The Deck - Nefertiri “Neffie” Trader (Queen of Hearts, Delaware)

Episode Date: April 29, 2026

Our card this week is Nefertiri "Neffie" Trader, the Queen of Hearts from Delaware. In the early hours of June 30th, 2014, 33-year-old Nefertiri, who went by “Neffie”, was kidnapped from her own front yard. In the dark, she was dragged into her car, away from the townhome she shared with her mom and three children. Even though Neffie’s kidnapping was witnessed, it would be almost nineteen hours before police learned that Neffie was missing. After an investigation failed to find out what happened to Neffie, a Delaware court declared her legally dead. But her body has still never been found.  Could the identity of Neffie’s kidnapper lie with friends she saw hours before she vanished?  Or is the suspect a convicted killer out for revenge? If you have any information about the disappearance of Nefertiri Trader, you can contact the New Castle County Police Department at their non-emergency number, which is 302-573-2800. Or you can call Crimestoppers at 1-800-TIP-3333.   View source material and photos for this episode at: thedeckpodcast.com/nefertiri-neffie-trader Let us deal you in… follow The Deck on social media. Instagram: @thedeckpodcast | @audiochuck Twitter: @thedeckpodcast_ | @audiochuck Facebook: /TheDeckPodcast | /audiochuckllc To support Season of Justice and learn more, please visit seasonofjustice.org. The Deck is hosted by Ashley Flowers.  Instagram: @ashleyflowers TikTok: @ashleyflowerscrimejunkie Twitter: @Ash_Flowers Facebook: /AshleyFlowers.AF Text Ashley at 317-733-7485 to talk all things true crime, get behind the scenes updates, and more! Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Our card this week is Nefertiri Neffi Trader, the Queen of Hearts from Delaware. In the early hours of June 30th, 2014, 33-year-old Neffy was kidnapped from her own front yard. In the dark, she was dragged into her car away from the townhome that she shared with her mom and three children. Even though Neffy's kidnapping was witnessed, it would be almost 19 hours before police learned that Neffy was missing. After an investigation failed to find out what happened in Neffi, a Delaware court declared her legally dead. But her body has still never been found. Could the identity of Neffi's kidnapper lie with friends that she saw just hours before she vanished? Or is the suspect a convicted killer out for revenge?

I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is the deck. Neffey Trader's neighbor was awake at around 4.15 in the morning on June 30th, 2014, when he heard a woman scream. Civilian investigator Teresa Teresa Williams of the Newcastle County Police Department told us that the sound was concerning enough that he got up and looked through his second floor window. So he looks out his window. He sees his neighbor and he describes her as wearing pink.

And when he sees her, she's engaged in some type of verbal altercation with what he thinks is a male. And he says that he sees her car. He sees the man kind of engaging in a physical altercation pulling her back. She gets in the driver's seat of the car. Then he sees that male on top of her. And then there's some type of struggle. And he actually sees this male subject pick her up and put her in the back seat of the car. And just the way, you know, when you think about somebody, the way they phrase things and the way they say, you know, he was dragging her. And then he said, and I don't remember if these are exact words, but then he says he picked up the body.

Somebody's saying that to you, you're like, something really bad happened to this lady. We reached out to the neighbor to ask him about what he saw, but he didn't respond to our reporter's text messages or phone calls. Whether she was dead or not, We still to this day don't know. That's Master Corporal Joshua Smith. He's currently working with Investigator Williams on Neffi's case, and we interviewed them together. But at that time, obviously, when we're getting this information, there's concern for her safety at this point.

This is more at this point than just a typical missing person. We have people go missing every day. The information that we're getting at this point, this is going beyond. After the neighbor saw someone being dragged, picked up, and driven off, he didn't call 911. For the next 19 hours, police were unaware of the precious time they were losing. It wasn't until Neffi's mom called to report her missing around 11 p.m. And they came out to Canvas that they finally heard this neighbor's concerning story. So why didn't he call 911?

I asked them that exact question and it was I just didn't want to get involved with other people's business. That was Sergeant Matthew DeSabatino, one of the original investigators. The neighborhood itself of Saddlebrook again is a blue-collar, low-income, salt-to-the-earth people, very normal, nice people. It's a one-way-in, one-way-out neighborhood. It's not uncommon for people to argue over parking spots or loud music coming from the neighbor's house. That's typical. call. So for him to say he didn't want to get involved in one of those aspects would have been completely normal. Why he chose not to get involved with this when he saw somebody getting

physically assaulted and kidnapped, it's beyond my comprehension. I don't know his background. I don't know his story, but has his own reasons, whatever they are for not telling the police. I think if we had been, if the police had been called sooner, I think this may have had a different result. Maybe it didn't, but we would have had a better chance to locate Nuffie had we been notified sooner. Investigators talked with the neighbor several times, and even after multiple conversations, they didn't believe that he was a suspect. There was no evidence that he'd been in contact with Neffi that morning, no sign that

they'd had a long-running dispute or argument. They were just two people who happened to live on the same street. But the neighbor's firsthand account of Neffi's kidnapping was important, because along with giving them confirmation of foul play, it also. confirmed that it was Neffi's own car that she was driven off in, a silver 2000 Accura. So the first thing that police did was push out a bolo for the vehicle. The best thing we know at that point in time is the sooner we get a description of the car out, the sooner we get the picture out to the media, that's the sooner we can ask the public for help.

So that was something real important that we did right away. Neffi's family didn't need the neighbor's sighting to know that something was very very very wrong. To them, there were signs. She lived at home with her mom and her three kids, and even though she'd been out at a club the night before, they expected her home by morning. In fact, what made this so concerning to them is that there had been evidence she had made at home. They found a collection of items left on the front stoop, a loaf of bread, two cups of coffee, and an unused condom still in the wrapper. Investigator de Sabatino was there that day. And he remembers one of those pieces of evidence very well.

On the front porch stoop of her townhome was the loaf of bread that we found, and it looked like it had been stepped on. We believe it was one of the things she was buying for the children for that day. The loaf of bread is just a typical grocery store loaf of bread, nondescript, and it looked like a shoe impression had to made into it. It wasn't enough for anything that we could actually form a cast off of and then utilized that. But it was enough to say this wasn't somebody

who was just holding a loaf of bread and it got squashed. It was flattened out. But that was just one more indicator that, okay, something is a miss. Investigators would learn that Neffi had purchased the bread and the other items at a nearby 7-Eleven roughly 10 to 15 minutes before she was kidnapped.

So this is a photograph of Neffi Trader at the 7-Eleven making her purchases. And it's time-samped 4.3. So this is right prior to her abduction, prior to her arriving home that morning and after her night at the club. So in the photograph, you can see the two cups of coffee. You can see the loaf of bread. The condom's kind of obscured in this picture, but this is her in the pink outfit, making those purchases at the 7-11. The items Neffi purchased seemed to tell a story.

Two cups of coffee, one condom. It seemed like Neffi was planning to meet someone. or perhaps she was already with someone that night. This is pure speculation, but she was at the club the night before. It's not impossible to leave. She had met an individual at the club, and she was driving home, and that's the individual who drove her from the 7-Eleven to the residence. It's possible, but I can't prove that.

We know from some of the items that were purchased at 7-Eleven, that it is a possibility. But I can't say definitively that's what occurred. Unfortunately, the 7-Eleven footage doesn't clear this up. Neffi appears to be alone inside, and the outside camera fails to show how she arrived or with whom. When Felice tried talking to some of the friends that they found out Neffi had been with at the club that night, they shared nothing. I'm told the club that they'd been at was an underground off-the-book sort of thing. So it's possible they just didn't want to get in trouble, or maybe they simply knew nothing. But no one could tell police who Neffi was hanging out with there, who she might have left with if she was alone, her plans, or who, if anyone, had given her a ride.

But people did have a lot to say about another night at a different club that might be at the center of a motive in this case. Investigators told us that in the early days there was one man who kept coming up in their interview. a man who allegedly wanted revenge on Neffi. According to Corporal Smith, that was Roddy Prince. So he is kind of well known to law enforcement in this general area due to an incident that happened several years ago where he did, I guess you considered a mass shooting in Maryland. The mass shooting took place in 2017, years after Neffi went missing. but it gives you insight nonetheless into who this guy is.

Roddy shot and killed three of his coworkers at a granite company in Maryland and injured two others. But the reason Roddy came up in Nethy's case is because of an incident that happened roughly four months before she went missing in February 2014. Roddy's connection was back in the city of Wilmington, there was a club that's no longer open anymore. but he was at this club with his sister. Neffi was there celebrating her birthday. Neffi and Roddy's sister knew each other from childhood. So at some point, Neffi joined up with them, and they all decided to get into a car and smoke weed together.

Next thing you know, the car door opens, Roddy's grabbed. He's assaulted and assaulted pretty badly and actually left a permanent scar on his forehead. According to investigators, Roddy became convinced that Neffi had set him up for the attack. Now, this made no sense to investigators because Roddy and Neffi weren't in a relationship. They weren't close. They'd just been smoking weed together that night. The timing, investigators say, was pure chance and there is no evidence that Neffi did set him up.

But Roddy became completely paranoid after he was assaulted. He was certain that everyone, including Neffi, was out together. get him. At the time, information that we were getting later on was that he was asking people, you know, who Neffi Trader was and where she lived because he believed that she set him up for that robbery and that assault. Investigators tried on several occasions to talk to Roddy. The closest they got was talking to the woman Roddy lived with at the time. According to investigators, she said Roddy was with her when Neffi was killed. kidnapped. But even when Roddy was in prison for the mass shooting in Maryland, he still refused to

answer any questions about Neffi. Investigators looked closer at other people in Neffi's life, like the father of her children who was questioned but not considered a suspect. They also talked to her current boyfriend, who had the rock-solid alibi of being in jail at the time of her abduction. Investigator de Sabatino remembers that conversation very well. I've never seen somebody break down emotionally the way he did. He was one of the most emotionally distraught individuals I had ever seen. We can't say we ruled him out 100%, you never do. But he was definitely not high up on the list of suspects.

Hitting roadblock after roadblock, investigators figured forensic testing might be the answer. specifically testing those items that Neffi bought at the 7-Eleven. Maybe the suspect's DNA was on them. But even this, they knew, was going to present its own challenges. Corporal Smith explained those challenges to our team. When we first made contact with the family and made, they made us aware that they had actually brought some of these items inside the house. So they had already touched some of these items.

They still attempted testing on the bread, coffee cups, and condom. But ultimately, there was nothing of evidentiary value found. If DNA is going to crack Neffi's case open, it's likely going to come from something else, something investigators still can't locate. And the biggest piece of evidence that we could potentially have to do comparisons with or put in something in a CODIS

would be her vehicle, which to date has never been found. Potentially, that crime, the initial crime that occurred, and subsequent crimes that happened afterwards, happened in that car. What happened to that car is a huge part of this mystery. Making a person disappear is one thing. A person and a car, that's harder. Our reporter Laura Freider asked about it. Are you surprised that the car just disappeared?

It's hard to do that. I am. I am, yeah. Unless Neffi's body and the car are together. maybe in a body of water. But over the years, police tried and failed to locate it. It wasn't for a lack of divers, both from the FBI, Delaware State Police. We have a significant amount of water in Delaware and a lot of deeper bodies of water, a lot of marshland. There's a lot of places to look for vehicles.

And obviously, it remains like, If you run her vehicle through the system nationally today, it will come up alerted and flagged for Newcast County Police in Delaware. Investigators hope Neffi's phone could shed some light on her movements or communications, but it's never been found. And when they analyze data from a cell phone tower that they believe Neffi's phone interacted with, they couldn't find any new leads. In a case like Neffes, which has been cold for so long,

The other way it could be solved is if someone decides to come forward. Maybe someone who is no longer afraid to speak out. Or maybe someone with a conscience who needs to get the truth off their chest. Investigator Williams believes that person is not necessarily the guy who abducted Nethy, but someone else. Because she believes that there had to be another person who helped cover up the crime. somebody besides just the really bad guy that hurt her, somebody else knows what that person did. And the big thing we think about too,

and we know this from doing this for so long, is that people go through different stages of their life. A lot of times, especially if it was a second person that involved us or a third person at the time. Maybe they were scared, maybe they were in duress, whatever it may be. And then their life changes, their circumstances change, and then, you know, 10 years passed,

and they're in a different part in their life where they can feel a little bit more comfortable about talking about something that happened in the past. The other thing I really look at, too, is, you know, to take her in her car, you had to get there. Delaware's not a place like a city, like Philadelphia or New York City or something,

where you'll walk everywhere you go. You drive in Delaware. And we do have public transportation, but not a four o'clock in the morning. Somebody knows what happened to this. woman, obviously the person that harmed her and took her. But there's somebody else that knows, too. You had to get rid of her car. And even if you got rid of her car somehow in a body of water somewhere, how are you getting back to your house? Neffi's family didn't want to participate in this

episode, which we understand. But all the investigators on Neffi's case still think about her loved ones, especially Neffi's mom, Denise. We're dealing with a mother. We're dealing with a mother Denise Trader, who has no idea where her daughter is or if she's ever coming home. The lack of closure, the lack of figuring out where is my loved one, why are they not home? Is it something I did? Is it something the family did? The lack of answers. Denise has said this multiple times where I just want to know what happened to my daughter.

I just want to know what happened to my daughter. Nephi was a young single mom. She had life in front of her for her to disappear in the way she did. that sits with me. I think it's a horrible thing when somebody in your family's a victim of violent crime and they're murdered. But it's another thing to not know

not be able to bury your loved one. I always think about her mom and I think about her children. And her mom has to go through the holidays and she's always still to this day thinking maybe one day she'll walk through that door. If you have any information about the disappearance of Nefertiri Trader, you can contact the Newcastle County Police Department

at their non-emergency number, which is 302-573-2-2-8-00. Or you can call crime stoppers at 1-800-tip 3333. The Deck is an audio chuck production with theme music by Ryan Lewis. To learn more about the Deck and our advocacy work, visit the Deckpodcast.com. I think Chuck would approve.