Daveigh Chase’s manager reveals real reason nobody reported her missing for over 10 years

Daveigh Chase’s former manager has opened up about the actress’ heartbreaking disappearance, revealing she had been missing for more than 10 years before her death.

The former child star, who voiced Lilo in Disney’s Lilo & Stitch and played Samara in The Ring, died aged 35 earlier this month. Her former manager and close friend, John Ryan Jr., has now shared new details about the years leading up to her death, saying nobody close to her knew where she had gone.

Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, Ryan said he first realised something was seriously wrong in 2015 after Daveigh failed to turn up for an important meeting with filmmaker Rob Reiner.

“Rob Reiner had called us and had a role for her, and she never showed up,” Ryan recalled. “He said, ‘I’ve got a role I want to talk to her about, have her come in!’ And then when we followed up the next day with him, like, ‘Hey, how did [the meeting] go?’ They were like, ‘She never showed.’ And then we were like, ‘Okay, something’s up.'”

Ryan explained, “She was staying with us a lot, my wife and I, so we had her passport, and we had her clothes,” he said. “At first, I thought she was kidnapped or something, and then we started putting two and two together.”

He said Daveigh had disappeared for short periods before, so at first her friends believed she would eventually come back. “She was very private and not Hollywood,” Ryan said. “She would be like, ‘Hey, I’m gonna go sit in the desert’ or ‘I’m gonna go hide in my house in Vegas for a couple months and just get away from Hollywood.'”

He added, “Because she was such an introvert, it wouldn’t be surprising if she didn’t leave her house for five months, and she just watched movies with her cats.”

Because of that, Ryan said nobody initially reported her missing. He said, “We called, we went down and told [the police]. But because of her history, we just assumed she’d show up.”

‘We’ve been looking for her ever since’

BDG/Shutterstock

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Ryan said Daveigh’s close friends and family stayed in contact with each other over the years. They regularly checked in about her well-being and hoped someone had heard from her. He said she had struggled with alcohol in the past and that he had helped her into rehab. But he insisted they believed she was doing well before she disappeared.

“She liked to drink now and then. It was more drinking than heavy drugs,” he said. “She was good. She was sober [for] a while before she went missing. Everything was fine. None of us thought she would go back on anything.”

Around six months ago, Ryan said he received a video which appeared to show Daveigh on Los Angeles’ Skid Row. “I ran down there, and by the time I went down there, she had already left,” he said. “We’ve been looking for her ever since. We’ve had private eyes on it.”

At the time, Ryan said he was actually working on a documentary called Finding Lilo, which was meant to help find Daveigh and encourage the public to look for her. “I didn’t think it’s my story to tell,” he explained. “I didn’t want to put my little sister on blast.”

He then added, “Once I got video of her, and how bad she looked, I said, ‘We need to bring the public in on this. I don’t want to protect the brand anymore. I want to protect the girl.'”

Ryan said the documentary will now instead celebrate Daveigh’s life. “We wanted the world to know, like, ‘Hey, this girl that you dress up as for Halloween has been missing for 10 years, and we need the internet’s help finding her,'” he explained. “Now we’re gonna spin it and make it a documentary celebrating her life.”

Looking back on their friendship, he said, “She was the sweetest girl on the planet, the greatest celebrity I ever had the chance to work with,” he said. “She was just so kind.”

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