LeeAnna Warner

Case background and investigation

LeeAnna Susan Marie Warner, a five-year-old known to her family as "Beaner," left her home in Chisholm, Minnesota, around 4:30 p.m. on June 14, 2003, to visit a friend who lived roughly a block away. Finding no one home, she started back barefoot, wearing a sleeveless blue denim dress and a red garnet flower earring. She was last seen between 5:00 and 5:15 p.m. walking westbound on Southwest Second or Third Street. Her mother began looking for her by about 5:30 p.m. and contacted police that evening. LeeAnna has never been found.

The response grew into one of the largest search efforts in the region's history. More than 300 volunteers combed a four-mile radius alongside police, firefighters, and trackers with bloodhounds, checking garages, sheds, and abandoned mine pits on the Iron Range. Longyear Lake was searched extensively after a child's footprints were reported near its shore. According to the Charley Project, tracker dogs traced LeeAnna's scent to the edge of the road but lost it there — a detail consistent with investigators' working theory that she was taken by vehicle rather than having wandered off. Over the years, authorities have logged more than 1,700 leads, with some accounts citing about 1,800, none of which produced a viable suspect.

Several individuals drew investigative attention. Matthew James Curtis, a 24-year-old Chisholm resident, was arrested in August 2003 on unrelated child pornography charges and was questioned multiple times; a warranted search of his pickup truck found no DNA or other evidence connecting him to LeeAnna, and he was never charged in her case. Curtis was found dead in his truck outside Chisholm in September 2003, a death officially ruled a suicide. Investigators later examined convicted sex offender Joseph Edward Duncan III after material referencing LeeAnna's disappearance was found on his computer, but he was ruled out because the timeline showed he was not in the Chisholm area when she vanished. Witness reports also described unidentified men and vehicles of interest, including a man with a dark star or sun tattoo on his right arm, but none were ever identified. LeeAnna's parents were not considered suspects.

The case reshaped how law enforcement in the region responds to missing children. According to the Duluth News Tribune, LeeAnna's disappearance was a factor in the creation of the Lake Superior Child Abduction Response Team, formed in 2015 and operational by 2017 — one of only two CART teams in Minnesota, drawing roughly 150 trained personnel from agencies in St. Louis and Carlton counties in Minnesota and Douglas County, Wisconsin, to coordinate canvasses, volunteers, and lead management in future abduction cases.

LeeAnna's mother, Tiffany "Kaelin" Whittaker, died in December 2022; family members said her dying wish was that her daughters find their sister. In April 2024, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children released an age-progression image depicting LeeAnna at 26 and placed it on billboards around Chisholm. Chisholm police say the case remains open, active, and a top priority, with investigators pursuing credible leads including those made possible by advanced DNA profiling techniques. Anyone with information is asked to call NCMEC at 1-800-843-5678.