Secrets in the Canal

0:00Music

0:13It was really pretty. Lots of palm trees. I like that. It was always hot. We always hung out in street corners, went to the beach, dyed our hair blonde. We also partied a lot.

0:35Kids partying, kids over at the park, kids with beer in the car. I mean, there wasn't very much going on here in 77. We didn't have a lot of violent crimes. I'm Bob Vernon. I'm a retired Coral Springs police detective. I worked on the Jeff Klee case. He was really tall and handsome. He was funny and smart, warm and kind, and he would do anything for anybody. I am Ginny Healy. In 1977, I dated Jeff Klee. He was the firstborn. He got along with most everybody. I'm Flossie Klee, and I'm Jeff Klee's mother. Jeff disappeared on June 21, 1977. It was on a Monday night. He went to the Crown Lounge with a group of friends.

1:29They apparently left about 2 o 'clock in the morning. It was an average Joe kind of bar, where everybody kind of hung out. When we woke up the next morning, Jeff wasn't in his bedroom. Jeff's band wasn't there. We called around, and we couldn't locate him. Was that unusual? Yeah. He'd never done it before. And so we called and reported it to the police. And they said, well, you know, he's 18. And, you know, he probably just took off. When your child goes missing like that, you don't know. How could this happen? I wonder where he is. I hope he's well. Well, he has a special place in my heart. He always has.

2:21A lot of people overlooked the case because it was just another kid who didn't come home and he's off someplace else. It was just like the earth just opened up and swallowed him. Somewhere in between the Crown Lounge and his house, something happened. That took 31 years for the case to be solved. Deep Secret, tonight's 48 Hours Mystery.

3:04Back in the 70s, how were you treated as a mom? Well, they ignored me. They said I was hysterical. When Flossie Klee reported her 18-year-old son Jeff missing on a June day in 1977, she was frustrated that police didn't take her seriously.

3:25I said, well, when was I hysterical? Because I never screamed or hollered or cried or any of that. I mean, I was just concerned. Where is my son? He isn't home. What are you going to do about it? They didn't do much. So they said, well, you know, he's 18 and we can't really do anything. You just sort of have to wait. He'll come up. He'll show up. Even if police had begun a serious search, it wasn't so easy to track down a missing teen back in the late 1970s. There weren't surveillance cameras like this everywhere as there are now. No ATMs on every corner, cell phones, electronic tolls, or vast computer networks.

4:09It wasn't so difficult to virtually disappear. Back in the 1970s, drinking laws were more lax too. It was perfectly legal in Florida for 18-year-olds to drink at bars. Nickel beer night at the Crown Lounge was a big hit with Jeff Klee and his friends. Jeff was, he was a lot of fun. He was a party maker. Alan Carpenter was one of those close friends. He just enjoyed having a good time. Ginny Healy was Jeff's girlfriend. He was strong and I thought he was handsome. Like a man's man. Didn't mean even at 18. It's like he knew who he was. You loved him? Absolutely. Here's his birthday. As the oldest of four children, Jeff was also close to his mother and three younger sisters.

5:12Dee Dee was 11. I remember sitting in the front yard for hours because I was waiting for him to come home. And she's like, okay, you know, it's time to come in, Dee Dee. I'm like, but he's not home yet. Cindy, now a Coral Springs cop, was 15. He'd give you the shirt off his back to anybody, even his sisters, believe it or not. Laurel, only a year younger than Jeff, was closest to him. She hung out with him and his friends, especially his best friend, David Cusinelli. They did everything together. He was like a big brother to me. He and Jeff, they were just almost inseparable. Both David and Alan worked for Jeff's dad, Bucky, who ran a landscaping business.

5:53Bucky had a commanding presence and expected his son to someday run the company. My husband had given him half of the business, and he had a brand new van. Did he like working in his father's business? Was that something he enjoyed doing? I think he did, but I also think that he'd get a little resentful only because he worked so much.

6:20How did your husband deal with Jeff's disappearance? How would you describe what he was going through? This was his boy, you know, and it left a big void with him in his life, I think. Do you remember the last time you saw Jeff? Yep. He was in my family room, and he was going out, and I could see him. And we were all laughing in the family room, doing something. And I remember him saying to me, Mom, I love you. And that was the last time I remember that.

7:01Jeff, from what I understand, left the Crown Lounge, and then he went to take David Cusinelli home. He never returned home himself.

7:12What I recall is Cusinelli telling me that Jeff had disappeared and his mother was looking for him, and have you seen him? And I said, no, and I haven't heard from him. So what did you think? He always mentioned when he'd go off daydreaming that he would move to California. And I thought he went. A lot of people thought Jeff, you know, went off on his own. Find a place down in the Keys. He had a scuba license. He loved the water. As time wore on, there was still no sign of Jeff. As part of procedure, police took a closer look at his family and learned that Bucky Clee was a gambler. My husband knew a lot of people, And not all of them were wonderful people.

8:03A little shady? Yeah, kind of. And Bucky did like to gamble. He knew Bucky's. Any possibility of your husband having a debt that could have something to do with your son's disappearance? No. Mm-mm. The police also learned that the Cleese had taken out a$100 ,000 life insurance policy on Jeff. And wasn't that a pretty large insurance policy on an 18-year-old? Well, probably. My girls also had large policies on them, too. And this was just something we did. Flossie refused to believe her son was dead. The first year she brought a ton of Christmas presents for him. I'm sitting there kind of like looking up, he's not here.

8:55Well, he'll have something to open up when he comes out in, you know, through the front door.

9:02Jeff's sisters began to wonder if the friend who last saw their brother might be hiding something. He had stopped working for their father right after Jeff disappeared. Did you continue to see David Cusinelli? I did from time to time, but I really thought that he knew something, but I didn't know what. Did you ever ask David? Like, what happened to my brother? Yes, I asked him and he just said he didn't know. But if David seemed reluctant to talk, someone else they knew was not. In 1981, four years after Jeff disappeared, suddenly there was news. And a friend of his is saying, Jeff's alive. Yeah.

9:44And he asked me not to say anything to anybody, because if they ever find Jeff, Jeff would be in trouble.

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11:21Old faded photographs are all Laurel Klee has left of the older brother who vanished in June of 1977. She heard nothing until four years later when by chance she ran into someone she knew from high school. It was just a bizarre conversation. Michael Collister told Laurel that Jeff was alive, but in hiding, living under an alias after a drug deal went bad. Mike Collister is telling you that when Jeff disappeared in 1977, he had actually gone somewhere, changed his name, and was on the run? Yes. But he refused to tell Laurel where. And he said that he had a nice girl, they were living somewhere, and he was set for life.

12:07It didn't sound like Jeff, but I, you know, I didn't know. Laurel, who at first kept quiet, later confided in her mother. I just didn't believe this. I said, Laurie, this is just not something Jeff would do. When investigators eventually tracked down Collister, he denied telling Laurel that her brother was alive. If I had a conversation with her about Jeff, it was only to try to ease her pain to some degree and tell her. A dead end, says Detective Bob Vernon. I discounted it right from the start. Vernon took charge of Jeff Klee's case in 1982, five years after he went missing. Vernon was shocked by how thin the case file was.

12:56Did Jeff Klee's disappearance kind of fall through the cracks? Yes. It was listed in the missing person on the face sheet. It was basically an empty folder.

13:09Vernon wondered how Jeff and his van could simply disappear without a trace. It never showed up in five years. I mean, not in a chop shop, the license plate didn't show up, it didn't end up on some used car lot. His gut told him that Jeff was dead. And back in 1977, when Coral Springs was an undeveloped maze of canals and levees, there were plenty of places to dump bodies and vans. There was a lot of empty fields. I mean, there was a lot of possibilities. While Detective Vernon was beginning his search, Jeff Clee's mom, Flossie, had never stopped hers. I think I chased every black man in Broward County.

14:00I hate to admit it, I went to at least five different psychics trying to find out. I would just come away shaking my head thinking, that's not him. They don't know him. Through all the false leads, Flossie held out hope. I never changed my phone number thinking that if something did happen to him, he'd know the phone number. Like Jeff's family, Detective Vernon thought that Jeff's friends had to know more than they were saying. Jeff Klee had been out with friends. They'd been drinking here at the Crown Lounge. According to police reports, the last friend to see Jeff was David Cusinelli. So Vernon began dropping by his workplace.

14:46After half a dozen or more visits, the same questions come up. Can you think about anything else? Do you remember anything else at night? David told Vernon what he told police in 1977. That Jeff dropped him and his brother Carl off at their house at around 2 a.m. They never saw or heard from Jeff again. Vernon felt the best clue to the mystery was something Jeff's sister Laurel had mentioned offhandedly. She said, a few years ago, I got a letter from Attica State Prison. The letter, Laurel says, came from a New York State prison official, who stated that an inmate wanted to write to her. An inmate by the name of Scott Rango.

15:40I was 17. My mom asked me if I knew him, and I said, no, I don't know who it is. Why did he want to write you? I had no idea. Scott Rango was serving a life sentence for murder. I just didn't want my daughter involved with that. And so that was the end of that. How would he get the address to write to the Clay family? What were you thinking? At that particular point, I tell you, I just, you know, it was like pulling on a string. I'm going to pull wherever I can to see whatever it is and, you know. Rango had robbed and killed a psychiatrist in New York and was a suspect in as many as 17 other crimes, many violent.

16:20He would meet people out, become friends, drink in bars, stuff like that, later rob them or try to kill them. More significantly, back in 1977, Rango was here, living in Florida, in the Coral Springs area. And he just happened to wash dishes at a restaurant near the Crown Lounge, the same club where Jeff hung out with his friends on the night he disappeared. And how close is the restaurant where Scott Rangel worked? Right across the street, I would say probably 500 yards. That one right there on the corner? That was known as the clock restaurant then. I was putting the pieces together, I'm thinking, thinking, well, you know, he comes across the street, he meets Jeff, he asks for a ride home.

17:09I was thinking he's probably killed him, took his van at that time and went to New York. Vernon was sure he was onto something, but it was too late to talk to Scott Rango himself. Shortly after Rango reached out to Laurel Klee, he hanged himself in his cell. Was the case pretty much though close, believing that Scott Rango was the one who killed Jeff Klee? In my mind, yes, it was. Nearly nine years after Jeff Klee went missing and at the insistence of the insurance company, the Klees finally asked to have him declared dead. I said, I can't do it. I don't want to do it. You know, he might walk through that door tomorrow.

17:58Detective Vernon testified how he believed Jeff Clee died at the hands of Scott Rango, and the judge made it official. Tough. Tough. Having to walk away from that judge's chambers in silence, not talking about it on the way home. Yeah, none of us talked. We just walked out real quiet.

18:23I would go to my grave believing that Scott Rango was responsible for the disappearance of Jeff Clee. But today you feel differently, don't you? I feel entirely different. Yes, absolutely. I was wrong. Totally? Totally.

18:42Three decades after Jeff Clee disappeared, Coral Springs is a thriving community. Busy bridges now span the city's canals. Was any of this here back then, like any of these homes? No, this was, these were cow fields back here, and this bridge wasn't built until 1989. The Klee case had been passed to Detective Dave Weissman, only five years old in 1977. I wanted to give the Klee's more answers. He was reviewing the case in March 2008, when he heard his colleagues were dredging the C-14 Canal. For stolen vehicles, possibly involved in insurance fraud. They fished out more than 30 vehicles here. And then, a discovery no one expected.

19:37Remnants of a black van that had been submerged for a very long time.

19:54When they put the van down on the concrete, it actually fell apart. So it had to be in a canal for several, several years because it totally deteriorated once it hit the ground.

20:06His scuba license floated to the top of the canal and the license plate was still on the van. One by one, clues to a 30-year mystery emerged. We found 8-track tapes. We found cologne, a comb. And Jeff Klee's bones. His mother's agonizing search had come to an end. I was just so astonished. I really was. I just... I had to go by and see the van. Jeff had never been far from home. It's incredible to think that probably about three and a half, four miles from our house, this is where my son's resting place was. And how many times have I driven over that bridge after it was made? How many times have all of us driven over that bridge?

20:59Jeff's father, Bucky, died in 2004, never knowing what happened to his only son. They found the van on my dad's birthday. You think that's coincidence? I said it was a gift from Daddy. What was your reaction when this was actually pulled up? What do you think even when you look at this now? I just can't believe that Jeff was stuck in this van for 31 years. It's just hard to believe. The timing was uncanny, because the van wasn't the only new evidence to surface. Remarkably, just two weeks earlier, the police heard from a new witness. I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth.

21:44What's up, you got? Hey, sir. Dana Holmes, who was only one year old when Jeff Klee went missing, came to police out of the blue to report an event that happened in the year 2000. Back then, she met a man at a Coral Springs bar. He was drinking very much. He was wasted. She and the man ended up alone that night. He was coming on to me, and I said, whoa, whoa, whoa. Instead of getting intimate, she says, they shared secrets. He started crying, and he explained that he killed his best friend. His words. And my heart dropped. And then he continued to say, but it was an accident. Dana was very disturbed by the story, but she was married to another man at the time, so she kept the story to herself.

22:36I figured, well, who am I going to tell? What am I going to do? Call Coral Springs PD and say, oh, this guy I met one night, he told me he killed his best friend. I don't know his best friend. I mean, it's one heck of a story. I didn't know if anyone would believe that. As Dana went on with her life, she says, she buried the memory of that night until seven years later in 2007, when her memory got a jolt. She was in a bar again. This time, she overheard a woman telling a chilling story about her missing brother. That woman was Coral Springs Police Sergeant Cindy Klee. Her brother had disappeared 30 years earlier.

23:23She strongly believes that her brother's best friend had something to do with it. And I listened and I thought, oh my God, I know this story. Did you say something to Cindy? No, I didn't. I didn't do anything. And it did work on me. What do you mean worked on you? Because now the victim had a name. It was six months after that, in March 2008, when Dana Holmes finally went to the police. He was very emotional and he was very, very detailed. And he said it was about when he was 17 or 18. And she gave them a sworn tape statement. He said that him and his best friend were fighting and there was some type of girl involved.

24:08He said that he accidentally had killed him and that he hit a body and he didn't want to go to the cops. Dana knew the man only by his first name, Dave. But when shown a photo lineup. That is David. She picked out David Cusinelli, Jeff Klee's high school friend. That's him. That's the man that told me he killed his best friend. It was just like God said, okay, we've had enough of this. Let's get this thing settled once and for all. Detective Weissman was now convinced that David was responsible for Jeff's death. How do you know he didn't just kind of get lost and drive into the canal? That wouldn't be possible.

24:51There were no roads back then. There wasn't a bridge. and when we found the van, it was found in neutral, which raised our suspicions that someone had pushed the van into that canal. Dana Holmes continued to remember details of the story David Cusinelli told her eight years earlier. There was something that had to do with a rock. This time, she was under hypnosis. It's an investigative tool. That's all it is. It's not immiscible in court. I don't know if he fell and hit his head on a rock or he hit him in the head with the rock. I know that he killed him. Weissman also interviewed Ginny Healy Spence, Jeff's high school girlfriend, who revealed to police for the first time that she had cheated on Jeff.