The accompanying stories indicated it was likely Jesperson had murdered Tyrone Power’s granddaughter, identified through DNA as Ylenia Carrisi. It was an international, sensationalized media event the Italian press and paparazzi could not let go of because of the star power Romina and Albano (and even Ylenia) had bred throughout their lives. The PBSO received scores of media requests, the language barrier adding fuel to the identity flame. The pace of Web sleuths and Internet surfers contacting the PBSO picked up as everyone seemed to have a potential Jane Doe match.
I sat back and allowed the narrative to play out, hoping that, in the end, Jane was heading home. It truly felt as if we’d done it: returned a soul to a body, and given her a name.
Ylenia Carrisi.
“We really believe it’s her,” Moody called to tell me one day. “It all fits.”
I was enthusiastic and emotional. In tricking Jesperson to help with the drawing, making him think that capital punishment was off the table, there might just be a payoff, making it all worth the pain, suffering, and five years of dealing with him. If I could solve this one case, or even just help a family spread word about a missing loved one, in some respects I’d feel vindicated, maybe even redeemed.
In total, forty leads came in after the video was posted. Half pointed to Ylenia Carrisi. As the story went on into the winter of 2015 through 2016, Dennis Haley and Paul Moody zeroed in on her. As each new piece of information about her surfaced, especially from the Carrisi family, it seemed more plausible than ever that Jesperson had murdered her—which, if true, was going to no doubt put Jesperson inside a courtroom facing a prosecutor and the death penalty. The Carrisi family, all of us knew, would insist upon Jesperson paying the ultimate price for killing their child. Any family would.
“You win some, you lose some,” I told Haley, Moody, and Ken one day as we discussed the likelihood of the Carrisi family putting pressure on the prosecutor to make Jesperson face death if their daughter was his Florida victim. “My first obligation is always to the victim.”
They agreed. When negotiating with serial killers, breaking promises was part of the deal.
Neither Moody nor Haley was a believer in using psychics to aid in solving crimes. Still, one of Carrisi’s family members had utilized a psychic in helping to find her during those days before the Happy Face story broke. The family sent Moody the report. The psychic had given the Carrisi family GPS coordinates, specifying where she believed the missing woman could be found alive, living her new, secret life. Because it was an official “lead,” however unconventional, Haley ran it down.
The provided GPS coordinates turned out to be “a block away from” Haley’s FDLE office in Pensacola—incredibly not too far from where Jane’s bones and dress and evidence had been stored since she’d been found. Even more fascinating (or maybe extraordinary), because the psychic had given the information to the family before Haley and Moody were involved with connecting Jesperson to Carrisi, none of it could have been gleaned from a Google search.
“Weird, just plain weird,” Haley said. “I was certain we were onto something. Not because of the psychic. But we thought for sure we had this thing solved. It was all pointing to Ylenia.”
“Yes, we did,” Moody said.
That confidence had nothing to do with the psychic’s information—a lead checked out by Haley himself, banging on doors in that GPS-suggested neighborhood, which went nowhere—but everything to do with Ylenia Carrisi’s family filling in some of the missing blanks that made her story fit all the more seamlessly into the situation Jesperson had described. Dates, places, times, where Carrisi was heading and coming from, where she had been seen, what she was wearing, an alias she’d used, what she was into—all of it pointed to her.
The champagne was put on ice.
The only thing left to do was check the Carrisi DNA against Jane’s. After a back-and-forth with Interpol and the Italian authorities, American law enforcement not wanting to use evidence sent from Italy that they hadn’t swabbed and controlled its chain of custody, Haley and Moody contacted Romina, who was living in the United States and now divorced from Albano, and asked her to submit a DNA sample.
The lab promised Haley it would put a rush on the test.
48
GRAND OPTIMIST
“Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise.”
—Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
A DAY AFTER CHRISTMAS, DECEMBER 26, 2015, JESPERSON SAT IN HIS cell “watching TV, thinking about” his life and how it had culminated into what was, by then, more than twenty years behind bars. He wasn’t upset, bitter, or angry, he claimed. He’d chosen this life. Instead, he wondered what “to leave behind as a legacy.” The analogy he used to explain his predicament centered on country-western singer George Jones, whom Jesperson had seen roasted on television.
Reading this, I thought: Narcissism oozes from this guy like sweat.
Here we have the perfect example of that grandiose, exaggerated, fantastical thinking the psychopath reserves for his private thoughts: Jesperson was comparing himself to a country music legend!
Further along, in one of the more revealing letters he’d ever written, Jesperson claimed to have lied in some shape or form to just about everyone who had ever tried to tell his story—including me. But here he was, after five years, now ready to come clean, he explained. He was finished hiding behind any inhibitions.
This was his way of telling me he wanted to stop bullshitting about certain events and clear the record. He knew I was almost done with him. He sensed it. He was trying to fit everything he needed to say into what were his last moments of me being his sounding board, available to him.
“You know, in 2000, not all of my cases were settled and to be so completely honest with [the late Jack Olsen] (who wrote a book about Jesperson, published posthumously in August 2002) was not in the cards. Or anyone for that matter.”
Jesperson said he still had “lots of court” ahead of him at the time he allowed Jack Olsen to interview him.
“I lied to Jack—a lot,” Jesperson told me.
The fact that it was now twenty years into his life sentences—Happy Face being a sixty-year-old lifer—had left “little they can or will do to me,” he said, adding how if Florida or California, the two states I’d worked hard at identifying victims, came calling, forcing him into court, he would not fight it. According to Jesperson, no more resistance. No more butting heads with the system. No more blaming others. It was time to man up.
In truth, he knew it would take fifteen years, at the least, to put him to death once the process got started. He believed he’d be dead by then, anyway.
From there, the letter, written as a series of answers to questions I was “going to get to, anyway,” became another outlet for him to stream his interpretation of what the public thought of him. He addressed any Dark Minds viewers wondering why he agreed to become Raven and help me profile unsolved serial killer cases.