48 Hours Mystery: Deep Secret

This story was first broadcast on June 2, 2009. It was updated on May 22, 2010.

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.

"Well, they ignored me. They said I was hysterical," she says. "And I said, 'Well, when was I hysterical?' I never screamed or hollered or cried or did any of that. I mean, [I] was just concerned. Where is my son? He isn't home. What are you gonna do about it?"

Police didn't do much.

"They said, 'Well, you know, he's 18. You just sorta have to wait and he'll come up. He'll show up,'" Flossie Klee tells "48 Hours Mystery" correspondent Erin Moriarty.

Even if police had begun a serious search, it wasn't so easy to track down a missing teen in the late 1970s. There weren't surveillance cameras everywhere or ATM's on every corner, as there are today; there were no cell phones, electronic tolls or other vast computer networks.

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.

Alan Carpenter was one of those close friends. "Jeff was - he was a lot of fun. He was a party maker," he says. "[Jeff] 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. Even at 18, it's like he knew he was." When asked if she loved Jeff, Healy says, "absolutely."

As the oldest of four children, Jeff was also close to his mother and three younger sisters; DeeDee was 11 when her brother disappeared.

"I remember sitting in the front yard for hours, 'cause I was waiting for him to come home," she recalls. "And [Mom's] like, 'OK. You know, it's time to come in, Dee Dee.' I'm like, 'But he's not home yet.'"

Cyndy, 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," she says.

Laurel, who was only a year younger than Jeff, was closest to him. She hung out with her brother and his friends - especially his best friend, David Cusanelli.

"They did everything together," Laurel says, "and he was like a big brother to me."

Flossie says David and Jeff "were almost inseparable."

David Cusanelli and Alan Carpenter worked for Jeff's dad, Bucky, who ran a landscaping business. Bucky had a commanding presence and expected his son to someday run the company. Jeff was given half of the business and he had a brand-new van.

Ginny Healy says that while Jeff liked working in his father's business, "I also think that he'd get a little resentful only because he worked so much."

Jeff's disappearance was tough for Bucky.

"This is his boy. It left a big void with him in his life, I think," says Flossie, who vividly recalls the last time she saw her son. "It was in my family room. And he was going out. I can see him. And we were all laughing in the family room doin' somethin'. And I remember him sayin' to me, 'Mom, I love you.' And that was the last time I remember that."

"Jeff, from what I understand, left the Crown Lounge. He went to take David Cusinelli home and never returned home himself," says Laurel.

"What I recall is Cusinelli telling me that Jeff had disappeared; that his mother was looking for him. And, 'Have you seen him?' And I said, 'No, and I haven't heard from him,'" Healy recalls. "He always mentioned when he'd go off daydreamin' that he would move to California. And I thought he went."

Carpenter says he and others also thought Jeff 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 Klee was a gambler.

"My husband knew a lot of people and not all of 'em were wonderful people. Bucky did like to gamble. He knew bookies," says Flossie, who believes there's no connection between her husband's gambling and their son's disappearance.

The police also learned that the Klees had taken out a $100,000 life insurance policy on Jeff.

"Wasn't that a pretty large insurance policy on an 18-year-old?" asks Moriarty.

"Well, probably," Flossie admits. "My girls also had large policies on them too. This was just something we did."

Cyndy says her mother refused to believe that Jeff was dead, even buying him Christmas gifts the first year he was missing, so he'd "have something to open up when he comes in, you know, through the front door."

Jeff's sisters began to wonder if the friend who last saw their brother might be hiding something. David had stopped working for their father right after Jeff disappeared.

Laurel says she saw David from time to time and even asked him what happened to her brother. "I really thought that he knew something, but I didn't know what," she says. "And I asked him and he just said, 'He didn't know.'"

In 1981, four years after Jeff disappeared, suddenly there was news: Someone Jeff knew says he is alive.

Old 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 and had what she describes as "a bizarre conversation."

Laurel says Michael Collister told her that Jeff Klee was alive, but in hiding, living under an alias after a drug deal went bad. He refused to tell Laurel where and asked her not to tell anyone, because it could mean trouble for Jeff.

"He said, 'He had a nice girl, they were livin' somewhere. And he was set for life,'" Laurel tells Erin Moriarty. "It 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," Flossie Klee says. "I said, 'Laurie, this is just not something Jeff would do.'"

When investigators eventually tracked down Collister many years later, he denied telling Laurel that her brother was alive. A dead end, says Detective Bob Vernon.

"I discounted it right from the start," says Vernon, who took charge of the case in 1982, five years after Jeff Klee went missing. The detective says he was shocked by how thin the case file was. "It was listed a missing person on the face sheet. It was basically, an empty folder."

Vernon 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," he says.

Vernon's gut told him that Jeff was dead. In 1977, when Jeff disappeared, Coral Springs was an undeveloped maze of canals and levees, with plenty of places to dump bodies and vans.

While Vernon was beginning his search, Jeff's mom, Flossie Klee, had never stopped hers.

"I think I chased every black van in Broward County," she tells Moriarty. "I 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, this just - that's not him. They don't know him."

Through all the false leads, Flossie held out hope. "I'd never changed my phone number thinking that if something did happen to him, he'd know the phone number."

Like Jeff's family, 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 at the Crown Lounge," he says.

According to police reports, the last friend to see Jeff was David Cusanelli, so Vernon began dropping by his workplace.

David told Vernon what he told police in 1977: that Jeff dropped him and his brother Carl off at their house around 2 a.m. They never saw or heard from him 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,'" he says.

The letter, according to Laurel, came from a New York State prison official who stated that an inmate named Scott Rango wanted to write to her. She had no idea who he was or why he wanted to write to her.

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," says Flossie.

Vernon wondered, "How would he get the address to write to the Klee family? At that particular point it was pulling on a string, you know? I'm gonna pull wherever I can to see whatever it is."

Rango had robbed and killed a psychiatrist in New York and was a suspect in as many as 17 other crimes - many violent. "He would lead people out, become friends, drink in bars, stuff like that. Later, rob 'em or try to kill 'em," Vernon explains.

More significantly, in 1977, Rango was living in the Coral Springs, Fla., area. And he just happened to wash dishes at a restaurant across the street from the Crowne Lounge - the same club where Jeff hung out with his friends on the night he disappeared.

Vernon started putting the pieces together. "I'm thinking, well, you know, he comes across the street, meets Jeff, asks for a ride home. I was thinking he probably killed him, took his van and went to New York."

Vernon was sure he was onto something, but it was too late to talk to Rango himself. Shortly after he reached out to Laurel Klee, Rango hanged himself in his cell.

Believing that Rango killed Jeff, Vernon thought his case was closed.

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. Flossie was hesitant. "He might walk through that door tomorrow."

Vernon testified how he believed Jeff died at the hands of Rango and the judge made it official. The Klees left his chambers in silence. "None of us talked," Cyndy says.

Vernon says "I would go to my grave believing that Scott Rango was responsible for the disappearance of Jeff Klee." Today he feels differently. "I was wrong. Totally."

Three decades after Jeff Klee disappeared, Coral Springs is a thriving community, with busy bridges spanning the city's canals.

The Klee case has been passed to Detective Dave Weissman - who was only 5 years old in 1977, when Jeff disappeared.

Weissman, who says he wanted to give the family more answers, was reviewing the Klee case in March 2008, when he heard that his colleagues were dredging the C-14 Canal for stolen vehicles possibly involved in insurance fraud.

More than 30 vehicles were recovered, including a discovery no one expected: remnants of a black van that had been submerged for a very long time. Weissman says Jeff's scuba license floated to the top of the canal. The license plate was still on the van, as well.

One by one, clues to a 30-year mystery emerged, including 8-track tapes, different colognes, a comb and Jeff Klee's bones.

His mother's search had come to an end.

"I was just so astonished. I really was," says Flossie Klee. "I had to go by and see the van."

All those years, and Jeff had never been far from home.

"It's incredible to think that… probably about 3 1/2, 4 miles from our house - this is where my son's resting place was," Flossie says. "How many times have I driven over that bridge after it was built? How many times have all of us driven over that bridge?"

Jeff's father, Bucky, died in 2004, never knowing what happened to his only son. "They found the van on my dad's birthday," says Jeff's sister, DeeDee. "You think that's coincidence? I said it was a gift from Daddy."

As for Weissman's reaction, "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.

Danna Holmes, who was only a year old when Jeff went missing, came to police out of the blue to report an event that happened in the year 2000, when she met a man at a Coral Springs bar.

"He was drinking very much. He was wasted. He was coming on to me and I said, 'Whoa, whoa, whoa.'"

Holmes and the man ended up alone that night, but instead of getting intimate, she says they shared secrets.

"He started crying and he explained that he killed his best friend. And my heart dropped. And then he continued to say it was an accident," she tells Moriarty.

Holmes says she was very disturbed by the story, but she was married to another man at the time. So she kept the story to herself.

"I figured, 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.' It's one heck of a story. I didn't know if anyone would believe that."

As Holmes went on with her life, she says she buried her memory of that night - until seven years later, in 2007, when her memory got a jolt. She was at a bar again, and this time, she heard a woman tell a chilling story about her missing brother. The woman was Coral Springs Police Sgt. Cyndy Klee.

Holmes recalls what she heard: "Her brother had disappeared 30 years earlier and that she 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.'"

Holmes did not say anything to Cyndy. "I didn't do anything." But she says hearing what she did "worked on her… because now the victim had a name."

It was six months after that, in March 2008, when Holmes finally went to police and gave them a sworn, taped statement:

He was very emotional and he was very, very detailed. He said he was about 17 or 18. He said that him and his best friend were fighting and there was some type of girl involved. He said that he accidentally had killed him and then he hid a body and he didn't want to go to the cops.

Holmes knew the man only by his first name, Dave. When shown a photo lineup, she picked out David Cusanelli, Jeff Klee's high school friend. "That's him. That's the man that told me he killed his best friend," she told police.

"It was just like God said, 'OK. We've had enough of this. Let's get this thing settled once and for all,'" Flossie said of the latest developments.

Detective Weissman was now convinced that David was responsible for Jeff's death.

"How do you know he didn't just get lost and drive into the canal?" asks Moriarty.

"That wouldn't be possible," he says. "There 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."

Holmes continued to remember details of the story David Cusanelli told her eight years earlier. This time, she was under hypnosis. "It's an investigative tool, that's all," says Weissman. "It's not admissible in court."

"It was something that had to do with a rock. I don't know if he fell and he hit his head on a rock, or he hit him in the head with a rock," she says under hypnosis.

Under hypnosis, Danna Holmes answers questions for police

Weissman also interviewed Ginny Healy Spence, Jeff's high school girlfriend. She revealed to police for the first time that she had cheated on Jeff with David Cusanelli - on Jeff's birthday.

"[Jeff] was pretty mad. So, we broke up," she says. When asked by Moriarty if she feels responsible in some ways, an emotional Spence says, "Yes."

Weissman now has a motive. "That gave Jeff the reason to confront David," he says.

David was still in the area and had never married. But making a case against him was not going to be easy. Nothing in Jeff's van or the condition of his body answered the biggest question: how did he die?

It was time for the detectives to confront David Cusanelli.

Four months after Jeff Klee's body was found, there was another surprising development. The man police suspect of pushing Jeff and his van into the C-14 Canal agrees to talk to Detective David Weissman.

"Nobody thought he would come in, and then we got the call he was down in the lobby," Weissman says. "All the investigators were stunned."

David Cusanelli, now 50, arrives without an attorney.

"It was extremely important," says Weissman, "because there was no physical evidence. And we needed David's confession."

But if David knows what happened to Jeff, he's not telling the team of detectives who question him.

Excerpts of David Cusanelli's police interview

Cop: Tell me about that night. Do you remember what time you left?
David Cusanelli: It had to be…
Cop: What time did you arrive? Who drove?
David: Jeff drove. Me and my brother went. Dropped me and my brother off at my parents house and that was it.

It's the same story he has always told, except for one crucial difference: for the very first time, David admits that he and Jeff had argued that night about Ginny Healy, Jeff's girlfriend.

"David admitted that Jeff was upset because he had found out that Ginny and him slept together," Weissman says.

Cop: Were you scared Jeff was going to hurt you that night?
David: No, no, no.

While police continue to press him in one room, what David doesn't know is that in another room, his older brother Carl - who also agreed to talk - is being interrogated. Police are hoping to find inconsistencies in the brother's stories.

David is confronted with Danna Holmes' statement that he had confessed to her that he had killed his best friend.

Cop: Why would she say something like that?
David: I have no idea. I never told her anything. I never told her that I killed Jeff Klee... I did not hit him with no rock. I did nothing like that.

David sticks to his story, even as he is egged on for hours. Then both brothers begin to waver on whether Carl had really been at the Crowne Lounge the night Jeff disappeared.

David: I thought he was in the van. Maybe another night he was in the van.
Cop: Where were you?
Carl: I don't remember. I thought I went to the bar with the two of them and that was it.

Weissman says that's when he went from talking to David to talk with Carl.

Excerpts of Carl's Cusanelli's police interview

After 3 1/2 hours, Carl appears to break. Weissman asks if there was any malicious intent with Jeff's disappearance.

Weissman: An accident is an accident, OK. As long as you can tell me there was no malicious intent, I'll be fine with that, I really will be…
Carl: There was no malicious intent.
Cop: Thank you.

"And at that point, I could see that we were getting somewhere," Weissman tells Erin Moriarty.

Carl: David called me up and told me there was a problem. I guess I went out and met him. I must have helped him dispose of the vehicle. If I helped him push it in.

Carl does not give details and insists he never saw Jeff's body in the van.

Cop: What did he tell you happened to Jeff?
Carl: I don't know. I vaguely come up with pushing the van into the canal, and I'm not even, I wouldn't swear up and down that…
Cop: Come on.
Carl: I can't think of anything else.

When police push him for more, Carl suddenly ends the interview.

Carl: I'm not gonna make something up. I don't know!
Cop: Come on Carl.
Carl: Do I need to get a lawyer at this point? Is that the point we're at?
Cop: Are you requesting a lawyer?
Carl: I can't give you guys the answers you want.

But Carl has given the cops the ammunition they need to press David. Weissman shows David portions of his brother's taped interview.

"When we brought the video in the actual room of Carl confessing, David started to freak out a little bit," Weissman says.

David: I did not do it!
Cop: David, by your brother's own admission, he helped you.
David: No friggin way! No friggin way!
Cop: It's your blood. It's your blood.
David: I did not kill Jeff. I did not.

Then, David changes his story. He begins to tell police how Jeff might have gotten hurt.

David: The only thing that could have happened is he was chasing me around the van, he tripped, fell, he hit his head.

Weissman believes David reached his breaking point after seeing Carl's interview with police and "seeing his own brother confessing to something they probably were gonna keep a secret amongst themselves their entire lives."

Cop: What's the possibility that you grabbed something and threw it at him?
David: (shrugs) I threw a rock at him maybe?
Cop: Is that more reasonable?
David: It's possible. But I don't know…

Cop: Do you remember if that rock hit him in the head…
David: No, I don't.
Cop: …or did he trip and fall.
David: I don't know if the rock hit him in the head or if it caused him to trip and fall or if it hit him in the body and then he tripped and fell…

Cop: Where did you see an injury?
David: Forehead, I would think, it was on his forehead.
Cop: How big of an injury?
David: I think it was split wide open.

The detectives finally feel like they are getting somewhere as David begins to reluctantly talk about that night. But he is never clear about how Jeff died or how he and Carl put the van in the water.

Cop: Did he jump back in the van with you and go down or did he follow you?
David: He would have followed me in his car…

David: If he was breathing, I wouldn't have put him in the canal, no way
Cop: Did you think there was a chance he could have been brought to a hospital?
David: If I thought there was, I would have.

"48 Hours Mystery" showed Jeff Klee's mother and sisters some of David's taped interview. She asks the family, "Do you think it's possible that Jeff wasn't dead when he was put in the -"

"That was one of the first questions I had," says Flossie. "How did they know he was dead? He could have been unconscious - totally unconscious."

"And then drowned," adds Cyndy.

"They aren't paramedics," says Flossie.

David: I thought it was a bad dream. So I woke up the next morning, I was like, no way did that (expletive) happen. No way…
David: Oh, my God! What did I do?

Weissman calls David Cusanelli's statement a confession. More than 9 1/2 hours after he arrived, David, now sobbing, goes home. The detective was hoping to charge David with homicide, but did not arrest him, explaining, "We wanted to review the case with the state attorney and make sure we had all our ducks in a row."

"He was a good looking fella. And he loved to be dressed nicely," Flossie Klee says as she looks at photos of her son, Jeff. She even remembers what he had on the last time she saw him in 1977.

"I remember he had this shirt on with little tiny roses," she says. "They were little tiny ones. He really liked that shirt." Her daughters laugh. "I don't remember any roses," says Laurel. "We do miss him. And what he could have been," says Flossie.

It's not just losing a son and brother that is so difficult for the Klee family. They are still reeling from learning that Jeff's best friend may be responsible.

"Maybe it was an accident. But, why did they have to cover it up then?" Flossie asks. "We might never know. So, there's always going to be a question in all of our minds."

What do they think of David Cusanelli today? "I think that he and his brother - both are cowards. They knew where Jeff was for 31 years," Cyndy says.

Immediately after David and his brother, Carl, gave their taped statements to the police, they hired attorney Mitch Polay. The Cusanellis wouldn't talk with "48 Hours Mystery," but Polay did.

Polay does not agree with police calling David's statement a confession. "I call it something that's coerced. I call it something that's manufactured," he tells Erin Moriarty.

Polay says the police fed David information and pressured him into admitting he was there the night Jeff died. But Moriarty points out examples from police tape that shows that does not seem to be the case.

"This does not come from police. When he says, 'Did you see an injury?' David responds, 'On the forehead.' That came from David," says Moriarty. "David is the one who said it was split wide open."

"David is the one who says 'It's a couple of inches of a gash,'" she continues. "That wasn't fed by the police. That sounds like real details, doesn't it?"

"But you have to take a step back," responds Polay. "Before he answered that way, with some specificity, who brought up the fact that he tripped and fell first? It was the police."

And Carl, his attorney says, got the same treatment.

"Every time he would say, 'I didn't have any type of involvement, I don't remember,' the police would say, 'That's not a good enough answer for us. That's not good enough. We could help you along,'" Polay says.

"I'm not saying that they didn't have anything to do with it," he says. "I'm saying that they both denied having anything to do with it. And I don't think that these so-called confessions, confirm anything."

The Klees hoped a criminal court would settle the matter, but then came a development that no one expected: Assistant State's Attorney Shari Tate Jenkins announces that the Cusanelli brothers won't face any charges.

"We don't have any evidence to suggest homicide, because it could have been accidental." Jenkins says there is simply not enough evidence to prove premeditated murder.

The main problem is that no one can even say how Jeff died. His skeletal remains, meticulously examined, reveal nothing - not whether he was drowned, stabbed, shot or hit in the head with a rock.

But what about Danna Holmes, who told police that David confessed to her?

"If you took that alleged statement as factual, that indicated an accidental death and really gave no details whatsoever of that," says Jenkins.

And as for David's own admissions?

"I don't think I could describe it as confession," Jenkins says. "He doesn't say, definitively, 'I hit him.' In fact, he, many times, stresses the opposite."

Jenkins says Carl Cusanelli "places himself there only to help his brother do something with the van. He claims no knowledge of Jeff Klee being there."

Even if it was an accident, what about manslaughter charges against the brothers? That's out too, because, says Jenkins, you have to apply the law that existed in 1977.

The Florida law has since changed, but in 1977, there was only a three-year statute of limitations on manslaughter, meaning that the state could only bring charges three years after a death. By 2008, the clock had long run out not only on manslaughter, but on lesser charges related to concealing the crime - even though no one even knew Jeff Klee was dead.

"They'll never pay for the crime," says Weissman, "which is frustrating to the police department, frustrating for the Klee family."

At a press conference with Weissman at her side, Laurel Klee made the following statement on behalf of her family: "We are burdened by knowing that someone who we believe put our brother in this van and pushed him in the canal will not be legally held accountable."

With no case pending, Jeff's belongings are returned to his mother and sisters.

"There were a few things my family decided to keep. They're strictly for their own personal remembrances," says Flossie. Among the belongings, Flossie finds a tiny threadbare piece of cloth with a faint but familiar pattern. It's the shirt with the roses that she has remembered all these years.

She allows the remnants of Jeff's van to be towed away and junked. In 1977, Jeff left in that vehicle, intending to spend a night out with his friends. His family feels he has finally come home.

"It's over with. We know the people involved. Are they gonna get justice? They probably won't. But, they have to live with themselves and as far as I'm concerned, that's the end of the story."

The Klee family cannot sue anyone for wrongful death because the new law is not retroactive.
Produced by Gail Zimmerman, Lourdes Aguiar and Marc Goldbaum