On June 3, 2014, 19-year-old Lea Porter went missing from Westminster, Colorado. Lea’s brother Maxx Porter suspected Christopher Waide, a young man who went to high school with Lea. At the time of Lea’s disappearance, Christopher Waide was a 23-year-old criminal justice student. When approached by Lea’s brother, Waide confessed to murdering Lea but he said it was in self-defense. Waide told Maxx Porter that his sister had come to his apartment; they had sex and then Lea wanted drugs. Waide claims that Porter tried to stab him for drug money and he squeezed her throat to loosen the knife out of her hand. Maxx forced Waide to call 911 and confess, which he did.
ABC 20/20 investigates the murder of Lea Porter and interviews Waide’s criminal justice professor Robert Wells who says: “His [Waide’s] efforts to clean and purge the crime scene — those are things he could have learned right there in my class.” Prosecutors don’t want to go to trial without a body so they offered Waide a plea deal — a 48-year sentence in exchange for the location of Porter’s body. Waide says he put Lea Porter’s body in a dumpster outside his apartment but the dumpster had already been taken to a landfill. ABC 20/20 airs Fridays at 10pm on ABC.
