MISSING: Nevaeh Kingbird

It's just after dawn and people are climbing out of their trucks, it's so cold they can see their breath. They got word on Facebook to meet at the Eagles Club. They've got miles to walk before Sundown.

Proud of everybody who showed up.

They set out to cross the south end of Bemidji. It's a small city in northern Minnesota that sits near three Native American reservations and hugs a lake with the same name. They're here to follow this man, Daniel Wind.

I'm not going to quit, Uncle's going to find her.

He's looking for any sign of his 15-year-old niece Nevaeh.

If she's out there, you know, we got to find her.

In the winter of 2021, Daniel and dozens of volunteers spent days on end searching for her, hiking through woods and brush and along railroad tracks.

I still got a few miles yet to go.

Teddy Wind is Daniel's sister and Nevaeh's mother.

I couldn't feel the cold, I couldn't even feel if I walked four miles that day. It didn't bother me because I was looking for my child.

Nevaeh is still missing, but Teddy has seen her in her dreams, a girl with a cheeky smile and a blonde streak in her dark hair.

She said She loved me and she missed me and that she was sorry.

And Teddy has recorded a message for Nevaeh it's on her voicemail just in case she calls.

Nevaeh, Can you please leave a message?

Mommy misses you and loves you.

This is a story about a family that's determined to bring a missing child home. It's a journey that has consumed them and changed them.

You are like a different person, almost since this happened, driven by getting answers.

Yeah.

And sometimes driven by anger, because Daniel and Teddy, members of the Ojibwe tribe, have learned there are so many other families like them.

It's real, you know, the fight, the fight, the struggle that we got.

I'm Andrea Canning and this is missing in America, a podcast from Dateline. We first featured Nevaeh Kingbird's case in our digital series in 2022. In this episode, we'll take you deeper into her mysterious disappearance.

You want to solve this case.

Yes, I do. It's difficult to know that a 15-year-old just disappeared.

We'll tell you about the intriguing clues uncovered by police and her family, and the disturbing questions those clues have raised. So please listen closely, because you or someone you know might be able to help find Nevaeh and give her loved ones desperately needed answers.

I told her that she had to be back at a certain time and she said she will be. And she seemed to be really happy and in a good mood, like she was just beyond excited to just go to the movies.

Teddy worked at a casino on one of the three reservations, not far from Bemidji. She was on the four to midnight shift and called Nevaeh around 8 p..m. to chat, but Nevaeh didn't pick up.

I called a couple times and I didn't get answers like, Oh, she's probably not back from the movies yet. So I kept on trying, kept on trying. And then she finally answered, and she was kind of slurring her words. I said, What's wrong with you? and she said, Nothing's wrong with me, mom.

Teddy's mama bear alarm was blaring. Nevaeh had recently lost two friends to suicide and she'd been struggling with her grief. In fact, Teddy had been so concerned she'd taken five days off work to be with Nevaeh and make sure she was okay. Now. She told her supervisor that she had to leave early and rushed home. What she saw when she got there was hard to absorb.

I looked at her and she was just like looking through me, and that's when I could tell it was alcohol that she was on.

Nevaeh had pulled a bait and switch straight out of the teenage handbook. Turns out she hadn't gone to the movies, she'd been partying with friends at another house on a reservation 20 miles away.

And then they got kicked out of that party and came to my house. I end up confronting Nevaeh about why are these kids here? why are you drunk? and why do you have a bottle in your hand? I think I was just talking too fast for her and she's like, Mom, mom, mom.

And that's when Teddy says one of the teenagers started pushing her.

She wouldn't let me near Nevaeh. She was standing in between me and Nevaeh. And I said, I'm going to call the cops, and then she goes, No, mom, don't call the cops. I was like, your friend's trying to fight me.

Teddy went outside, got in her truck and sat in the dark, staring at her phone. Thinking about how much she and Nevaeh had been through together, how close they once were, Teddy had always thought of Nevaeh as her mama's girl.

Nevaeh was only two years old, just a few months over two years old, when me and her dad split up.

The third oldest of Teddy's six children, it was Nevaeh who helped her single mom keep the rest of the kids in line. Even when she was little, Nevaeh would pick out her younger brother and sister's clothes, make sure their hair was brushed.

Nevaeh was the boss of everybody, even me.

She would take charge.

Yeah, she was in charge of everything, she made sure of that, and I allowed her to be that way. I just knew that was her way or no way.

Teddy says Nevaeh loved her with that same fierce spirit.

If I'm eating, she would eat off my plate. If I gave her the same thing, she would switch my plate and take from me, give me her plate. I felt like she was still holding on being a baby to me.

I know how teenagers and their moms, I know it can be hard. Did you two have that same experience of that transition into being a teenager?

Oh yeah, definitely. Nevaeh developed faster, she was taller than my other daughter, and her body developed faster than hers.

Teddy says by age 12, Nevaeh had confided in her that she was what some Native Americans call two-spirit, meaning a person who embodies both the male and female spirit. Nevaeh's revelation was no surprise to Teddy, though.

Nevaeh likes girls. I figured that out at a young age for her, because when the kids were liking Justin Bieber, she was liking Selena Gomez. So I'm like, all right, I knew she. They're like, Oh, Nevaeh, you can't like girls, and Nevaeh's like, I like whoever I want to like.

You two didn't butt heads over her being two-spirit.

No, not at all. The only thing I was upset with was the choice of the people she was interested in. They were not very kind to her, and I learned that I had to let my kids make their own choices.

Now sitting in her truck, Teddy faced a choice of her own. Nevaeh had begged her not to call the police, but she was terribly worried.

I was like, I got to call them.

Teddy dialed 911 and then she heard banging from her garage.

Girl was trying to fight me, walked out the wrong door instead of going straight. She went into my garage door, so I let her out my garage door. And I was like, Where's Nevaeh? and she's like, Nevaeh left? And I went to the back door and the back door was wide open.

Before Teddy even had time to think. The Bemidji Town police arrived at the scene and then everything was chaos. Another police car showed up, then an ambulance. One of the teenagers was taken to the hospital with alcohol poisoning. Only then did Teddy get a chance to tell officers that her 15-year-old daughter had slipped out drunk into the bone-chilling dark.

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It was after one o'clock in the morning in Bemidji, Minnesota. Teddy Wind was watching city police cart drunk teenagers out of her house. But there was no sign of her own 15-year-old daughter Nevaeh. She'd slipped out the back door. Into the frigid night, it was only 23 degrees.

It wasn't snowing out, but it was super cold, you know, like desert cold at night.

So Teddy reported Nevaeh missing to one of the officers.

And he goes, Oh, she just ran away on you and I was like, Well, then you need to go find her because she was intoxicated.

Police officers went looking for Nevaeh, but they didn't see her on the roads in the dark. Her mother was worried, but wasn't panicking. Not yet.

I thought she was just going to wake up at one of her friends house and contact me and then would fix it.

Teddy couldn't just call Nevaeh. Nevaeh's phone didn't work unless it was connected to Wi-Fi. They usually chatted on social media, but there was no message from Nevaeh the next day or the next.

She says, Brother, brother, Nevaeh's gone. She, you know, I can't, I can't reach her, she hasn't been active. And I said, Well, just just give her, just give her a day, you know, just give her a day and she'll come home.

Then, before Teddy could do much more, a curveball knocked her off her feet. She and her children came down with Covid, and she could barely function even as her missing child spoke to her in her sleep.

I kept on having bad dreams of her. I had a dream of her being in, like, some fancy house with another girl. And she was telling me she was dead and she can't come home.

In Teddy's house, Nevaeh's absence filled every corner, and there was someone else who wasn't there her sister Lakaylee.

It just like irks my soul, I guess, because I couldn't be there.

She's one year older than Nevaeh and was away at a residential program that provides support for teens with mental health issues.

That must have been such a struggle for you not being home during this time.

Yeah, it made me feel like helpless.

Because Lakaylee knew Nevaeh better than anyone.

We would talk to each other, like tell each other everything, like every night after school, she'd tell me about school, her day.

Nevaeh loved school and had big plans for both of them. Lakaylee read me a text that Nevaeh sent her a year before she disappeared.

She said When we get older, I want to get an apartment together in New York while I go to college to get my bachelor's degree.

Those are big dreams.

Yeah.

Going to New York and bringing her sister with her.

Yeah, we were, we were close, very close.

At first, Lakaylee wasn't surprised when she found out Nevaeh had taken off into the night after Teddy busted up the party.

I would be on run, too, because I'd be scared to go home after I just brought a bunch of random people into my mom's house.

You might think Lakaylee's being dramatic when she says she would have run away, too, but here's the thing you need to know about Nevaeh. Something her family and police were aware of as they tried to track her down those first few weeks.

You and Nevaeh had run away before.

Yeah.

Not once, but repeatedly. Nevaeh and Lakaylee had both run away from home separately, and one time they did it together, Nevaeh stayed away for an entire month. As fiercely as Nevaeh loved her mother. They could argue, too.

All of us kids bumps heads with my mom, but like, who doesn't bump heads with their mom?

When she first told the Bemidji police that Nevaeh was missing, Teddy reported her as a runaway. Looking back, she wonders if that label stopped the police from working Nevaeh's case hard. In those early days. She says it took a week for the officer she filed her report with to even call her.

He said, Did Nevaeh come home? and I said, No, Nevaeh didn't come home, not yet. And then he goes, All right, I'll call you in a week, see if she came home. And then he hung up.

She blames herself for not pushing them to do more.

I kick myself in the butt more like, I think I'm more hard on myself than I'm hard on anybody else. Because I'm like, what could I have done more to search for my daughter?

After several weeks with no word from Nevaeh, Lakaylee realized this time was different She believed Nevaeh hadn't just run away.

She would always like keep in contact, like even though she was on run, she would keep in contact even if it was through somebody else's social media.

Another red flag to Lakaylee.

She hasn't came back for none of her clothes.

And then there was their little sister, Natalie, who was five. She was so close to Nevaeh she'd fall asleep in her bed every night. Lakaylee and Teddy didn't think Nevaeh would ever leave her willingly.

Natalie was her whole world.

Those two were close, huh?

Yes, very close.

If Nevaeh wasn't a runaway, then what had happened to her?

Around the 30-day mark is when investigation starts.

The teenager's case file was handed off to a detective, which is department protocol for runaways who are still missing after a month. Detective Sergeant Dan Seberg, a veteran of the Bemidji Police Department, said the officers before him had done their best to find Nevaeh. But this wasn't a typical runaway case Nevaeh had been gone too long.

Do they usually come back in your experience?

Usually, they return home.

So this was a big cause for alarm that Nevaeh had not returned home.

Correct? When Teddy informed me that she hadn't been active on any social media and friends were reporting they hadn't heard from her, it made me very concerned.

Nevaeh's mother was now in full panic mode. It wasn't just her daughter's silence that worried her. She had found out something new, a potentially huge break in the case, which she shared with Detective Seberg. Where Nevaeh went after bolting from their house, someone told Teddy's 12-year-old son that Nevaeh and another girl had run to a trailer park just a few blocks away. Nevaeh knew someone there.

So I spoke to a number of people that were in that trailer. Nevaeh and her friend showed up. Nevaeh and her friend were there for a while visiting, they were talking. The juvenile male's dad knocks, or stepdad knocks on the door because he hears voices, so he's telling everyone they need to go home.

Her friend had got a ride home. But Nevaeh had run off into the dark again, this time alone, and she'd left her phone behind, which maybe explained why no one had heard from Nevaeh.

Nevaeh and her friend both left their phones behind. The juvenile male that resides at the residence actually found their phones a couple weeks later, between his bed and the wall. So they must have fallen out when they climbed in the window.

Was anyone able to get into her phone? Did it provide any information?

Yes, we were able to finally crack the passcode on her phone and we got into it. It hasn't provided any further information.

So no messages from anyone saying I'll come pick you up or nevaeh telling someone you know, I'll come over to your place, nothing like that.

Nothing that night, no.

And no trace of her on the trailer park security camera footage either.

We checked with everyone that had security cameras in the trailer park that night, and no one's security cameras went back to the night in question.

That's a shame that that couldn't have been done sooner.

It is yes.

Precious time was lost.

Investigators used dogs and drones to search the area around the trailer park. The detective had a sobering working theory about what might have happened.

You thought she might have frozen to death or been incapacitated somewhere?

Jumping out of the window and she fell asleep somewhere because she was trying to hide or just laid down.

The police search came up with nothing and the trail went cold until a crime analyst at the Bemidji Police Department spotted another possible clue. In a property damage report. Of all places, it had been filed about eight hours after Nevaeh jumped out of the window at that trailer park.

The complainant reported that a female had knocked on their door early morning hours and asked for somebody and then had left. And the following morning, when they woke up, they found their detached garage had two broken windows on it.

Could it have been Nevaeh seeking shelter in the cold? The people who filed the complaint lived just south of the trailer park. Detective Seberg went to see them.

They described a mid-teen Native American female with dark wavy hair, with either blonde or orange highlights in it.

They also described what she was wearing.

A black, zip-up hooded sweatshirt with a white t-shirt, skinny jeans and no shoes, dark colored socks.

No shoes? Yeah, no shoes. That description matches the clothes Nevaeh was wearing that night. But when Detective Seberg showed the couple the photos of Nevaeh, they didn't identify her as the female who knocked on the door.

They indicated that they didn't believe it was Nevaeh due to some different things in the photos. But in talking to them, the description they provide matches her almost to a t.

Do you think she spent the night in that garage?

I don't know that.

If she had, she was clearly gone by the morning when the property owner had called the sheriff's office.

Did they live near a busy road at all, a highway, somewhere where she could have hitchhiked?

Yeah, they lived right along Washington Avenue, which is a main road leaving Bemidji southbound.

Some people think that road might just lead to answers in this mystery, and possibly another one.

Do you think there's any possibility that Nevaeh and Jeremy's disappearances are connected?

Winter was coming in Bemidji, Minnesota, temperatures were dropping, snowstorms gathering. And so were theories about what had happened to 15-year-old Nevaeh Kingbird. She'd been missing for more than a month. A girl who looked like her had been reported to police hours after Nevaeh disappeared close to a road leading out of town.

Have you heard about the theories of human trafficking that she might have?

Met with harm.

When she possibly went out to that road.

We don't have any evidence of that, but it's definitely a possibility.

Is human trafficking an issue in Bemidji?

We don't see a large amount of human trafficking in Bemidji, but it's definitely prevalent in the northern part of the state.

A few weeks after Nevaeh disappeared, there was another possible sighting. A girl with a black eye and a resemblance to Nevaeh was spotted by a family friend at a target store. Could it be her? Detective? Seberg tracked down the girl and talked to her She wasn't Nevaeh.

So, a dead end false alarm, correct?

For Nevaeh's mother, the false alarms and the uncertainty were agony. She couldn't stop thinking about the night of the party.

I felt like I was frozen in time because I'm like, should I not have called the cops on them, kids, you know, like, just beating myself up like that?

Then, almost two months after her disappearance, came another painful moment for the family. A big storm had covered Bemidji in knee-deep snow. Law enforcement suspended their searches for Nevaeh.

We had done what we believed we could do due to the snow.

Teddy was determined to keep the search going. She asked volunteers to meet the family at the Dollar General Store near her house. Hundreds of people showed up, including her brother Daniel. When Nevaeh disappeared, he told Teddy not to worry, told her Nevaeh would come home.

It wasn't until the day, actual day of the search. It hit me like a wave, you know, and yeah, and then I, yeah.

The search made it feel real that here we are looking for Nevaeh, that she's.

Reality hit Yep.

Something else hit Daniel during the family's first search.

I noticed there was a there was a lack of structure and, like organization. Nobody was doing grids, nobody was keeping track of what was searched. And I was like, dang, I knew I had to step up.

Daniel knew more than most about that kind of thing. He had spent more than a decade working as a firefighter battling wildfires across Minnesota.

I'm sure you never thought your experience fighting wildfires would translate into your own search for your niece.

Yep.

At the family's second search four days later, Daniel took the lead.

The volunteers are marching off for our second large area search.

And this time, they found something at the trailer park buried in the snow was a pair of frozen women's jeans. Then, a few days after that, someone found another piece of clothing, a sweatshirt that looked like one Nevaeh's grandmother owned. It had strands of hair in the hood. Police collected both of the items.

I couldn't even talk, I cried all the time, I was hysterical. I was out there digging in snow piles to see if my daughter was under them snow piles.

Just trying to imagine you as a mother, searching for your own daughter, that fear of what's around the corner, you know, what's under that snow pile?

I was afraid, more afraid than I've ever been in my whole life.

After weeks of searching, even a trained first responder like Daniel was struggling.

I'm able to keep my emotions intact, but when they hit, it cuts deep. The hurt, the sadness is just as intense as the anger when that comes. You know what I mean?

Yeah.

And Daniel was plenty angry with the police.

First thing I noticed at that first search is there was absolutely no law enforcement present there whatsoever. Like, you look at all these searches on the news, and they're out there leading searches, or they're out there taking part in them. I didn't even see one cop, one patrolman there.

It made him think the police just didn't care about a missing Indigenous girl.

The world reacts different to us. You know what I mean? You know, I'm not saying that directly to anybody, it's just the way life is for us, you know?

Five months after Nevaeh disappeared, her family was starting to feel defeated and so alone, and that's when someone new came into their lives.

She brought me hope, she brought, she brought.

She brought that to me.

No, it's okay.

Teddy is talking about a woman named Lyssa Yellowbird.

I am a justice seeker for missing, murdered and exploited people with a preference for Indigenous people.

I first met Lyssa in 2020 when I was reporting on a story for Dateline about her murdered niece, Karla. Lyssa helped police track down the killer. She's helped locate dozens of missing people, some of them alive, some not.

You've seen so many cases like this.

Right, it's like one wrong move, one miscalculation, and there's a person missing. What happened that evening with Nevaeh happens all the time.

Lyssa lives in North Dakota, almost 400 miles from Bemidji, but she knew the area where Nevaeh was last seen very well.

It was Teresa Jordan that reached out to me first and said, Are you aware that there's a young lady missing in the area? Nevaeh Kingbird. And I said, I was not.

Five years before Nevaeh disappeared, Lyssa had come to Bemidji to help Teresa search for her 17-year-old son, Jeremy. Like Nevaeh. He'd vanished after leaving a party. Police found Jeremy's backpack lying in the middle of the road, but no trace of Jeremy himself. Detective Seberg told us. There's no evidence the disappearances are related, but Lyssa says the similarities are uncanny, not least that Jeremy vanished less than a mile from the trailer park.

It's haunting, it's pretty haunting.

Lyssa swung into action over the phone. She and Teddy and Daniel strategized and made a plan. Then she drove more than six hours with her cadaver dogs to help Daniel and the rest of the family search.

Day five This is Badoe from the Sandy Scouts. Lyssa, the Yellow Bear, chases doggy.

In a video, Daniel recorded Badoe trots ahead of him, nose close to the snow.

Me and him had partnered up for five days now, covered a lot of ground the past four or five days.

Daniel tried to hold out hope that his niece was still alive. But following behind the dogs, he knew if they found Nevaeh, they would most likely find her body.

Me and my girlfriend. We found a tarp laying in the middle of the snow, it was on top of the snow and it looked about the right size. I walked up and I grabbed it and I went to pull it. And I and my heart, my heart, almost like I thought I was ready, you know?

Did you think it was Nevaeh?

I was just ready, ready for it to be something, you know, and it would end up being a dog frozen there. But it scared the shit out of me like that.

That's still unsettling.

Even finding a frozen dog is awful. Did Lyssa's searches turn up anything? Did they help at all?

We found Nevaeh's eyeliner in her lighter.

Or at least an eyeliner that was the same brand that Nevaeh always carried with her. With each search, Daniel felt like they were making progress. He said it was helpful even when the dogs found nothing, because he trusted their keen sense of smell.

I was able to have that peace of mind that there's nothing there. We can move to the next spot.

But it was something else. Lyssa did that, Daniel says. has changed his life. Before Lyssa came to town. Daniel had been too shy to share Nevaeh's story with strangers. Lyssa didn't have any patience for that.

And I tell him, Look, Nevaeh's not here to speak for herself, you are her voice. We don't got time for being shy. You have an audience here and you got one chance to make them care about Nevaeh as much as you do.

Lyssa nudged Daniel and Teddy to ask neighbors and strangers, too, for tips and information.

There's something that keeps a lot of families from going and knocking on the door, and so I and Daniel and Teddy basically started knocking on doors.

You get this feeling that people don't care, you know other people around Bemidji, and. But you go door to door and you talk to them and some of them start crying and they get you crying. It's crazy how much people that actually do care and want to help.

As time went on, Daniel says he noticed other families in his community suffering missing a loved one. Like he was, he felt like his eyes had been opened to the epidemic right in front of him and across the country. According to the FBI's National Crime Information Center, Nevaeh was just one of more than 6,000 Indigenous children and teenagers who were missing in 2021..

That was a good walk, that was a good little walk.

He also started giving speeches.

You have gone, Daniel, from someone who, from what I understand, hated public speaking, and now you've turned into an activist. You are like a different person. Almost since this happened.

Yeah, you know, it's like I said, I'm doing it for Nevaeh and her siblings and my sister, but yeah, because nobody else is, you know?

We asked Detective Seberg if Daniel was right to think that the family was on its own.

There's, you know, the thought that Nevaeh didn't get the attention that, say, a white girl would have gotten.

I mean, some people may believe that, but that is not the case in this.

The detective told us he has worked the case tirelessly, chasing down dozens of tips and keeping the family informed.

The family says, You know, they went out and searched that winter in the, you know, the brutal temperatures. They don't understand why the authorities didn't go out.

And that's a conversation I had with family. I informed them that we couldn't expand the resources walking through knee-deep snow when we would just have to redo it again in the spring.

And he said police did do a few small searches that winter, looking for any animal activity that might signal the presence of human remains. They didn't see anything. We also asked Detective Seberg about the frozen jeans the family found and what police had done with them.

They don't appear to be the jeans she was wearing, No.

Were they tested at all, or is this just eyeballing?

Eyeballing and the fact that the condition of the jeans, they appeared to have been in the woods longer than just over a month.

So you don't think those were Nevaeh's jeans?

I don't believe so, no.

As for the sweatshirt that looked like Nevaeh's grandmother's, the detective sent it to the lab for testing. He said. The hair did not belong to Nevaeh. He's waiting for results to come back about the eyeliner.

Another day searching y'all.

Pray for us. Get some answers today.

They didn't, but this time, the family felt like investigators were working with them, working to find their nevaeh. You want to solve this case?

Yes, I do.

It seems obvious.

Yes, I want closure for Teddy and her family. These types of cases are not fun for whichever investigator is the primary on it. It's something that sits there and it's something that you see and work with every day. And it's difficult to know that a 15-year-old just disappeared.

Ten months after she vanished, Nevaeh's family and friends celebrated her 16th birthday without her.

Happy birthday.

They gathered in a park, children released balloons that rose into the summer sky.

Because you two were going to do it together.

Yep, we were.

Do you have a message for Nevaeh if there was any chance that she heard this?

Just that, you know, her family's still here and we're not going to give up until we find out what happened. And we're not mad. Yeah, but we're hurting, definitely hurting.

Nevaeh's mother says that hurt never leaves her, but she also has some hope. These days, she feels supported by advocates like Lyssa Yellowbird and heard by Detective Seberg. She has faith that she might get answers one day.

Nevaeh is heaven spelled backwards.

Yes, Nevaeh is heaven spelled backwards.

Do you think that Nevaeh is in heaven now?

I don't know.

Daniel Wind says he will do whatever it takes to bring her home.

How badly do you want someone to come forward and say, Yes, I know something? What's your plea to them?

Yeah, I pray every day, like I tell people, you know, I don't lock people up. I just want to find my niece, you know what I mean? I just want to bring her home.

Here's where you can help. Nevaeh Kingbird is 5'4 and at the time of her disappearance, she weighed 120 pounds. She has brown eyes and dark brown hair with blonde streaks. She has a scar on her left eyebrow and another on her left thigh, and was last seen in the Nymore neighborhood of Bemidji, Minnesota. If you know anything or saw something, please call the Bemidji Police tip line at 218-333-9111 or the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children at 1-800-the-Lost.

Missing In America is a production of Dateline and NBC News.