The Deck - Diana Ferris (10 of Hearts, Connecticut)

Episode Date: August 30, 2023

Our card this week is Diana Ferris, the 10 of Hearts from Connecticut.In 1996, 34-year-old Diane was preparing to welcome her fourth child when one spring day she was ambushed and brutally murdered in the privacy of her own home. The investigation into her slaying was quick to go cold, but a recent breakthrough in the case has police more confident than ever that they’re hot on the killer’s trail.If you know anything about the murder of Diana Ferris in April of 1996, please call the Connecticut Cold Case Tip Line at 1-866-623-8058, or you can email tips to [e-mail].  To learn more about The Deck, visit www.thedeckpodcast.com. To apply for the Cold Case Playing Cards grant through Season of Justice, visit www.seasonofjustice.org Let us deal you in… follow The Deck on social media.Instagram: @thedeckpodcast | @audiochuckTwitter: @thedeckpodcast_ | @audiochuckFacebook: /TheDeckPodcast | /audiochuckllc The Deck is hosted by Ashley Flowers. Instagram: @ashleyflowersTikTok: @ashleyflowerscrimejunkieTwitter: @Ash_FlowersFacebook: /AshleyFlowers.AF Follow The Deck on social media and join Ashley’s community by texting [phone] to stay up to date on what's new!

Our card this week is Diana Ferris, the 10 of hearts from Connecticut. In 1996, Diana, who went by Diana, was preparing to welcome her fourth child. When one spring day, she was ambushed and brutally murdered in the privacy of her own home. The investigation into her slang was quick to go cold. But a recent break through in the case has police more confident than ever that they're hot on the killer's trail. I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is The Death. It was about 6 p.m. when Claudio Rice arrived at his brother's apartment complex on Hartford's north side to do an unofficial welfare check.

His brother, Harold, better known as Pookie, was locked up on a robbery charge, and no one had been able to reach his living girlfriend Diane for a few days, which was out of the ordinary. So Claudia agreed to go check on her. He went up and knocked on the apartment door, but there was no answer. The door was locked, so he contacted a maintenance man to let him in. As they set foot inside the small one-bed, one-bath unit, nothing immediately seemed off. But when they peeked into the bedroom, they saw a sight they could never unsee. Sprawled out on the bed was a woman who appeared to be Diane. She was covered in blood and had a spiral telephone cord around her neck. In a complete

panic, Claudy and the maintenance man ran out of the apartment to get help and happened upon a police car just driving by. They flagged down the officer, Sergeant Ed Mouringer, and told him about the horrifying scene they just found. Here's Detective Drew Jacobson explaining what Sergeant Mouringer did next. Mouringer called for an ambulance to come by. He entered the apartment and proceeded in the bedroom. He observed a partially clothed female lying on her back. Her arms are bloody. Her hands are kind of fixed. She had a pillar on her face. There was a spiral telephone cord wrapped around her neck.

It looked like the woman had been there a while. And adding to the heartbreaking scene, she appeared to be pregnant. Within minutes EMTs arrived on scene and officially pronounced the woman dead. And with that, investigators got to work, scouring the apartment for any clues. The rear door to the apartment was dead-bolted still still and there are no signs of forced entry. The front door was viewed and there were also no signs of forced entry. The kitchen, bathroom, and living room were all pretty clean. It was clear that the majority of the struggle had taken place in the bedroom.

I mean, lamps were on the ground, a fan knocked over and ash trays scattered across the floor. Police collected everything from the bedroom as well as a bloody smudge from outside the apartment. It looked like maybe a finger smudge, but it was too blurred to lift a print from. But regardless, they cut out the wall plaster and kept it as evidence. While the scene was still being processed, police were questioning Claudia, but he didn't have much to say.

I mean, he knew Diane was in her mid-30s, but honestly, he didn't even know her last name. His brother, Pookie, had only been dating her since November, about five months, and he'd just come over at the behest of his mother, who hadn't been able to get a hold of Diane for the past few days. As the investigation was just getting started, word was spreading around town that Diane had been murdered. And people started showing up, including a man, Wilkall Cecil, who seemed noticeably distraught as he stood outside looking on.

He told police that he was a good friend of Diane's and Pukies, and then he said something that threw up some major red flags. He told them that he had been sleeping with Diane while his buddy pookie was incarcerated. Now, why he randomly admitted to this? I don't know. Maybe just wanting to get it all out there before it came to light, or perhaps wanting to throw a disclaimer out there if anything of his was maybe found at the crime scene. But a man sleeping with the victim, who also happens to show up at the scene, sketchy at best. So right away, Cecil's name was penciled in at the top of the person's of interest list. Now the following day, the autopsy got underway, and that's when the woman was officially ID'd as 34-year-old

Diana Ferris. Cause of death, ligature strangulation. She was five months pregnant with a baby boy who was sadly stillborn. And it was at the autopsy that authorities got a better grasp of how long she'd been dead. Mumification had begun to set in on her fingers, and given that there was no rigor mortis present, they assumed that she'd been there for at least 36 hours. The Emmy found no appearance of genital injury or sexual assault. But there was also obvious distortion from the severe decomposition, so they couldn't be 100% sure either way.

But of the tips that were already starting to trickle in, they suggested a motivation that wasn't sexual. Some of those tips were implying that perhaps this was a robbery gone wrong. There was a TV that somebody had bought for Diana for her house, the TV's gone. Police began trying to hunt down the missing TV, thinking that it would lead them to their killer. But it wasn't that easy. It ended up amounting to nothing more than a wild goose chase.

They heard through the grapevine that possibly a cousin took the TV, but that was never confirmed and they never ended up locating the TV, so that lead just crumbled. As the days dragged by, there were other rumors surfacing. Like maybe her death was connected to another murder. A murder that she was believed to have been at the scene of a few years prior in 1993. According to the Hartford Current, here's what happened. Diane gave 37-year-old Thomas Myers a ride to a downtown housing project. She got out of the car and police believed that she was supposed to return. While Thomas was

waiting, he was ambushed and stabbed to death. Now at first, Diane was painted as a person of interest, but it seems that police later changed their minds and considered her a potential witness. No matter what she was labeled, the local paper reported that she was, quote, reluctant to give police information. Thomas' case was still unsolved by the time Diane was murdered. So investigators on her case looked into a possible link, but it didn't quite make sense for someone to wait three whole years to kill a witness or to get revenge. And it's not like that case was getting any closer to a resolution or a trial that maybe

she was planning to testify at. So police weren't exactly ready to call it their working theory, but they kept it in their back pocket as they continued their investigation. Now another rabbit hole police went down was probing a potential habit that Diane had. She was never convicted of prostitution, but just through talking to people, she might have done that for a cocaine habit, and that they started to look at potential customers that she, because you just don't know, you know, did he follow her into the house, so we just don't know.

So they started to look at some of that. Dipsters say that they saw her in a pickup truck, not long before she was found dead. And believe it or not, police were able to track down the truck and the driver. They talked to him a little bit, and they were able to rule him out. It was dead end after dead end. And eventually, things slowed to a screeching halt.

But just a few months later, a man incarcerated at a local prison wrote police a letter, a letter that gave them their first solid theory. This letter was from a man who will call Mark, and we actually got our hands on a copy of this letter, so I'm going to have a voice actor read it in part with real names changed to pseudonins. On a cold night, about 1.30 in the morning, I, Mark, was walking down Garden Street. I walk in a Matthew and Jimmy running from this building on Garden Street. Matthew said, hey, Mark, let's go get high because me and Jimmy just did some crazy sh**.

All three of us walk until we reach this green apartment building. We sit on the back porch, Matthew pull out a package of cocaine which from my point of view had to be about a quarter of an ounce. So I said, where did you get all that from? Jimmy said, remember Big Pookie's white girl? I said yes. Jimmy said, me and Matthew had her out there tricking for cocaine. Mike said, after she got out of the car with her last

customer, him and Jimmy was waiting on the side of the building for her. When she got out of the car, she said, guys, come upstairs. Then Jimmy said, he made sure all of the doors was locked. Matthew said he told the white girl, the **** come up with the rest of the **** before we kill you. Matthew said the **** kept denying that she didn't have nothing else. Matthew said we tied the b***h up and started beating the s*** out of her. Jimmy said she was screaming so loud until she started choking until she passed out. I, Mark, said, that's how you got all the cocaine?

Jimmy and Matthew said, hell yeah. Then Matthew said to Jimmy, I think we killed her. After a few days went by, I heard on the news that a pregnant white woman was murdered. The same day I saw Jimmy and Matthew. I said to Matthew and Jimmy, you all know I know you killed that white woman. Jimmy said, oh what, you going to tell on us? I said no. Then Matthew said to Jimmy, what about our fingerprints in the apartment? Jimmy said, don't worry Matthew.

If the **** comes down, I say I was renting a room there. That will take care of the fingerprints. I don't know why, but for some reason, there's no record of Jimmy or Matthew being spoken to after police received this letter from Mark. Why they wouldn't have followed up? Your guess is as good as mine.

Maybe it's because Diane didn't have an extra bedroom in the apartment, so that didn't really match up with what Jimmy supposedly said, or maybe the tip just didn't seem credible because the autopsy didn't mention anything about Diane being beaten. But you would think that detectives at the time would have considered the possibility that she could have been beaten, but was just too decomposed for the Emmy to tell. Also, Mark himself did have a criminal history, so maybe they just took what he said with a grain of salt. That's the best I can come up with, but still, seems like some major follow-up would have

been the bare minimum. But for whatever reason, Mark's letter faded into the background, and Diane's investigation was once again deadlocked. The lack of movement frustrated Diane's family. Especially her oldest daughter, Miranda Van D'Venter, who was just 16 when Diane was killed. Not only did Miranda have to finish growing up without the love of her mother, but she had to do so without any answers to comfort her. And so did her two younger brothers, who were nine and thirteen.

The three of them hadn't lived with their mother in quite some time due to her struggles with substance use disorder, but they knew that she loved them, and they loved her all the same. Despite her struggles with addiction, she was an extremely loving mother. So loving that she wanted to make sure her children were taking care of, because she recognized that she couldn't do what she wanted to do and bringing us up any longer, because the addiction had gotten in the way of that. But she made sure that we were with family and she signed her rights over. And she thanked my aunt who took care of me

for allowing me to live with her because it gave my mother just a sense of peace knowing that I was safe. She always did the best that she could. And she always showed that love and that affection. And I feel like that made a huge difference in my life and my two younger brothers' lives. My mom always had a really great personality. She was fun loving. She was funny. She had a great life. just car rides, listening to music, and her joking about something. And because I was the oldest, I was pretty much always the passenger. So I have really good vivid memories of being right there beside her with music going and windows down.

Miranda also held close the memory of her last conversation with her mother. I was actually visiting with my brothers at one of my uncle's homes and she had called them to talk to them and I happened to be there so I got on the phone to talk with her and it was just a normal conversation. What did you guys up to today? Oh, I'm so glad that you're there visiting your brothers and then passed the phone around to both my brothers and then it was, and I love you.

And that was our last conversation. We always said I love you before getting off the phone and it's something that is just kind of ingrained in myself and my brothers, that you don't leave a conversation with somebody you love without those final words of I love you. So definitely give us some solace, I guess. While Miranda and her brothers struggled to come to terms with their mother's passing, the investigation stayed ice cold.

There were occasional glimmers of hope, like in the early 2000s, when a serial killer theory came to light. Around a dozen women had been killed in Hartford between 94 and 2001. All of them convicted or suspected sex workers and or substance abusers. And Diane was on the list. Eventually, Matthew Stephen Johnson was charged with three of the murders on that list. And if that name rings a bell, it may be because I talked about him in our previous episode on Elizabeth Miller. You may remember that the murders he was convicted of were those of Iida Kinyones, Rosalie Jimenez, and Alicia Ford.

You also might remember that those women had been stomped to death, a far different MO from how Diane had been killed. So soon enough, just like all the leads before, the serial killer theory fizzled out. And the case was back to stagnant. And it pretty much stayed that way until 2011, 15 years after the murder. That's when Detective Jacobson picked up the case, dusted it off, and got to work. Jacobson spent countless hours familiarizing himself with the case file and evaluating what more could be done. Specifically, what could be tested for DNA,

which was something that hadn't been possible in the years prior and had never been done? Remember that bloody fingerprint smudge that I mentioned earlier? When Detective Jacobson read about it in the case file, he was hopeful that it had been well preserved. And if it was left by the killer, he hoped they'd be able to easily lift the killer's DNA from it.

They did a great job. They cut out a square and they put it on a piece of cardboard. They put it inside of an evidence bag and they put it into our property room. Detective Jacobson's hopes were dashed when he went to the property room and realized what they put the plaster in. Plastic. So number one, it's going to denature DNA and blood to all of the plaster crumbled. So I got nothing.

I got a bag of powder. Not all hope was lost just yet, though, because there was another key item of evidence that hadn't been tested either. The bed spread that Diane was found laying on. Detective Jacobson sent it off to the lab, and after a long wait, they confirmed the presence of DNA. There was semen on the bed spread from not one but two men. The samples gave them full profiles good enough to enter into Codus, and when authorities

did, they got two hits. And they were names that Detective Jacobson recognized right away. Those names that he got from codis were Cecil and Jimmy. Now remember Cecil is the friend of Diane and Puky's who showed up to the scene the day of and claimed up and sleeping with Diane while Puky was incarcerated. And Jimmy is one of the guys Mark implicated in his letter. Then from there the state lab requires us to do confirmatory samples meaning that then you have to go back to the people presented and get known DNA directly from them.

So there's no confusion with a CODIS system or anything else. This is common practice, to get a confirmatory sample after the CODIS head. Because if they just relied on the CODIS match and then it went to trial, the prosecution could easily poke holes in the scientific integrity of the case by calling into question the whole chain of custody of the initial DNA sample. So Detective Jacobson tracked down Cecil and asked him for a sample. Because of how cooperative Cecil had been throughout the entire investigation, even now that his DNA was found at the scene, his name was quickly fading from the suspect list,

and all eyes turned to Jimmy, who naturally was next on Detective Jacobson's checklist. But before approaching Jimmy, who remember had never been approached by law enforcement about Diane's case before, Detective Jacobson wanted to make sure he had all of his ducks in a row. So he asked Mark to come down to the station for an interview just to see if he doubled down on his 1996 statement or not. I gave him this letter and I said, hey, remember writing this letter? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Can you go through and reread it? And he reread the whole letter. And then in a statement to me, he said, today I was giving a copy of the letter to review.

I read the letter and it is truthful and accurate. I agree with everything I wrote in the letter. And there's nothing that I want to change. At this time, I can't think of anything else that I need to add. I signed and printed my name at the bottom of each page of the letter. Armed with Mark's testimony, the code is hit and a warrant, Detective Jacobson was ready to reach out to Jimmy. When he did, he found out that he was in federal prison in New York, locked up on some drug

charges. So, Detective Jacobson scheduled a trip. But it wasn't the productive conversation he'd hoped for. Try to interview him and talk to him about this case, and he was not happy with us. He held on screen and was pissed. He told me that he knew of her, but didn't really know her. Never touched her or anything like that. So now you're telling me you didn't touch her, but you've seen her there? What happened?

Even though the conversation wasn't as fruitful as heat hoped, Detective Jacobson was able to get the confirmatory DNA sample. I know what you're thinking. That's it, Case closed. You've got a damning statement that the witness doubled down on and the official DNA sample. But of course, it's not that easy. Seemed on a bed spread doesn't mean you're killed there. It's not that easy. For Detective Jacobson to be satisfied that Jimmy was the killer, or at least one of the killers, he needs something more. Like finding Jimmy or Matthew's DNA on the telephone cord that was used to strangle Diane,

that would seal the deal. Detective Jacobson wanted to remain vague about this aspect of the investigation, but he said he needs to find a specific kind of advanced testing to be able to pull any potential DNA from the court. And that's where the case sits now. He's still working to get that testing. Even though all signs seem to be pointing to Jimmy and Matthew, Jacobson knows he's got to avoid tunnel vision. So for him, nothing's off the table. Even the seemingly far-fetched possibility that Diane's murder is connected to Thomas Myers.

Until there's a conviction, I'm open to anything. Because anything could happen. I wasn't there in 1996. I wasn't around, so I have to keep my mind open to anything. In the meantime, Diane's family, Miranda and her two brothers, are busy keeping her memory alive and making her proud. Thankfully, all of us today are doing very well in our lives, and my brothers have careers, their business owners.

I used to teach high school and then became a stay at home mom to raise my three boys. And we have successful relationships, and none of us have drug addiction in our lives. None of us luckily have gone down that same path that my mother and my step other went down and I think that's a testament to the security we had of knowing that we were loved and knowing that they wanted better for us my mother and my

step-other both wanted us to live better lives than what they had been living. And that was one thing that I promised when I spoke at her funeral in her unity, promised her that I would look out for my brothers and that we would make her proud. And that has always stayed true. And I was very loyal to my word. And we've all made her proud. Miranda is now the proud mother of three boys and she makes sure that they know all about

the loving woman their grandmother was. I believe that's how you keep somebody alive is through their, through the memories that you have. I'm proud to say my old is to actually studyingology. And he wants to be a detective one day. And we've never discussed that desire as to why it's detective, but I believe that has to do something with his grandmother. My hope is that there can be closure. And, you know, I've always said, no matter whether this case is solved or not, I know in my heart that

the person or people who did this to my mom will be rightfully served their justice, whether it's here or in the next life. And so that gives me peace having my face that justice will be served regardless. But my hope would be to have that closure before I die. Just to know it's solved and to put just small piece behind me. I would love to look the person or people in the base who murdered my mother and my baby brother and let them know how that changed our lives and how that impacted our lives. But I would also like to let them know that it also made us stronger and that despite what they took from us, my brothers and I, that we've continued to make our mother proud.

If you know anything about the murder of Diana Ferris in April of 1996, please call the Connecticut Cold Case Tip Line at 1-866-623-8058, or you can email tips to cold.case at CT.gov. The Deck is an audio chuck production with theme music by Ryan Lewis to learn more about the Deck and our advocacy work, visit the DeckPodcast.com. So what do you think Chuck? Do you approve? Visit thedeckpodcast.com.

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