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The Happy Face Killer and the Identity of Suzanne Kjellenberg · Murder Files Unsealed

0:00
Speaker 1: Imagine just for a second that you are handed this
0:03
like sealed envelope. Okay, you open it up, and inside
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is a complete, handwritten, just incredibly detailed confession to a
0:14
brutal murder. Oh wow, right, and the person who wrote
0:17
it includes these massive secrets from the crime scene. We
0:20
are talking about details that are so hyper specific, so
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tightly held by law enforcement that only the true killer
0:27
could possibly know them, so things.
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Speaker 2: They absolutely didn't release to the press exactly.
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Speaker 1: So, the police have this confession in their hands, they
0:34
have the killer sitting right in front of them, dead
0:36
to rights, and yet they are utterly completely powerless to
0:41
make an arrest.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, which is just wild to think about.
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Speaker 1: I mean, they can't bring charges, they can't lock this
0:46
person away for this specific crime. And the reason why
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it's because while they have the killer and they have
0:50
the confession, the victim is well, she's a ghost. The
0:54
victim has no name.
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Speaker 2: It is uh. It's the ultimate lockdrum mystery, but inverted.
0:59
You know, you have the betrayer standing right in front
1:01
of you holding the key, but the room itself is
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completely vanished. The crime physically exists, but legally legally without
1:09
an identity. Attached to those remains. It is basically a void.
1:13
Speaker 1: It's a total void. And that is exactly the mission
1:15
for today's deep dive. We are going to explore this
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true thirty year odyssey that hinges on that exact chilling premise.
1:25
Speaker 2: That's heavy one, it really is.
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Speaker 1: We're going to walk you through the decades long fight
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to identify a woman who is known for an entire
1:31
generation only as Okalusa Jane Doe. We're going to look
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at how the agonizingly slow but ultimately like a miraculous
1:39
evolution of forensic science finally outsmarted one of the most
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notorious serial killers in American history.
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Speaker 2: And to really understand how this happened, you have to
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start by setting the scene. We need to go back
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to a very specific place, a very specific time, and
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honestly a very specific geography. Right.
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Speaker 1: So, the year is nineteen ninety four and we are
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in Okahusa County, Florida.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, and the geography of Oklouosa County is fascinating. It's
2:02
absolutely foundational to understanding how this crime unfolded and why
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it went unsolved.
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Speaker 1: For so so long because it's a place of extremes, right.
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Speaker 2: Completely, it is a place defined by its extreme dualities.
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It's a study in contrast. If you go to the
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south end of the county, you have exactly what you
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picture and when you think of like a high end
2:20
Florida vacation, exactly destined. You have these stunning emerald green
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waters crashing against literal white sugar beaches. It is a
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tourist haven. It's idyllic, packed with resorts, families, sunshine, all
2:34
of that. But then as you drive just a few
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miles north, the landscape aggressively, almost violently shifts.
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Speaker 1: Yeah. And the word Okalousa itself is actually a Choctawachi
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Indian word that translates to blackwater.
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Speaker 2: Which makes perfect sense when you see it, right, And that.
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Speaker 1: Is because of the rivers in the northern part of
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the county. The water there is stained dark by the
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tannins from decaying vegetation. So you leave those pristine white
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sand beaches behind and suddenly you are in deep, humid farmland.
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Speaker 2: You are in dense swamps.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, swamps. You're driving past isolated RV parks, these thick
3:08
pine forests and those dark, winding rivers. It is an
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incredibly stark contrast within a single jurisdiction. I mean it
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goes from a crowded, wealthy tourist track to incredibly isolated
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rural wilderness in the blink of an eye.
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Speaker 2: And synthesizing why this specific geography matters is crucial Overall.
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In the mid nineteen nineties, Okhosa County was considered a
3:31
very safe, low crime area.
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Speaker 1: Right, like a nice place to live exactly.
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Speaker 2: That's a place where people went to escape, to vacation
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or to settle down and raise their kids away from
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the hustle of big cities. Violent crime wasn't just rare.
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It was the kind of thing that genuinely shocked the
3:46
community and made the front page of the local papers
3:48
for weeks when it happened.
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Speaker 1: But despite this peaceful, family friendly facade, Okaloosa County had
3:53
one massive, glaring vulnerability cutting right through its center Interstate ten.
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Interstate ten.
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Speaker 2: And to understand this case, you really have to understand
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the sheer, overwhelming scale of Eye ten. This isn't just
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you know, a local highway, No, not at all. It
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is a major transcontinental trucking artery. Yeah, it is one
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of the primary veins of American commerce. I mean, it
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runs all the way from the Pacific Coast in Santa Monica, California,
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carving through the deserts of the Southwest, across the Deep South,
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and straight over to the eastern coast of Florida in Jacksonville.
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Speaker 1: And in nineteen ninety four, which is before the era
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of widespread GPS tracking, digital logs, or you know, everyone
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having cell phones, any goods, any vehicles, any transient populations
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moving across the lower half of the country were likely
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spending time on een.
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Speaker 2: They almost had to.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, I always think of iten as this giant concrete
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conveyor belt of anonymity.
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Speaker 2: That's a great way to put it.
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Speaker 1: You just have this constant, relentless flow of movement, millions
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of people, thousands of massive long haul trucks just passing
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through at sixty five miles an hour, never stopping long
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enough to be remembered by a waitress at a diner
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or like a gas station attendant.
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Speaker 2: If you are someone who is looking to commit a crime,
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or more specifically, if you are a predator looking for
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the perfect isolated dumping ground to hide the evidence of
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a horrific crime, a conveyor belt of anonymity surrounded by
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dense Florida swamp is exactly what you want.
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Speaker 1: It's the perfect storm.
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Speaker 2: It is. You can pull over in the dark, drop
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something in the brush, get back in your cab, and
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within hours you are hundreds of miles away in another state,
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completely lost.
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Speaker 1: In the traffic, which brings us to a blistering Wednesday,
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September fourteenth, nineteen ninety four. Picture of the scene. It
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is a typical sweltering, violently humid September day in the
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Florida Panhandle. The heat is just radiating off the asphalt.
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O miserable weather, Yeah, just brutal. And along the side
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of Ien near the town of Holt, there is a
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crew doing landscaping and supervised highway maintenance. They're out there
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clearing brush weed, whacking the tall grass, just trying to
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keep the shoulders of a highway manageable.
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Speaker 2: But this isn't like a civilian crew of state workers
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right now.
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Speaker 1: These are inmates from the Okalusa Correctional Institute. They are
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out there under the brutal sun doing the hard physical
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labor required of minimum security details. And during this routine work,
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deep in the thick brush, just off the shoulder, one
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of the inbates stumbles upon something. Oh, man, yeah, it's
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a body, or, more accurately, considering the Florida heat and
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the wildlife, what is left of a body. It's wrapped
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in a puffy winter jacket and it is almost entirely skeletonized.
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Speaker 2: And the reaction is of course immediate. The inmate, knowing
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exactly what this means, drops his tools and runs straight
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to a supervisor. The supervisor immediately radios law enforcement and
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looking at the history of how this was handled gives
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us a really clear, unfiltered window into the reality of
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a nineteen ninety four crime.
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Speaker 1: Scene, right because it was a very different time, totally.
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Speaker 2: Different back then, Okolosa County only had about seven criminal
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investigators for the.
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Speaker 1: Entire county wait seven for the whole county, just.
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Speaker 2: Seven detectives handling every major crime. But their response to
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this scene was incredibly meticulous. They arrive and the very
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first thing they do is establish control. They push everyone back.
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They string up the yellow crime scene tape to create
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a hard perimeter. They freeze the scene because they know
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that whatever is inside that tape is a fragile, rapidly
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degrading story.
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Speaker 1: And they have to read that story before the elements
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erase the ink.
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Speaker 2: Completely precisely, because I mean they don't have laser scanners
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or drones. They start with hand drawn scenes sketches on
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legal pads. They take exhaustive photographs using physical film cameras,
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hoping the exposure is right right.
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Speaker 1: You had to wait to get it developed to even
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know if you got.
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Speaker 2: The shot exactly, and then they call the medical examiner's office.
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When the coroner arrives to take possession of the physical remains,
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those seven investigators are left on the side of the
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highway to slowly methodically process the surrounding dirt, the leaves,
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the brush. They are hunting for artifacts.
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Speaker 1: They're trying to figure out what happened.
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Speaker 2: They are asking the physical space to answer fundamental questions
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like was there a struggle here? Is the brush trampled
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down in a way that suggests a fight. Was she
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killed on this exact spot, or was she murdered somewhere else,
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driven here and dumped over the guardrail after the fact.
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Speaker 1: Okay, let's unpack this, because we really need to talk
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about what they actually found in that brush, and more importantly,
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what was missing. Because the condition of these remains dictated
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everything that happened for the next three decades.
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Speaker 2: It's the central problem of the case.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, the original investigators noted that the remains were roughly
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eighty five percent skeletonized. The skull was actually found about
8:32
four feet away from the rest of the body, which
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investigators assumed was likely due to animal scavenging or severe
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weather over the preceding months.
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Speaker 2: And that eighty five percent figure is a harsh, sobering
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reality check for forensics, especially in the analog world of
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the early nineteen nineties. When you have remains that are
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eighty five percent skeletonized, you have lost the vast majority
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of the biological evidence that medical examiners typically rely on
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to tell them how a person died. The soft tissue was.
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Speaker 1: Gone, which means all the normal clues are just missing exactly. Yeah.
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Speaker 2: If this woman was brutally beaten, if she suffered heavy
9:07
blunt force trauma that resulted in massive bruising, the investigators
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will never know unless the force was so extreme that
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it literally broke or chipped the bone. If she was stabbed,
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they won't know unless the knife scored a rib.
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Speaker 1: Ah. That's frustrating.
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Speaker 2: If she was shot, they have to pray the book
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struck a bone and left a defect. Otherwise a bullet
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passing straight through soft tissue, These absolutely no trace on
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a skeleton.
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Speaker 1: And obviously no soft tissue means no skin cells under
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our fingernails from fighting back. It means no traditional swabs
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for sexual assault DNA, which in nineteen ninety four was
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just starting to become a reliable tool anyway, right, which
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makes me wonder and I have to push back a
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little here on the capabilities of the time. If the
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soft tissue is entirely gone, and we were sitting in
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a lab in nineteen ninety four pre CSI, pre ubiquitous
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DNA testing, what can they actually learn from a pile
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of bones? How reliable was their science back then?
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Speaker 2: It is a vital question, and you're right to ask it.
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In nineteen ninety four, it wasn't the forensic magic we
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see on television today. It was painstaking, grueling analog deduction.
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Because they lacked the soft tissue. They had to squeeze
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every possible drop of context from the few artificial items
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that survive the elements like her clothes. Yes, for instance,
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the clothing, the puffy jacket she was wrapped in, actually
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served an accidental forensic purpose. It helped keep a lot
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of the smaller bones, like the ribs and vertebrae contained
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and relatively intact against the weather and animals.
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Speaker 1: Wow okay.
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Speaker 2: And mixed in with those remains they found remnants of
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a floral printress and crucially, the tags were still legible.
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The brand name was Brandywine Creek.
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Speaker 1: And they had to meticulously document all of that, right,
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I mean they were writing down the clothing sizes, the
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bra size, the shoe size, not just for an inventory log,
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but as a desperate investigative tool to figure out who
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she was.
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Speaker 2: Yes, and the process was incredibly labor intensive. Think about it. Today,
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we might just extract a DNA sample, run it through
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a sequencer and build a physical profile of the victim
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directly from their genome. We can predict eye color, hair color,
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and build.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, the technology now is insane.
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Speaker 2: But in nineteen ninety four, documenting those clothing tags was
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their primary method for estimating the victim's physical size and
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finding a brand name like Brandywine Creek. Meant investigators were
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literally pucking up the phone, calling the manufacturer and trying
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to track down distribution.
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Speaker 1: Logs the man the leg work.
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Speaker 2: They wanted to know which specific regional department stores carried
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that specific dress in that specific size. They were hoping
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to narrow down where she might have lived, or at
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least where she shopped, to give them a geographical starting point.
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Speaker 1: They also found costume jewelry tangled in what was left
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of her hair. They noted her hair was brown but
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had been obviously bleached, which speaks to a level of
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personal maintenance. She was wearing a stoling silver ring. Every
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single item is a tiny isolated pixel in a very blurry,
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low resolution photograph.
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Speaker 2: That's a great analogy.
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Speaker 1: But despite that, the forensic anthropologists they brought in managed
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to build an incredibly specific physical profile from just the
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bones and the clothes. They determined she was a white
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female roughly five foot four inches tall, give or take
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two inches, based on the length of the long bones
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like the femur. But the detail that absolutely stopped me
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in my tracks when I was researching this was how
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they estimated her weight.
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Speaker 2: Oh, this is a classic textbook example of old school
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forensic ingenuity. It's deductive reasoning at its finest, it really is.
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Speaker 1: I mean, they didn't have flesh to put on a scale,
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so they looked at her surviving undergarments based entirely on
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the fact that she was wearing a thirty four b bra.
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They made a highly educated guestimation that she weighed somewhere
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between one hundred and ten and one hundred and fourteen
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pounds in life. Right. That is astonishing to me, the
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leap from a piece of surviving elastic and underwire to
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a precise four pound weight window. Can you explain the
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logic behind that.
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Speaker 2: It's a like a matter trick, I know, but it
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is actually based on anatomical ratios and the demographic of
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the early nineties. So the band size of a bro
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the thirty four correlates to the circumference of the ribcage
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just beneath the bust in nineteen ninety four, before the
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massive shifts we've seen in average body mass indexes. A
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thirty four inch rib cage coupled with the height of
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five foot four strongly indicated a very slender.
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Speaker 1: Built h I see.
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Speaker 2: They combined the skelical frame measurements with the clothing sizes,
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compare them against statistical averages for adult women of that era,
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and narrow it down to that incredibly tight window.
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Speaker 1: That is just brilliant.
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Speaker 2: It really highlights how resourceful investigators had to be when
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the obvious evidence was completely stripped away by nature. But
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as much as the clothing gave them a picture of
13:40
her physical life, there was one artifact found at the
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scene that clearly, unmistakably pointed to the manner of her death.
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Amidst the brush, right in the area where the neck
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vertebrae were found, investigators recovered black zip ties.
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Speaker 1: And these weren't the flimsy, little plastic ties you used
13:56
to seal a trash bag. These were thick, heavy duty
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black zip tis, the kind typically used by electricians or
14:02
sound engineers to bundle and wrap heavy industrial chords, nasty stuff.
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And these zip ties were found physically encircling her cervical vertebrae,
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literally still held in place by her matted hair.
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Speaker 2: That right there is what you call the smoking gun
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in the autopsy room. This discovery shifted the entire context
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of the medical examiner's examination. It took it from a
14:24
suspicious death to a definitive homicide, and the skeletal remains
14:29
actually backed it up. During the painstaking process of the autopsy,
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the medical examiner was able to recover about two thirds
14:36
of the victim's.
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Speaker 1: Hyoid bone, Okay, the hyoid bone. I hear about this
14:39
constantly in true crime. That's the little U shaped bone
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in your neck, right under the jaw. What does it
14:44
actually do and why is it so important in cases
14:47
like this?
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Speaker 2: The hyoid bone is entirely unique in the human body
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because it is the only bone that is not articulated,
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meaning it doesn't connect directly to any of the bone.
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It essentially floats in the neck, anchored purely by muscle
15:00
and ligaments. It sits right at the root of the tongue,
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and its primary job is to support the tongue and
15:05
help facilitate swallowing and speech.
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Speaker 1: Okay, so it's just kind of hanging out there exactly.
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Speaker 2: And because it is so delicate, and because of where
15:12
it sits in the throat, it is incredibly vulnerable to
15:15
external pressure. The fact that a full third of this
15:19
bone was missing in our victim was highly significant.
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Speaker 1: Because it implies it was broken off.
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Speaker 2: Right now, scientifically speaking, you have to allow for the
15:27
possibility that the bone was just unfused, which can happen naturally,
15:31
or that the missing third was lost to animal scavenging
15:34
or the elements. Sure, but when you view that missing
15:37
bone in conjunction with heavy duty black zip ties wrapped
15:40
directly around the cervical vertebrae, the conclusion becomes unavoidable. The
15:45
missing portion of the hyoids strongly suggests it was violently
15:48
fractured due to severe strangulation. The zip ties at her
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throat were the undeniable physical proof that this was a deliberate, brutal,
15:56
upclose homicide.
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Speaker 1: So the investigators have a cause of They have a
16:00
rough physical profile, height, weight, hair color. Now they need
16:04
a timeline. They need to know when this happens so
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they can start looking at missing persons reports from the
16:08
right month.
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Speaker 2: And this brings us to one of the most fascinating
16:12
and frankly slightly skin crawling aspects of the early investigation.
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Speaker 1: Oh yeah, forensic entomology. While they were processing the dirt
16:19
around the bones, they were also collecting insects, larvae, and
16:22
foliage from the immediate area.
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Speaker 2: Forensic entomology is a brilliant, highly specialized branch of science.
16:28
When a body is left exposed to the elements, especially
16:32
in a humid, biologically active environment like a Florida swamp,
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it essentially becomes a temporary ecosystem.
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Speaker 1: Gross but true.
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Speaker 2: And nature is incredibly efficient. Different types of insects, specifically
16:44
various species of flies and beetles, will locate and colonize
16:48
a decomposing body at very predictable intervals.
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Speaker 1: How do they find it so fast? Though? We're talking
16:53
in minutes sometimes right exactly.
16:55
Speaker 2: Blowflies, for example, have incredibly sensitive olfactory receptors. They could
16:59
detect the trace amounts of gases released during the very
17:02
first stages of decomposition from miles away, often arriving within
17:06
minutes of death. They lay their eggs in the soft tissue,
17:09
which hatch into maggots. Those are the early colonizers. But
17:13
as the soft tissue is consumed and the body dries out,
17:16
the ecosystem changes. The blowflies leave, and different insects like
17:20
domestic beetles, which feed on dried skin and cartilage, arrived.
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Speaker 1: So the bugs are essentially acting like, I don't know,
17:26
a biological stopwatch.
17:27
Speaker 2: That is a perfect analogy. The bugs act as a marker,
17:31
a flag for the investigators by carefully cataloging exactly which
17:36
insects were present on and around the remains, looking at
17:39
the life cycles of those specific species, whether they are
17:42
in the larval stage, the pupa stage, or adults and
17:45
cross referencing that with the historical weather data for Okalusa County,
17:49
scientists can calculate a window of time.
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Speaker 1: So they basically reverse engineer the timeline.
17:53
Speaker 2: Yes, because the decomposition was so advanced, they couldn't give
17:57
the detectives an exact hour or a day of death,
18:00
but the forensic entomologist allowed them to confidently deduce that
18:03
based on the absence of early stage insects and the
18:05
presence of late stage beetles, her body had been dumped
18:08
on the side of I ten no later than April
18:10
of nineteen ninety.
18:11
Speaker 1: Four, so she had been lying there in the brutal
18:15
FLOORI to heat, just feet away from thousands of passing cars,
18:20
every single day for at least five full months before
18:23
the inmates found her in.
18:24
Speaker 2: September, just hidden in plain sight.
18:27
Speaker 1: Just imagine the sheer frustration of being one of those
18:30
seven Okalosa investigators. You have all these puzzle pieces laid
18:34
out on a table. You know her exact height, you
18:37
know her jewelry. You know she weighed around one hundred
18:39
and ten pounds. You literally hold the heavy duty zip
18:43
ties used to murder her in an evidence bag. You
18:45
know she was killed in the spring. You have everything,
18:48
You have the entire border of the jigsaw puzzle completely assembled,
18:51
but you don't have the box, the picture on the front.
18:53
You don't know whose face goes in the middle.
18:55
Speaker 2: And they tried everything to find that face. They consulted
18:59
multiple neighboring agencies, They scoured national missing person's teletypes. Detectives
19:05
actively investigated at least thirty different missing persons cases from
19:08
across the Southeast, dedicating hours of manpower to see if
19:12
any of those missing women matched the physical profile of
19:15
their Jane do.
19:16
Speaker 1: But without a face, without a name, without a definitive fingerprint,
19:21
every single lead inevitably withered and died. It was a
19:25
brick wall, which makes what happens next feel completely surreal.
19:29
We are going to jump forward one year to nineteen
19:32
ninety five. The Okoloose investigators are exhausted. They are hitting
19:36
dead end after dead end. The case is threatening to
19:39
go cold, and then out of nowhere, a suspect just
19:43
falls right into their laps, Just out of the blue.
19:45
They receive a notification from law enforcement in a completely
19:48
different state, a man sitting in a jail cell has
19:51
openly admitted to killing a woman along Interstate pen in Florida.
19:54
And this isn't just some random drifter seeking a warm
19:57
bed and a psych ward. This is Keith Jessperson.
20:00
Speaker 2: For anyone unfamiliar with the dark history of American true crime,
20:03
Keith Jefferson is a profoundly disturbing figure. He is infamously
20:07
known to the public and the media as the Happy
20:10
Face Killer.
20:11
Speaker 1: Yes, and the reason for that nickname tells you everything
20:14
you need to know about a psychology. He was so brazen,
20:17
so completely desperate for attention and notoriety, that he would
20:21
write these lengthy, taunting confession letters to journalists and to
20:25
law enforcement agencies, and he would sign them with a
20:28
hand drawn smiley face.
20:29
Speaker 2: It is pure arrogance.
20:30
Speaker 1: He was a long haul trucker and he would even
20:33
scrawl confessions on the bathroom stalls of truck stops across
20:36
the country, detailing his crimes and adding a happy face
20:39
at the end, just to mock the police who couldn't
20:41
catch him.
20:42
Speaker 2: It is a textbook terrifying display of malignant narcissism and
20:47
a deep seated need for control. At the time, the
20:50
Okalhouosa County Sheriff's Office gets the call in nineteen eighty five,
20:53
Jefferson is already incarcerated. He had finally been caught and
20:57
was serving time for the murder of a woman named
20:59
Tanja Ben in Oregon.
21:00
Speaker 1: Okay, so he's already off the.
21:01
Speaker 2: Streets, right. But once he was behind bars, once he
21:05
realized his days on the open road were over, he
21:08
started talking. He began boasting to authorities that Tanja Bennett
21:12
was just the tip of the iceberg. He claimed he
21:14
had killed roughly one hundred and sixty people across various
21:17
jurisdictions during his time criss crossing the country in a
21:20
semi truck.
21:21
Speaker 1: One hundred and sixty people. That is a staggering, almost
21:25
incomprehensible number. But as you and I know, and as
21:29
any seasoned investigator knows, you cannot just take a serial
21:32
killer at their word.
21:33
Speaker 2: Right, Absolutely not. You have to understand the deeply manipulative
21:36
psychology at play here. Serial killers often boast, especially once
21:40
they are caught.
21:41
Speaker 1: Why though just for the attention.
21:43
Speaker 2: Largely yes, when they are locked in a cell and
21:46
lose their power over life and death in the real world,
21:48
they try to maintain dominance, relevance, and fear by exaggerating
21:52
their body counts. It gives them leverage, It forces investigators
21:56
to come to them and treat them like VIPs, It
21:58
breaks up the monotony of prison life, and above all,
22:01
it feeds their massive egos.
22:02
Speaker 1: Wow, that's sick.
22:03
Speaker 2: Law enforcement is acutely aware of this phenomenon. Out of
22:07
the one hundred and sixty murders Jessperson claimed to have committed,
22:11
authorities were ultimately only able to verify eight.
22:14
Speaker 1: Oh wow, eight confirmed victims out of one hundred and
22:17
sixty claimed.
22:19
Speaker 2: Exactly so, when he starts talking to Oregon authorities about
22:22
a nameless woman he supposedly killed in Florida, the OKLUSAD
22:25
detectives don't just blindly celebrate. They approach his confession with
22:30
extreme calculated skepticism. They assume he might be lying just
22:34
to get a free flight to Florida.
22:36
Speaker 1: But then they actually review his statements, They read the
22:39
transcripts of what he's telling the police and Oregon, and
22:41
all of that practice skepticism starts to evaporate because Jessperson's
22:45
confession isn't just a vague yeah, I killed some girl
22:48
in Florida on the highway. He provides granular, non public details.
22:52
Speaker 2: Details that were completely held back by the police and
22:55
never released to the press.
22:56
Speaker 1: Exactly he knew that the victim was strangled, he knew
22:58
the specific type of heavy duty black zip ties that
23:02
were used. He knew she was wearing a floral print dress.
23:05
Speaker 2: He provided a narrative timeline that made complete logical sense,
23:09
aligning perfectly with the physical evidence gathered at the scene,
23:12
down to the geography of the highways shoulder. He knew
23:16
things that only the person who tightened those zip ties
23:18
could possibly know.
23:20
Speaker 1: So it wasn't a bluff.
23:21
Speaker 2: To the Okahoosa County Sheriff's office. His confession was incredibly,
23:26
undeniably credible. They knew they had the right man.
23:30
Speaker 1: It's like they finally found the final page of their
23:33
murder mystery. The killer is standing right there holding his
23:35
hands out, saying I did it. Here's exactly how I
23:37
did it. But then you read that final page and
23:40
the protagonist's name has been completely redacted by black ink. Yeah,
23:44
because when the investigators asked jesperson, okay, who is she?
23:48
What is the name of the woman you strangled and
23:49
dumped on Ien, his memory suddenly conveniently failed him.
23:54
Speaker 2: He told them her name was either Suzanne or Susette,
23:58
and beyond that first name, he claimed he couldn't remember
24:00
anything else about her, no last name, no hometown, nothing.
24:04
Speaker 1: And this right here is the infuriating crux of the
24:08
entire situation. You have the killer, you have the detailed
24:11
confession matching the physical evidence. Why on earth does the
24:14
case stall? If I walk into a police station and
24:17
confess to robbing a bank, and I know exactly how
24:20
much money was in the vault and exactly how I
24:22
bypassed the alarm, I go to jail, Why couldn't the
24:25
state of Florida just lock him up and put a
24:27
murder conviction on his record based on his incredibly detailed confession.
24:31
Speaker 2: Because of a fundamental centuries old legal doctrine that forms
24:36
the bedrock of our justice system. It's known in legal
24:39
terms as corpus delicti, which is Latin for the body
24:42
of the crime.
24:43
Speaker 1: The body of the crime. Okay.
24:44
Speaker 2: In the American justice system, which inherited this from British
24:47
common law, a confession alone is legally insufficient to secure
24:52
a criminal conviction. The prosecution is legally required to prove
24:55
with independent evidence that a specific crime actually occurred against
24:59
a specif person where does.
25:01
Speaker 1: A rule like that even come from It seems designed
25:03
to let guilty people walk.
25:04
Speaker 2: Well, it exists to prevent the state from executing people
25:08
for imaginary crimes. Historically, there were cases like the famous
25:12
Camden Wonder in seventeenth century England, where people confess to
25:16
a murder were executed and then the supposed victim walked
25:20
into town a year later, perfectly alive.
25:22
Speaker 1: Oh my god, you're kidding.
25:23
Speaker 2: No, it really happened. So to prevent false confessions, whether
25:27
driven by mental illness, coercion, or attention seeking, the law
25:32
demands proof that the crime happened to a real person.
25:35
Speaker 1: So even though they have a literal physical body the bones,
25:38
and they have a confession, it's not enough.
25:41
Speaker 2: Think about it strictly from the prosecutor's perspective preparing for
25:44
a trial, they have a confession from a known liar
25:47
to killing a woman named Suzanne or Susette. To prosecute
25:51
that case before a jury beyond a reasonable doubt, the
25:54
state needs to definitively prove that the pile of bone
25:56
found on nine ten is in fact Suzanne or Susette.
26:00
Speaker 1: To link the confession to the bones.
26:01
Speaker 2: Without an identity, A competent defense attorney would rip the
26:05
case to shreds. They would argue that Jesperson read about
26:08
a different missing woman in the paper, or that the
26:10
police accidentally fed him the details during the interrogation, or
26:14
that he's just a compulsive liar seeking attention who made
26:17
a lucky guess about zip ties. You simply cannot try
26:21
a man for the murder of a question mark. You
26:23
need a legally recognized name on the indictment.
26:26
Speaker 1: Which means, despite having their man, the detectives are completely paralyzed.
26:31
They are legally barred from moving forward. In nineteen ninety six,
26:35
despite sending investigators to interview jess Person again, trying to
26:38
shake any identifying details loose, the case just goes completely cold.
26:43
Speaker 2: It's tragic.
26:43
Speaker 1: The investigators had used every single tool available in the
26:46
mid nineties arsenal. They did the entomology, the anthropology, the interrogations,
26:51
and they were simply devastatingly unsuccessful. The killer is known,
26:55
the crime is known, but the victim remains a ghost
26:58
trapped in a cardboard evidence box in a climate controlled room.
27:01
Speaker 2: And that ghost would wait in that box for over
27:04
a decade before anyone found a new way to and
27:07
speak for her. They had squeezed every drop of data
27:10
out of the physical world. If they were going to
27:12
solve this, they had to wait for the scientific world
27:15
to catch up, and it.
27:16
Speaker 1: Took a full thirteen years for a new door to open.
27:20
We are now in two thousand and seven. The Oakloose
27:23
investigators refuse to let this go. They are looking at
27:26
this cold case file and they decide it's time to
27:29
try a completely new approach, using the advancements of the
27:32
twenty first century.
27:33
Speaker 2: By two thousand and seven, forensic techniques had advanced considerably,
27:37
giving cold case units across the country a renewed sense
27:40
of hope. The investigators decided to tackle the visual problem first.
27:44
They packed up the victim's skull and shipped it to
27:46
a forensic anthropologist specializing in three D clay facial reconstruction.
27:51
Speaker 1: I have some pictures of these reconstructions, and they are
27:53
always so haunting, almost like Uncanny Valley. How exactly does
27:56
that process work? Are they just guessing what she looked like?
27:59
Speaker 2: It is a fascinating, highly precise blend of anatomy and art.
28:03
It relies on decades of anatomical research. The anthropologist takes
28:08
the bare skull and using a complex charting system, they
28:11
play small, precise, eraser sized pegs at very specific anatomical
28:16
landmarks across the bone.
28:18
Speaker 1: Okay, what did the pegs do well?
28:20
Speaker 2: Scientists have spent years mapping the faces of kidavers, giving
28:23
them average tissue depth measurements for different demographics, ages, and sexes.
28:28
They know exactly how thick the muscle, fat, and skin
28:30
should be over the cheekbones, the jawline, the brow ridge
28:34
for a woman of her estimated age and build.
28:36
Speaker 1: So they use those pegs as a physical guide for
28:38
the clay exactly.
28:39
Speaker 2: They build up layers of clay over the skull, carefully
28:42
matching the depth of those pegs. Two pains takingly recreate
28:45
the soft tissue that was lost to the elements in
28:47
the Florida swamp. They are essentially sculpting the face back
28:50
onto the bone, trying to recreate what the individual look
28:52
like in life.
28:53
Speaker 1: That is incredible.
28:54
Speaker 2: Now, the goal isn't to create a perfect photorealistic portrait.
28:58
The goal is to creative visual trigger. They released photographs
29:02
at this three D clay rendering to the public and
29:04
the media, hoping someone somewhere we'll see the structure of
29:08
the face, the set of the eyes, the shape of
29:11
the jaw, and have a visceral reaction. They are hoping
29:14
someone to look at the news and say, wait, I
29:15
knew her. That was like the girl I worked with
29:17
in nineteen ninety four.
29:18
Speaker 1: And releasing that clay mask did actually generate some momentum.
29:22
People called in with tips about missing family members and
29:25
friends who resembled the reconstruction. But every single one of
29:28
those leaves was meticulously followed up on by detectives, and
29:32
every single one turned out to be a dead end.
29:34
Speaker 2: They really tried everything they did.
29:36
Speaker 1: The women they tracked down were either found alive or
29:38
they were conclusively ruled out. The visual trigger failed, so
29:41
they pivot away from art and back to hard science.
29:44
Also in two thousand and seven, they launched a major
29:47
multi agency effort with DNA.
29:49
Speaker 2: They sent portions of the skeletal remains to two different
29:52
high level facilities. First, they sent samples to the Florida
29:55
Department of Law Enforcement or FDL for advanced genetic ten
30:00
and then simultaneously they sent samples to the FBI laboratory
30:04
in Quantico to extract mitochondrial DNA, which has passed down
30:08
strictly through the maternal line.
30:10
Speaker 1: And the science worked right. They were successful in generating
30:13
DNA profiles.
30:14
Speaker 2: It were despite the age of the bones and the
30:16
degradation from the environment, the scientists successfully extracted genetic profiles
30:21
and uploaded them to CODIS.
30:23
Speaker 1: COTIS, the Combined DNA Index System. I feel like this
30:27
is the magic bullet in every crime show. It's the
30:30
national database run by the FBI. You put the DNA in,
30:33
the computer beeps, and you get a match. Why didn't
30:36
that happen here?
30:36
Speaker 2: Because the reality of CODIS is very different from the
30:39
television version, and it has a critical limitation that people
30:42
often misunderstand. Yeah really Yeah. COTIS is essentially a closed loop.
30:46
It is a highly restricted database that primarily contains the
30:50
DNA profiles of individuals who have been arrested for or
30:53
convicted of specific crimes, along with unidentified DNA collected from
30:58
previous crime scenes. It is incredibly undeniably effective at linking
31:03
a repeat offender to a new crime scene or linking
31:06
two separate, previously unconnected crime scenes together to prove a
31:10
serial killer is at work.
31:12
Speaker 1: It's like a VIP list at a club. If your
31:14
name isn't already on the clipboard because of prior arrest
31:17
the bouncer doesn't know who you are.
31:19
Speaker 2: That's a great way to look at it. If the
31:20
person you are trying to identify has never been arrested,
31:23
and if their immediate family members haven't been involved in
31:26
the criminal justice system in a way that required a
31:28
mandatory DNA swab, they simply do not exist in the
31:31
Codis architecture, so.
31:32
Speaker 1: It's useless for just a regular person.
31:34
Speaker 2: Exactly, the computer will search the millions of profiles and
31:37
it will return absolutely nothing, which is exactly what happened
31:40
to Okalusa Jane Doo.
31:41
Speaker 1: And just to add one more agonizing step to this timeline,
31:43
in two thousand and eight, they sent her remains to
31:45
the University of Florida for further anthropological testing. This testing
31:50
used newer methods to refine their physical profile, definitively confirming
31:53
she was between the ages of thirty five and fifty
31:56
five at the time of her death. But here's where
31:58
I have to ask the obviously question. I am putting
32:01
myself in the shoes of a detective. It is two
32:03
thousand and seven, two thousand and eight. I have a
32:05
three D clay model of her face. I know her
32:08
age range with high confidence, and most importantly, I hold
32:11
in my hand her actual unique genetic profile. Why is
32:15
the case go right back into the cold case filing cabinet?
32:18
Why wasn't that enough to find her?
32:20
Speaker 2: If we connect this to the bigger picture of forensic history,
32:23
it perfectly illustrates the vast chasm between having a biological
32:27
code and having the cipher required to read it. Having
32:29
a DNA profile in two thousand and seven was like
32:31
having a license plate number in a world where the
32:33
department Motor vehicles hasn't been invented yet. Oh, I see,
32:36
you have a unique, infallible identifier, but you have absolutely
32:40
no infrastructure to attach a name and address or history
32:44
to it. The technology to cast a wider net to
32:47
look outside the criminal justice system simply hadn't been invented yet.
32:51
Speaker 1: That is so frustrating, it is.
32:53
Speaker 2: And so despite all the effort, despite the clay and
32:55
the DNA, the case froze again. The tragedy of that
32:58
moment is profound. The investigators know they have a murder victim,
33:01
they know exactly who killed her, but because they cannot
33:04
cross that final invisible barrier of identification, the victim's family
33:08
is left in perpetual agonizing limbo, and the justice system
33:11
is utterly paralyzed its agonizing.
33:14
Speaker 1: So the case sits, the evidence box gathers dust, the
33:18
calendar turns for another fourteen long years. And this brings
33:22
us to October of twenty twenty two. Our setting shifts
33:26
dramatically away from the human swamps of Florida to a
33:28
brightly lit National Medical Examiner's conference in Las Vegas, Nevada.
33:33
Doctor Deanna Alesque from the Okhoosa Medical Examiner's Office is
33:37
attending a session and she hears a presentation about a
33:39
technique called forensic genetic genealogy being pioneered by a company
33:43
called Outhrum. And here's where the science gets really really interesting.
33:47
Speaker 2: Forensic genetic genealogy is the seismic shift that has completely
33:51
revolutionized cold case investigations in the last five to ten years.
33:55
It fundamentally permanently changes the math of DNA identification. How So,
33:59
instead of relying on a closed system like CODIS, which
34:02
only looks for exact matches against known criminal offenders, forensic
34:05
genetic genealogy looks at a much broader, richer spectrum of DNA,
34:08
specifically hundreds of thousands of genetic markers and compares them
34:12
against public opt in genealogy databases.
34:15
Speaker 1: We're talking about the websites regular people used to find
34:17
out where their great grandparents came from, or to find
34:20
out what percentage Irish.
34:21
Speaker 2: They are exactly databases like ged match or family Tree
34:26
DNA where users explicitly consent to law enforcement searches. And
34:31
the brilliance of this approach is that you do not
34:33
need the victim's exact DNA to be in the database
34:37
for it to work. You aren't looking for a direct match.
34:40
You are looking for a distant cousins, second cousin's third cousins, So.
34:43
Speaker 1: You're building a net.
34:44
Speaker 2: You are turning entire, sprawling family trees into vast searchable
34:48
data sources. If you can find a cluster of distant
34:51
relatives who share specific DNA segments with your unidentified victim,
34:55
specialized genealogists can meticulously build those family trees backward, generation
35:00
by generation until they intersect a common ancestor, and then
35:04
trace the branches forward, pointing directly to the missing branch
35:07
the unidentified victim.
35:08
Speaker 1: And the reason Authorum was specifically highlighted at this conference
35:12
is because they aren't just doing the genealogy side of things.
35:14
They actually built the lab infrastructure to handle the most degraded, intractable,
35:19
ruined DNA evidence imaginable. They don't need pristine blood samples.
35:24
They are purpose built for the impossible cases. So doctor
35:28
Alaski is sitting in this conference room in Vegas listening
35:30
to this presentation, and she realizes she has an impossible
35:34
case sitting in a box in Florida. She literally takes
35:37
a picture of a slide during the presentation with her phone.
35:40
She texts it to her associate back home, doctor Lorraine Lopez,
35:43
and says, can you initiate contact with them? Let's try
35:46
to do this for Suzanne.
35:47
Speaker 2: That single text message reignites the entire thirty year investigation.
35:52
But wanting to use this new technology and actually achieving
35:55
a result or two entirely different things, especially when you
35:58
are dealing with remains that have been de rating since
36:00
nineteen ninety four.
36:02
Speaker 1: Yeah, the science of actually extracting the viable DNA was
36:05
a massive, frustrating process of trial and error. The investigators
36:09
reached out to Athram establish a partnership, and they started
36:12
sending pieces of the skeleton to the lab. First They
36:15
sent teeth, specifically the molars.
36:17
Speaker 2: Which is usually a very safe, reliable bet in forensics.
36:21
Teeth are incredibly resilient. The hard enamel exterior protects the
36:25
pulp inside, which often preserves DNA well even after decades.
36:29
Speaker 1: But not this time.
36:30
Speaker 2: Now, in this specific case, after twenty eight years in
36:33
the acidic Florida soil, exposed to extreme heat and humidity,
36:36
and surviving previous testing rounds in two thousand and seven,
36:39
the molars were a failure. Authoram couldn't extract enough viable
36:43
DNA to build a profile.
36:45
Speaker 1: So they try again. They go back to the evidence box.
36:46
They sent a femur, the massive thick.
36:48
Speaker 2: Thigh bone, again a highly logical choice. Long bones are
36:51
dense and they contain bone marrow, which is rich in
36:53
cells and often protects genetic material from environmental disruption. But
36:57
again it failed. The DNA was simply too chopped up
37:00
two degraded, not enough yield for extraction.
37:03
Speaker 1: And this is where the biological ingenuity of the medical
37:06
examiner really shines. They refuse to give up. Doctor Alesque
37:10
ends up sending a very specific, highly protected part of
37:13
the skull. She sends the base of the skull specifically
37:16
the area where the sphenoid sinus cavities live. Why there,
37:20
out of the entire human skeleton, why did that weird
37:23
little bone work when a massive femur failed.
37:26
Speaker 2: It comes down to structural anatomy. The sphenoid bone is
37:29
located deep within the cranial vault, situated right behind the
37:33
nasal cavity in the eyes. It is an incredibly complex,
37:36
butterfly shaped, structurally dense piece of anatomy.
37:39
Speaker 1: Okay, so it's very deep inside the head.
37:41
Speaker 2: Yes. Because of its location at the very absolute core
37:45
of the skull, surrounded by other dense cranial bones, it
37:48
is far more protected from environmental elements the sun, the rain,
37:52
the temperature fluctuations, and the insect activity we talked about
37:55
earlier than the exterior of the teeth or the long
37:57
bones of the legs. The dense thing bone surrounding those
38:01
deep sinus cavities acted like a biological vault, preserving the
38:05
fragile genetic material inside just enough for modern technology to
38:08
read it.
38:09
Speaker 1: And that vault held the answer they had been seeking
38:11
for three decades. In late December of twenty twenty two,
38:15
AUTHRM achieves the breakthrough. They successfully extract a forensic grade
38:19
profile from the sphenoid bone. And this wasn't just a
38:22
basic DNA profile like they had in two thousand and seven.
38:24
This profile contained hundreds of thousands of SNP markers.
38:28
Speaker 2: This is a crucial distinction. SNP pronounced SNIP stands for
38:32
single nucleotide polymorphism. Traditional DNA testing, the kind used in
38:37
Codus in the nineties and two thousands looks at STRs
38:41
or short tandem repeats.
38:42
Speaker 1: What's the difference between the two, Well, SCRs.
38:44
Speaker 2: Are essentially just counting the number of times a genetic
38:46
sequence repeats itself. It's like counting the number of red
38:49
cars in a parking lot. It's great for exact one
38:51
to one identity matches, but it is terrible for finding
38:55
distant relatives because the data is too simple. Oh I
38:57
see SNPs, however, are variations at a single specific position
39:02
in a DNA sequence. They are the actual letters of
39:04
the genetic code. By analyzing hundreds of thousands of SNPs,
39:09
you get a high resolution, wildly detailed map of a
39:12
person's entire genome. It gives you physical traits, geographic ancestry,
39:16
and most importantly, it is exactly the data you need
39:19
to accurately determine distant familial relationships across multiple generations.
39:24
Speaker 1: So often takes this incredibly detailed, high resolution SNP profile
39:29
and they upload it to the ged match database and
39:32
it hits. It actually works. Now they don't immediately get
39:35
a pop up with her full name and social Security number,
39:38
but they find a cluster of relatives located in very
39:40
specific parts of the United States.
39:42
Speaker 2: And that cluster is all the genealogists need to go
39:44
to work. They spend weeks tracing the lineage to public records,
39:48
Sensus data, obituaries, and marriage certificates. They build the family
39:51
trees downward, and by early twenty twenty three, they have
39:53
zeroed in on a specific family branch.
39:56
Speaker 1: They actually found her family.
39:57
Speaker 2: It did. Law enforcement makes the call. They contact this
40:00
family out of the blue and ask the heaviest, most
40:03
terrifying question imaginable, are you missing someone in your family?
40:07
Speaker 1: And the family says yes, we haven't seen her since
40:09
the mid nineties. Now to confirm this result beyond a
40:12
shadow of a doubt, so they can take it to court,
40:14
investigators need a direct comparison. They arranged to take a
40:19
buckle swab, a simple painless cotton swab rubbed on the
40:23
inside of the cheek from the missing woman's mother. And
40:26
here I have to pause because there's a detail in
40:28
the police reports in case summaries that absolutely stopped me,
40:31
and I need you to explain this to me.
40:32
Speaker 2: Okay, what is it?
40:33
Speaker 1: The report state they performed why STR testing to compare
40:37
the mother's DNA against the profile built from the sphenoid bone.
40:41
Wait a second, hold on hy STR that tracks the
40:44
Y chromosome, right, the male lineage. How on earth are
40:46
they doing a Y chromosome test on a cheek swab
40:49
from her mother. Women have two X chromosomes. They don't
40:52
have a Y chromosome to test. Is that a typo
40:54
in the official documentation?
40:55
Speaker 2: That is an incredibly sharp catch, and you are one
40:58
hundred percent correct to push back on that. It is
41:01
biologically impossible a mother cannot provide a Y chromosome for YSTR.
41:06
Speaker 1: Testing, right, So what happens?
41:08
Speaker 2: What you've caught is a fascinating reality of reading decades
41:12
of compiled police notes, media summaries, and multi agency reports.
41:16
When translating complex science into field reports, errors happen. It
41:21
is highly highly likely that what the lab actually performed
41:25
was mitochondrial DNA testing, which strictly traces the maternal line
41:29
from mother to child. Or they simply perform standard autosomal
41:32
DNA testing on the mother to confirm apparent child relationship.
41:36
Speaker 1: Okay, that makes way more sense.
41:37
Speaker 2: Alternatively, it's possible they swabbed a brother or a father
41:40
for y SPR testing and the summary report erroneously attributed
41:44
the swab to the mother, But the biological error in
41:47
the paperwork doesn't negate the scientific reality of the lab work.
41:50
They compare the familial DNA to this phenoid bone profile,
41:53
and it was a definitive, undeniable match.
41:56
Speaker 1: Think about the poetic justice of that moment. A brutal
41:59
harsi fit crime that began with a body hidding in
42:02
the humid brush along an anonymous highway, a case that
42:05
stalled and frustrated detectives for twenty nine long years, is
42:09
finally irrevocably unlocked by a simple cotton swab rubbed against
42:14
a mother's cheek in her living room. It bridges a
42:17
nearly thirty year gap in a matter of weeks.
42:19
Speaker 2: The moment of discovery inside the Okaloosa Medical Examiner's office
42:23
must have been electric. Doctor Less described it later in interviews,
42:27
she was sitting quietly in her office doing paperwork, and
42:30
suddenly her associate, doctor Lopez, just starts yelling down the hallway, just.
42:34
Speaker 1: Screaming, just scooming.
42:35
Speaker 2: We identified Suzanne, and doctor Less, confused ask what's her name?
42:39
And doctor Lopez replies.
42:40
Speaker 1: Suzanne, are you kidding me? That was doctor Eleski's exact reaction.
42:43
Are you kidding me? Because for twenty eight years, every
42:45
single person who touched that file had assumed Keith J.
42:48
Justicson might have been lying or guessing or misremembering when
42:51
he said her name was Suzanne or Suzette in his
42:53
nineteen ninety five confession. They thought it was just another
42:57
serial killer playing games. But he wasn't. He was one
42:59
hundred percent accurate the entire time.
43:01
Speaker 2: Synthesizing the immense weight to this moment requires us to
43:04
look back at the agonizing history we just discussed. In
43:07
the nineteen nineties, they cleared at least thirty separate missing
43:10
persons reports trying to find this woman.
43:13
Speaker 1: Thirty different women.
43:14
Speaker 2: Yeah, for three decades, she wasn't a person. She was
43:17
a case file number. She has a set of skeletal measurements.
43:20
She was a haunting clay mask staring out from a poster,
43:24
and suddenly the ghost has a name. The profound, emotional
43:29
and procedural victory for those scientists bouncing around the office,
43:32
cheering and hugging is entirely deeply earned. They finally had
43:38
their victim.
43:38
Speaker 1: So who was she? Who was the woman beneath the
43:41
clay mask? Her full name was Suzanne Krelenberg. She was
43:45
thirty four years old at the time she was murdered
43:47
in nineteen ninety four. Learning about her life gives us
43:50
a glimpse into the human being, humanizing the bones we've
43:53
been clinically analyzing for the last half hour. Her family
43:56
was from the Midwest. Her father was an attorney, She
43:58
had a brother, and importantly, tragically, her family had never
44:01
given up looking for her. They had wandered every single
44:04
day for thirty years. What happened to her.
44:06
Speaker 2: The description of her lifestyle is vital to understanding why
44:09
she remained unidentified for so long and why she fell
44:12
through the cracks of the system. She's described by her
44:15
family as a free spirit, something of a drifter. She
44:19
liked to roam around the country, spending time in different regions,
44:23
chasing different experiences.
44:24
Speaker 1: And in the nineteen nineties it wasn't uncommon for her
44:27
to get rides with truck drivers, to hitchhike, to live
44:30
completely off the grid. She didn't stay in constant, weekly
44:34
contact with her family. She just did her own thing
44:37
and checked in when she felt.
44:38
Speaker 2: Like it, and that transient lifestyle collided tragically with the
44:42
very rigid missing person's protocols of nineteen ninety four. The
44:46
investigator's note a massive systemic contrast between how missing adults
44:50
were handled then versus how they handled now. It was
44:53
the difference well today. If an adult is reported missing,
44:56
especially under suspicious circumstances, or if they fall into a
45:00
vulnerable category, the law enforcement response is immediate. Informations pushed
45:05
out digitally, National databases are updated instantly, the public is
45:09
alerted via social media and smartphones.
45:11
Speaker 1: It's instant.
45:11
Speaker 2: But in nineteen ninety four, the prevailing attitude among police departments,
45:15
especially regarding an adult who was known to be a
45:17
drifter and had a history of dropping out of contact,
45:20
was very much let's wait twenty four to forty eight
45:22
hours and see if they come back. Adults have the
45:24
right to walk away from their lives.
45:26
Speaker 1: Let's wait and see before we burn resources.
45:28
Speaker 2: Exactly yeah, Because she was an adult who freely traveled
45:31
and didn't check in often, the urgency to find her
45:33
was diluted. That systemic delay, that lack of immediate aggressive
45:38
tracking across state lines, is a huge part of why
45:41
her disappearance in the Midwest didn't immediately link up with
45:45
the unidentified body found on the side of Ien in Florida.
45:48
Speaker 1: It's a compounding tragedy. The killer physically steals her life,
45:52
but the system's limitations and the technological limits of the
45:55
era essentially steal her identity and her voice for three decades.
46:00
And that is why the scientific breakthrough is so much
46:02
more than just closing a cold case file. Giving Suzanne
46:06
Killenberg her name back is the ultimate act of reclaiming
46:09
her humanity. It's taking her out of the dark shadow
46:12
of the happy Face killer and restoring her as an
46:15
individual who had a family, who is loved, and who
46:18
is deeply missed. But having her name is only half
46:22
the battle, because now that the legal requirement of Corpus
46:24
delicti has been met, the state of Florida has a
46:27
very real decision.
46:28
Speaker 2: To make, and this raises an important question, one that
46:31
forces a real, moral and practical reckoning for the justice system.
46:35
Keith Jesperson is already in prison in Oregon. He's serving
46:38
multiple life sentences for other murders. He is never ever
46:41
getting out of a concrete cell. So, as a state
46:43
attorney or a cold case detective, do you spend the
46:47
immense amount of time, the man power, and the thousands
46:50
of taxpayer dollars required to mount a prosecution across state
46:54
lines against a man whose fate is already permanently, irrevocably sealed.
46:59
Speaker 1: Imagine you are the prosecutor making that call. You've got
47:02
a monster locked in a cage until he dies. Do
47:05
you really spend the state's budget to put him on
47:08
trial again for something that happened thirty years ago. It's
47:11
a tough logistical.
47:12
Speaker 2: Question, but justice is not just a spreadsheet of state funds,
47:15
and it isn't just a singular, overarching concept of removing
47:18
bad guys from the street. Justice is fiercely individual. The
47:22
decision made by the Medical Examiner's Office, the State Attorney's office,
47:25
and the detectives in Florida was unanimous and profound.
47:28
Speaker 1: They decided to go for it.
47:29
Speaker 2: They concluded that justice isn't just about punishing the killer.
47:32
It is about validating this specific individual life of the victim.
47:37
So Zan Gaellenberg deserves the exact same measure of justice
47:40
as every other victim. Keith jesperson was convicted of killing.
47:43
Her family deserves the official legal recognition that a crime
47:47
was committed against her, against their daughter, against their sister,
47:50
not just an anonymous Jane Doe.
47:52
Speaker 1: So they decide to move forward, which leads to one
47:55
of the most intense cinematic scenes in this entire narrative.
48:00
It is September of twenty twenty three. A team of
48:02
four investigators from Florida, including seasoned cold case detectives and
48:06
an assistant state attorney, fly across the entire country to Salem, Oregon,
48:10
to the Oregon State Penitentiary, and they show up at
48:13
the prison completely unannounced.
48:15
Speaker 2: The element of surprise is a very specific, highly calculated
48:18
interrogation tactic. You do not want a seasoned, manipulative psychopath
48:22
to have time to prepare his narrative, to review his
48:24
old lies, or to mentally fortify himself for a confrontation.
48:28
You want to knock him off balance.
48:30
Speaker 1: Walking into that prison must have been surreal. You're stepping
48:33
into the visitation room, smelling the floor wax and institutional food,
48:36
knowing you're about to sit across from an apex predator
48:39
who thinks he's already won the game. He's been living
48:42
in this cage for decades, comfortable in his infamy, probably
48:45
bored out of his mind, and suddenly the heavy metal
48:48
door opens, and the past from nineteen ninety four walks
48:52
right in.
48:52
Speaker 2: Jessperson in twenty twenty three was a different man physically,
48:56
but the core was the same. He had aged naturally.
48:59
He was sixty eight years old, gray haired, and wore glasses,
49:03
but the physical presence of the man was still deeply imposing.
49:06
He was roughly six foot five inches tall, pushing three
49:09
hundred pounds. The investigators specifically noted in their reports that
49:13
he had huge hands, a detail he carries a horrifying
49:16
visceral weight when you know his preferred method of murder
49:19
was strangulation.
49:20
Speaker 1: But the scariest part wasn't his size, it was his demeanor.
49:24
He was described by the detectives as appable, friendly, even gregarious.
49:28
If you didn't know who you were sitting across from,
49:30
you'd think he was just a typical chatty, big guy
49:32
telling stories at a bar.
49:34
Speaker 2: That is the chilling, perfect camouflage of a successful serial killer,
49:39
the charm, the casual ease. It's a psychological mask that
49:43
allows them to move through society undetected, to lure victims
49:47
into their trucks. And clearly Jefferson hasn't lost that ability
49:51
to project affability even while locked away for life.
49:54
Speaker 1: So the Florida team introduces themselves. They sit down at
49:57
the table and say they're from the Okhusa County Sheriff's office,
50:00
and instantly, without missing a beat, Jessperson leans back and says, oh,
50:04
about the girl I killed in Holt.
50:06
Speaker 2: He knew exactly why they were there. Thirty years later,
50:08
he hasn't forgotten a thing.
50:10
Speaker 1: Decades have passed, he claims one hundred and sixty victims,
50:13
yet he instantly recalls the specific town in Florida. The
50:16
investigators sit down and they essentially just let him talk.
50:19
They ask him to explain what happened. They want to
50:21
hear it from his own mouth, but more importantly, they
50:23
are rigorously testing him right.
50:25
Speaker 2: The team had heavily obsessively reviewed the case file before
50:29
flying out, especially his original nineteen ninety six statements. They
50:32
needed to gauge his truthfulness in twenty twenty three against
50:36
the established facts of the crime scene and his past confessions.
50:40
They needed him to confirm time, place, and incredibly specific
50:43
details to prove once again that he possessed knowledge only
50:47
the true killer could hold ensuring that his confession would
50:50
hold up in a modern court.
50:52
Speaker 1: And his explanation for why he killed Suzanne is perhaps
50:55
the most sickening, deeply unsettling part of this entire deep dive.
50:59
According to his statement to the detectives in that room,
51:02
she was sleeping in the cab of his truck while
51:04
it was parked. He decided he didn't want to get
51:06
in trouble with the truck stop security for having an
51:08
unauthorized writer in his cab.
51:10
Speaker 2: Okay, so he.
51:11
Speaker 1: Claims he was trying to be a gentleman by waking
51:13
her up to see if she needed to use the
51:15
restroom before he started the engine and moved the truck.
51:17
When he startled her awake, she began screaming, and because
51:21
he didn't want the security guard nearby to hear her
51:23
screaming and get him in trouble with his employer, he
51:26
grabbed the zip ties and strangled her.
51:28
Speaker 2: Analyze the sheer, breathtaking triviality of that motive. He didn't
51:32
kill her out of some grand, uncontrollable psychotic compulsion. In
51:36
that moment, he killed a human being because she was
51:38
a logistical inconvenience.
51:40
Speaker 1: It's just evil.
51:41
Speaker 2: She was going to get him written up by a
51:42
security guard, so he simply snuffed out her life as
51:45
easily as turning off for radio. It is the purest
51:48
definition of the banality of evil.
51:50
Speaker 1: The investigators described it as chilling to hear someone so casually,
51:55
so matter of factly, discuss the violent murder of another person.
51:59
There was absolutely lutely zero remorse in his voice. In fact,
52:02
they got the distinct sense that he enjoyed talking about it.
52:05
He liked the attention. He liked holding court in that
52:08
prison room, looking at the prosecutors, and recounting his power
52:12
over her life and death, Which.
52:13
Speaker 2: Is exactly why the meticulous quiet preparation by the Slorida
52:17
team was so necessary. They weren't there to appeal to
52:19
his conscience, because he clearly doesn't have one. They were
52:22
there to legally corner him. They used his arrogance and
52:25
his desperate desire for attention to lock in the facts,
52:28
verifying every single word against the nineteen ninety six statement
52:32
and the physical evidence from the swamp.
52:33
Speaker 1: And they succeed. They spend a couple of hours with him,
52:36
secure the recorded statements they need, pack up their briefcases
52:40
and get out. When they returned to Florida, they filed
52:43
the official charge second degree murder. Now, this is an
52:47
interesting procedural detail that caught my eye. Why charge him
52:50
with second degree murder when this is an admitted serial
52:53
killer who clearly committed a premeditated act.
52:55
Speaker 2: So it was a highly strategic, incredibly pragmatic legal move
52:59
by the state of Attorney under slord to law to
53:02
charge someone with first degree murder. The state is strictly
53:04
required to convene a grand jury to secure an indictment
53:08
that takes considerable time, a massive amount of resources, and
53:11
complex coordination.
53:12
Speaker 1: Oh I see, So it's a shortcut exactly.
53:15
Speaker 2: The investigators knew that Jesperson, secure in his organ cell
53:18
and likely enjoying the renewed notoriety in the press, was
53:21
already willing to plead guilty to a life sentence just
53:25
to get it on his record. By charging him with
53:27
second degree murder, the state bypassed the grand jury requirement,
53:31
entirely securing a swift, undeniable conviction without putting the victim's
53:35
family or the taxpayers through a protracted, unnecessary legal circus.
53:39
Speaker 1: It's efficient justice, and that brings us to the final
53:42
resolution of the timeline. On April fourth, twenty twenty four,
53:46
nearly thirty years after those inmates were weed whacking on
53:49
the side of I ten, Keith Jesperson is officially convicted
53:52
of the second degree murder of Suzanne Kallenberg. The ghost
53:56
case is closed, and.
53:57
Speaker 2: With that legal conviction comes the final essential act of closure.
54:02
Suzanne's physical remains, after being held as nameless evidence in
54:05
a cardboard box for three decades, are finally officially released.
54:09
The files note that she was transferred to a funeral
54:12
home and cremated, allowing her family to finally bring her
54:14
home and put her to rest.
54:16
Speaker 1: One of the lead investigators summed up the emotional impact
54:18
of this journey perfectly. They said, this case grounds them.
54:22
It reminds them to never ever give up, because just
54:24
because the answer isn't right in front of your eyes
54:26
today doesn't mean it can't be developed tomorrow.
54:28
Speaker 2: That's a powerful thought.
54:29
Speaker 1: It gives them genuine, fierce hope for other cold cases,
54:33
some sitting in their files dating all the way back
54:35
to nineteen seventy three. If they can solve this, if
54:38
they can pull DNA from a skull bone and put
54:40
a name to remains found in a swamp in nineteen
54:43
ninety four, they believe they can solve anything.
54:45
Speaker 2: It is a profound testament to the fact that while
54:48
justice can be delayed by the limits of human knowledge,
54:51
the relentless, marching pursuit of science can eventually inevitably tip
54:56
the scales back toward the truth.
54:58
Speaker 1: So what does this all mean? As we wrap up
55:00
this steep dive, I want you to think about the
55:02
massive foundational shift and power that this story represents in
55:06
our society. For decades, the worst predators in our world,
55:10
the serial killers like Keith Jessperson, relied on the vast
55:14
anonymity of highways. Like I ten, they relied on the sheer,
55:18
overwhelming scale of the country and the limitations of biology
55:21
to swallow up their victims and hide their crimes. They
55:24
thought time, whether and nature were their greatest accomplices.
55:27
Speaker 2: They operated under the belief that if they stripped away
55:29
a person's life and discarded their identification. They had successfully
55:33
committed the perfect unsolvable crime.
55:35
Speaker 1: But the world has fundamentally changed Today. The very bones
55:39
they leave behind in the dirt can wait patiently for
55:41
thirty years. They can reach out into a digital ether,
55:44
cross reference themselves against a vast database of distant cousins,
55:48
and point an unerring, scientifically perfect finger right back at
55:52
the monster who put them there. The vast anonymity they
55:55
relied on is gone, which leads you with a thought
55:57
tom all over in an era worse. A single microscopic
56:01
cell hidden deep inside a slainous cavity can unravel a
56:04
perfectly executed, thirty year old secret. Are the days of
56:07
the truly unsolved mystery finally coming to an end? Keep learning,
56:10
keep asking questions, and we'll see you next time.