The VERY Suspicious Death Of Jessica Easterly

[Music] hey guys and welcome back to my channel i hope you guys are all having a great day okay you guys don't judge me i am absolutely covered in animal hair today but what can i do this is my life i don't know where my lint roller is and i've tried to just pull it all off but it's not working so we're just gonna accept it so before we get started i wanted to thank you guys for tuning in to my video if you did about being an active true crime viewer and what that means and you know listening to some family members who have been featured on this channel what that has been like for them and what things they appreciated from people what things they didn't appreciate from audience members i thought it was a super helpful discussion if you didn't check it out i will have it linked below but everyone that did thank you for taking the time to do that thank you for taking the time to comment on that too the amount of positive comments that came through for the people that were on the video was incredible and they felt the love they felt the support they saw some movement as far as followers and petition signatures and stuff like that and it was just awesome and today i'm going to be introducing you to another family and we're going to be talking about jessica easterly i have been in contact with jessica's sister audrey for a while now this story is so crazy what this family has been through is insane and should never happen to anyone i honestly don't know how they're still going what they've been through has been traumatizing to say the least but they still continue to fight audrey has fought so hard to get her sister's name out there and i wouldn't know about the case if she didn't contact me but more people need to hear about this one because it's insane and it just happened pretty recently i mean in the last couple of years and not enough people know about it so today is going to be one of those videos where we need active true crime viewers to help us we have a call to action plan and you can actually make a difference by following the steps that i will get to in a little bit or that are already in the description box if you want to just get ahead of the game but before i get into jessica's case i wanted to quickly let you guys know that i have a new campaign launching with new merch for her justice i'm really excited about this we've worked on this for the last couple of months and i'm so happy with how everything turned out so this is a collab with stickers they are a really cute small sticker company and they did some designs for us actually that we printed and put on some merchandise as well this campaign is inspired by the work that her justice does to shift the power so her justice works with women in new york city who are in poverty 100 of their clients are living in poverty and 80 of them are survivors of intimate partner violence which we will be talking about today also 71 of their clients are mothers and 61 of their clients were born outside of the us they offer legal help to these women in need who have nowhere to turn and they even have a legal helpline they offer legal advice legal information and referrals brief services for example drafting documents required by court and they offer volunteer attorney representation in court free of charge i love that her justice is a small organization who's making a big impact and i'm telling you that you can feel good about your donation to her justice because they are putting every cent to work and 100 of the profit from this collection is going directly to her justice in the work that they're doing so check it out there's a link below it is on sale now it is going to be limited edition so if you want it get your hands on it it is pre-order so be patient it may take a little while to get to you but that's just because i don't know how many people are going to want one it's so hard for me to predict with these charity campaigns but if you would just like to check out her justice i'll leave their website below as well as our donation team page so you can donate directly there if you're not interested in the merchandise okay now let's get into jessica easterly's case so jessica was born on august 17 1976 in mississippi she was delivered by her own grandfather who was a doctor dr clay easterly her parents names are donna and lloyd and when she was younger she had an infant brother named clay who was named after their grandfather but unfortunately they lost him when he was only an hour old that was really hard on their family but that made them cherish jessica even more and she was a very loved child everyone in the family said she was constantly bringing joy into their lives she had a huge smile gorgeous smile that really lit up a room as a baby she was healthy happy and pretty easy jessica also grew up with her two sisters amanda and audrey who goes by audra sometimes and she also spent a lot of time with her cousins who were just like siblings to her and they would all spend time together at their grandparents home they were very very close with their grandparents she and her sisters were raised mostly in ocean springs in a town just across from biloxi bay in mississippi and growing up her family says that she was full of life i mean she was a little leo so that does not surprise me but she's described as being witty smart and very active she also was funny she was described as having a really good sense of humor and also a good imagination jessica was friendly she had friends from all walks of life she was funny she was especially quick with her jokes she loved to cook she was great at fashion she could put any two pieces of clothing together and make something phenomenal she loved music especially 80s she also had a penchant for rap music jessica was probably the funniest person you you would ever meet she had a lightning fast wit no matter what you were talking about she would come right back something so funny it like if you talk to her on the phone you would spend the whole time laughing and like betty white level wit just quick quick quick and funny um she was the type of girl that really liked to just sit around in your pjs and watch movies together and cook and and have just the most chill time and laugh and when she was growing up she was really into dancing she loved performing arts she loved to play outdoors and spend time with her dogs she was a huge animal lover and she also had an insatiable love for reading and jessica had a really good childhood she was very loved had both of her grandparents very close to her her grandma would teach her how to cook her grandpa spent tons of time with her and all the other grandkids she loved her parents and they supported everything that she did she was involved in many activities and had a lot of friends she loved holiday traditions she loved marilyn monroe and she loved the color purple our parents married whenever i was about nine and jessica was about 12. so growing up with that age difference we were basically big sister little sister relationship about a year after i graduated from high school is whenever i moved in with her and that's whenever we became close and she was one of my best friends so after high school jessica went to the university of south alabama and she graduated with a degree in audiology and speech pathology and as an adult jessica's friends and family said that she was just as upbeat and lively as she was when she was a kid jessica was always up for adventure and had a real spark of life to her she made friends super easily and was very loyal to the friends that she had so her parents actually separated when she was young and her mom got remarried and she really liked her stepdad as well and his name is rick schmidt he was around for many years when jessica was younger i'm not sure when exactly he entered the picture but he was very close with her and she was very close with him so eventually jessica meets this guy named justin derning jr and it's apparently love at first sight jessica had actually written about this and talked about how she met him on a boat and when she first got on the boat she was like with a group of friends she saw him they locked eyes and she couldn't keep her eyes off him it was you know one of those situations where she didn't want to stare but she couldn't stop and she noticed he was doing the same thing and they connected that night and she said it was just kind of love at first sight so eventually in 2002 she moves to new orleans to be with justin and they actually get married in 2015. when jessica told me she was marrying justin i was honestly happy for her i thought to myself good she found the one that's going to make her happy for the rest of her life but even though she had moved to a different state she stayed very close with her friends and her family she was constantly talking to her mom and her two sisters audrey and amanda and also would always stay in touch with her friend maria they were super super close the two of them had actually been friends for over 20 years and they'd helped each other through a bunch of highs and lows it sounds like from interviews i've heard with maria so their bond was incredibly close maria said that it was one of those friendships where no matter how much time had passed since they had last seen each other that when they did get together it was just like old times it was easy and they would always stay in contact you know they never let that slip now her friends and family definitely had some concerns about justin from the beginning none of them were ever really close to him in any way and we'll get more into that he just seemed a little like trying too hard to be personable but it wasn't a natural thing there was an incident when i was getting my kids buckled into the car where my oldest son who was two or three at the time he held out his little hand to justin um and he said i hurt my finger or my finger hurts i don't know what he had done to it um and justin whipped out a pocket knife and flipped it open and was like let me just cut it off for you which i i guess he thought he was being funny but to my very small child this wasn't funny like he was very alarmed and and cried a lot about it and another thing to know about justin is he has a daughter and her name is gracie she was very close with jessica from what i understand and jessica loved her too and she loved being a stepmother so over time things started to fall apart with jessica and justin and there are a lot of questions here that we're just not gonna have the answers to because jessica's not here to tell us but it seems like a lot of their life was kind of secretive their friends and family only knew so much about what was going on but jessica was telling her friends that justin was being physically abusive to her specifically she was telling maria and really confiding in her and maria was supporting her and kind of coaching her because maria has mentioned in interviews that she has been through a similar situation seemed like just mental abuse at first and i i think that's emotional and mental abuse are always the first steps in a relationship like that anyway if she was doing anything he didn't like it was just just chaos and and fighting and and and just a very tumultuous situation in the household she was always reluctant to be very forthcoming because she really wanted her marriage to work and she knew that the more she revealed the more she couldn't fix it if things got better in my eyes so she was always trying to save face more than she was trying to save herself which is very unfortunate but she never wanted anybody to view um the relationship as bad she always wanted to have the fairy tale so when things got really bad it was really hard for her to be open about it but she eventually did tell me that um he was doing things to her in her sleep and when she was asleep she had been given too many pills or was unable to wake up for whatever reason so she was asleep in a way that she could not control and and she said he was doing things to her that she did not um agree to while she was sleeping and no one was really close with justin it didn't seem like he had any fans out of her friends and family they were concerned audra was very concerned about justin that her sister was being controlled and she made it clear several times that she didn't like him that she felt worried about him and he eventually cut communication for the two of them he was constantly looking over what they were doing and if they did talk he would want to listen in on the conversations they would have to be on speakerphone so that's the type of guy he was he was incredibly controlling and we're gonna go through some of jessica's text messages today and when you hear them you're gonna understand exactly what this guy was like so this is a message that jessica had sent maria before she disappeared and to give context to this message basically maria was going to be coming down her way because one of her children had a cheer competition and she was like oh maybe we can stay with you and justin and jessica said yeah apparently justin said yeah too like we have plenty of room you can come stay with us this guy was very hot and cold he would sometimes say certain things and then go back on it apparently he wigged out right before they were supposed to come and this is her message trying to explain that to her it says hey i need to talk to you about this weekend i'm hiding in the bathroom right now so justin doesn't hear me we've been fighting like fighting for the past three days about everything he's threatening to kick me out put me in jail he's hit me it's bad he told me you guys can't come or it's gonna be worse for me low which is what she calls maria i'm so sorry i know it's last minute i feel awful i don't know what to do i can recommend somewhere else that's reasonable like a b on the canal we used to stay there a lot and then she writes low i'm scared so after hearing that message obviously it really paints a picture for what was going on what jessica was dealing with how she felt she was clearly incredibly frightened and worried and knew that something could happen to her and from what maria has said basically it seemed that jessica was wanting to leave and would tell justin i'm gonna leave her first concern was that she would never get to see grace again her stepdaughter and her second concern was she wouldn't be able to provide for herself which i'm not sure why she felt that way because she was on disability so she had steady income he made it clear to her that if she left she could never come back and he threatened according to her obviously i never heard him threaten her he's always trying to be charming in front of me but according to her there were threats that if she ever left he would use all of his resources and by resources he he claims to have all these special ops friends in the military that could just like hunt her down and track and trace all of any kind of financial electronic data cell phone records all of that sort of thing that he would hunt her down and kill her if she tried to leave according to her and so if she was gonna leave it had to be like the great escape where she would like have a burner phone if any at all and have to do everything cash and she was really afraid that her disability check being deposited into account would make her findable no matter where she went and she would have to go really really far to get away from him before jessica met justin she was a very independent girl she always kind of seemed to have her stuff together she wasn't the sort of person that really tolerated a whole a whole lot from from her partners she was she was quick to say this isn't working out and and move on that was the hardest part about her being with justin is seeing a very very quick shift from that very independent-minded very outgoing girl to someone who's whose light was actively dimming so it seems like jessica was possibly planning to leave in fact her friends and family all believe that she was planning to leave justin and that she may have been executing the plan they believe that she had a breaking point in the marriage and she knew she could not stay with him that she feared for her life it seemed like she had finally accepted that she deserved better and was ready to make the move obviously domestic violence situations are not easy to leave some people may not understand that i mean you could never really understand unless you've been in that situation but she felt trapped and she was also so worried that she wouldn't be able to see her stepdaughter again she loved gracie she was like a mother to her so the idea of losing her was scary and sad so that brings us to august 12 2019 and something i want to note before we continue is around this time according to her stepdaughter gracie jessica was possibly cleaning the house like deep cleaning the house and this information is from maria she said eventually justin cut off communication with her and gracie so she can't talk to her anymore but she said that gracie said that she was cleaning a bunch and maria said that that kind of made her think maybe she was preparing to possibly leave because sometimes when you leave situations like that you want to do a deep clean kind of get your ducks in a row make sure you're ready you have everything that you need because you may never come back and she thinks that jessica may have been putting her plan to leave justin in action but on august 12th something clearly happened that gave jessica the urgent need to leave her house she called maria and maria missed the call she actually missed it three times she called like three times in a row and she called her back in just a few minutes and when she did connect with her jessica sounded exhausted and panicked and said that she needed a ride that she needed to leave the house and she said she needed this ride right now but the problem is maria was over two hours away from her maria is also a mom she has young kids and she had no one to look after them and she was very concerned to take them with her and bring them possibly into a dangerous situation logistically there was no way for me to get her on on that monday afternoon and also get my kids from school in time so she kind of calmed jessica down and she promised her that she would get to her the next morning like just get through the day and i will be there in the morning and i said what about your stuff and she said well i don't know he's not gonna let me leave with any of it i'm gonna have to go back and get it at some point with somebody and i suggested she needed to call the police and she was like well maybe i can just pack a few things and i don't know i'll have to figure it out and i said okay well i'll come get you tomorrow morning but you have to be willing to get in the car and go as soon as i get there her plan was the next morning to drop her kids off at school and then head straight to jessica but then that next morning her and jessica talked on the phone jessica was actually at the doctor's office with gracie and she was able to step out in the hallway for a second and make this call she called me and she was like you know i just need to see what happens when i get home he's had a chance to sleep now i'll just i'll let you know and i said okay and we got off the phone so that evening jessica's going home and the last message that she sends maria says this okay just hang on i don't know what's gonna happen when i get home and then that whole night maria does not hear from jessica and then the next morning she starts calling her trying to get a hold of her texting her and she hears nothing back she wasn't sure what to do and she thought it was possible that justin was just keeping her phone from her or she couldn't talk while he was around something like that so then she doesn't hear anything until 9pm the following night the 14th she gets a message from jessica's facebook account from justin and it says is jess with you grace and i are worried and of course maria's immediately panicked now she knows something probably happened so she frantically starts typing back to justin trying to get some more information out of him and here is their conversation i think it's very telling so i want to go through it so he says is jess with you grace and i are worried if so that's fine we just don't know where she is and grace can't handle stress like this right now maria says no she's not when was the last time that you spoke to her he says about noon today and she left everything here keys car id money and he puts a bunch of question marks maria says what about her phone he says here too effing weird worried she's never done this i have no idea checked everything and everyone i know question mark question mark she says okay well i'm sending the police over there to which he says okay you're going to freak grace out but question mark question mark question mark question mark to which she says if jonathan came home from work and all my stuff was here and the kids didn't know where i was he would already be talking to police to which he responds i know how to file a missing person's report do you think i hurt her or something police can't do anything until 24 hours she's an adult i'm checking hospitals and jails now called hospital in both jails but not at any of them called police and missing persons is 24 hours after last scene to file a report i have got to be missing something i'm going full out on social media and every other asset i have to find if my wife is safe i have a child throwing up that needs to know her mom is okay here is the missing person's report if you know where she is and that she's okay i would appreciate you telling me before all the world knows our personal problems this is really messing grace up and then maria says this if she left because you're an to her i'm 100 supportive of her doing that the problem that i'm having is is i'm the person that she would call and i haven't heard from her since monday so either some random person in this big dangerous city you live in has taken my friend or you lost your because she was trying to leave from my point of view but honestly i can't even name one single other friend she has left it doesn't make sense that she would leave and not tell me something and he says back you're right as always it's all about you thanks for helping her and us in this and she says don't even if i hear anything from her i'll be sure to let you know that she's safe for grace's sake and he says plenty human of you and the whole thing about having to wait 24 hours to file a police report is not true someone tells you this it's incorrect information and maria even called the police station to confirm this and while i was on the phone with the police he was saying oh i know i know how to file a missing persons um do you think i did something to her i was like i haven't said that why would you immediately jump to that and he said well i can't file a missing person's report for 48 hours and i read that out loud to the dispatcher and she was like that's not true and then it started to sink in for her that my alarm was was probably well-founded and that somebody needed to go out there and and check on jessica jessica's friends and family at this point were extremely worried and knew that something had to have happened because jessica would not have just left like this and you know like maria said she would have at least told her even if she did decide to just go start a new life she would have told her so they know that something's got to be wrong here she's not okay there's no way that jessica is out there and just not letting us know that she's okay friday went by no response saturday no response sunday evening i finally got in touch with a different person a different call taker at the third district so she was able to impress upon detectives that i was not going away anytime soon and had them call me and they went out to check on jessica assuming that she was home and just no longer allowed to communicate with me because i was making a scene on social media it was just right from the beginning um very unmotivated and dismissive of this as a whole and of my concerns um for her well-being dispatch sent out two patrol cars um to just do a wellness check on jessica and they showed up i've watched the video for that he was acting very nervous trying to talk about his dog and his dog being trained and trying to be very jovial and then trying to name drop that he had buddies at the police station none of which is relevant to his wife missing so the police were very suspicious and rightfully so but here's here's my concern he was not even worried about this until her friend from out of state sent officers over here to look for her to make sure she was okay that's what prompted him no he's he's really not it doesn't like he's just world nonchalant like oh uh you know i have the officers come to the polk street side they're uh they're my my dad and my daughter are sleeping i don't want to wake them up but then when we get here he's like do you guys need to do this in the car or do you want to come in you can come look through the house if you want you know he's just being like really weird about it she says when she doesn't take her medication like she has mental problems uh that she gets like severe depression but it doesn't make her active it makes her go sleep inside but right if she got bad enough with depression maybe you know right he is just explaining himself to death didn't you get that feeling yeah oh he really explained he was like i'm sorry if i seen the yeah and he said i'm sorry if i seem sketchy this is just all weird to me and he's just constantly trying to and he's just like over explaining everything like is there any place that she would go hang out is really tomorrow that she goes to or or the only friends that we really have or in north carolina um you know we have keller and analog but i mean he's the first person i called they relayed to the police department precinct whatever that they needed to send somebody out again to investigate the fact that she was missing because the welfare check had been performed she was not there now she was missing and so i guess this procedure that that has to be called in and then sent back out so the report was filed at about 2am on the 15th so a few days later is actually jessica's 43rd birthday and her friends and family are just devastated that she's not there so i created a missing poster for her on her birthday and published it on social media and um in an effort to just get some traction get some attention get the word out so that if she was somewhere hiding safe which i really didn't have a lot of hope that she was that she would see it and at least contact me to calm me down and call me off so that um she could go and disappear and do her thing and escape her situation the police work in this one is beyond upsetting truly like this should piss you off if it doesn't i don't know what to tell you but eventually jessica's family just decided to go down to new orleans and try to find her themselves because they didn't feel like justin was doing anything they didn't feel like the police were doing enough so they wanted to take matters into their own hands so her family goes down there and they bring one of their cousins named doug and doug goes with them so that he can talk to detectives because he kind of knows what to ask and understands all of this a little better we went to project nola to go see if we had seen the car going anywhere or jessica walking around but there was nothing then we decided to go to her neighborhood and scout out places for a future search party so as they're driving around the neighborhood they have the windows down and they're about two and a half blocks from jessica's house when they notice a bad smell the smell of a decaying body which doug is familiar with and they follow the scent and that is when we found jessica that's right her family found her body near her house almost like police didn't even look this is near the interstate 610 underpass they get out of the car and as soon as they see this body laying there they realize that it's jessica she was in this wooded area right in city park just lying in the open this is at the end of a dead-end corner there's a bunch of trees kind of like right before the woods start she was right there just lying in front of the trees i can't imagine what that moment was like for their family what it was like for audra when she realized that that was her sister lying there and this is like a week after she went missing and they had to call the police and let them know we literally found our family member's body because you couldn't it was chaotic there was 15 20 cops there i had never seen so many cops my whole life and she was so close to home and wasn't even hidden like wasn't buried it's odd that they didn't find her it doesn't make any sense you know there are cases out there where it's next to impossible to find the body or someone literally got rid of it to the point where you cannot find it but in this situation where she's literally just lying on the grass near her home it's so frustrating to hear about this and one thing that stands out is whenever the lieutenant was talking to a homicide detective we heard him say that this is a homicide and it's possible that they even broke her rib when they moved her although i want to clarify that the family does not believe that's what the broken rib is from we'll get more into that so the coroner arrives to the scene and they take her body to the orleans parish coroner's office and at this point her body is not confirmed to be jessica and even though her family felt like this was her recognize some of her clothing you know they have to confirm that it is with dna and her body was so decomposed because she's lying out in the sun in new orleans in august for like a week so they start an investigation right and they talked to justin and he told them several different stories and there's not a lot of information about what exactly he told them but his timeline for when she left the house kept changing and at one point he even suggested that she went to a psychiatric hospital had left a house to go there when jessica first went missing i tried to give justin the benefit of the doubt i wanted to hear his side of the story because i had only heard maria sighed i called no answer and to this day he still has not contacted me so the police seem to be getting nowhere with the case not getting anywhere with justin and jessica's family had so many questions i mean how did her body get there was her body there the whole time did someone put her there how did they miss her in their initial search did they even search the neighborhood we have no idea and some of the neighbors have said that they never saw police presence in that area around that time so my guess is no so their family at this point is stuck just waiting and they're waiting for them to even identify her body as jessica because the police tell them that they cannot start the investigation until they even confirm that it's her even though we had identified jessica at the scene they said that they needed dna evidence from my mom just in case if this ever went to court and the process of identifying jessica was painfully slow for the family first of all it took over a week after she was first found for the police to mail a dna swab of jessica's mother's dna to the new orleans police department for comparison and then for a while they just didn't hear anything they were supposed to be identifying her but during all this time she's just in the morgue it took us forever to get an official id on her body so they can't lay her to rest they can't even confirm that it's her imagine what that would be like and during all this time justin never called jessica's parents which is so bizarre i can't imagine josh not calling my parents if i was missing he would be on the phone within hours of me being gone with my parents it takes him until september 2nd to call her family finally justin calls her parents and talks to them and i'm not sure what that conversation was like i mean her family definitely had their ideas of what had happened justin has not one time shared her missing poster but the day her body was found he was telling oh she committed suicide i'm just ready to heal and move on from this and just trying to really put it behind him so then over a month goes by without a single word from detectives and their family this whole time is under the impression that they're in the process of identifying jessica so that they can start the investigation but then as if they haven't been through enough in october they find out that the new orleans police department was sent the dna sample from her mother and that they put it on someone's desk and that was the last time that any of them had seen it the reason why the autopsy took so long was because they misplaced the dna and they kept bumping jessica for other cases and it's really depressing to hear this kind of thing that this stuff actually does happen you know you'd think that if something happened to you you'd hope that the police are going to make identifying your body a top priority and not just throw dna on desks willy-nilly and just lose things hearing that police departments lose evidence is so maddening and it happens so often so they had to get another sample from her mother and send that in they weren't able to get confirmation that this was jessica's body until november 8th the coroner confirmed that a body found a couple of blocks away belonged to jessica the positive id in this case took more than two months this thing would not have taken as long as it has it should not laid in the new orleans sun for a week and a half before her body was found she shouldn't be dead right now my family's devastated they lost a cousin a sister a daughter and if that's not bad enough it then took the coroner two months to say what her cause of death was and on january 15 2020 the coroner came back with undetermined which is not what their family wanted to hear but now that the autopsy was done her body can be released to her next of kin and because she was married that person is justin and justin was apparently dealing with things in other ways because about a week after this he's in a bar and scares some woman so bad that he is detained for a 24 hour observation and get this this woman's name is also jessica he had been staring at this woman he eventually went up to her told her that his wife was also named jessica and that she had committed suicide and then tells her that he would like her to take her clothes she said that he was just acting crazy and her and her co-worker actually called the police because they had heard about justin from this case and on that same day while justin is busy with all of that audra and jessica's stepfather are doing everything they can to move everything forward so they met up with the new orleans police department in person to have a chat with them and when they meet with them they are told that jessica's case is a cold case that there is no further information or evidence there's no new leads the investigation is stalled and normally this doesn't happen for quite a while i mean it was a pretty fresh case to be determining it a cold case already obviously they were very disappointed and everything felt even more bleak when the coroner's report came back at the end of january and it turns out that jessica had a broken rib which the police claim is from them moving her after they found her but we don't know she also had an injury to her nose and had a linear fracture in her jaw but her most significant injury was a broken vertebra specifically the c4 vertebra which is near the base of your neck it's part of the midsection of the cervical spine and an injury to the cervical vertebra is the most severe type of spinal cord injury this vertebra has nerves that run to the diaphragm and control breathing and if someone survives breaking this they are likely to suffer paralysis and may need to be on a ventilator for the rest of their lives some people get injuries to their c4 when they get in car accidents like a quick jerk but it can also be caused by choking strangulation so when it comes to her toxicology report apparently they weren't able to run that many tests because of her advanced stage of decomposition all they could test was liver tissue and it did come back with traces of methamphetamine and bupropion but they can't confirm that jessica had even taken these recently now there has been a lot of speculation about what drugs jessica possibly could have been taking at the time jessica had fibromyalgia and it's basically i have it too it's weird it's just body pain all over it feels different at different times and it can be unbearable at times and so jessica was prescribed medication for that obviously those medications can be very addicting and they can also make you feel very drowsy and tired so according to her friends who have contacted some of justin's previous wives which he's had multiple ex-wives they have claimed that justin really liked to take a bunch of different pills that he really liked uppers so jessica's friends believe that it's possible justin was giving her stimulants like adderall or something to counteract the medication that she was taking but because she was so decomposed there's no way to really know how much she was taking on that day or if it was affecting her in any type of way and because of this the coroner can't rule out a drug-related death so that's still kind of on the table but jessica's friends and family are convinced that there was foul play they were really frustrated that the manner of death is listed as undetermined because of that c4 injury that could have been caused by strangulation and the broken rib so meanwhile word had spread around the area that jessica lived in lakeview that there could be a killer on the loose that someone could have just randomly attacked jessica and people were really freaked out everything seems to be hush hush the police don't know anything the neighborhood is very upset about it and we would really like some answers as to what happened to our neighbor and then after a little while someone in the neighborhood actually found more evidence that the police had missed they found a blanket and jessica's id which was all crumpled up and had a little tear at the bottom so they call jessica's sister audra and she calls police to let them know to go over to this person's house and collect the evidence and talk to them she doesn't hear anything so a week later she calls this couple that found the id in the blanket and police never contacted them they never did anything with this so it had become increasingly clear to their family that the police just did not do a thorough investigation if any investigation at all it seems like they were missing all the major evidence the fact that they missed her body they were losing dna it's like they just didn't care it was almost like they were sabotaging the case when we were growing up we were always taught that if you need help to ask the police so the way this case has been handled from the beginning is heartbreaking it's an injustice it is a slap in the face we shouldn't have to fight the justice system to get justice for our loved ones so on april 14th audra decided to file a formal complaint because they felt like they were failing to investigate jessica's death and i completely agree and of course for the next several months she would try calling to get an update on the complaint at least and she would hear absolutely nothing she could never get a hold of anybody so finally on august 6 the public integrity bureau confirms that they had started an investigation into the nopd's handling of jessica's case and this is just unbelievable but that couple that had found the blanket in the id were not contacted by police until september 1st this is 170 days after they reported these items to a detective they still don't know how long her id was laying on the ground they don't know if they even searched the area and one of the worst parts about this case was how long jessica's body was in the morgue during all this time she's still in the morgue justin never picked her up her family was desperately trying to get in touch with him for months and he just wasn't replying so then in late october somebody threw out a headboard and a futon in front of jessica's house from inside the house so crime scene investigators surprisingly actually went to the scene and collected some evidence from it these items had been in jessica's room and they were put outside for a donation pickup and of course they found this really odd and with their experience so far dna testing takes a long time with these people so they were hoping it would come back by maybe the end of the year but by this last christmas eve of 2020 jessica's body was still in the morgue it had been there for 490 days and the results of that dna testing from those items outside the house had still not come back so obviously her family feels stuck they feel like the police investigation is going nowhere that it doesn't seem like they even want to solve this case and that's how it looks so her friends and family are left to try to raise awareness and figure out what really happened to jessica and get her the justice she deserves and they have done an excellent job of raising awareness her sister audrey is so so tough she is not going to stop until she gets justice and i think it's amazing what she's doing but there is one huge part of this that we just have to talk about i know people are going to look into it anyway and i think it's important so justin and jessica were actually in the adult entertainment industry they were doing cam videos jessica did this under the name vivian or viv and justin did it under the name lance anderson they had built up a little you know fan base that was watching them as these characters and these characters had kind of whole storylines to them as well and it sounds like her family did not know about this you know it's her private life whatever she doesn't need to tell them but her friend maria kind of knew that it was going on but she didn't know she had never seen it before she didn't actually understand what was happening but she knew that jessica was doing this i remember joking with her i was like i wonder if i could sell videos of my feet like if somebody wants to be a weirdo and look at my feet like i i can make peace with that like i could sit here and adjust my claims and take videos of my feet and like if somebody wants to pay me like pay me so i mean i never followed through with that but that was like that was our little running joke so that's another thing it's quite possible if she left justin she'd be losing her livelihood because he kind of put all this together and put it out there he convinced jessica that he had a vpn and this is not how a vpn works right we know this he convinced her that he had a vpn that was blocking her content her adult content from popping up in certain states like where her friends and family were so that no one would know that she was doing this on the side and even after jessica was found justin continued posting from the two of them continued sharing her pictures and video content after he knew she was dead all over this page he was right away in communication with some girl from the porn industry and sharing you know kind of salacious messages back and forth with her and ready to move on just ready to heal and move on and then eventually in november remember she died in august he announces that she died to all of their followers and then in december of 2019 he creates two different gofundmes clearly trying to make money off of jessica's death after all of this the first one that he made is for jessica derning which is his name her maiden name is easterly but the second one was for vivian for her memorial services literally for the character that they were putting out online luckily the fundraiser only raised about 140 bucks before it was closed and this is probably one of the scummiest things i've ever heard when looking into one of these cases but justin put in the description box of vivian's gofundme that people who donated would be promised special exclusive pictures lingerie videos from jessica that she had already pre-recorded and even some of her items such as her shoes he was literally selling her stuff to strangers online after she was dead that's what he was spending his time doing then it turns out that justin has been arrested in the past for unrelated charges such as assault unlawful possession of a firearm contributing to the delinquency of a minor a probation violation and some domestic violence thrown in there as well also it seems like he has a history of lying of course he's innocent until proven guilty i have to say that this is alleged but according to her family and friends justin has also lied about his background in the military and it's impossible to find anything about this guy and what he does online but it seems as if he has been saying for a long time that he has this extensive military background and knows all these people and that's what he used to scare jessica with is like i know all these people so you'll never get away from me whatever but it turns out when they tracked down his ex-wives they confirmed that he never was in the military at all and in fact one of them said he never even made it to enrolling in boot camp so who knows the truth about this guy but with all of that he's never been named a suspect in her death and the house that they were all living in justin's father also lived in and justin owned half of this house he like inherited from his mom or something but his father was also living there at the time of jessica's disappearance and he's never been questioned also the detectives never even searched their house or her vehicle so of course we got to talk about other theories here there is a possibility that jessica could have been being stalked i mean you've got to kind of consider it when she did have all these fans online it's possible that someone was kind of obsessed with her and sought her out but with the timeline of everything this seems incredibly unrealistic also the suicide theory which justin seems to be really pushing in fact he had told that woman in the bar that his wife had committed suicide and the coroner did find drugs in her system there was no way to know when she took them and what did she just take a bunch of pills and then go out and lay down near her house outside it just makes no sense right the detectives at the new orleans third district police department tried to say that maybe she wandered off in the woods and caused those injuries to herself i then said even after death what about those injuries of course there is the possibility that jessica was in the wrong place at the wrong time maybe she was walking around and happened to run into some type of predator seems like other things are more likely so as for latest updates jessica's body was finally released from the morgue to her family in february at that point jessica's body had been in the morgue for 530 days i've never heard anything like this and this was because justin just straight blew off picking her up the coroner didn't hear from him for months like he didn't even care and he just left her in the morgue forever her family just recently was able to get her out of the morgue um due to lack of contact and and he tried to raise funds to bury her and then never went and collected her remains or did anything whatsoever finally they were able to have a small burial for her on february 16th and her loved ones were you know able to say goodbye and eventually they're gonna have like a celebration of life service for jessica you know once things calm down after covid but as of right now they are still waiting on those forensic results from the dna swabs they took from the headboard and the futon in front of jessica's house that was collected in october 2020 and here we are over six months later we still have nothing as far as i know as of today there's nothing going on with jessica's case it is nothing more than a box full of files collecting dust on a shelf somewhere jessica's friends and family have vowed to not stop fighting for her until they get the justice that jessica deserves and if you have been moved by this story i invite you to be an active true crime viewer by taking a few steps to help jessica's family today and they're easy so first of all this case will obviously be updating and changing over time hopefully so you can stay updated on jessica's case by following her twitter account that her family runs or you can also stay up to date by visiting justice justiceforjessica.org that's four like number four and their family also uses justice for jessica as their hashtag for the case so you can stay up to date that way then we also have a petition going that will be linked below please just take a minute to sign it i promise it takes less than a minute honestly takes a second of your day if you had time to watch this whole video you should have time to take a quick second to sign this and if you want to really go above and beyond you can participate in our calling and emailing campaign which is super easy to do and it will make the most impact because we're going to be contacting the new d.a who was just appointed in january his name is jason r williams and we're going to ask him to look into the investigation and death of jessica easterly it's that simple let me just show you guys how easy this is all right i understand some people like emailing i'll have like a little email easy below that you can just copy paste or if you want to make this call the numbers below super easy i think it's after hours but i'll just leave a message hi this message is for district attorney jason r williams my name is kendall i am calling about jessica easterly derning's case i'm asking that you look into the investigation and her death as there are a lot of unanswered questions and their family really needs help i would really appreciate it see it's that easy and these calling and emailing campaigns really make a difference you guys like if we come together we can get some things done for this family and for jessica because they deserve answers jessica deserves justice this case just tore my heart apart so again i'll put all that information below you can follow justice for jessica you can sign the petition and you can make a short phone call and an email it's gonna make a huge difference i think that what i would like everyone to remember about jessica's case is the injustice she wasn't important enough she got put on the back burner and still is to this day she was a human being she loved and she had a life and it got taken away from her but that is going to be it for me today guys i hope you found this case interesting i hope it made you as angry as it made me thank you to everyone in advance for the kind comments only about jessica and to her family please just leave comments of support i don't want to see anything else i know that's what you're thinking it is the internet but hey i gotta try but that is gonna be it for me guys i will be back next week with a very exciting update on a case that i've covered before i'm sure a lot of you guys already know what it is but until then have a great week stay safe out there and i will see you next time you

Channel: Kendall Rae

Views: 3,684,594

Keywords: kendallraeonyt, kendallrae, kendall rae, true crime, crime, crime documentaries, criminal justice, news

Id: ApwR1DWsKEo

Length: 52min 50sec (3170 seconds)

Published: Mon May 03 2021