Jennifer Kesse went missing from her condo in Orlando, Florida on January 23, 2006. Her car was found abandoned around a mile from her home. No arrests have ever been made in her case and no sign of Jennifer has ever been found.
Jennifer was born Jennifer Joyce Kesse on May 20, 1981. Jennifer’s parents are Drew and Joyce. Jennifer has a brother, Logan.
Jennifer was raised in Tampa, Florida. She attended Gaither High School and would later go on to attend the University of Central Florida. She studied finance there and graduated with honors in 2003.
After Jennifer graduated, she got a job as a Finance Manager at Central Florida Investments Timeshare Company. By all accounts, she was very successful and was promoted very quickly. She was able to purchase her own condo.
The condo is located in the Mosaic at Millenia complex at 3735 Conroy Road in Orlando, Florida.
This is some info about the complex:
Welcome home to the highly desirable Resort Style Living in Mosaic at Millenia! This 2nd floor, 1 bedroom/1 bath condo comes with a washer & dryer, 1 assigned parking spots, newer A/C, title kitchen & bathroom, private balcony over-looking the pond, stone counter tops, upgraded cabinets, exterior storage room and in home security system. Mosaic at Millennia is a gated community that offers its residents tennis courts, club house, park & playground, volleyball area, valet trash disposal, out-door grills, fitness center and pool. Just minutes away from the very popular Millenia Mall, major highways, theme parks, restaurants and multiple shopping centers.
Her childhood best friend Lauren McCarthy told 48 Hours that Jennifer had chosen Mosaic at Millenia condos because it was a gated community with a guard, making her feel safe.
“She was extremely safety conscious. She was very aware of her surroundings. She carried pepper spray with her all the time,” Laurem explained. “She was the type of person who would call her mom or her dad or me when she was simply walking from Target in the parking lot and it was dark.”
According to redfin, the complex started to be built in 2003 and it was still under construction in many areas when Jennifer purchased her condo. There were many vacant condos and some of the tradespeople who were working on the site construction were living on site. There was some apparent conflict about the quality of work being done in Jennifer’s complex. She knew some Spanish and told friends and family that when she walked past some employees, she understood that they were making sexual and aggressive statements about her.
“Whenever workers entered her apartment for painting and repairs, Jen was always on the phone with us,” said Drew, her father. “She’d stay on the phone in the doorway of her condo until they had left.”
Jennifer had a boyfriend at the time she disappeared. His name was Rob Allen. He lived in Fort Lauderdale, which is around three hours from Orlando.
The couple had been dating for around a year before Jennifer disappeared. As they lived hours away from each other, they would see each other most weekends.
Jennifer and Rob took a trip to St Croix in the US Virgin Islands together on the weekend before she vanished.
While Jennifer was away, she told her brother Logan that he could stay in her condo. He and two of his friends spent the weekend in the condo. A man named Matt Sullivan, who was friends with Logan and was also Jennifer’s ex, also hung out with Logan over the weekend. As a side note, Jennifer’s family have said that Matt took their break up very hard and that he did not want the relationship to end.
When the group left the condo, one of Logan’s guests accidentally left his phone behind.
Jennifer and Rob returned from their vacation on Sunday, January 22, 2006. There had been some delays in their travels so Jennifer spent that night at Rob’s home. She drove straight to work on Monday, January 23, 2006.
“Jen shared every detail about the trip. She was just really happy, she was on a cloud,” her mother Joyce said.
On Monday, Jennifer’s toll pass indicated that her car passed through expressways on her way to work at 6.16am.
Jennifer went to work on Monday as usual. She spoke with her parents, her brother, her friend Lauren and also Rob during the day. Logan told Jennifer that his friend Travis had left his phone at the condo. Jennifer told Logan that she would mail the phone back to Travis on Tuesday.
She left the office and called her parents on the phone at around 6pm. Her car also went through the tollway that night at 6.16pm on her way home.
Drew would later tell a true crime podcast that on the evening of Monday January 23, Jennifer was talking on the phone with a friend around 6.30-7pm when there was a knock at her door. The friend said that Jennifer looked out and saw her upstairs neighbor at her door. She told the friend ‘I’m not gonna answer.’
She also chatted with Rob. The two finished their call at 10pm that night. That was the last time that Jennifer was known to be alive.
To make sure we tell the whole story with all of the possible players, reports indicate that Matt (Jennifer’s ex) was at a bar near her condo that night. The bar was called the Blue Martini. Matt did not live anywhere near the area – he lived around 25 minutes away near the University of Central Florida.
Rob and Jennifer had a routine where they would call or text each other in the morning when they woke up. Rob did not hear from Jennifer on the morning of January 24, a Tuesday. He decided to call her while he was on his way to work and the call went straight to voicemail.
“I knew she had a lot on her plate and I knew she had a busy schedule. So I left a message with her and then went ahead with my day,” he explained in 2006. “I called her again, and once again I got her voicemail, which I thought was odd.”
Jennifer was a very reliable employee who would always usually call if she was going to be late. When she had not arrived at work by 11am, her employer contacted her parents and said that she had been a ‘no call, no show.’
Drew and Joyce tried to call Jennifer and when they also could not get in touch with her, they left Tampa with Logan and his friend Travis to drive to her condo. That drive is around 80 minutes according to Google maps.
“I called and I called and for the first time since Jenn was a teenager, it went straight to voicemail,” Drew said. “In that second, I knew something was wrong.”
Jennifer had been having some trouble with a man at work, named Johnny Campos. Reports indicate that Johnny arrived at work on January 24 at around noon – late. Some coworkers said that Johnny appeared agitated. Johnny was married but repeatedly made advances towards Jennifer which she always rejected.
While they were driving, Drew and Joyce called the condo manager and asked him to check Jennifer’s home with a spare key. He entered the property and said that everything seemed normal and that her car was not parked on the lot. The manager said the door to the condo had been locked.
Joyce has spoken about what they found when they arrived at the condo at around 3pm that day.
“When we arrived, there was nothing amiss. You know, typical Jen … hurriedly leaving for work, make-up out on the counter, hair dryer, what she wore to bed the night before on the bathroom floor, bed not made, a couple of outfits strewn on her bed,” Joyce said.
There was a wet towel left out and clothes laid out which suggested that Jennifer had showered and was preparing to go to work. The shower corners and walls were wet which indicated that she had showered recently before vanishing. Her underwear and a t-shirt that she wore to bed were on the bathroom floor.
Jennifer wore both glasses and contacts. Her contacts were gone and her glasses were left behind, indicating that she had probably put the contacts in to go to work.
The only things missing from her home were things that Jennifer would likely have taken with her when she left for work – her purse, keys, cell phone and iPod. As we mentioned, her car was also gone which led her family to think that something had happened to Jennifer either while she was getting ready to leave for work or after she had left.
“She slept [in her condo] for sure and I think she got up for work as she normally would. ‘Okay, I’m going to work. I have a meeting, it’s busy.’ Locks the door of her condo, that’s where the mystery starts,” Joyce said.
Jennifer’s luggage from her vacation was in the hall of the condo, untouched.
Drew and Joyce called the police who initially suggested that Jennifer was an adult and that she could have left of her own accord.
When Logan and Travis arrived at the condo, they said there was a white van parked near Jennifer’s parking spot. There were two maintenance men in the van. Logan tried to speak to them but they basically ignored him. Logan tried to speak to a few other employees of the complex but none were willing to give much information.
By 5pm, friends and family had arrived in the area. They started to make fliers with Jennifer’s details to distribute. Police sent a detective to the condo to start the investigation that night.
A witness would later come forward and say that they thought they saw Jennifer’s 2004 Chevy Malibu swerve out of the parking lot at around 7.40am on January 24. They said they did not know the direction in which the car traveled.
Over the next few days, media appeals for information in Jennifer’s case were made. Authorities asked the public to be on the lookout for her Chevy Malibu. On January 26, 2006, at around 8am, a man named Larry Maynor, who lived at an apartment complex called Huntington on the Green called police to say that the Chevy had been parked in the lot there for several days.
Police went to the site and examined the vehicle. It was taken away for forensic examination. They backtracked and looked at CCTV and found that the car had been left there at 11.59am on January 24. A person could be seen exiting the car and walking away.
The CCTV is frustrating because it is the type that doesn’t run continuously. One photo was taken by the system approximately every three seconds. Due to this delay, this meant that the suspect’s face was never able to be clearly seen.
One journalist called the suspect “The luckiest person of interest ever”. The FBI was called in to help determine the person’s size and gender, but could only say that the person stood between 5’3″ and 5’5″. NASA also enhanced the video to help identify the suspect.
“We’ve done quite a bit of measuring and work with the camera angles and also had people of different heights walk by,” Detective Joel Wright told 48 Hours.
He continued, “We’ve come up with a height of between 5’3 and 5’5 and this has been backed up by the FBI who also came down and checked out the figures. Now, the clothing looks to be maybe someone who is a painter or some type of worker.”
Police used a search dog that tracked the scent from her parked car back to her condo complex, which indicates that the suspect may have returned to the Mosaic at Milennia after dumping the car.
This info is from reddit:
Orange County Sheriff’s bloodhound named Bo took a sniff from the front passenger side of the car. The scent led straight to the front door of Jennifer’s home. The trail bypassed the complex’s only entrance and led to a stretch of fence separating the public sidewalk from its private ground. Once dog entered the grounds, it picked up the scent inside the fence and went directly to a stairwell leading to Jennifers 2nd floor condominium.
Joyce Kesse said that back stairwell was to parking spot and front stairwell overlooking the water. The dog tracked back at the front stairwell. Those stairs would have been closest to her door.
The second bloodhound tracked around the corner to Park Central Mid Town Terrace Apartments and then lost the track. The distance between Jennifer’s car to there is about 0,9 miles(1,5km)
No real evidence was found in the car besides a latent print and a small DNA fiber.
Evidence has also suggested that markings on the car could indicate that there was a violent struggle before she was taken somewhere, per Fox News. In photos taken of the vehicle shortly after it was found, handprints across the hood show there may have been an altercation.
“It looked like someone was thrown down on the top of the hood — arms spread out and then dragged back almost like off the hood to the point where you can almost see fingers scribbling down the hood,” Drew told the outlet.
There were apparent items of value found in the car (a DVD player that belonged to Rob, as well as Travis’ cell phone that Jennifer had been planning to mail back to him) so police said that they did not believe robbery was the motive.
Due to Jennifer’s condo complex being new, no CCTV had been installed there. A security guard had been hired to keep a log of visitors on the property but he only kept incomplete records.
The Kesse’s made a GFM to aid the search for Jennifer and the family have posted updates on that over the years. In one update, they said that “a complete set of keys for the complex” had been stolen a month before she went missing.
When police did decide that something had happened to Jennifer and that she had not left of her own accord, they went to her condo and found that it had been compromised as friends and family had been using it as a gathering place during the search.
Police did attempt to ping Jennifer’s cellphone but were unable to do so, indicating that the phone had been switched off/died.
Police interviewed Matt, Jennifer’s ex. According to Fox, he was cleared. Police also investigated Rob and he was also consequently cleared and his alibi was checked.
One of Jennifer’s co-workers, a man named Francisco Javier Aragon came forward and said that he overheard a confrontation between her married co-worker Johnny Campos and Jennifer on the morning of January 23. Francisco said that om or about the day after Jennifer’s disappearance, Johnny asked him to drive him to an impromptu meeting at the new Lake Eleanor Office. When the pair arrived, Johnny said he would meet up with him in about 30 minutes in the cafeteria.
Allegedly, during the drive Johnny told Francisco wherever she (Jenn) was, “she was likely eaten up by alligators already.”
Some articles do indicate that Johnny has been cleared in Jennifer’s case but I cannot find any public statement by LE confirming this.
Police apparently attempted to interview the people who had been working at Jennifer’s complex. Only a handful of them spoke English and the police did not apparently have a Spanish speaking officer to interview the others?
The police first interviewed Penisimani Mataele, aka “Ben”. He said that he had been to Jennifer’s condo once for a work order. He denied knowing anything about her disappearance. He said he went to the apartment with a maintenance man named Virgilio Ramos. Virgilio was one of the employees who was working and living in an empty condo on site.
During the first week of Jennifer’s case, a tip was called in saying that Virgilio was involved in the case. Another woman who lived in the complex said that Virgilio would approach her late at night when she got home from work and would make her feel uncomfortable.
Another woman said the opposite and said that he was always ‘fun and friendly.’ This woman said she was not suspicious of Virgilio until one day, nine months after Jennifer vanished, that he suddenly moved out of the complex in the middle of the night.
Despite this, he was not questioned by police until 2008. In 2009, he apparently passed a polygraph in the case.
Jumping back a bit, in May 2007, a $1m reward was offered for information leading to Jennifer’s whereabouts, with a stipulation that she had to be alive. It was never claimed.
The Kesse’s hired a PI named Michael Torretta. Michael is adamant that a worker was involved. After years of being on the case, he claims that up to 10 construction workers were living in the condo across the hall from Jennifer — and it was one of those men who abducted her.
“What I’m thinking is, Jennifer comes out, she locks the door. Of course, she has her back to the apartment behind her and then is abducted by those individuals across the hallway,” he said on 48 Hours.
“She’s locking the door and never sees it coming. She probably was attacked immediately upon exiting. She’s dragged into that other apartment and that’s the end.”
Despite this theory, Drew did say on the GFM that that unit was searched with scent dogs who produced “negative results.
In June 2010, the FBI took over the case from the Orlando PD.
In 2016, Jennifer was officially declared dead by the state of Florida. In the years that followed, her parents decided to sue the Orlando Police Department in order to get access to her case files. Police chief Orlando Rolón gave his department six months to work on the case and when they were unable to come up with new leads, he agreed to hand the files over to the Kesse family.
The Orlando Police Department eventually handed over 16,000 pages of documents and 67 hours of video and audio, which cost the family over $18,000, per their GoFundMe. The files came with the stipulation that the police department would no longer lead the investigation. Upon receiving the files, the Kesse family learned that there had been no recorded documentation of investigation efforts between late 2012 and 2019.
As of 2019, the family had spent over $500,000 of their personal money to find their daughter.
In 2020, her father told Fox News: “We don’t care when. We don’t care how and frankly, we don’t care who. We just want our daughter back, for the good or the bad. We miss her every day.”
In 2022, the family also enlisted the help of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. In collaboration with their private investigative team, the FDLE planned to retest physical evidence as well as speak with new and old potential witnesses.
As of June 2025, Jennifer is still considered missing and endangered by the Orlando Police Department, FBI, Orange County Sheriff’s Office, FDLE, NCIC, NCMA, and Interpol. She also remains on the FBI’s Most Wanted/Missing List.
On May 20, 2025 (coinciding with her 44th birthday), the FDLE announced that they had gone through thousands of pages of documents and had also spoken to about 45 people since the case was turned over to their unit in December 2022. They also announced that they have identified “several” persons of interests in Jennifer’s disappearance and have stated that the case is no longer considered cold. The FDLE also said that artificial intelligence may potentially be able to identify the person of interest seen on the CCTV after dumping the car.
The family wrote an update on the anniversary of Jennifer’s disappearance in January 2025.
“How can a missing person’s case with such awareness not produce even a direction 19 years later is inconceivable, yet very true and we, Jennifer’s family and friends, live with that very real fact day in and day out,” the family wrote on the 19th anniversary of her disappearance in January 2025.
They continued, “NO, time does not heal all wounds. But we still stay strong and fight the fight that needs to be fought for Jennifer’s sake. … We are continuously humbled by the people who still reach out on a very regular basis with leads. Maybe someday one will produce results.”
SOURCE LIST
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Jennifer_Kesse
https://people.com/jennifer-kesse-disappearance-missing-case-8774071