My New Podcast: The Final Hours with Sarah Turney and Kourtney Nichole

February 25, 2026·43 min·3 clips

Police told Jennifer's family she 'probably just stormed off to cool down' after a fight with her boyfriend — wasting the critical first hours.

1. The Final Hours, a Crime House podcast hosted by Sarah Turney and Kourtney Nichole, examines the January 2006 disappearance of Jennifer Kessie from Orlando, Florida. 2. Sarah Turney identifies herself as an advocate for missing persons whose sister Alissa disappeared in 2001; Kourtney Nichole identifies as an investigative journalist whose interest in true crime began when a family member 'found themselves on the wrong side of the law.' 3. The episode's thesis is that disappearances hinge on tiny deviations from routine — a missed morning call, an unread text, a wet towel still on the bed — and The Final Hours will examine those details under a microscope each week. 4. Jennifer Kessie was 24 years old in January 2006, had recently purchased her first condo at the Mosaic at Millennia in Orlando, and was a financial analyst at a timeshare business where she earned two promotions in her first year. 5. Her parents Drew and Joyce lived two hours away in the Tampa Bay area; her younger brother Logan was close to her; her boyfriend Rob lived three hours away in Fort Lauderdale. 6. Jennifer was notably safety-conscious, carrying pepper spray on campus after her parents Drew and Joyce were held at gunpoint in New Jersey when she was younger. 7. The Mosaic at Millennia was still under construction when Jennifer moved in, with construction workers and day laborers regularly on site at all hours, a situation she expressed unease about to family and to Rob. 8. On January 19, 2006, Jennifer and Rob took a four-day vacation to the Caribbean island of St. Croix; she returned in good spirits and spoke to her mother Joyce and brother Logan on the evening of January 23. 9. That same evening, Jennifer and Rob had a heated phone argument about the strain of their long-distance relationship; Rob later acknowledged this freely to investigators. 10. On the morning of January 24, Jennifer showered, did her hair and makeup, left a wet towel on the bed and her curling iron on the counter, and left her condo with her cell phone, her briefcase, her iPod, her car keys, and Travis's work phone she had planned to mail back. 11. When Jennifer failed to call Rob during her usual 8 a.m. commute and did not arrive at work, her company's CFO called her parents; police initially dismissed the report after learning about the previous evening's argument with Rob. 12. Jennifer's 2004 Chevy Malibu was found two days later, on January 26, at the Huntington-on-the-Green complex about a mile away — a location known for abandoned stolen vehicles. 13. Forensic examination of the car revealed a drag pattern on the hood that Jennifer's father Drew described as someone being thrown down with arms spread out and pulled backward, along with a partial palm print, hair, and latent fingerprints — but the DNA was too degraded to analyze. 14. Security footage from the Huntington-on-the-Green complex captured a male approximately 5'3" to 5'5" parking Jennifer's car at 12:59 p.m. and walking away along a fence, but the camera's slow frame rate and the fence line blocked his face in every usable shot. 15. NASA reviewed the footage and slightly improved the resolution but was unable to identify the suspect. 16. Residents at the Mosaic told investigators that construction workers had slept in vacant units, harassed women in the complex, and one worker was observed standing on a resident's patio engaged in indecent behavior; one woman believed her apartment had been entered while she was away. 17. In 2009, three years after Jennifer's disappearance, a housekeeper identified a maintenance worker known as Chino as resembling the man in the security footage; Chino had keys to every unit, had been inside Jennifer's apartment the week before she vanished, and was found to be serving prison time in Florida for the statutory rape of a teenage girl committed in 2008. 18. Chino passed a polygraph and no direct connection to Jennifer was established; the family sued the Orlando PD in 2018 for the case file and won in 2019 — the first Americans to successfully sue for an open case file — paying more than $18,000 for over 16,000 pages and 67 hours of recordings. 19. The case was officially transferred to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement's cold case unit in 2022, and in October 2025 Jennifer's father Drew announced on Facebook that untested DNA from the original case file had been discovered. 20. Listeners who follow cold cases involving abduction, forensic limitations, and institutional failures in law enforcement will find this case thoroughly covered; those seeking resolved cases or lighter true-crime content will not.

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