THE KIDNAPPING OF JESSICA LUNSFORD

so today's video is going to be another solved true crime case today we're going all the way to florida we're going to be talking about the disappearance of jessica lunsford this is going to be a two-part case this is of course part one part two is gonna be out in the next few days so make sure you're subscribed with notifications on so that you don't miss the rest of the case when i upload it part one is a little bit shorter than part two so you might be looking at this thinking this is a short first part that's because most of the case happens in the second part but before we do get into part one of this case i just want to thank our sponsor for making this video possible magellan tv you guys that watch my videos regularly should know by now but i am absolutely obsessed with magellan tv it is my favorite documentary streaming service this week i watched one of their new releases called a mother's madness which is a very very tragic but also a quite familiar story i've covered quite a few cases like it before where one day a mother will just like switch and take the lives of her children without any warning those kind of cases are some of the most heartbreaking and also i hate to say it but also like the most morbidly interesting to me because my interest in true crime is all based in the psychology of the killer i'm really interested to know why they do what they do like what happened in their brain that made them want to do that because especially with a mother and her children that's a bond that is supposed to be so innate and like natural to human beings but then for a mother to kill her own children it doesn't happen often and that's because human brains are just simply not wired that way to kill your own offspring so i always i'm always interested in the psychology behind those kind of cases magellan tv has some really really interesting cases like that ones that will leave you thinking about the case for like days after you've watched the documentary magellan tv is completely ad-free you can watch it on any device that you have pretty much and they also add between 15 and 20 hours of new documentaries every single week so you're never gonna get bored there's always something new for you to watch and they're very very kindly offering you guys a month free trial when you sign up using the link down below in the description so make sure you're making the most of that go discover some new interesting true crime cases and report back to me because i'm interested i want to know what you guys are watching thanks again to magellantv for sponsoring this video now before we get into this case i just want to give my usual disclaimer that i mean absolutely no disrespect to anyone that i talk about in this case this video is for educational purposes only and everything that i'm about to say is just information that i have found on the internet and i'm compiling into one video a couple of content warnings as well before we get into this this case is all about the sexual assault and murder of a child so if that is something that you can't watch right now i totally understand feel free to click out of this video look after yourself don't watch anything that's going to put you in a bad headspace i'm sure i'll see you again another time for a different case there's also themes of miscarriage actually that i forgot to add so if any of that is something you don't want to watch right now click out all that being said let's get into the case jessica marie lunsford was a nine-year-old girl born on october 6 1995 in north carolina usa she was actually more known to her friends and family as jessie rather than jessica i might call her birth throughout this video probably by accident because i've done more formal research under the name jessica but then as i've been watching interviews of like her father and stuff he calls on jessie a lot so i'm sorry if i keep switching speaking of her father her father was named mark her mother was named angela and they had her and raised her originally in a place called gastonia jessie had a few older siblings from mark's previous marriage but they were all at least in their teens when jessie was even born so she was kind of like an only child in the way that she was the only child in the household if that makes sense she did have older brothers and sisters but they weren't kind of in her immediate life and jessie was actually quite a miracle baby when she was born because her mother angela had had like seven miscarriages through her life until she eventually fell pregnant with jessie so everyone was so so excited they were elated that there was gonna be another baby in the family but it wouldn't be that way for long when jessica was just one year old her parents mark and angela decided that their marriage just wasn't working the way that it used to and so they decided to get a divorce it was actually mark that got custody of jessie after the split and so it was him that raised her pretty much her whole life and he did absolutely everything in his power to make sure that jesse had the most magical childhood that he could possibly give her honestly from what i read in my research mark sounds like an amazing father he would take jessie to work with him because she was she was obsessed with him he was obsessed with her they were like inseparable and his work knew that he was an only parent and so he was kind of struggling so they would allow him to just bring jessie in and she would just play about i think he was like a construction worker or something so jesse would come in she'd be playing in piles of wood chips and she would talk to all her dad's co-workers he would drive her around on all the tractors and the forklifts she loved it following the divorce mark and jessie stayed in north carolina for a while that was where she was born however when she was about five or six years old i think jessie's grandparents mark's parents moved to florida and they really really missed jesse's grandparents when they moved so much so that one day mark literally just turned to jesse and he was like do you want to move to florida to go and be closer to them and jesse said yes so they just packed their bags and left so they went to go and live with jesse's grandparents on a trailer park in a place called homosassa i think i'm saying that right if i'm not please forgive me i feel like there's probably something more to that name that i'm missing homosassa but yeah they went and moved in with mark's parents they felt it would just be easier because mark's parents were getting old now so mark could look after them it also meant that if he ever wanted to go out anywhere he had literal free child care for jessie at home her grandparents could just look after her it was an ideal fit and this trailer park seemed quite nice from what i could find like they had big open spaces that jessie liked to go out and play in she was super happy in florida she had everything she needed there like her father absolutely doted on her so did her grandparents they were obsessed with her as well she was very very loved her grandmother ruth would always take her out whether that was for walks to go out and play or maybe to go shopping they went shopping quite a bit jessie was super into dolls when she was younger and so her grandmother ruth would often take her out to like fabric stores they would pick out particular patterns that jesse really liked and then they would buy the fabric ruth would bring it home and saw jessie some little like clothes for her dolls i think it's so cute that they could share that together to make clothes for these dolls together but at heart jessica lunsford was a daddy's girl through and through mark was her best friend she would always bug her grandmother ruth to ring mark while he was at work just so that she could chat to him she missed him she wanted to talk to her dad i think it was actually a landfill site but he worked on landfill construction something like that but either way it was manual labor and there were long days that he would work so whenever he would get home from work he'd be super super tired but that wouldn't stop him from spending some quality time with his daughter almost every single day on weekends he would take her out to eat they would go to karaoke her favorite songs to sing were anything by pink she loved pink and also shania twain her father mike was also super into motorbikes he was part of like biking clubs and stuff like that and so naturally jessie wanted to be a part of that she wanted to do that with her dad but obviously it's kind of dangerous obviously very dangerous for a child so he would sit her on the bike and take her slow rides around the block making sure that they were safe and she loved every second of it she loved doing things with her dad whatever that was he would take her to church the whole family was christian i believe and sir jessica eventually got into that later on in life she started attending different um sunday schools or classes at the church and there was one story that jessie's father mark told at a conference about how he and jesse always used to have arguments about who loved the other one more jessie always used to say i love you this much and i love you this much like she's trying to stretch her arms all the way out and so one day mark turned to her and said well i love you this much and he said that this much by crossing his wrist that meant it went all the way around so then jesse turned round to him and said well daddy i love you this much and this much meant that nothing could come between them overall jessica lunsford was known for her sweet kind caring personality her school said that she was quite quiet she was shy in front of certain groups but in front of the right groups she was the most confident outgoing little girl you've ever seen it really just depended who she was around which i mean isn't it that way for everyone i suppose jessica was super super affectionate she was actually quite clingy which isn't a bad thing she always wanted cuddles she always wanted kisses she always wanted to be holding hands just showing physical signs of affection jessica's favorite colour was purple she loved stuffed animals she had a huge collection of stuffed animals she loved to sing and dance she was afraid of the dark as many other kids her age are or many other people that are and for that reason she had like three different nightlights that she wouldn't sleep without she had to have light on at all times jessica would tell her family that when she grew up she wanted to be a singer well this changed by the month jessie had a lot of different career options that she wanted she wanted to be an olympic athlete at one point she wanted to work in the fashion industry i think she was just a very excitable kid i mean when you're that young and you're learning about all these new professions you kind of want to do everything you want to experience everything on february 23rd 2005 it was a wednesday and every wednesday jessie would attend this local church group after school she's nine years old at this point in the case by the way i think i forgot to mention so she's nine and she went to this church group she was there until maybe about 6 p.m and then she came back home to the trailer with her father the two of them made dinner they ate together they played for a couple of hours and then that same evening mark was gonna go out on a date he hadn't really dated as far as i'm aware since jessica's mother so this was quite a big deal it had been like eight years or something and he'd met this woman he was gonna go out on a date with her and everyone was so excited i don't know if jessie fully understood what was going on i don't know if he like sat her down and explained where he was going but she gave him a big kiss goodbye they said good night before he left as well because mark probably wasn't going to be back before jesse was in bed so they said good night gave each other a big kiss a big hug and mark went on his way whenever mark wasn't there it was jessie's grandmother ruth that would put her to bed and so the two of them went to jessica's bedroom they got her clothes out for the next day they laid them on the bottom of her bed jesse climbed into bed ruth took her in kissed her good night and then ruth went off to bed herself i think that night mark stayed over at his date's house and then went back to his the following morning around 5 6 a.m to go and get ready for work so he got there he starts getting changed and whatever and then he hears jesse's alarm going off in her bedroom it was time for her to wake up for school she got up at the same time every single day and mark's getting ready and he's still here in this alarm it's not going off normally jesse would have woken up straight away and switched her alarm off so mark thinks oh well maybe she's sleeping through it maybe she's just in a really deep sleep so he went over into her bedroom to turn it off for her and to wake her up properly but when he walked into jesse's bedroom her bed was empty she wasn't in there she was nowhere to be seen and so he thought well maybe she'd woke up before her alarm maybe she's already somewhere else in the house in the kitchen making breakfast or something maybe she's already dressed and ready so he's walking around the house going into every different room the kitchen living room different bedrooms but jessie's not there she's not in the entire trailer so mark decided to go and check outside because jesse loved playing outside there was always the chance that maybe she got up early and then decided to kill some time playing outside but when mark went to go and open the front door of the trailer he realized that he'd left it unlocked the night before so anyone could have gotten in or out he opened the door jesse wasn't outside and that was when it sunk in he'd left the door unlocked and now his nine-year-old daughter is missing his mind immediately went to the worst case scenario as i'm sure most peoples would and so he immediately picked up the phone called the police and reported jessica as missing so the police were on their way down to the trailer but in the meantime mark decided to ring through absolutely everyone he knew all his friends all his family to see if jesse had turned up at anyone's house but absolutely no one had seen her since the night before since ruth took her into bed no one had seen jessica since but everyone was equally as worried as mark was and so they were all volunteering to come down and help look for her that same morning a nationwide alert was put out for jessica lunsford not an amber alert just a nationwide alert because i think correct me if i'm wrong an amber alert is specifically for children that have 100 been kidnapped or at least where police are pretty certain that that is the circumstances whereas here although it does kind of look that way immediately there were also no signs of a struggle no signs of a break-in at the same time police couldn't be 100 sure that it was a kidnapping because the door was unlocked after all jessica could have literally just gotten out of bed opened the door and walked out herself she could have gone off her own accord by that evening jessica went missing first thing in the morning she was noticed missing at 6am and by that evening there were hundreds of volunteers out searching for her but jessica lunsford didn't come home that day or the next day or the day after that she was gone and searches went on for weeks weeks and weeks and nothing was really coming up nothing was found there were no clothes there were no not even any suspicious items near the scene you know that could have hinted to anything happening obviously that's me skipping ahead in the case a little bit as those weeks were going by police were obviously doing more than just manual searching for her police spoke with all of jessica's family about the night of her disappearance trying to get any kind of information from them but none of them saw or heard anything at all actually police decided to look into jessica's father mark and her grandfather archie as suspects they detained both men for three days and they were giving them interrogations questioning they were trying to pit them against each other try and get in each other to like spill anything they were giving them polygraph tests left right and center and the men actually passed these tests these lie detector tests they passed them but of course polygraph tests are never 100 accurate like scientifically accurate so that didn't ultimately mean anything police were still very very focused on them they were questioning them for days especially the grandfather archie that was who they were really suspicious of there's this one clip of an interview where mark is crying of course his daughter is missing his nine-year-old daughter his best friend is missing and he is being treated as a suspect he is sobbing in this interrogation room and one of the police officers turns to him and says somebody's got to tell me why your father isn't like this because archie wasn't crying in his interrogation he didn't seem too visibly distressed by this whole situation and so that was the police saying well your father isn't acting the way that we expect a grieving grandfather to act which is so ridiculous everyone handles grief and stressful traumatic situations differently some people cry some people sob just like mark but some people internalize it all some people will just hold it all in and maybe release it on their own time maybe not some people just aren't criers and that was archie of course he was distraught that his granddaughter was missing of course he was but because he wasn't crying in his questioning police deemed him a suspect this officer that said that to mark about like someone's got to tell me why your father isn't crying he also followed up that statement with he's asleep in the other room i'm not saying he did anything i'm just saying it looks bad police confronted archie the grandfather by saying right now everything we've got so far is pointing at you to which he replied i'm not guilty of anything except loving a grandchild if you had to get an education to do this man your money was wasted which is so true if police are going on the fact that someone is not crying in a questioning and that is what makes them a suspect in a case there's issues that is an issue it was just so traumatic for both of them for mark and for archie because they were devastated they were terrified they were in absolute agony over the disappearance of their beautiful daughter their beautiful granddaughter jesse and now they were being treated as suspects they're being accused so intensely as well it's not even just a little bit of a questioning it is police sitting them down and saying we think it's you police even allegedly and i have to say allegedly but watch the amazon prime documentary on this case please police even allegedly told archie that they had dna evidence against him to say that he had done something to jesse they said they had dna evidence now i don't know what that dna evidence is because it never came out it's never been in the trial it's never been mentioned past threatening archie which makes me absolutely fuming that they told this elderly man that they had evidence dna evidence that said that he did something to his own granddaughter which simply wasn't true and obviously this was all getting to archie so much inside he was already so worn down at the whole situation that his granddaughter was missing and now he's getting angry at these police officers which quite frankly i do not blame him and so at one point archie got up out of his chair and went to leave the room which was when these officers grabbed him they pinned him up against the wall they grabbed his arms put them behind his back as though he was like being handcuffed but they never handcuffed him which yes i would understand police acting like that and grabbing someone pinning them against the wall if they were arrested and they were trying to leave the room but archie was never arrested he didn't have to be there he was just being there to help this investigation to help them find his granddaughter he did not have to be in that room legally so police actually had no grounds to do that to him he had the right to leave that room if he wanted to but police were manhandling this elderly man for what for what reason and like i said they tried turning mark against his own father archie they were telling mark well your dad probably knows what happened to her or where she is after about day one or two they quickly believed mark that he had nothing to do with his own daughter's disappearance but of course they weren't feeling the same way about archie they were still suspicious of archie and so they told mark to go in to the room where his father was and question his own father like he was a police officer and man if you get the chance to see this clip online it's actually in an amazon prime documentary it is so so heartbreaking mark is sat there in this interrogation room opposite his father and mark is just sobbing you can tell he so badly does not want to be in this situation mark is saying to his father they're making me ask you i'm so sorry please forgive me dad and archie say no ask me i forgive you i forgive you it's so emotional these two men are just being absolutely torn apart by this whole investigation like as if it wasn't bad enough that they're looking for missing jesse they're also being put against each other they're being accused it was just such a horrific situation to to watch it was awful and my heart goes out to those two men seriously eventually after a few days of this torture police were eventually satisfied that neither of the lunsford men had anything to do with jesse's disappearance and so they were let go they were ruled out as suspects but police wasted so much precious time here accusing the wrong men even pretending that there was dna evidence against one of them all of that when they could have been out finding the real kidnapper of course there's been a lot of controversies in this case relating to this little bit of the investigation where police went so hard on the lunsford men and they've actually tried to defend themselves in the media have these police but their defense all they can do is make these really vague excuses like oh there were a lot of red flags about archie and like oh he'd committed some offenses before and i'm not gonna lie i don't know what offences archie has or hasn't committed in his life i don't know anything about his past but also at the same time i doubt it was anything on the level of the kidnapping of a child so police were still talking with the family but instead of questioning them in a suspect kind of way it was a lot more like a witness kind of way just asking them if they had seen or heard anything on the night that jessie went missing and that was when archie mentioned to the police that he did wake up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom at around 4 00 am but he didn't see or hear anything that was directly concerning but he did remember that the dog was acting a little bit weirdly that night this dog that they had it slept outside and it was normally quite a neutral little animal like it didn't bark or go crazy or anything but for some reason it was out on the porch at 4am barking really flipping loud i actually just shrugged it off thinking oh maybe i'd seen a squirrel maybe there was just like another animal out there something that was stressing the dog out but now now that he knows that his granddaughter is missing now that this investigation is going ahead he thought well what if the dog was back in for a reason what if it had seen something what if it had been disturbed unfortunately archie didn't go and check in jesse's room at the time when he woke up around 4am so there's no way of us knowing whether she was still in bed or whether she'd already been taken who knows maybe if archie had walked in when he went to the bathroom he might have even caught someone in there trying to get his granddaughter but other than the dog thing there was nothing else that the family could really tell the police they hadn't heard or seen anything on the night so police asked the family how likely it was that jessie might have left on her own accord because obviously this is looking most likely to be a kidnapping but there was always the possibility with the door being unlocked that jessie could have literally just gotten out of bed and and walked out the door herself but her grandmother ruth told the police that that like there was no chance that that was the circumstances jessie was such a shy anxious little girl there was no chance that she was just gonna get out of bed in the middle of the night and just go out into the world all by herself she was a really clingy kid she was obsessed with her dad why would she ever just walk out the door and leave her dad she was scared of the dark she needed like three nightlights to be able to sleep this is not a child that is just gonna go out in the middle of the night and just go walking and never come back but one thing that made police kind of cling on to this theory not necessarily cling on to it because they didn't fully believe it but mark did tell the police that in the days after the disappearance he noticed that one of jessie's stuffed animals was missing you know i said she had this huge collection of stuffed animals it seemed that wherever she was she must have taken one with her it was a little purple i say a little it was actually quite big um a stuffed purple dolphin teddy that her dad had actually won for her at the florida state fair a couple of weeks prior and she loved this dolphin this was like her newest teddy obsession it reminded her of her dad she hadn't left it alone all week she'd carried this purple dolphin around with her all week and so as soon as that was missing people started thinking well maybe she's gone and maybe she took the dolphin with her police felt like this was quite important to the case they didn't fully know why right now because they didn't know the circumstances of anything they didn't know why it was missing where it was but they felt like it was important that jessie had taken this with her most likely so at this point in the case they've been searching for weeks and jessie still hasn't turned up it's been weeks and naturally people started to think that maybe they weren't gonna find jessica lunsford alive which is the sad reality of most missing children's cases especially if they're not found within the first few hours of them being missing more often than not that child is later found murdered by week three of the search bear in mind there's still hundreds of volunteers searchers officers all out looking for this girl but by week three they decided to implement in some other tactics thinking that maybe now they were probably looking for a body so they started searching these big open areas like woods and fields they were bringing in officers on horseback they searched bodies of waters so they were sending diving teams down into rivers and lakes they had sniffer dogs brought in to try and track jesse's scent and there were also dogs that could alert to the scent of decomposing body because at this point that was what everyone was thinking they were gonna find this was a huge huge search there were still like police helicopters everything they were doing every single method that they could think to do to get this girl back it was a largely believed theory at this point in the case that something had happened to jessie in the woods outside her home it was super super dense and quite dark it got dark very early in this woods obviously because of all the cover so that was where a lot of the searches were concentrated that's where they had the helicopters the police on horseback they had sniffer dogs running through these woods but nothing was really coming up and so police came up with another theory and that was that maybe jessie had left off her own accord because they had to keep that in mind maybe she'd gotten up and left out of that front door in search of her mother jesse hadn't really seen her mother angela in like four years at this point and so people thought maybe she was going looking for her and of course she had no idea where she was going she wouldn't have been able to get all the way to north carolina so the theory then was that maybe something had happened to her along the way maybe she'd gotten lost or maybe she'd been even kidnapped along the way and this theory did make sense to a lot of people but not jesse's family they said that jessie wasn't that kind of girl you know she might have missed her mother she might have wanted to speak to her mother but she would have gone about it in a lot more sensible way she would have asked her father if they could go and see angela she wouldn't just take off in the middle of the night all alone not knowing where she was going in the dark remember she was scared of the dark jessica's mother angela was kind of looked into her not as a suspect but she was questioned about all of this but at this point she'd kind of moved on with her life i think she lived in a different state she had a new husband she had a kid with her new husband they all gave polygraph tests but none of them seemed to know anything about what had happened to jessie i mean they were all ruled out as suspects and it seemed that none of them had a clue there was another theory that was flirting around for a while that maybe jessie was involved in some online chat rooms bear in mind this is a nine-year-old girl people thought she'd been talking to strangers in online chat rooms and then maybe she'd agreed to meet them in person and maybe she gave them her address or maybe she did just leave in the middle of the night to go and meet them i think this theory was only a theory because it was at the start of that kind of like cyber stranger danger panic online chat room kind of thing you know that thing that happened in the 2000s where it was like do talk to strangers online because back then talking to a stranger online was dodgy these days probably not so much i mean do be careful i don't i don't condone but like talking to random people on twitter now is not the same as what it used to be when you would meet a stranger in a chat room kind of thing but again the same reason that all the other theories were kind of debunked is the same reason why this one was she was a shy girl she was anxious she was scared she wasn't gonna leave in the middle of the night she was scared of the dark all that kind of stuff she wasn't gonna do that the family laptop was seized and checked and all the history was gone through and stuff and there was no sign of anyone ever using these like online chat rooms jessica was nine years old she wasn't online she was like playing in the grass outside the trailer so now after all of those theories were pretty much almost ruled out police were focusing on the main theory and that was that this was a kidnapping someone might have come into the trailer in the middle of the night and physically taken jessie from her house but despite all of these theories all of these searchers all these volunteers all these massive efforts to try and find jessica lunsford there was still absolutely no sign of her and it was at this point about three weeks in after all of these like cadaver dog kind of searches had started florida was hit with extreme weather conditions and this forced the police to have to stop the physical search for jessica lunsford which i can only imagine was absolutely devastating for her family they're holding out hope that their nine-year-old girl is still out there in the world but now they are forced to stop looking for her while she's out there caught in these extreme weather conditions that must have been agonizing to even think about they were still hoping that they were gonna find this nine-year-old girl alive but right now this would mean that she was out there alone in the storm so instead because these physical searches had to be paused police decided to do some other work in the case some other lines of inquiry and they were going to try and find a suspect because obviously kidnapping was the main believed theory right now and so they started to look through sex offenders registers people in the local area that had committed crimes kind of like this either violence crimes or sexual crimes maybe pedophiles in the area and there was about 208 of these different suspects whether that was sex offenders pedophiles violent criminals in the very immediate area around where jessica lunsford lived 208 that is a terrifying figure and all of them were considered suspects so police started by arranging interviews with each of these individual men at their home addresses and they were just going to go and talk to them get an alibi kind of i don't know assess the situation and they were going to rule them out on a case-by-case basis so they're doing this they're going out to all these different men's houses and that was when this one name in particular proved to be quite an issue for the police a 46 year old man named john evander cui who was a registered sex offender he'd lived in homasasa his whole life but when police went down to his home address to go and speak to him conduct one of these interviews they found that he'd actually moved out now this was an issue not exactly related to jessica's disappearance but related more to his sex offender status people on the sex offenders register need to inform police if they're gonna move a dress because police need to keep constant tabs on these people they're very dangerous people and so police need to know where they are at all times it's an offense to move houses or move countries or move cities towns and not let the police know if you're on the sex offenders register so this guy john cooey was now in trouble for a completely other reason so yes they did want to find him and interview him about jessica lunsford but they also wanted to find him and arrest him for breaking the rules of being on the sex offenders register i guess and it didn't take long for the police to chat around and find out that john cooey had actually been staying at his sister's house well his sister's trailer and this trailer was only 100 yards from where jessica lunsford lived so this only makes him even more suspicious in this case that he was very very close to where jesse went missing he lived in this trailer and for a pretty small trailer it had a lot of people living in there so there was john cooey his sister dorothy dixon and then i think her partner her daughter and her daughter's partner as well i think there were four other people other than john cooey basically so police rushed down to dorothy's trailer but jonkey wasn't there either everyone else was but not him and everyone that was in that trailer said that they hadn't seen kiwi in fact they were all adamant that he didn't even live there they all said that he still lived at his home address but obviously not true police couldn't really do anything at this point i mean they wanted to go and interview kiwi cui wasn't there so what else could they do they decided to go and do like door-to-door inquiries throughout that trailer park that kiwi lived in to see if anyone could give them any information about this man and police did quickly learn from the locals that everyone that lived in this trailer cui his sister her partner the other two they were all massive drug users particularly cooking and heroin they also just lived a life of crime to be able to afford these drug habits as well while police weren't too concerned with the drug habits obviously all of that kind of stuff is illegal but they had bigger problems to deal with right now hearing that the group committed crimes to make money to buy drugs was quite a big thing in this investigation because police are now thinking well did kui break into the trailer and then kidnap jesse while he was there was he originally going there to rob the place who knows but also the fact that he had fled the whole area told police more than what they needed to know that suggests that you're guilty of something if you haven't only fled your home address but also the other address that you frequent sometimes what is this guy hiding why doesn't he want to talk to police so bad so police were at this trailer park they were talking to all these neighbors and they knew that john cooey was up to something whether it was the disappearance of jessica lunsford or whether he was just a very dodgy guy they knew he was up to something and so they desperately wanted to search that trailer that he lived in with his sister and everyone but without a search warrant they couldn't do it i think they did have a quick look through the front door or something like as they were trying to talk to the rest of the people in the trailer maybe they went and sat in the living room to question them all they had a quick scan around the room they didn't see anything suspicious but they still wanted a search warrant so they went back to the police station and they filed all this information for a search warrant but it was going to take a few days for them to get that so in the meantime they decided to look further into john cooey like who was this guy so like i said john cooey had lived in homosassa his whole life he hadn't really ventured much further than this one little town in florida he'd been unemployed for a long long time following quite a lengthy criminal history that police were soon to discover obviously no one really wanted to hire him and in this criminal record police found that cui had a lot of charges for a lot of petty crimes like theft possession of cooking possession of cannabis possession of a weapon he tried to drive with a suspended license as well i think he'd been arrested 24 times in his adult life now most of these had been for those smaller crimes that i just talked about all the possession and stuff like that but there were some bigger and a lot more concerning crimes that this man had committed he was done for fraud at one point he burgled multiple houses broke into loads of different places for drug money and then of course there was the crime that got this man on the sex offenders register in the first place in 1991 so over a decade before jessica lunsford's disappearance john cooey had molested a child under the age of 16. and this was exactly the kind of suspect that police were looking for obviously someone that had an interest in young girls around jessica's age she was nine so this was just alarm bells after alarm bells and then finally a few days later police finally got this search warrant to go and search the trailer the search warrant was obtained on march 18th but jessica actually went missing on like february 25th so this was almost a full month into the investigation now that police actually finally got to search this trailer bear in mind at this point i just want to remind you police have no idea where john cooey is he still hasn't returned to either of these addresses that they keep checking for him at he doesn't have a job for them to check out they don't have anyone to call i mean this man is literally just upped and left and he is potentially a very very dangerous person right now so police went and searched this trailer for any clues to his or jessica's whereabouts they're searching every single closet every single draw every single cupboard they're looking under things on top of shelves everywhere and there is nothing that was until one of the officers went into the bedroom that they suspected belonged to john cooey they were looking all over and there wasn't really anything and that was when one of them pulled back the duvet and on the mattress they found a stain but that is where i'm gonna leave part one of this case thank you so so much for watching part two of the case will be out in the next few days so make sure you subscribe with notifications on so you don't miss the rest of it thank you again to magellan tv for sponsoring this video remember if you want to get a month free trial you can do so using the link down below in the description i love them they're my favorite documentary streaming service i know you guys will love them too huge thank you to all of my channel members for helping me decide the cases that i cover especially my tier 2 members whose names are all on screen right now if you want to become a channel member you can just click the join button on a desktop or there'll be a link in the description of this video but yeah thank you so so much for watching like i said part two will be out in the next few days so stay tuned if you want to subscribe to my channel you can click this link to do so right here if you want to subscribe to my second channel you can click this link to do so right here and if you want to watch another true crime video there will be a playlist on screen right now bye

Channel: Eleanor Neale

Views: 2,127,127

Keywords: eleanor, neale, eleanor neale, eleanor neale true crime, mystery, unsolved, unsolved mystery, true crime, solved, documentary, killer, murder, serial killer, buzzfeed, buzzfeed unsolved, podcast, true crime podcast, storytime, dateline, interview, news, jessica lunsford, jessica, lunford, mark, the jessica lunsford act, jessica's law, mark lunsford, jessie's dad, kidnapping, abduction, missing, unsolved disappearance, john couey, florida, usa, miami, story, parents, 2021, true crime daily, john, couey

Id: C3eTy7kNuvA

Length: 40min 1sec (2401 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 10 2021