Listening Recommendation // Stolen Season 1: The Search for Jermain

One of Montana’s most high-profile missing person cases is the backdrop of a 2024 court decision that could have statewide implications for violent offenders’ access to firearms. Connie Walker’s reporting between 2020 and 2023 offers valuable insight into the June 2018 disappearance of Jermain Charlo, the ongoing investigation, and the firearms case that stemmed from it.

In 2023, a federal court found Michael DeFrance, then 29 and living outside Missoula, guilty of illegally possessing firearms after a domestic violence conviction, and guilty of lying about his status as a person prohibited from owning guns when purchasing them in 2018. Under federal law, individuals convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence crimes may be banned from owning firearms, sometimes for life.

DeFrance's prior conviction was the result of an incident in April 2013, where he admitted to police to hitting his then 17-year-old girlfriend Jermain Charlo once with an open hand, then twice more with his fist. Charlo, a mother of two and a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, has been missing since June 16, 2018. DeFrance is the father of Charlo's children and the last person seen with her on security camera footage behind a downtown Missoula bar the night before she went missing.

Over five years separate the incident where DeFrance admitted to causing Charlo bodily harm and her disappearance. But what we know from court records is that the 2013 partner or family member assault (PFMA) conviction was his second such offense at the time, and that when he pleaded guilty in 2013, he signed a form saying that he understood a PFMA conviction would limit his access to firearms.

Firearms seized from DeFrance's property in October 2018 were found as a result of multiple searches conducted by Missoula County Sheriff’s Office within four months after Charlo's disappearance. DeFrance has never been named a suspect or charged with any crime in relation to her disappearance. Nonetheless, his 2013 PFMA conviction was the basis for the 2023 firearms conviction.[1] DeFrance appealed the latter conviction, and it was overturned in December 2024 for a surprising reason.

According to a three-judge panel, because Montana's PFMA statute is broad and includes non-physical acts like causing emotional distress, DeFrance should not have been charged under the federal law which defines domestic violence crimes more narrowly. To meet the federal statute that prohibits perpetrators from owning firearms, the conviction would have to result from a law that also narrowly defines domestic violence in terms of bodily injury and/or use or attempted use of physical force. DeFrance’s assault in 2013—which would meet the federal definition based on his admission that he caused Charlo bodily injury—was immaterial in the judges’ view since his federal conviction and sentence was based on a guilty plea under the broader state statute.

At face value, the Montana law is more protective because it better recognizes the spectrum of violence victims may experience at the hands of abusive partners or family members, often leading up to or in combination with incidents that do result in injury or fatality. But counterintuitively, while a Montana PFMA conviction offers broader protection and accountability than the federal definition, if the 2024 decision in DeFrance's firearms case stands, those convicted of PFMA in Montana may no longer be able to be barred from owning firearms under the federal law.

Victim advocates and members of law enforcement across the state are understandably concerned about this precedent. PFMA calls are dangerous—many law enforcement agencies have protocols to help ensure patrol officers don’t have to respond to them alone for that reason, and firearms can add to the danger.

The presence of a firearm in a domestic violence situation can increase the risk of female intimate partner homicide by as much as 500%. Nationally, 69% of female intimate partner homicide victims are killed with a gun and almost all familicides are carried out with firearms. That reality coupled with the fact that Montana has the highest rate of gun ownership in the nation (63-65% of adults live in a home with a firearm) poses a distinct challenge in both managing a victim’s risk of lethality in domestic violence situations, and ensuring public safety.

A History of Violence

Jermain Charlo’s disappearance is still unsolved, but it’s hard to separate her case from her ex-boyfriend’s federal charges. Many of the reasons why are laid out brilliantly in the reporting of Cree journalist Connie Walker between 2020 and 2023 as part of the podcast series Stolen.

After years of covering the crisis of missing or murdered Indigenous women (often called MMIW for short) in Canada, Walker turned her attention to the issue in the United States, and Montana quickly caught her attention. She was struck by the number of missing person cases involving Indigenous women in Montana, and data on missing person entries confirms the scale of the crisis here. According to a 2024 report published by the Montana Department of Justice, Indigenous people make up about 6.2% of the state’s population, but accounted for 30.6% of missing person cases in 2023.

In 2020, Walker began visiting with Charlo’s family, friends, and neighbors, as well as the lead investigator in her disappearance. From her reporting, we learn how Charlo’s story connects to a larger history of violence (especially sexual violence) disproportionately affecting Indigenous women in North America since the arrival of white Europeans. Many of Charlo’s friends and family interviewed disclosed their own experiences of intimate partner violence, rape, and sexual abuse. And for many of the Native women Walker spoke with, Charlo’s disappearance was not the first or only one to occur in their families.

During a June 2020 visit to Dixon Agency on the Flathead Reservation, where Charlo grew up and was living at the time of her disappearance, Walker had a chance to speak with Charlo’s cousin Alejandra, who confided that in addition to losing Jermain, her sister-in-law was Selena Not Afraid—the Crow teen from Hardin who was found dead in January 2020 near the southeast Montana rest area where she was last seen 20 days earlier.[2]

Walker’s reporting also uncovers a pattern of control and violence that defined much of Jermain Charlo’s relationship with Michael DeFrance, which started shortly after the DeFrance family moved to Dixon in 2010. They started dating when Charlo was around 14 years old and DeFrance would’ve been 16 or 17. We know from court records that the April 2013 incident when DeFrance was arrested and pleaded guilty to injuring his partner was his second PFMA conviction, but we don’t know when the first occurred, or if it also involved Charlo because it’s sealed. However, Walker found a Facebook post from 2011 in which DeFrance complained about losing gun rights—possibly a result of an earlier PFMA conviction—and she points out that he would’ve been a minor at that time, which might explain why the Sanders County court documents related to his first PFMA offense are sealed.

We also know DeFrance has been arrested for PFMA at least twice since 2013–once for assaulting Charlo’s aunt Valenda in June or July of 2014 while Charlo was over 8 months pregnant with her first child, then again in May 2017 for pushing Charlo out of a moving vehicle on I-90. This is all to say that DeFrance has quite the rap sheet of domestic violence arrests.[3] If anything, he fits the profile of the dangerous and likely type of offender that the federal firearms ban is intended to offer protection against. That Montana’s broader definition of domestic violence could undermine that protection in future court decisions is ironic at best, troubling at worst.

Seven Years Missing

In light of the federal case surrounding DeFrance’s access to firearms, the absence of Jermain Charlo’s voice in all of this is deafening. The victim of his 2013 PFMA conviction has never had the opportunity to tell a judge whether or not she thinks the man should be anywhere near guns. By the time of DeFrance’s first court appearance related to the federal charges filed in 2021, Charlo had been missing for over three years. This June 16 will mark seven years since Charlo’s disappearance.

In interviews with Walker, and more recently for an episode of CBS’s 48 Hours that aired earlier this year, Detective Guy Baker with the Missoula Police Department has repeatedly said that Jermain’s disappearance is nowhere close to a cold case. Baker is the lead investigator, and while much of his work on the case, including search warrants, remain sealed because it’s an active investigation, he has confirmed that DeFrance’s federal firearms conviction stemmed from the FBI and the City of Missoula’s investigation into Charlo’s disappearance.

It bears repeating that DeFrance has never been named a suspect or charged with any crime in connection with Charlo’s disappearance. At the same time, Baker has never indicated that DeFrance has been ruled out as a suspect. Baker has also repeatedly stated that while he doesn’t yet have sufficient evidence to name a suspect and make an arrest, he has no doubt that Charlo was the victim of a criminal act, and he is confident that he has identified the individual or individuals responsible.

Walker’s interviews with Baker and others who are either familiar with the case, or able to offer critical insight into the pace and the process of the investigation point to other forms of circumstantial, and even forensic evidence tying DeFrance to Charlo in the hours after they were seen leaving a bar together. Cell phone data acquired for the investigation has pinned the location of Charlo’s phone to DeFrance’s Evaro Hill property between 2am and 10am, the hours immediately after she was last seen. Location records put DeFrance’s phone nearby in the same time range. DeFrance claimed to have had Jermain’s phone after dropping her off in Missoula, but he also said in an interview with Missoula Police that he later destroyed it and threw it out on a highway on the way to Idaho.

If the story DeFrance told police about Charlo’s phone is true, we don’t know why he would admit to taking and destroying it. At least in the context of domestic violence cases, damaging a communication device like a phone or computer to prevent somebody from calling for help is a crime that can have severe penalties. What is concerning is that Charlo’s family members tell Walker that destroying phones and computers (yes, phones and computers plural, not a one-off) was not out of character for DeFrance.

Walker turned up court documents of a November 2014 incident where police were called because DeFrance had taken Charlo’s phone and broken it after dropping it in water. It’s unclear if DeFrance was charged with a PFMA after this call, but Charlo’s grandmother Vicki Velarde remembered DeFrance frequently complaining about Charlo being on the phone and not paying attention to him. That type of jealous and controlling behavior is one of many facets of Charlo and DeFrance’s relationship that Walker notes “could be pulled from a textbook about domestic violence.”

Pulled from a Textbook

Jermain Charlo’s disappearance is a big reason for the level of awareness around the crisis of violence against Indigenous women and girls in Montana. In the nearly seven years that have passed, many have become familiar with her family’s search for justice, but Walker’s reporting reveals that Jermain’s story, especially in the year before her disappearance, appears to be that of somebody carefully separating themself from an abusive former partner while also placating them strategically to maintain contact with the two children they shared.

If you listen to Stolen: The Search for Jermain, notice not just the controlling behavior, but also the moments in Jermain Charlo’s relationship with Michael DeFrance where she keeps speaking and spending time with him, even when they’re broken up. Notice the lethality factors present in their relationship, especially when the couple was living together. Walker keys in on a big one in episode six, “The Last Year”:

For years, [Jermain] had presented this picture online of a happy relationship, but in [a] Facebook post from May of 2017, she spoke out about the abuse. She said that Michael put his hands on her, and then she made a more serious allegation. She said that Michael threw her up against the pullup bar at her house and he choked her. She said she didn't have any marks on her neck, but that she felt the burn all day. Jermain was probably unaware, but four days after she posted that, strangulation of a partner or family member became a felony in Montana.

Strangulation became a felony in Montana in large part because of its well-documented correlation to intimate partner homicide. Some research estimates that being strangled by a partner even one time increases a victim’s risk of being murdered by the perpetrator by over 600%—making it at least tantamount to the presence of firearms as a risk factor for homicide.

We don’t know if Charlo knew the gravity of that allegation, but the fact that she related it on social media in May of 2017 and traveled with DeFrance later that month to a Def Leppard concert in Bozeman (the same trip that resulted in his fourth PFMA arrest for pushing Charlo out of a vehicle along I-90) could indicate that Charlo felt the need to make nice and keep the peace after speaking out about DeFrance’s abuse. Family members also believe that Charlo spending time with DeFrance in Missoula the night she went missing was part of a long-game strategy to keep access to her children after DeFrance was given residential custody of their sons in late 2017.

As you listen, pay attention also to how consumed DeFrance seems to be with Charlo’s whereabouts and activities, especially when they’re no longer together. In 2023, when Walker finally had a chance to interview Shyanne Howes—who DeFrance was dating until just a few weeks before Charlo’s disappearance—she tells Walker that she split up with DeFrance because all he seemed to care about was what Jermain was doing, where she was at, and who she was with. For her part, Charlo also appears to have been trying to hide her own new relationship from DeFrance at the time of her disappearance. Like strangulation and access to firearms, jealousy is considered a red flag. On the lethality risk assessment tool used in our own community, the second question asks victims if their abuser is “violently and constantly jealous” of them. Charlo’s efforts to conceal her new relationship might indicate her own vigilance around DeFrance’s violent jealousy.

When Walker says the year leading up to Jermain’s disappearance could’ve been pulled out of a domestic violence textbook, she’s referring heavily to these lethality factors. That the year before she went missing appears to have coincided with the end of her relationship with DeFrance adds to Walker’s point. In her introduction to “The Last Year,” she says:

In relationships where there is intimate partner violence, people often ask women, “Why don't you leave?” The question is built on this assumption that leaving equals freedom—freedom from the controlling behavior, from the abuse, from danger. But…one of the most dangerous times in an abusive relationship can be when it ends.

From what we've learned in talking to Jermain’s family and friends, and reading court documents and Facebook posts, the year before Jermain disappeared could be pulled from a textbook about domestic violence—how difficult it is to stay and how hard it can be to leave. We don't know what happened to Jermain on the night she went missing, but a year earlier, she was ending her relationship with Michael.

Research indicates that about 75% of domestic violence-related homicides occur upon separation, which is generally defined as the first 18 months after the end of a relationship. As Walker points out, we still don’t know what happened to Jermain Charlo after she went missing. What we do know is that she was last seen with somebody who had previously admitted to assaulting her, who also admitted to taking and destroying her phone after she went missing, who showed jealous and controlling behavior during and after their relationship, who seemed to be able to withhold her children from her even before they had a custody plan in place, and who allegedly strangled her. We know also that Charlo was last seen with DeFrance in a timeframe that both advocates and law enforcement are trained to recognize as extremely dangerous for victims who’ve ended a relationship.

Regardless of what happened in the early hours of June 16, 2018, it’s next to impossible to not see any future charges that stem from the investigation into Jermain Charlo’s disappearance through the lens of the real danger she was in at that time. And we’d argue that one of the great achievements of Connie Walker’s reporting on this case is her ability to show that, at least for those of us who stand with survivors and want to change the culture that enables violence, and especially violence against Indigenous women like Jermain, we can’t look at any act of violence in isolation.

We can’t separate this story from what we know about domestic violence relationships—like Walker said, it could’ve been pulled from a textbook on the subject. Nor can we separate Jermain Charlo's story from what her former partner’s access to firearms now means for other offenders’ access across the state, and the ramifications it could have for the safety of victims and the public. It would also be remiss of anyone to discuss Charlo’s disappearance without considering the history of violence against Indigenous women in North America—a direct result of the colonialism that’s been playing out for over 500 years now.

For those of us determined to see justice for victims and their loved ones, accountability for perpetrators, and safer communities where nobody has to live in fear of violence, there’s so much to learn from this story. We can’t recommend Connie Walker’s reporting on it in the inaugural season of Stolen highly enough. Embedded below is the link to the trailer for the first season from Spotify. If you go to the show feed, keep in mind that Stolen: The Search for Jermain includes eight original episodes published in early 2021, plus three updates covering DeFrance’s arrest and trial for illegal possession of firearms published between August 2021 and September 2023 (between the second and third seasons of the podcast in the feed).

About Stolen

Stolen Season 1: The Search for Jermain contains detailed descriptions of violence and trauma. It’s powerful and important to engage with stories like the ones reported in this podcast, but we encourage everyone to take care of themselves while listening.

Subsequent seasons of Stolen are also deeply insightful about the intergenerational impacts of violence and abuse in Indigenous communities in the U.S. and Canada. In the second season, Surviving St. Michael’s, Connie Walker investigates her own family’s experience of sexual violence while attending St. Michael’s, a residential school operated until 1982 by the Roman Catholic Church in Duck Lake, Saskatchewan. Surviving St. Michael’s earned Walker both a Pulitzer Prize and a Peabody Award in 2023—making it the first podcast to win both awards in the same year. The most recent season, Trouble in Sweetwater, investigates the cases of two missing women on the Navajo Nation, and the challenging search for justice in a remote place where people say you can get away with murder.

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Notes

[1] It’s worth noting that the search warrants that led to the firearm seizure show that Missoula County was investigating DeFrance’s property in relation to a crime. The first search warrants for DeFrance’s property were executed less than two weeks after Charlo’s disappearance in June 2018. In a subsequent request for DeFrance’s location history from Google submitted on August 1, Detective Steve Diebert with the Missoula County Sheriff’s Office stated that he had reason to believe the crime of unlawful restraint had occurred in Missoula County. By the next day, Detective Diebert submitted another application to search and surveil DeFrance’s property in Evaro in relation to a deliberate homicide.

[2] Big Horn County, where Selena Not Afraid was found, typically sees many more missing person reports per capita than any other Montana county. The impact of this trend on families from the Crow Reservation and Northern Cheyenne Reservation is the focus of the 2023 Showtime docuseries Murder in Big Horn—an excellent starting place for anyone wanting to learn more about the current state of missing and murdered Indigenous women in Montana, and the frustration families often experience with the media coverage and law enforcement response to these cases.

[3] While Michael DeFrance is the son of a tribal member and technically a descendant, he is not a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes—a fact worth highlighting because if DeFrance has committed other crimes against tribal members while living on the Flathead Reservation, tribal authorities may not have had the jurisdiction to arrest, charge, or prosecute him in tribal court.