 [Daily Beast] Chelsea Curnutt didn’t plan to spend the day before her baby was due driving 16 hours to bang on the door of her fiancé’s parents’ house, but there she was.
Nineteen months earlier, she’d started Instagram messaging with Richard Kane Mansir, a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army whom everyone called Kane. He was 10 years her senior, had two sons from a previous marriage, and lived 600 miles away, but she didn’t mind. He was smart and funny, and they talked easily. He liked shooting and skydiving; she loved the first and always wanted to try the latter. They met in person for the first time in December 2019, when she was driving home from vacation and offered to meet him at his post in Fort Bragg. They’d talked every day since. At the beginning of 2020, when he told her he was being relocated to Virginia, she volunteered to move with him. In October, she found out she was pregnant with their first child.
But now it was June 7, the day before their baby was due, and Curnutt hadn’t been able to reach Mansir in more than 48 hours. So she packed up her belongings, waddled out to the car, and set off to find him.
In retrospect, there were always things about the relationship that seemed off. According to Curnutt, she was watching Army leadership videos one night and stumbled across one of Mansir in which he talked about having a daughter. When she asked him why he’d never mentioned the third child, he told her she had died. Another time, she found the results from two local 10K races in which Mansir had finished right in front of the same female Army member. When she asked if he knew the woman, he brushed her off. His ex-wife had even called her once, in February of this year, and left a voicemail. But she says Mansir told her the woman was crazy and out for his money, so she ignored it.
The strangest incident happened in the spring of last year, when the couple decided to move to Virginia together. Curnutt says she volunteered to go early, so she could settle in and find work. Mansir was supposed to relocate in June. But then, in April, he told her he had been deployed—she doesn’t recall where exactly, but she remembers him calling her on WhatsApp from Kuwait. He didn’t know how long he’d be gone. At one point during the deployment, he told her he’d broken his foot and had to be evacuated to Germany. He even sent her an X-ray of the break.
In August, Curnutt was on a run near the Army base when she saw what looked like Mansir’s Jeep. It had Illinois plates and stickers for the Rangers, his former division. When she asked Mansir about it, he insisted it wasn’t his car. But a few days later, while filling up her gas tank on base, she saw him open the door and get in. 
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