Deep Secret

Was A Missing Teen A Runaway Or The Victim Of A Serial Killer?

(CBS) 
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.

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Under Hypnosis
Watch as Danna Holmes answers questions for police.

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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.