Carrisi landed in New Orleans a week before she went missing, Ken found out. She’d traveled to New Orleans for a vacation with her parents in July 1993. While on that holiday, she met a street musician she took a liking to, “a fifty-four-year-old cornet player with a Jamaican accent,” the New York Times reported. When Romina and Albano continued their vacation from New Orleans into Miami, their daughter stayed behind in New Orleans, telling her mom and dad she “wanted to write and paint.”
Two days after her parents left New Orleans, Carrisi fled the Big Easy to Miami, “telling her parents she feared two men were trying to drug and kill her,” my law enforcement source was certain.
Carrisi had studied in London. During that 1993 holiday break (on December 30) from university, she headed back to New Orleans. She was a dedicated artist, who loved music and painting and that free spiritual movement of mysticism. Our source tracked down her best friend, who confirmed that “Ylenia loved flowery dresses, was into dark magic and tarot cards, and liked junk jewelry.” All of which fit into Jesperson’s Jane Doe scenario.
By January 1, 1994, she was roaming the streets of the French Quarter in New Orleans hoping to “find characters for a book she was writing,” Romina told Italian media after her daughter’s disappearance. Her mother said this was the only reason why Ylenia went back to mix it up with the homeless and street culture and live unassumingly as one of them. It was not because she wound up strung out, as some later claimed, but rather embedded herself in that world as research for a book and art project. While back in town, Carrisi hooked up with that street player she’d previously met. One shop owner in the French Quarter told the Times that Carrisi “worked ‘very hard at being a street person.’”
Romina and Albano did not believe that the security guard—who later “tentatively” identified her in photos—had met up with their daughter; they once thought she was being held hostage somewhere. It would have been unlike her to jump into the Mississippi River. She had way too much going on in her life to abandon it. She wasn’t reported to be depressed.
When later asked, the street musician said, “I believe she is safe.”
One Elvis-like sighting surfaced in 2014. According to a German magazine, Freizeit Revue, an American sheriff reported that Ylenia Carrisi was living in a Greek Orthodox convent outside Phoenix, Arizona. Albano came out afterward and said it was nothing more than “shameful speculation containing not a bit of truth.”10
Carrisi’s body was never recovered from her possible jump into the Mississippi. Because of this, we could not eliminate her as a potential Jane Doe at that point, especially with all of the evidence pointing toward her being in Florida near the time Jesperson met “Suzanne.”
“I read the descriptions about her and followed her trail and she keeps popping back up as my top candidate,” Ken told me. “What has Jesperson said from the lineup you sent him?”
Jesperson, I explained, circled Carrisi in the lineup I’d mailed, not knowing anything about her and a possible connection. Ken had also found several other girls with Jane Doe potential, some of whom were named Suzette, Sue, Susan, Suzanne, which I had placed in the same lineup.
“‘Could be her,’ Jesperson told me, referring to Ylenia,” I explained to Ken. “He didn’t pick out any of the other girls.”
“You’re shitting me?” Ken responded.
“No. His entire focus was on Ylenia. He wasn’t one hundred percent certain, but said he never could be based on how long it’s been.”
*
JESPERSON CAME THROUGH. THE first sketch of Jane he sent Moody was a black-and-white pencil-and-charcoal portrait drawn from just below her neckline, up past the top of her head. He wrote “white woman with blond hair” on the page, signed and dated it “?1994?,” the question marks around the date indicating he could not recall when he’d killed her. Her hair was frizzy and thin, flowing wildly outward like fire. Her eyebrows were dark and resembled check marks. Her face oval, her eyes wide open.
Miss Anybody, I thought when I first looked at this image. But then studying it more closely, she had a strange familiarity about her I could not shake for days. I kept the image on my desk. She stared back at me as I worked. This woman looked like someone I knew. Someone I had seen before. I was certain of it. It bothered me that I couldn’t figure it out.
The next drawing, a pastel, charcoal-colored pencil, a more in-depth and detailed creation, Jesperson sent to me. In this rendering, which looked similar to the black-and-white he had sent Moody, but with far more detail, her blue eyes looked up toward the sky.
“You realize that in all of the pictures he draws of Jane,” Moody said to me during a call, “she is looking up? You know why that is, don’t you? ’Cause he’s so big, they all had to look up at him. That’s how he sees his victims, [he’s] looking down on them.”
In Jesperson’s portrait, Jane’s hair was brownish blond. She wore a blue blouse. Her lips red, her skin tone and features Caucasian. He’d sent it to me in a large envelope. I opened the package, pulled the portrait out, and thought: What the hell is he up to now?
Next time he called, I lashed out: “Dude, you sent me a picture of Nicole Fucking Kidman. What the hell? It looks just like her. Is this some sort of a joke to you? Am I just wasting my time?”
I realized that was why the black-and-white sketch seemed so damn familiar, a drawing that could be mistaken for Kidman, but it’s not what your mind gravitates to first; whereas, this color pastel he sent me was Kidman’s doppelganger.
“All I had to go by was a People magazine,” he said.
“What?”
Explaining further, he and Moody had talked about Jane looking similar to Kidman and that he would use a People magazine Moody had sent him as a baseline to generate ideas. Just so happened, there was a photo of Nicole Kidman in the magazine. However, neither Moody nor Jesperson had taken it upon himself to let me in on any of this.
“Are you messing with us?” I asked.
“No, no, not at all. I needed somewhere to start. I’m not that type of artist to go from memory alone. Kidman looks a lot like my Jane Doe.”
This was dangerous ground where trying to develop a composite was concerned. People might only see Nicole Kidman. Jane would be lost forever. I was more than pissed.
“I told him not to draw me a likeness of Nicole Kidman,” Moody recalled. “That wasn’t going to help us. That wasn’t part of the plan.”