Investigator plans to release video, audio interviews in connection to DeOrr Kunz case
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IDAHO FALLS — A private investigator says he’s planning to release around 15 hours of video and audio interviews in connection to the DeOrr Kunz case.
Philip Klein of Texas-based Klein Investigations and Consulting says his team of nine investigators spent more than 700 hours working on the case of the Idaho Falls toddler who disappeared during a 2015 camping trip.
There has been no sign of DeOrr since that day, and nobody has been charged in connection to his disappearance.
Klein was hired by the Kunz family in early 2016 to conduct a private investigation into the disappearance. But he was terminated months later after Klein indicated he believed the parents were lying and should be charged.
Klein says a private citizen then hired him to continue the investigation.
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“Our client has given us permission to release all of the original interviews that we did on video and audio with all the primary players,” Klein tells EastIdahoNews.com. “We feel that since the public held fundraisers and paid for us to travel back and forth from Texas to Idaho that it is the public’s property.”
Klein says the footage will include interviews with the four people who were camping with DeOrr the day he disappeared: Jessica Mitchell, DeOrr’s mother; Vernal Kunz, DeOrr’s father; Robert Walton, DeOrr’s great grandfather; and Isaac Reinwand, a friend of Walton’s.
“We’ll probably release some secondary interviews that we conducted. We’ll probably put up our conversation with the store clerk at the Stage Stop in Leadore,” Klein says. “We’ll likely put up the young man who pumped the gas and other people who may have seen DeOrr.”
Klein later abandoned the investigation altogether in November 2017, after Vernal Kunz and Dennis Kunz filed a lawsuit against him for breach of contract, infliction of emotional distress, libel, slander and fraud. Klein said that he believes his investigation could no longer move forward because Kunz and Mitchell were not telling the truth and that criminal charges should be filed against them.
“We are out of the case but we feel very strongly that the citizens of Idaho have a right to know,” Klein says. “We need to let the public see and hear what we did so they can come to their own conclusions about what happened.”
Klein says his firm is in the process of building a website where all of the interviews will be posted within six to eight weeks.
Lemhi County Sheriff Steve Penner declined to comment on Klein’s announcement.