20/20 - The After Show: Life on the Line

Episode Date: October 13, 2025

Deborah Roberts and 20/20 producers discuss Denise Amber Lee's case and the clues the kidnapped mom left to help police find her killer. Plus, the team shares bonus clips with an investigator on the case and with Lee's two young sons, now teens, on how they carry her legacy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Free access ends August 24th. Visit Ancestry.ca for more details. Terms apply. Hi everybody. I'm Deborah Roberts and welcome back to 2020 The After Show, the program where we take you behind the scenes of some of our reporting and give you kind of a look at how we put these programs together. And today we're talking about a story that I worked on. I reported on down in Florida. A 21-year-old mom has gone missing from her home. She left behind at the time her two small sons, whom her family, of course, insisted she never would have left abandoned.

It's a 2020 episode called Life on the Line. And it's available right here on your podcast feed and streaming on Hulu and Disney Plus. Producer's Jeff Schneider and Denise Martinez Ramundo worked on this case with me. And I'm so excited to have Denise and Jeff here. Denise, good to see you. I think I'm going to start with you because you brought this story to me. It was something that you, I think, discovered, and, you know, obviously it had been a story that had happened in Florida. As a mom, you're a mom, I am too. And oftentimes you and I have connected over these stories just because we're parents. And when it is something that involves a parent, it really kind of grabs us right away. And tell me about for you when you first heard about this story, a 21-year-old

mom going missing. And of course, you know, tragically turns out dead. Her name turns out to be Denise, just like my name. We actually share the same birth year. And, you know, so you kind of hit close to home. Also, like, reaching out, you know, curious, I'm sharing the same name. And what was really interesting is that as a mom, you know, she was taking, leaving her two young sons behind, six months and two years old. I have young children. So to know that she had to be taken away from them and in her mind to maybe try to protect themselves, take the harm away from them. She was a young stay-at-home mom, a very bright young woman, Denise Amber Lee. One of the things that we really, I thought, brought home for viewers in this case was sort of 9-1-1 calls, how it all works, why that was so urgent.

What were you thinking in terms of bringing this home to viewers? We have a series of 911 calls that really bring this kidnapping to life. Like we are experiencing and listening to it unfolding in real time. So I think this is unlike any other story that we've seen, that we kind of. kind of can see that progression, and I think it was really important to bring that to the viewer. So the audio is obviously really shocking to hear, but obviously, you know, in order for that to bring it to life, I think definitely Jeff, you know, with the video really was able to, you know, capture that. And for folks who may not have seen the episode, and I'm telling you,

you're going to want to go see the episode, but those of you who did, you'll remember that Denise Amber Lee placed a 911 call from the car, her captor's car. She was actually taken from her home and she very cleverly was able to get his phone and to place a call to the police just sort of not obviously signaling that she was calling the police but giving enough information there it's almost like something out of a out of a tv show and jeff what about you and your approach to this particular story you knew the area yeah i mean and i'm also a dad so uh with two kids and i immediately when when i read this story when i learned about the story i put myself in Nathan's shoes and her husband you know I just yeah her husband and I just really wanted to

capture kind of what he was going through and what he was feeling and you know these locations were all so very important like where their house was you know it was in the middle of nowhere it was a back on a tucked in you know street where it felt safe you know and so that was really something that was important for me to try to get across with the with the visuals is just where everything took place, the relationship to each other, and stuff like that. And then, you know, also the strength of this family, you know, Sue, the mom, taking in the children in the middle of this nightmare, you know, like you mentioned, having to go, she had to go get formula because Denise was still breastfeeding.

Yeah, there was something about that tender idea that she's still a breastfeeding mom and had to leave her children behind because she was kidnapped. And in the story, we learn a lot about the two of them, Denise and Nathan. They were very young when they got married. They had these children pretty quickly. And Nathan was a very devoted dad, working very hard. It comes home, and, you know, his wife's keys and her purse are there, but she's not to be found anywhere. He's the first person, actually, to call 911 in the story.

So let's remind our listeners, and let's take a listen. Northport Emergency? Yes. I'm at Latour Avenue. I just got home from work, and my wife, I can't find her. My kids were in the house, and I don't know where she is. I've looked every single place, and I don't know. How old are your kids, sir?

My oldest is two, and my youngest is six months. I know. I don't know where her mommy is. Your vehicle is in a driveway? Yes. Do she have any medical conditions? No. Her purse is here. I don't.

Her cell phone is here. I don't. I don't know. I don't know. Okay, what is your name? Denise. That call is just so chilling because you can hear the desperation. You can also hear the panic in his voice.

Jeff, you talked about being a dad, and of course, Denise, you're a parent too. And I think for all of us, as we were going back and looking at this story, and I had an opportunity to meet her two now older sons, her father's a police officer, and we'll talk about that and her parents. This was a hard one to report Denise. And I mean, even your face now, as we're watching, talking to you about it. I mean, this was a hard one, wasn't it? Yeah, definitely. I mean, in that 911 call, you hear even the son asking, where's mommy? You know, my little one

is starting to talk, almost getting close to the two-year-old age. And, you know, they realized and just hearing that the panic on his voice, the little young son asking for his mom, you know, it was hard, you know, to report on it. So we had covered the story back in 2008, but we didn't have her 911 call. And even though it's heartbreaking and, you know, hard stopping, but it really shows how brave she was. And I think it was important for us to do this story, showing, making our viewers listen to that 911 call to show the impact that her case has had on the 911 system going forward. Yeah. And that became kind of a theme for us, Jeff, in this story. We're going to examine 911 calls and operators. And we went actually to a 911 office there to kind of find out how they

work because this case would eventually change a lot in Florida when it comes to 9-1-1 cases. We have to dig through a lot of video file reporting. And as Denise said, this is the first time we had actually had an opportunity to broadcast this particular 911 call. Yeah, yeah. Both me and Denise, you know, go through all the case files that we can get our hands on. You know, we try to get everything. We listen to everything.

We make notes on it all. you know and we're listening to everything and we're keeping all that in mind as we go out and I think that makes us better in the field so that we can really know what to what how to film certain things you know the locations and everything like that yeah especially when it's a case like this one that happened several years back and then we try to see what we can do to bring something new to it fresh eyes well there's so much more to this story to report and to tell you all about how we put it all together Denise Amber Lee and the case of the missing mom down in Florida.

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Desjardin today. We'd love to talk business. We are back now with Denise Martinez Ramundo and Jeff Schneider, producers on this story with me for 2020. They covered the Denise Amber Lee case and it was driven by consequential 911 calls. I want to get into all of them, but we heard that call from Nathan a little earlier. Now, there was a call from Denise herself. I want to play for all of us in a clip from that. Do you know this guy that's with you? No. You don't know him from anywhere? No, me. Oh, God, help me. What is the address to your end? Where are we going? Because it's wrong.

Can you see that? That's the last way. Four street, fall, five, three, go from your house. I'm clear. Yeah.

I'm aware. Northport L-9. Sarasota just had Denise A. Lee on the phone advice and she was taken by an unknown subject. Ugh. That call was just so distressing. What were your thoughts about how much of it to play and whether even to play it? We gave it a lot of thought to that.

In our previous reporting, we had her dad. her dad and ourselves describing the call. I mean, after listening to the call, I think we felt it was important for us to, for the Bureau to hear how brave she was and how she handled herself in that situation. It was really important, you know, in her 911 call, that she's relaying critical information about, you know, about the person who has her, you know, he's saying, like, I don't know you, please take me back home. She says, take me back home to my house and Latour, trying to give, you know, dispatchers information about, you know, where her home is. So she could identify her.

They could identify hopefully him. And that was really critical because they will eventually use that information and they will convict him later on. Yeah. It was so amazing to me. I mean, this is a 21-year-old woman. Her father was a police officer. So she had some smarts about, I guess, the law and maybe even just about, you know,

trying to figure out a way to get herself out of this, but that she had the presence of mind, even in the middle of all that fear, to throw out these little breadcrumbs to police. And also, too, of course, to try to plead with this abductor. But then another call came through that actually helped identify who her actual killer was. Let's take a listen to that call. I just got a call from my dad, and his cousin came over his house with a girl in the car, and she was tied up. He borrowed a shovel, a gas tank, and found out. What's the kind of driving?

A green Camaro. What's the cousin's name? Mikey King. Put out a ball over to FHP 2, please. We're a dark green Camaro. Lucy Sane is driving that Camaro. Michael King. Oh, my gosh.

I think for all of us, this was not only upsetting, but maybe even infuriating when you think about this young woman is missing every second counts. This young girl calls because her father didn't call, and she gives police a little bit of information. this is the first time we actually hear a name, Michael King. And that was critical, Jeff, right? It was. And, you know, when we talked with the police and the detectives, they had said that Denise's call, when they got the 911 call from Denise, they started to trace it. And then they

got this other call from that girl that we just heard. And that they had a name. And then they eventually got the name back from the phone that they were tracing from Denise's 911 call. And it matched up and both, you know, it was Michael King. So they knew they had their guy and it was just, you know, you talk about the research that we were doing when we when we first started this, you know, we tried to dig into who was this guy, who is Michael King. Yeah, what was his connection to Denise Amber Lee, which was nothing. Which was nothing.

And there was, you know, we couldn't find any criminal background with him. And so that randomness just made this even more change. feeling. Yeah, Denise, I think that's what got me, the randomness, because we do so many of these stories, and oftentimes we kind of see it coming, right? It's either the spouse or a relative or some disgruntled, you know, employee or worker with someone. But in this case, it's just one of those things, those random crimes that all of us fear. That's what makes it the, this case, really, really scary, because it's somebody random, somebody that had no connection whatsoever to her. And, you know, somebody who turned out to be a father. You know, he had a young son. Yeah. And, you know, his most

recent girlfriend had said that she was shocked as everybody else to hear that it was him and that she would never have imagined that he would be capable to do something like this. Yeah. As I said, the 911 calls played such a role. Denise makes a call. This young woman makes a call. And then there's another call that comes in that could have changed everything. A woman named Jane Kowalski, who you had me meet Denise and I drove along with her so she could point out to me where she was driving. She happened to be in town on her way to go visit a relative and she saw a car with someone banging on the back window in the car. And she said she was on the phone with her sister and she could hear this screaming. It was almost like a kid's voice. She couldn't

make it out. And she knew something was wrong. She could see that this guy was driving and this person was banging very, very frantically. Let's take a listen to this one. they kept banging on the window and screaming and not a happy scream like get me out of here scream he just turned on to little boy i don't know if i can catch up there's a bunch of traffic and i can't get over oh boy you can't get more specific than that this woman is giving all this detail in real time she's telling them where she is i mean i think all of our jaws just dropped denise let's talk about how you found jane you brought her to florida i got a chance to get in the car Jeff, you were shooting to talk to her about how this all played out for her.

And she was a very interesting woman, very strong woman who felt very strongly about trying to do the right thing. She even wanted to follow the car, but they lost her after a while. She was like trying to do her part as a citizen. Yeah, I mean, it's always really important for us to be able to go back and find those people that are so key to the story. I mean, obviously Jane saw something that in her mind look like a kidnapping. And, you know, I think it was really important for to have you right with her so she can really point, you know, I'm in this lane. He's crossing over. I mean, I think to be able to really capture that and I understand it from herself. I mean, I mean, you saw she even showed you how loud the banging on the window was. I mean, that was quite something so that she really knew somebody was in trouble. And so, I mean, I think it's really, you know, unfortunately, you know, her call comes to at the dispatch center, were actually her, you know, the agency where Denise's father works for. So it was people there that obviously really care about Denise.

And of course, you know, what was so upsetting was that we learned that there was a snafu in the 911 call center, which just complicated this story all the more. Ultimately, sadly, very sadly in this case, Denise's body was found. Well, we talked about Denise's sons who are now young men, almost grown men. And we had a chance to meet them and to talk with them. They're very, very amazing young men. We're going to share some extended moments for my interview with them when we come back. So stay with us.

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The hell to stay, kid. 911, Nashville. All new Thursdays, 9-8 Central on ABC and stream next day on Hulu. We are back now with producers Jeff Schneider and Denise Martinez-Ramundo talking about our recent 2020 life on the line of a heartbreaking and chilling story about a 21-year-old young mom. of two who went missing and was later found dead. And we kind of take you through all the twist and turns now of this story, but also the 911 calls that played such a key role in this case. And sadly led to a delay in police being able to track down Denise. We also went to those detectives who were on this case. And Chris Morales was one of them. He was the lead detective

on the Denise Amber Lee case. Jeff, talk to us a little bit about that because we had to not only track him down but take him back to these locations of where this all played out and it's a story that he hasn't forgotten either no and you know after this case he wanted to figure out what they could do better how they could improve how they could not have this happen again and they he spearheaded this real-time intelligence center um and when we went and talked with him and sat him down to interview him you know he took us into the intelligence center and we just felt like this is where we need to talk to him. Well, let's take a listen to what he told us. What's behind me here is our real-time intelligence center. There's over 150 pieces of intelligent equipment that's placed throughout

our city. I can tell you right now if we were able to take all of this behind me and go back in time and implement it into 2008, I strongly believe in my heart that we would have had Denise Amber Lee. I also had an opportunity, which was pretty amazing, was to talk to our her sons, Adam and Noah. One of them had just graduated from high school. The other one is a chef. And they were really pretty amazing to talk to. Denise. Yeah, I mean, one thing when I started working on the story, I mean, I realized the six-month-old and the two-year-old are probably teenagers now. I want to hear from them. I want to know how this, you know, what life has been for them, you know? Obviously, their mom was taken away from them when they were so young. And, you know,

and, you know, we'll talk about, like, how their dad has gone on to speak about her mom's story. But I wanted to hear from them, and I think it was very moving, and I think they were very eloquent. And they say themselves, they say, you never, you usually don't get to hear about, you know, like the kids, you know, from like the impact that it has on them. And I think that was really, really moving to hear what they have to say. Adam and Noah were talking to us for the first time publicly about this case, and we have a bonus clip. from our interview, so let's take a listen. When you think about the two of you now, having grown up, you had each other.

Did that create a special bond between the two of you? Yeah, you know, even as we take our separate paths in life, that keeps us bonded forever, you know. Knowing that he was going through the same thing, definitely helped, help me. There's a monument in the park that is basically a tribute to your mom. Do you spend any time there?

I still make an effort to visit and to kind of say my peace, you know, almost like she's there. If I don't go there, I go to the cemetery. So you feel some connection to her? I used to wear a cross on one of my necklaces. I left it there with her. At the cemetery? Just a part of me with her.

Because I'll always have a part of her with me. And I'd do my best to carry her with me everywhere I go. Do you feel on some level that you kind of know her, even though you don't remember her? All these stories and everything I hear, you know, she's still been a perfect mother despite her not being here. I always try to dedicate a part of my success to her without her.

You know, what would I be, you know? what would I be, you know? I have to tell you, this was very hard for me sitting across from these two young men. I mean, you could hear Noah weeping there and just, oh, my, even just listening to it again now, powerful words from these two. And it was interesting to hear them talking about, you know, visiting her and the jewelry. And, of course, having talked to Denise's husband, who now has been remarried, Nathan, but who still so clearly carries a lot of pain, having lost Denise.

Nathan, though, one of the things that I just thought was so remarkable, Denise, was that Nathan had given Denise a ring when they first started dating, not a very expensive ring, but it was like a little heart. It was for Valentine's Day. She was wearing that ring when she was abducted. And smartly, she left the ring behind in the car to give police a clue. And he actually got that ring back not long before we did this interview. And Denise, that was really pretty remarkable. Yeah, when I, you know, reached out to him about doing the story, you know, he had mentioned to me that just a few months ago, he had gotten, you know, that ring back in, you know, Michael Kin's appeals had all been exhausted. So he was able to get this piece of jewelry back, which again, it was so special. He said that it wasn't expensive, but it became one of her priceless possessions. And she left it in that car because she knew that Nathan would be. able to identify it. So getting it back was very special for him. Yeah. And just a remarkable man himself, Jeff. I mean, he has dedicated his life now to speaking out about 911 and how laws

changed in Florida and other parts of the country where they strengthened the protocol for 911 calls. You know, I actually attended one of the events where Nathan was telling Denise's story to a bunch of people that work in the 911 field. And I talked with the people. after the people that were attending. And her story, him telling her story, really made a difference, really impacted them. And, you know, it also impacted me. You know, I'm not going to forget this, you know.

And I think that it's just really amazing. Again, I think I said the strength of this family was so important. And just the way that they've turned their tragedy, you know, into action is just, it's remarkable. Yeah, pain into purpose as we see in so many of these episodes. Well, guys, you brought it home in such. a remarkable way and such a powerful way. Denise and Jeff, so well done on the piece. And thank you so much for being with us today.

Thank you, Deborah. Thanks, Deborah. I'm going to see you soon, I'm sure. Tron is back. Are you serious? And it must be seen on the biggest screen possible. Experience mind-blowing visuals and one of the best film scores of all time. I just can't get enough.

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