SAN DIEGO — The boyfriend and self-proclaimed fiancé of former La Jolla resident Dia Abrams (who mysteriously went missing in 2020 from her ranch near Idyllwild and has not been seen since) petitioned a Colorado court earlier this month to discontinue the requirement that he register as a sex offender.
Court records showed Keith Harper, 72, was convicted in 2011 of misdemeanor charges that he groped two women during a snowmobile tour. In 2012, San Juan County Court Judge Anthony Edwards sentenced Harper to register as a sex offender for ten years. That term has now expired.
Harper’s name and photograph currently appear on the California Megan’s Law sex offender website. He is listed on the site as living in Idyllwild, though his address is not required to be posted.
The petition Harper filed on March 15 in the Silverton, Colorado courthouse listed his address as 58111 Bonita Vista Road in Mountain Center, the address of the Bonita Vista Ranch, where Abrams, 65, went missing in 2020.
In a previous interview with CBS 8, Harper claimed Abrams was his fiancée and she went missing from the ranch on the afternoon of June 6, 2020, while he was mowing the lawn and working on the 117-acre property.
Abrams left her vehicle, purse, and cell phone behind.
Neighbors, Riverside County Sheriff, and a team of volunteers searched the ranch for three days, but never found any trace of Abrams. Detectives served search warrants on the ranch, as well as on Harper's RV and a storage business he owns in New Mexico.
Harper has assumed control of Abrams' estate under the terms of a restated trust filed two weeks before Abrams went missing. Abrams' two children are contesting the trust agreement in Riverside County Probate Court. Depositions in the case are set for early April, in advance of a hearing set for May 9 in the Palm Springs courthouse.
On December 23, 2021, a second woman was lost on the Bonita Vista Ranch, when Harper called 911 to report one of his workers, Jodi Newkirk, 46, had died in an ATV rollover accident.
Family members described Newkirk as a skilled horse handler. She had worked at the ranch since early August and rented a nearby house also owned by Dia Abrams, making payments to her landlord, Keith Harper.
Riverside Sheriff’s detectives called Newkirk’s death “suspicious” in a news release posted days after her death.
Newkirk’s autopsy and toxicology reports have been completed by the Riverside County Coroner, as CBS 8 previously reported, but the records have been sealed and her cause of death has not been made public, pending an ongoing investigation.
Investigators have not named Keith Harper a suspect in either the disappearance of Dia Abrams in 2020, or the death of Jodi Newkirk in 2021.
A hearing on Harper’s petition to discontinue the requirement that he register as a sex offender is set for May 17 at 9 a.m. in Colorado’s San Juan County courthouse.
WATCH: CBS 8 extended interview with Keith Harper from August 2020:
