops show up, Harper left. He took off for New Mexico in his white Ford motor home with Deer's dog, Ruby, who according to Deer's friends, Harper didn't even like. I asked Harper about this. Well, I had a tax bill I had to take care of. It was supposed to be taken care of a week before. And we were going to do that when we were heading to Colorado in Arizona. I have a ranch there as well. So to reiterate, he says he had a tax bill to take care of in Arizona. And that's why he left two days after his fiance disappeared. But Harper gave Diana an entirely different reason the morning that he left.

We were having coffee and we went over to the trail to take a look again to see if she could be over there. And he told me he had to go back. I think he said Arizona or New Mexico. I can't remember which state it was that he had to go back to that part on bloggy on, but he told me about his probation. Probation. Diana says Harper told her he had to go and check in with a parole officer. I asked Harper about this too.

No, I heard that too and I don't know where the hell she got that. I don't know where it comes from. When I was in Arizona, I was talking with the sheriff's office all the time until I was told by Diana that they had come and the ranch was closed. He said he took his RV so he'd have somewhere to stay when he came back to California because the cops told him they were shutting up the ranch. I've done a lot of research, and I can't find anything that Harper would have been on probation for at that time. So that doesn't add up. That leaves the tax bill story, which is a little odd. Why would you have to drive hundreds of miles to go take care of a tax bill? And

why would it be so urgent that you have to leave two days after your fiancé goes missing? As I waded into this story, I found that getting clarity on what might have happened to Dia that day was not so straightforward. Over the past few years, I've been down endless rabbit holes that have led nowhere and hit countless brick walls. They have been many times where I've been close to walking away from this story. But what's kept me coming back to this, like some bad habit I can't quite kick,

is the ridiculous amount of times I've shouted, wait, what? Out loud in my living room, to myself, after finding out some insane new piece of information. It's so hard to know who to trust, because almost everyone I speak to seems to have something to gain from Dia's disappearance. Everyone wants their version of events to be believed, to go down as the truth. What happened to DIA has become one of those internet whodunit yarns that attracts armchair sleuths, a strange chorus of anonymous people on Reddit and YouTube, all obsessing over the evidence. I mean, I guess I've become one of them too. The theories of what happened range from plausible to wild speculation.

I listen to all of them, hoping that somewhere in that pile of theories lies the truth. And knowing that very likely, one of the people I'm speaking to is lying. Coming up this season on Where's Dear. People I didn't know were in our family home. I had gone up there ever since I was a little kid, and now suddenly, you know, the people who I suspect have murdered her are moving in. I said, well, this guy's acting really suspicious, and I have all kinds of alarms going off in my head.

There's something not right. We were showing Harper the place, and we took him down the road and looked, and he just thought Dom was signed. He had every reason to harm her, but so did Kersara and Clinton just because so much money's involved. You can't trust anything the man says at all.

Like, literally, he just, he's allergic to the truth. This story is getting ready to blow wide open. If you want some information, we can talk. Where's Dear is written and hosted by me, Lucy Sherriff. Our producer is Daphne Chen. Editing by Karen Shikurji. Production assistance from Joey Fishground. Fact checking by Lauren Vespoli. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith.

Original score, sound design and mastering by Echo Shores. Where's Dear is a co-production of Pushkin Industries and iHeart Media.