disappearance of el segundo realtor, deede keller, all of l. a. s south bay seemed to be looking for her, and for her missing mercedes. leading the search, her best friends cindy and linda. a lot of times when people disappear, you get the immediate family working on it, and then everybody else is like, well. not in this town. we had an army. deede s daughter julie rushed back to l. a. from a trip from mexico. it was the most surreal experience. only to be greeted by suspicion. l. a. sheriff s detective jimmy gates had discovered that in the event of their mother s death, julie and her brother mike stood to inherit more than 1 million dollars, so he confronted deede s kids using one of the oldest tricks in the investigators handbook. do you remember in the interview that you did with jimmy gates?
concerned, too, was doctor julie. she d talked of meeting her mom that same friday during a layover at l. a. x., as julie headed for cabo san lucas, mexico. she s like you know what, i might have an appointment that morning. if i don t, welcome. via text. we will have to coffee. so we would be laid over in los angeles. i didn t get a text, it was a little on. but didn t think much of it. deede s son michael was beginning to worry. after he returned from a business trip to the san francisco area. when i called her cell phone, the voicemail was full and that had never happened with my mom. she prided herself on being
and in 2003, one of the rainmakers in the real estate business, selling those beautiful homes in el segundo and the south bay was a woman named julia keller, known as deede . she really just embraced everyone that came into her path. deede s best friends, mortgage executive cindy ertman and real estate saleswoman linda dondero. she was good at her job? i love working with deede. everybody did. she was just so easy to like and wanted the best for everybody. and her clients were very loyal over the years. deede was loyal, too. not only to our clients but as a divorce mom to her children, mike and julie. i remember my mom explaining to me when is about ten years old that, as you get older, we probably not going to be as close, or you won t like me tweak quite as much. and it never happened. if anything, we just got
they re both out of town at the time that their mother went missing. why is that significant? why would the reverse be more true? i thought if the mother goes missing and it just so happens that mike is gone in san jose, and julie is down in a resort, and it s been my experience that sometimes people dissipate stress after they commit a crime in different ways. some people drink. some people take drugs. and some people leave the area, just to dissipate stress. and there was strangely, one more person who just happened to have been traveling near the time of deede s disappearance. her ex husband, erwin howard, had just flown to his home country of bolivia. and erwin was a mechanic who worked for american airlines in l. a.. the common thread in all of these trips? nearby l. a. x. airport. and so, the detective thought,
mike stood to inherit more than 1 million dollars, so he confronted deede s kids using one of the oldest tricks in the investigators handbook. do you remember in the interview that you did with jimmy gates? i do. in which he asked you some pretty basic questions like, what s your name, where you live. pretty ordinary stuff. and then all of a sudden he says, did you have anything to do with her mom s disappearance? i think it was more, did you kill your mother? and you re what, startled, or angry? it was a horrible question him, but i can understand why it need to be asked. detectives asked similar questions of julie. next, in attempting to rule out suspects those closest to deede, detectives turn their attention to her ex husband, erwin howard. it turned out that although deede and erwin had been divorced for more than a year at the time for disappearance, friends told police that she had recently invited him back into her life. about six months earlier, deede had been in a