Ken pulled up an image on his iPhone, passed it to me. Ylenia Carrisi: five-seven, 120 pounds. Carrisi had light brown/blond hair, green eyes, and brunette eyebrows. She was thin and in great physical shape. An Italian citizen speaking fluent English, Ylenia was twenty-three years old the last time anyone had heard from her. She’d walked away from a New Orleans “low-rent hotel,” wearing a floral-patterned dress, leaving behind her personal possessions (identification, specifically). It was January 6, 1994. For about a week leading up to that day, she’d been staying with an older man, a French Quarter street musician. After she went missing, the man tried to pay the hotel bill using traveler checks made out in her name.
Ken explained how he’d found Carrisi and why he was interested in her as our Jane Doe. He’d discovered her months before our trip to Florida and had done a lot of research into her life. He explained that although she’d been living as a vagabond, her story was anything but that of a poor, homeless street girl.
“She was one of the first missing girls I came across,” Ken said. “From all you’ve told me, from all the interviews I listened to between you and Jesperson talking about his Florida Jane Doe, from all I’ve learned about Ylenia, we might have found her.”
In many circumstances, Americans who go missing have family members step up and submit familial DNA samples so a hit can be matched if a body turns up—like Jesperson’s Jane Doe—somewhere. That DNA is then put into the system (Combined DNA Index System [CODIS] and other law enforcement databases). Because Carrisi was from Italy and had come to the United States on vacation, Ken found out, her familial DNA had not been put into the national American databases. That would explain why there had been no connection made between our Jane Doe and Ylenia Carrisi.
“New Orleans?” was my first question. It was not Florida.
“I found out Florida is where she first came to for vacation with her family, and it was stated somewhere she was possibly headed back to Florida from New Orleans because she was fleeing the city, terribly scared for her life.”
That worked.
While researching her case, Ken and I obtained information that placed her in Miami just before that August date when Jesperson met Jane in Tampa. Jesperson’s victim, who he claimed went by the name Suzanne, Suzie, Susan, Sue, Sue-Ellen, had told him she needed to go back to Miami in order to grab some of her belongings.
“Ylenia Carrisi told [someone],” explained a source Ken and I developed while looking into her life, “that a couple of men from Miami were looking for her. Not sure what for. Probably failed to pay for some[thing] (at least that’s what was thought). Of course, then the mind runs scenarios and maybe they kidnapped her and took her to Miami to ‘work’ off the debt.”
The other part of this was that while she was in New Orleans, she did not want anyone to know of her family origin, the Carrisi name, which held a celebrity, almost Hollywood royalty–like, status in Italy.
“So, because she didn’t want people to know her family name, she went by ‘Sarah’ or ‘Susan,’” the same law enforcement source said.
In his 1996 FDLE statement, Jesperson mentioned a Latina or Italian look to Jane. That floral dress. The hair. Her size and shape. Her eyes. The logistics. Now the name.
“The pieces are falling into place,” I told Ken.
“I found her listed in the Louisiana repository for unidentified and missing persons,” Ken said. “I knew nothing about the Carrisi name then, or who she was, other than the fact she was missing and wore a flowered-print dress, same as our Jane Doe.”
Then we started looking at photos of Ylenia Carrisi. There were so many available online because of who she was—and every damn one of them seemed to match Jesperson’s description.
Ken also found another missing girl from Louisiana.
“Either of these two could be Jane,” he said.
“I like that you are not focusing on just one.”
Making sure not to wear blinders, Ken continued searching missing persons databases, reading reports, and making calls to families of some of the women he found, asking questions (without projecting hope). Ken stayed up night after night, watched the sunrise more times than he’d like to admit while, he recalled, “my eyes bled from all the searching and sadness.”
At times, he’d close his Mac and think: How the hell can we find a needle in a haystack as big as the United States?
It was true. Jane’s DNA had been put into all of the databases long ago. No hit. We needed fresh leads. New familial DNA to test. Ylenia Carrisi and the other Louisiana girl were a start.
“More potential matches that haven’t been put into the databases,” Dennis Haley explained. “New people to come forward, in other words, and say, ‘I think Jane Doe is my sister or wife or family member.’”
I e-mailed a lineup Ken had generated (with Carrisi and the other girl part of it) to Moody and Haley. I also prepared one for Jesperson. As that work got started, Ken created a second lineup. I e-mailed that one, too. And as we continued to study her life, more stars aligned. It was clear, for example, that Ylenia Carrisi could have dabbled in the occult, knew people from that “voodoo” culture so prominent in New Orleans, or she had been researching it for some purpose unbeknownst to anyone. This was significant because Jesperson had found tarot cards, along with some odds and ends (a few pieces of clothing) in Jane Doe’s suitcase. Confirmed in the 1994 crime scene reports and photos, Jane wore jewelry with a square, two circles and triangle, which, when braised together in the way they were, could be interpreted as an occultist symbol. She also wore two bracelets and a ring: one was either occult-based or Native American, the other a charm bracelet without any charms, and a heart-shaped ring with symbols that could be considered connected to the tarot card, mystic/ occult community.
We felt some momentum. Haley, Moody, Ken, and I were excited.
Then, as we dug deeper into her life in New Orleans, we experienced a setback. On January 30, 1994, a security guard at the Audubon Aquarium of the Americas claimed to have encountered a woman fitting Carrisi’s description. On the same day she went missing, near 11:30 P.M., while he was conducting his nightly patrols inside Woldenberg Park, on the west bank of the Mississippi River, the guard spied a blond, thin woman sitting on the edge of the pier. About eighteen to twenty-four years old, she wore “a jacket and a floral dress that fell just below the knees.”
“Hey, you cannot be here in the park after hours,” the security guard told her.
“It doesn’t matter,” the security guard reported the woman saying. “I belong to the river.”
Just after that, without another word, she jumped into the Mississippi and swam into the current. As the security guard called it in, she “began to struggle and ask for help.”
A barge came by, kicking up an incredible wake, and the woman was swallowed up into the dark water and never seen again.
Rescuers searched the river. A helicopter was brought in. When it became known to the Carrisi family back in Italy that this could be Ylenia, for whom they’d been searching for three weeks already, the river was dragged.
They found a body—but it was male.
The day after this Mississippi River event was reported, the man Carrisi had roomed with in the low-rent hotel was arrested in connection with her disappearance.