Murder: True Crime Stories - MYSTERY: The Blurred Suspect

Episode Date: September 25, 2026

In January 2006, 24-year-old Jennifer Kesse vanished from her condominium in Orlando, Florida, just days after returning from a vacation with her boyfriend. When she failed to show up for work, her family knew immediately that something was wrong, and her car was found abandoned at an apartment complex more than a mile away. Surveillance footage captured a person of interest parking her car and walking away, but the images were too blurry to ever identify who it was. Despite an exhaustive search, a devoted family who never stopped fighting, and years of investigation, Jennifer has never been found and no one has ever been charged. In this episode of Murder: True Crime Stories, host Carter Roy examines the disappearance of Jennifer Kesse, the frustrating dead ends and missed opportunities that defined the case, and the enduring anguish of a family still searching for answers nearly two decades later.Head over to our YouTube channel to WATCH our video episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@crimehousestudios If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Murder: True Crime Stories to never miss a case! Want all 2 parts of every case all at once? Join Crime House+ and get both parts of each case dropped at once ad-free. Join at crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. Murder: True Crime Stories is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios.🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of Reddit, Serial Killers & Murderous Minds, Crime House 24/7, and more wherever you get your podcasts!Follow me on SocialInstagram: @CrimehouseTikTok: @CrimehouseFacebook: @crimehousestudiosX: @crimehousemediaYouTube: @crimehousestudios

Hi, everyone, it's Carter. Real quick before two days' episode, I want to tell you about another show I think you might like hosted by Vanessa Richardson and forensic psychologist Dr. Tristan Ingalls. It's called Serial Killers and Murderous Minds. Every Monday and Thursday, they take you deep into the psychology of the most chilling murderers and uncover what drives them to kill. Follow serial killers and murderous minds available wherever you listen to podcasts. This is Crime House. Somewhere out there is a picture of the person who knows what happened to a 24-year-old woman from Orlando, Florida on January 24, 2006. It comes from a security camera, black and white, a little grainy. In it, someone climbs out of her car in a parking lot, turns, and walks along a fence, never once looking back. The camera caught them over and over as they went. it should have been the brake that cracked this whole case wide open. One clear look at the person behind the wheel of her car.

But every few seconds, right when the shutter clicked, a fence post fell across the frame. And in every single image, that post lands in exactly the same place across the face. Police could tell you the person was short. They could tell you the clothes looked like a work uniform. form. They even shipped the footage off to NASA to sharpen it. And after all of it, they still couldn't tell you the one thing that mattered, whether they were even looking at a man or a woman, what that face looked like or who it belonged to. Twenty years later, that blur is still the

closest anyone has ever come to the truth. This is the story of Jennifer Kessie. People's lives are like a story. And there's a beginning, a middle, and an end. But you don't always know which part you're on. Sometimes the final chapter arrives far too soon, and we don't always get to know the real ending. I'm Carter Roy, and this is Murder, True Crime Stories, a crime house original powered by Pave Studios. New episodes come out every Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, with Friday's episodes covering the cases that deserve a deeper look. Thank you for being part of the Crime House community, please rate, review, and follow the show. And for early, add free access to every episode, subscribe to Crimehouse Plus. You'll get part one and part two at the same time, plus exclusive

bonus content. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com or tap try free on the Murder True Crime Story show page on Apple Podcasts. Welcome back to another episode of Murder Mystery Fridays, where I'm covering cases with questions that I can't get out of my head. Ones where the evidence points in multiple directions, and every theory feels like a possibility. Remember, these episodes are also on YouTube with full video. Just search for Crimehouse Studios and be sure to like and subscribe. Today's case is one of the most haunting unsolved disappearances in Florida history. You just heard about the tape and the face no one has ever been able to make out.

But before there was a tape, there was a young woman. Jennifer Kessie was 24. She was careful and she was doing everything right. None of it mattered because on the morning of January 24th, 2006, she walked out of her door and was never seen again. What I can't shake is everything that came after. The fall starts, the years her case file sat untouched and the family that has spent two decades fighting the very people

who are supposed to be looking for her. All that and more coming up. At the start of 2006, Jennifer Kessi was 24 years old, and by all accounts, she was thriving. She grew up in the Tampa Bay area and went to Gather High School, then headed to the University of Central Florida in Orlando.

She joined the Alpha Delta Pi sorority there and graduated with a finance degree in 2003. After college, she stayed in Orlando, and took a job as a financial analyst at Central Florida Investments, a timeshare company out in Okie. She was good at it, too. In her first year, she was promoted twice, and it was paying off in a big way.

Just a couple of months earlier, she'd bought her first home, a condo in a brand new complex called The Mosaic at Millennia, right next to a big new mall she loved. Jennifer wasn't doing any of this alone. She was close with her family, even though they were a couple of hours, hours away back in the Bradenton area. She talked to her mom, Joyce, every single day. She was

tight with her younger brother, Logan, and her dad Drew was her biggest champion. She also had a boyfriend. His name was Rob Allen, and they'd been together for about a year. Later, Joyce put it simply. Her daughter was in love. The catch was the distance. Rob lived roughly three hours away in Fort Lauderdale, so they saw each other on the weekends and kept in touch through phone calls during the week. There is one more thing about Jennifer that everyone who knew her brings up. Although she was confident, she was very cautious. This was someone who carried pepper spray, someone with a you can never be too careful streak. Part of it went back to a story she'd grown up hearing. Years earlier, her parents had been held up at gunpoint.

And something like that happens to the people you love, you tend to take your own safety more seriously, and Jennifer did, which is why her new home nagged at her. On paper, the mosaic was exactly the kind of place a careful person would pick, gated with a guard out front. But it was still half built when she moved in. that meant construction and maintenance crews coming and going at all hours, a lot of strangers on the property, and units all around her still sitting empty. Jennifer noticed, and she said something about it. More than once, she told her family and Rob that the workers made her uneasy. But in the middle of January 2006, Jennifer got a break from all of it.

On the 19th, she and Rob flew down to the Caribbean island of St. Croix for a long weekend. It was short only a few days, but by every account, it was exactly what she needed. While she was gone, Logan did a little house sitting at her condo with two friends, Travis and Matt. And on the way out, Travis left his work phone behind. He figured he'd grab it once Jennifer got home. Jennifer and Rob flew back to Florida on Sunday, January 26th. She spent that night at Rob's place in Fort Lauderdale, then drove straight up to Orlando for work on Monday morning, the 23rd. On Monday was a normal day, Jennifer went to the office, she left her on 6 p.m., and on the drive home, she called her dad like she often did.

That evening, she caught up with her family about the trip. She talked to Logan, who reminded her about Travis's phone. Jennifer said she'd seen it at the condo, and rather than make the long drive to hand it off, she'd just take it to work the next morning and mail it back. Then around 10 p.m., she got on the phone with Robb, and that call didn't go as smoothly. By Rob's own account, the two of them got into it about the distance. The vacation was over, and the reality of living three hours apart was hitting hard. Rob has said it was a real sore spot in the relationship that the distance left Jennifer wondering whether he loved her enough to close the gap.

Nobody knows exactly how that conversation ended. We don't know if anything was really wrong or if it was just an ordinary argument between two people figuring out a hard situation. But what we do know is this. Late on the night of January 23rd, that phone calls. was the last time anyone who loved Jennifer Kessie ever heard her voice. Nominated as one of the best British true crime podcasts, Murder Mile is hailed as a masterpiece of compelling storytelling.

Research used in the original police files. Over 300 episodes, Murder Marla's covered hundreds of crimes you won't hear anywhere else. As well as solving cold cases, unearthing new evidence, and even discovering a serial killer, no one even knew existed. For a truly original podcast, subscribe to Murder Mile. On Tuesday morning, January 24th, 2006, 24-year-old Jennifer Kessie starts getting ready for work sometime around 7.30 a.m. Her suitcase from St. Croix is still sitting on the floor,

full of dirty laundry and toiletries. She probably figures she'll unpack it later. Then she grabs what she needs, her purse, her keys, her iPod, her own phone, and Travis' phone to mail back and locks the door behind her. And then silence. Most mornings on her way into work, Jennifer called Rob just to say hi. That Tuesday, the call never came. By 8 a.m., he still hadn't heard a word.

Rob figured she'd overslept, gotten busy, or was already buried in her morning. He had a 9 o'clock meeting of his own, so he let it go and headed in. but when he got out, he tried her himself. It rang, then went to voicemail. He tried again and got the same thing. It wasn't like Jennifer. At her office, the same worry was setting in. Jennifer hadn't shown up, and Jennifer always showed up.

As the morning wore on and her desk sat empty, her coworkers started asking around. Nobody had heard from her. By about 11 a.m., enough people were uneasy that one of the company's executives picked up the phone and called Jennifer's parents, just to ask if they'd heard from her. For Joyce and Drew, that call flipped a switch. Within minutes, they were in the car making the two-hour drive from the Bradenton area to Jennifer's condo in Orlando. Logan and Travis were already on their way there. When Joyce and Drew arrived,

the door was locked, and they let themselves in. with a key. Inside, nothing was wrong, and that's what has gnawed at this family ever since. The condo looked the way it always looked, a little messy in the normal way, makeup on the bathroom counter, a towel still damp from her shower, the outfit she'd passed over, still lying on the bed. But some things were gone. Her purse, her keys, her iPod, her briefcase, and both cell phones, hers and Travis's. A pair of shoes she'd been excited to wear was gone from her closet, too, and her car. A black 2004 Chevy Malibu wasn't in the lot.

All of it pointed the same way. She'd gotten dressed and left for work like any other day. So her parents, well, did what you'd do. They told themselves, well, there was an explanation. Maybe a car accident on the way to work. They started calling hospitals and police stations. Nobody had anyone matching Jennifer. So that same day, they filed a missing persons report.

And this is the first place the case goes wrong, and it goes wrong fast. The police took the report. What they didn't do was treated as an emergency. The argument with Rob the night before, collared everything. To detectives, it read like a young woman who had had a fight with her boyfriend, went somewhere to cool down, and would turn back up on her own. Now, there is also a myth worth clearing up while we're here because people get it wrong all the time. There is no rule that makes you wait 24 or 48 hours to report an adult missing. If something feels wrong, you can pick up

the phone right then. But a report sitting in a file isn't the same as a search. And in a disappearance, those first hours are everything, because that's when witnesses scatter, memories blur, and evidence starts to fade. So while the police waited for this to resolve itself, well, the family got to work. They printed flyers and handed them out, and they started knocking on doors around the complex themselves, including talking to the construction workers on site that day. Logan spoke to a few of them. He came away feeling like they weren't being straight with him,

like they knew something they weren't saying. And when investigators finally did start working the scene, they hit a wall immediately. The first thing you want is security footage, but the mosaic was still under construction, and its own cameras weren't up and running yet. So they went looking for witnesses, which was hard because half the building was still empty.

One couple did come through. They said that around 7.40 that morning, they'd seen Jennifer's Malibu swerving out of the lot. To the detectives, that swerve read like a struggle. Detective Joel Wright put it this way, quote, control of the car, but the couple never got a look at who was behind the wheel and couldn't say which way it went once it hit the road. Put that together with the untouched condo, no break in,

nothing forced, nothing stolen from inside, and detectives landed on a chilling conclusion. Jennifer had almost certainly been taken right there in her own parking lot in broad daylight. That left two questions. Who took her and where? But for now, the only thing anyone could do was look for her. In those first days, the search was enormous. Police and volunteers combed the area on foot and on horseback by boat and by air, and they dragged nearby lakes and ponds.

None of it turned up a trace, Jennifer. Her family still believes those slow early-outly, hours cost them a lot back when the case was being treated as a spat instead of an abduction. Two days later on January 26th, they got their first real piece of the puzzle. Jennifer's Black Malibu turned up about a mile from her home, parked in a visitor's spot at another complex called Huntington on the Green. A neighbor there had seen the car on the news and recognized it. And this wasn't a random spot either. Huntington on the Green had a reputation as a place where stolen cars got dumped. With a car finally in their hands, one of the first things detectives did was call rob to the scene.

By then, they'd confirmed his alibi. He'd been more than 200 miles away in Fort Lauderdale when Jennifer vanished. But they wanted to watch his face when they opened the trunk. they walked him to the back of the car and popped it open. Jennifer wasn't inside. At first glance, there was no obvious sign of a struggle, and it clearly wasn't a robbery. A DVD player was still in there, so were a phone charger and a couple pairs of Jennifer's shoes.

But once the car got back to the lab, the details got darker. Investigators found a latent print and a large boot print down near the gas pedal. There were marks on the hood, too. In police photos released years later, they looked like the aftermath of a violent struggle, and the car looked like it had been wiped down. When they ran what they had through the database,

they got no match. And the DNA they did manage to pull was too degraded to use. Now, the prints, the DNA of the database, None of it had handed investigators a name, but the car still had one thing left to give. A scent. They brought in a police bloodhound, and it picked up a scent off the driver's seat and followed it, not around the neighborhood, but straight back toward Jennifer's own complex. And the trails skipped the complex's main gated entrance.

Instead, it cut to a gap in the fence between the public sidewalk and the property, slipped through and led right to the rear staircase up to Jennifer's condo. So after dumping her car a mile away, whoever did this may have walked all the way back to the exact building where she lived. But that only told detectives how this might have played out. They still didn't know who that sent belonged to or why they'd go back. And then there was the video. Unlike the mosaic, Huntington on the green did have working cameras,

and they'd caught the whole thing. Around noon, on the same day Jennifer vanished, the footage showed someone pulling her Malibu into the lot, sitting there for a moment, then getting out and walking away along a fence. They never looked back once. When investigators watched the video, they were struck by how calm the person seemed.

Whoever this was hadn't panicked and ditched the car in rush. They backed it in and lined it up straight in the space, then walked off like they had all the time in the world. And this should have been the answer. A clear look at the person who was almost certainly the last to see Jennifer Kessie, except the camera worked against them. It only caught an image every three seconds or so, and by pure, sickening luck,

the person's face was blocked in every single frame. By the black bars of the fence, by the distance, by the angle, the shots of them on foot were a little sharper, but the face was always gone. Police were so desperate to sharpen it that they turned to, an unlikely source, NASA. Within a day, their engineers were trying to improve the footage,

and this tells you how bad it was, because even NASA couldn't fix it. After all that, investigators still couldn't make out the face. They couldn't even say for certain whether they were looking at a man or a woman. The most they could pin down was a height, somewhere between 5'3 and 5.5. foot five. Later, the FBI added one more detail, feet that seemed unusually large for someone that size. Journalists who covered the case called that figure the luckiest person of interest

ever. If you wanted to create a suspect, nobody could identify. You couldn't design it better than this, but there was still a huge hole in the middle of it. If Jennifer was taken from her lot around 740 in the morning and her car was dropped a mile away around noon, then where were Jennifer and her car for the more than four hours in between? That question was about to lead detectives to a man known around the complex only as Chino. One summer evening when she was 20 years old, something terrible happened to Vienna, Luke. I can't figure it out, but I do. know that it was a violation. Then people started asking questions.

What a creep. Who else knows about this? From CBC's personally, this is Agent Layla. The story of how a victim went undercover. So bring it on. Let's go. Let's get a confession. Available now on CBC Listen, or wherever you get your podcasts.

By early 2006, investigators had Jennifer Kessie's abandoned car, a scent trail that led back to her own front door and a blurry surveillance video on what they didn't have was a name. With no one to point to they did what investigators always do first start ruling people out. And in a case like this, the boyfriend goes to the front of that line. The first person they cleared was Rob. Over the next few weeks, Rob Allen sat through something like a dozen interviews and multiple polygraphs, and he cooperated with everyone. He'd also been more than 200 miles away when Jennifer vanished. That was enough.

Police let him go as a suspect, and Jennifer's family never turned on him. Rob himself understood the position he was in. I know that as the boyfriend, I'm prime suspect number one, but no one treated me like that. The community was supportive, and the Kessi family. treated me like a son. With Rob cleared, the investigation turned back toward the thing Jennifer herself had flagged before she vanished, the workers at her complex. A lot of the men working the site were day laborers, and a number of them scattered before police could talk to them. Some of that may have been about immigration status rather than guilt, but it meant a whole pool of potential

witnesses just evaporated. And when investigators talked to the residents who were there, a lot of them young women living alone like Jennifer, they heard the same unsettling things over and over. Workers were reportedly sleeping in the empty units after their shifts and partying in them after hours. Women said they were a cat-called and harassed on the property. Jennifer included. Residents said the security guard was often just gone from the gatehouse, leaving the front of the community wide open. Drew Kessie later repeated what his daughter had told them, quote, there's a lot of workers here and they tend to stop when I'm walking to my car and they just look. And when the family's own investigator went back through it years afterward, he found

Jennifer hadn't been the only one. He spoke with six other women. who had lived at that complex, all of them uneasy around the workers. One of them named Colleen described coming home to groups of men drinking outside and the stairs and comments she had to walk past just to reach her own door. None of that pointed at any one person exactly. It was a portrait of a place where women already felt watched. But set it next to the one real piece of evidence. evidence they had, the figure on the tape, and the pieces started to fit. They were looking

for someone short, with access to the property, apparently walking right back toward Jennifer's own building after dumping her car a mile away. From there, a theory took shape. Detective started to wonder whether Jennifer had been taken by someone who worked there, and whether more than one person might have been involved, which opened a darker possibility too. With no body and maybe more than one person in on it, they had to ask whether Jennifer had been forced into trafficking. It was a horrifying idea, but buried inside it was a sliver of hope because it was one of the few theories where Jennifer might still be alive. While detects, it was a sliver of hope, it was a sliver of hope. while detectives chased the worker theory, the family and the public were trying to force the case into the open.

Just days after Jennifer vanished, an anonymous donor put up a $100,000 award. And in May of 2007, more than a year later, her employer offered a full $1 million, but only for information that brought Jennifer back alive and only until that 4th of July. No one ever collected it. That same month, Orlando Police made another move. They put out the fuller, clear video and changed a single word. The figure was no longer just a person of interest. Sergeant Barbara Jones announced that they now considered the person a suspect.

The video did shake new calls loose, and by then Jennifer's story was national news, covered on Dateline and on CBS's 48 hours. But as Drew put it, the calls that came in were never the right ones. So for a while, the case just slowed, leads thinned out. Years went by. Then, in 2009, three years after Jennifer disappeared, a detective named Joel Wright went back to the complex and started re-interviewing people. And a former housekeeper looked at that grainy surveillance image and said something new.

She said the walk, the hair, the clothing reminded her of a guy who used to work there, a guy called Chino. That name sent right back into the file where he found something that should have surfaced years earlier. In the very first week of the investigation, an anonymous tipster had also pointed at Chino. So, who was he? Chino was a former maintenance worker who'd lived in another building at the Mosaic. He'd also done repair work inside Jennifer's own condo about a week before she vanished. Right, tracked him down pretty easily because by 2009, Chino was already in a Florida prison.

He was serving time for the statutory rape of a teenage girl, an offense committed after Jennifer vanished. Now, on paper, Chino looked like their guy. He'd had access to units all over the property. And roughly nine months after Jennifer disappeared, he'd moved out of the complex and dropped off the map. So in March of 2009, Detective Wright interviewed him in prison. Chino admitted he'd done work in Jennifer's condo, but he said the visit was completely

normal and that she'd let him in herself. He denied having anything to do with her disappearance. Then he agreed to a polygraph and passed. Now, polygraphs are notoriously unreliable, but that wasn't the only thing that raised eyebrows. The person in the video looked roughly five, five foot three to five foot five chino was taller than that closer to five foot nine and investigators could never physically tie him to jennifer still right wasn't ready to rule him out entirely drew kessie went further he didn't buy chino's story that jennifer had willingly let him in because that was the opposite of everything jennifer did she was careful with those workers. So Chino ended up in a kind of limbo, and he's been there ever since.

There was never enough to charge him and never enough to clear him. To this day, he's a person of interest who has never been ruled out. Even so, Wright had come away with a clear idea of what happened that morning. He said, quote, I believe Jennifer got ready for work. She shower, got dressed, went outside of her condo, locked the door on the way out, and made it as far as her car. After that, I believe she was abducted. Unfortunately, Wright wasn't able to make any more headway because in 2010, the department pulled him off the case and told the Kessies they'd run out of leads. After that, the investigation didn't just stall, it stopped.

Over the next few years, the family watched the case wither by 2011. They'd asked the police to formally declare it a cold case. It wasn't because they were giving up, but because cold cases can unlock things an open case can't. Special funding, dedicated programs, priority access to newer forensic tools. The Orlando Police Department refused. The last official police search for Jennifer came in February of 2014. In 2016, 10 years after Jennifer walked out her door, a Florida court declared her legally dead.

Drew called it, quote, one of the hardest things I've ever done in my life. But the family wouldn't let go. In late 2018, they did something almost unheard of. They sued the Orlando Police Department for a copy of Jennifer's own case. file. And in 2019, they won. It cost them. The city handed over the file for more than $18,000 in fees. It contained 16,000 pages of documents and something like 67 hours of audio and video. And the family had also hired their own private investigator, a retired federal agent named Michael Tarretta, and he combed through all of it.

Buried in those pages was a gut punch. According to Drew, the lead detective on his daughter's case hadn't written a single report in about a dozen years, but once the family's own investigator was inside the file, he started finding leads that had just been sitting there. One of them sent divers into a lake. A woman said, that around the time Jennifer disappeared,

she'd watched a man back a pickup truck up to a lake called Lake Fisher, pull out a rolled-up piece of carpet six to eight feet long, and dump it in the water before driving off. What stopped everybody cold was the timing? On the day, Jennifer went missing. Workers had been laying carpet in a unit

right across from hers. So on November 8, 2018, police divers spent two days searching Lake Fisher about 13 miles from Jennifer's condo. They found nothing. Now, the case did finally get pulled away from the Orlando Police Department in November of 2022. It was handed to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement's cold case unit, which is where it sits today. And there's been movement. In October of 2025, Drew Kesson.

said agents had found DNA on a piece of evidence that had never been tested. They said they'd narrowed down the list of people who might know what happened to Jennifer. For the first time in a long time, the family said the case was, in their words, no longer cold. Now, none of that momentum happened on its own. For most of those years, the people doing the hardest work on this case have been Jennifer's own family. Drew and Joyce effectively took over the investigation, hired Toretta to run it,

and created a go-fund meet that has raised more than $100,000 to keep it moving. And Toretta keeps landing where the rest of us do. He agrees that the person caught on camera is the key to solving the whole case. I keep coming back to that morning, because of how ordinary it was. Jennifer packed a phone.

That wasn't even hers. So she could do a small favor for her brother's friend on her way to work. She had clothes laid out and a whole life she was in the middle of building. Everything about that morning says she was thinking about the rest of her day, the rest of her week, the rest of her life. and then somewhere between her front door and her car, she was gone. No sound. Anyone noticed? No sign of a fight.

Just to silence her boyfriend heard when 8 a.m. came and went. And a family that has spent two decades refusing to accept I don't know as an answer. And that's the part I can't shake. Not the blurred figure. not the fence. It's that a woman who did everything right still disappeared without a trace and then had to be failed a second time by the people who are supposed to find her. Her case is open right now with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and the people who love her have never stopped pushing. And this is who they're looking for.

A woman with sandy blonde hair, green eyes, a close, a close, left chin and a small shamrock tattoo on her left side. If you know something, anything, you can call the FD-L-E Orlando office at 407-245-0888-8-8 or leave an anonymous tip with crime line at 1-800-4-2-3-847-7. somebody out there knows what happened to Jennifer Kessie. And if that's you, they're still listening. Before we get out of here, this is the part of every murder mystery Friday, where I tell you what I think, this is Carter calls it.

Now, this case doesn't have a verdict for me to argue with. No one was ever charged. So instead of picking apart a jury, I'm going to tell you which theory I find. the most convincing. I think she was taken by someone connected to that complex. I think the trail sent back to the place. It makes it pretty clear.

Why would you go back to a crime scene unless you were connected to it? And I think that makes the likeliest version one of the workers. You start with a person on that video, and I don't want to be straight about its limits because they matter. The quality was so bad that police could never even say for certain, whether they were looking at a man or a woman, let alone put a name to the face. so nobody should pretend that tape identifies anyone, but it isn't nothing either.

Now, they could tell the person was short between 5-3 and 5-5, with a shoe size that looked too big for that height, though I suppose they could have been wearing oversized shoes. Now, that alone rules out Rob, but height was never going to name anybody. What matters is what's sitting right next to it. Whoever this was got Jennifer out of her own parking lot without a sound. Drove her car a mile and walked back toward her building like they had every reason to be there.

Could it have been a stranger? Could. I just think the far likely a read is somebody who was already supposed to be there. And then again, like I said, there's the dog. The send had picked up led back through a gap in the fence to Jennifer's own staircase. whoever dumped that car, knew where she lived, and felt comfortable going back. That's somebody who belonged on that property. And Jennifer told us, before any of this happened, she was the one raising the alarm about the men working in her building.

Other women there later described the same crew, sleeping in the empty units, drinking on the property, making the residents uneasy in their own homes. It's not a coincidence sitting next to her disappearance. That's a pattern she was standing in the middle of. As for a name, the strongest one the investigation ever produced is Chino. He'd been inside her condo a week before. He had access to the whole property. Two separate sources put his name on file, one of them in the very first week.

And when police finally sat down with him, he was already in prison for a sex crime against a teenager. But I want to be careful and fair here. Chino passed a polygraph. Investigators could never tie him physically to Jennifer, and he was taller than the figure on that tape. He was never charged with anything in this case, and I'm not going to sit here and convict him for you. But I'll say what the lead detective said in his own way. A past polygraph doesn't rule a person out. Chino is a person of interest who has never cleared and to me, well, there's still the most interesting figure in this whole thing that we can name. And I can't rule out the darkest version either, that Jennifer was trafficked and that more than one person was involved. That would explain the missing body

and the total silence. It would also mean there are people out there right now who know exactly what happened. So that's my call. Jennifer Kessie was almost certainly taken. taken by someone who worked at or had access to that complex, someone she may have already been afraid of. And the failure to nail it down in those first crucial days is on a police department that stopped doing its job. Now, if you think it went another way, a stranger, boyfriend, something none of us have thought of, I want to hear about it. Tell me in the comments and tell me who you think the person behind that fence really was. And I want to add one more thing here at the end and something I'll probably tell you again,

don't be afraid to advocate and keep asking. If you live in a place where you don't think there's enough security, hound them for more cameras, hound them to make sure the guards are on duty. If the police you think aren't listening to your reports, hound them to do more. And I want to be clear, the Kessie family did all they could.

I'm not suggesting they didn't. But as we see in this case, there were places that could have prevented this crime or maybe help solve it. but the people in charge of safety and security were too lax, so don't be afraid to push them. Thanks so much for listening. I'm Carter Roy, and this is Murder True Crime Stories.

Come back next time for the story of another murder and all the people it affected. Murder True Crime Stories is a Crimehouse original powered by Pave Studios. Here at Crimehouse, we want to thank each and every one of you for your support. If you like what you heard today, reach out on social media at Crimehouse on Twitter. TikTok and Instagram.

Don't forget to rate, review, and follow Murder True Crime Stories wherever you get your podcasts. Your feedback truly makes a difference. And to enhance your Murder True Crime Stories listening experience, subscribe to Crime House Plus on Apple Podcasts. You'll get both parts of every story dropped on Tuesday, completely ad-free, no waiting for part two, plus ad-free and early access to every show across Crime House and bonus episodes every month.

To join, go to Crimehouse. Houseplus.com or if you listen on Apple Podcasts, tap try free at the top of the Murder True Crime Stories page. We'll be back on Tuesday. Murder True Crime Stories is hosted by me, Carter Roy, and is a Crime House original, powered by Pave Studios. This episode was brought to life by the Murder True Crime Stories team, Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Benadon, Natalie Protofsky, Lori Maranelli, Sarah Camp, Alyssa Fox, Mara Delarosa, Claire Swartzlander, and Russell Nash. Thank you for listening.

Thanks for listening to today's episode of Murder True Crime Stories. If you're looking for another show to check out, listen to Serial Killers and Murderous Minds. Every Monday and Thursday, Dr. Tristan Ingalls and Vanessa Richardson dig into the most chilling murderers and uncover what drives them to kill. Follow serial killers and murderous minds, available wherever you listen to podcasts.