There was nothing out of the ordinary when Jennifer Kesse called her parents on the night of January 23, 2006.
The 24-year-old had just returned home to Florida from a long weekend vacation with her boyfriend Rob and his family to St Croix and she was regaling her family with stories about what a great time she had.
‘She had gone down for the weekend and she had called from St Croix to say ‘hey Dad it’s great, I can’t believe how nice the islands are,’ her father Drew Kesse tells Dailymail.com.
‘And I was like ‘Jennifer you’re only there for two days, just go enjoy it. I can talk to you later on,’ he laughs. ‘But she just always kept in contact.’
She and Rob then returned to his home in Fort Lauderdale, and she had made the two-hour journey back to her own place in Orlando in time for work Monday morning. When she went home that night, she called Rob, some friends and her family again.
‘She told us about her trip, how she had a great time and it was now, you know, back to work. Everything was just normal. She was telling us how much fun it was and it was just a recap of the great weekend she had,’ says Kesse.
‘Everything was great in Jennifer’s life. Honestly, it was a fab time in her life. She was just taking off on that young adult path that we’d all love to have. She was enjoying life – as she should have been.’
That would be the last time Jennifer’s family ever heard from her.
The next day would become what Kesse describes as the ‘day hell came to visit.’
And what has since followed is almost two decades living without Jennifer, with no answers, no suspects and no credible leads about her sudden disappearance.
‘That day, hell came to visit. And we have not been able to put a trail on Jennifer since that day. We’re now 19 years out and we don’t have any direction,’ says Kesse.
But now, 19 years to the day she vanished without a trace, Jennifer’s dad is hopeful a new team of investigators and a chilling piece of surveillance footage will finally hold the key to bringing his daughter home.
It was January 24, 2006, the morning after those final phone calls to her loved ones, and Jennifer had failed to show up to her job as a finance manager at Central Florida Investments Timeshare Company.
Concerned that this was out of character, her colleagues called her parents, who lived around two hours away.
‘I said I would give her a call,’ says Kesse.
‘Since she was 15 and we gave her a phone and a car that was the first time she never answered and it went straight to voicemail. We immediately knew right then that something was wrong. We took off for Orlando immediately.’
Kesse and his wife, Jennifer’s mom Joyce, drove straight to their daughter’s condo complex Mosaic at Millenia.
Inside her condo, everything appeared to be as it should be.
Jennifer’s pajamas were on the floor, a damp towel was by the shower, her hair tools looked as though they’d not long been used and the front door was locked.
Her car, a 2004 Chevy Malibu, was gone, as was her cellphone, purse, iPod and keys.
All the signs pointed to that Jennifer had gotten up that morning as normal, got ready and left for work.
Her parents called police to report her missing and organized a huge search to desperately try to find their daughter.
Two days later, on January 26, 2006, Jennifer’s car was found abandoned around one mile away at a different condo complex at Huntington on the Green. There was no sign of Jennifer. Her phone, purse, iPod and keys were also never found.
Grainy surveillance footage from the complex had captured a mystery individual parking her car there and walking off at around 12pm on the day Jennifer went missing.
A team at NASA was brought on board to try to enhance the footage to get a clear picture of this person of interest who could hold a critical clue to Jennifer’s whereabouts.
But, despite these efforts, it was impossible to get a clear shot of the individual’s face because it was obscured by fencing.
To this day, the person of interest – believed to be a man around 5 foot 3 to 5 foot 5 tall with unusually large feet for his height and dressed in workman’s clothes – has never been identified.
Over the last 19 years, 14,000 tips have poured in, rewards have been offered, and multiple people have been questioned by police.
But no solid evidence has ever been found, no credible leads have materialized and what happened to Jennifer remains a mystery.
‘It’s just gone nowhere,’ Kesse says of the investigation. ‘After 19 years, it’s just unfathomable that we don’t even have any direction.’
Jennifer’s dad is adamant that someone, somewhere must know something about what happened to his daughter.
‘More than one person knows what happened,’ he says, as he implores them to come forward, no matter how small the information.
‘If you know anything about Jennifer please just go to a lawyer, go to the police if you feel comfortable, or go to a priest if you feel comfortable doing that,’ he says.
‘Just get the information into law enforcement’s hands and they’ll take it from there.’
Kesse believes that the grainy surveillance footage of the mystery individual holds the key to finding out the truth.
‘Someone must know who that is [in the footage]. Someone has to know,’ he says. ‘If you know that person, you would look at that and know who that is. You can look at a picture and go ‘oh yeah, that’s my cousin, that’s my son.’
‘That [footage] is really the only thing we have, period.’
The Kesse family blames the poor progress in Jennifer’s case on a lack of urgency from local police when she first went missing.
While the family knew Jennifer would never have disappeared voluntarily, Kesse says they had a fight on their hands to get the Orlando Police Department to take the case seriously.
‘They did not take it seriously at all. We knew something was wrong right away and we called the police and we met them four hours after Jennifer didn’t show up for work,’ he says.
‘But the first police officer looked round her apartment and said ‘oh she probably had a fight with her boyfriend, she’ll be back’ and walked out. And that’s when we lost Jennifer.’
The push for action was made more challenging due to the fact that, at the time of Jennifer’s disappearance in 2006, Florida’s laws around missing persons did not include searching for adults. In 2008, the Jennifer Kesse and Tiffany Sessions Missing Persons Act was passed by the Florida legislature, reforming the state’s missing persons laws to include adults deemed missing and endangered.
‘To get [law enforcement’s] attention that Jennifer needed their help and to get the right people involved along the way has been a struggle,’ Kesse says.
‘So in the early days, when they didn’t go straight out to look for her we got our own team. So we had our own team of 13 investigators and a legal team on Jennifer’s case. You have to do what others aren’t willing to do.’
He adds: ‘We’re very loud people. We don’t take no for an answer so it’s a matter of people recognizing the Kesses are not going to walk away. We’re not that type of people. We believe that no one in America or anywhere should just be left missing.’
In 2018, following years of frustration with the state of the investigation, the family took the unprecedented step of suing the Orlando Police Department to close the case so that all records could be released.
The files, including 16,000 pages of records and 67 hours of video and audio, were ultimately handed over to the Kesse family and their own private investigator, while the Orlando police stood down from the investigation.
Since getting their hands on the records, Kesse says the private investigator has found other leads that weren’t followed up on properly.
When Jennifer’s car was found back in 2006, investigators noticed signs of what appeared to be a struggle on the hood of the vehicle.
‘The hood of the car had marks on it. It looked like someone had been pushed on top of the car and their hands and fingers had scraped down the hood of the car,’ says Kesse.
But, he says that part of the car was never tested for DNA. ‘So we lost a lead there too,’ he says. ‘There was a lot of things that were not done as it wasn’t taken seriously.
‘I’m angry that some people in law enforcement at the time didn’t do their jobs properly. And it just went from one mistake to another mistake to another mistake. They destroyed Jennifer’s chances of being found.’
Dailymail.com has contacted Orlando Police for comment.
Over the years, Jennifer’s family members have poured more than $700,000 of their own money into trying to find her but now those funds have dried up. The family is now appealing for donations through GoFundMe to keep her case alive.
In 2022, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement took on the investigation and Kesse believes Jennifer’s case is now finally being taken seriously.
Investigators have spoken to over 60 people in the last year alone, followed up on dozens of leads and evidence has been submitted for new DNA testing.
Now, he is hopeful that, finally, the family will get some answers.
‘They have put full energy into trying to find out what happened to Jennifer,’ he says. ‘It seems as though now, after 19 years, it’s Jennifer’s time.’
‘There’s been over 14,000 leads and nothing has made sense, nothing has been real. So we’re just waiting for that one that does,’ he adds.
As the years have passed, in the absence of answers, several theories have emerged about what happened to Jennifer.
Speculation has often fallen on construction workers who were carrying out work at the 24-year-old’s condo complex at the time of her disappearance. Some workers were staying in the empty condos and Jennifer had confided that some of the men made her feel uncomfortable, according to the family’s GoFundMe. A set of keys for the complex had also been stolen around the time of her disappearance, the family says.
Kesse feels certain that Jennifer wasn’t taken by someone she knew.
‘She was liked by everyone who knew her. Myself and her mother don’t know one person who disliked Jennifer,’ he says. ‘She lit up a room. And people say this about their kids all the time but I can honestly say this about Jennifer. She was just one of those special people in the world.’
He believes the 24-year-old was abducted and immediately trafficked out of the US by someone she didn’t know.
‘I think it was a job for someone – probably to pay off a debt of some sort – and they came, did the job and then left. I don’t think she is in the country and I don’t think she was in the country very quickly,’ he says.
‘I don’t think it was about Jennifer but they wanted a beautiful white woman with blue eyes and blond hair.’
For Kesse, he has also come to the heart-wrenching conclusion that his daughter is no longer alive.
‘Her mom thinks differently – she thinks she’s still out there, that we’re going to find her alive and we just have to keep going,’ he says.
‘I don’t believe that. I believe Jennifer will have fought at some point – we taught her to fight – and I think she took her chances… I think she’s no longer with us.’
He adds: ‘But I may be 100 percent wrong as we have no clue what happened.’
Kesse says he hopes the person responsible for her disappearance is ‘looking over their shoulder constantly.’
However, there’s a sense of fear that after almost two decades, there’s ‘a lot of catch-up work’ to be done and that, the more time that passes, the chances of catching those responsible or finding people with information could be running out.
‘The sad thing is people might be dead by this time. We’ve had detectives who have worked on the case who have passed away,’ Kesse says.
‘People we wanted to talk to who have passed away. That person [who took Jennifer] might no longer be here, they might have passed or might be in another country. Obviously the longer things go on, the less chances you have.’
Jennifer was declared dead by the state of Florida in 2016. And after many years, and finding no further options to test it, the Kesse family finally parted ways with her car.
For Jennifer’s dad, one of the hardest things over the years has been realizing that ‘life goes on.’
‘You’re a shadow when it first happens but you have to go on with life or it’s going to eat you up and spit you out,’ he says.
‘We’re strong people. We don’t have a choice, well we do have a choice. We can go around the corner and cry but we choose to be proactive and to try to find our daughter to this day.
‘So now I have 2 minds: I have a Jennifer mind where it’s constantly there then the 2nd is things you have to do in life – eat, sleep and all that.’
Kesse is determined that he’ll never stop looking for Jennifer.
‘We’re never going to give up trying and doing everything we can. My biggest hope is that we can bring Jennifer home before Joyce and I pass. I was 48 when this started and I’m 68 now. I don’t want to leave this for her brother,’ Kesse says.
‘I don’t want to go to my grave not knowing where my daughter is.
‘I don’t expect her to be alive. I don’t expect her to come back home to daddy. I do expect her to be found and identified.’