Kriti Mehrotra
When 34-year-old mother of 3 Joleen Cummings suddenly disappeared from her workplace at Tangles Hair Salon in Yulee, Florida, on May 12, 2018, it left the entire county shaken to the core. ABC’s ’20/20: The Final Cut’ chronicles the case in great detail and highlights how the hairstylist was a family-oriented and responsible person, so it was unimaginable that she would have left everything behind willingly. What came as another shock was when her coworker, Jennifer Sybert (real name Kimberly Kessler), was arrested for murder days later. She was eventually found guilty and sentenced for her crime.
Kimberly Kessler Had Assumed 18 Aliases Over a Period of a Decade
Although Kimberly Kessler was born on May 9, 1968, in Butler, Pennsylvania, she reportedly never had the comfort or support she desired there, which is why she ran away at age 35 in 2004. She actually once told officials that she had fled right after high school and lived under fake names until she started dating a bank robber in Arizona, but a simple inquiry brought the truth to light. It turned out she had skipped her hometown in July 2004, after informing her family that she was relocating to the south for good with a new identity she had taken from a local cemetery.
The identity was later confirmed to be of Jennifer Marie Sybert, a 13-year-old girl who had died in a car crash in Germany back in 1987, so Kimberly believed using her name would be no issue. As per records, her family only reported her missing 8 years later, in 2012, just for local officials to quickly ascertain that she wasn’t a missing person but a woman who left without wanting to be found. Yet, everything turned upside down for her when she was arrested at a rest stop on May 16, 2018, as the documents in her car revealed the extent to which she had gone to conceal her reality. Detectives actually found multiple fraudulent papers, identification cards, and safekeeps that made it clear she had assumed at least 18 different aliases across 33 cities in 14 states since 1996.
Police Gathered Significant Evidence Against Kimberly Kessler in Joleen Cummings’ Murder
When the investigation into Joleen’s case kicked off after she was reported missing by her mother on May 14, 2018, officials quickly figured out that she was last seen at her workplace two days prior. However, it wasn’t until Kimberly (as Jennifer) refused to speak to them after they made the trip to Tangles Hair Salon in Yulee to question all the owners and employees that they became suspicious. According to records, “Jennifer” was likely the last one to see Joleen alive, based on their schedules. Therefore, detectives wanted to have a conversation with her, but she never showed up. That’s because the moment she had heard they were waiting via a courtesy call by the owner, she gave herself the day off before texting that she was quitting and would mail in her key later.
What’s more, “Jennifer” later called the police herself to claim she could not be a part of their investigation because her alleged stalker ex-boyfriend was a hacker and could find her if she was. Her allegations didn’t particularly make sense, but it wasn’t until they received surveillance footage that they were able to confirm that she was hiding her connection to Joleen’s disappearance. The footage showed her dressed in all black, abandoning her coworker’s car in the parking lot of a nearby Home Depot at 1:17 am on May 13 before returning to Tangles to retrieve her own vehicle.
Investigators then also discovered that Jennifer had given her employer a false address and that the salon had significant cleared-up blood residue all across the walls, chairs, cabinets, and sinks. The blood was confirmed to be Joleen’s, immediately pushing them to find her mysterious coworker on the run, to see her sleeping inside her car at a rest stop between two semi-trucks on May 16. That’s when the truth about her real identity came to light, along with additional evidence in the form of Joleen’s blood on the boots, socks, and scissors in the car, as well as in her rental storage unit.
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Kimberly Kessler is Serving Life in Prison
Kimberly was initially taken into custody on the charge of grand theft auto, but when the results of all the forensic tests came out, she was officially indicted on one count of first-degree murder. When she was first arrested, she had a large scratch below her left eye that she claimed was from running into a tree branch, yet investigators were certain it had come from a likely scuffle with Joleen. Nevertheless, it still took her around 48 hours to admit to them that she was not Jennifer but Kimberly, and then she refused to answer any more questions about Joleen by retaining legal counsel.
It took a few years for Kimberly to stand trial for the charges against her, especially since she was facing life in prison for murder despite the fact that Joleen’s remains have never been found. During her 2021 trial, the prosecutors painted a picture of how her actions on the evening of May 12, 2018, were deliberate because she was afraid of her coworker figuring out her real identity. They backed this up with statements claiming Joleen had been suspicious about who “Jennifer” really was from the outset, as well as the evidence from the surveillance footage. After all, the latter showed her hurling heavy trash bags into a nearby dumpster behind Tangles Hair Salon on the evening of the incident before going on a late-night Walmart run.
There, Kimberly purchased a few additional 30-gallon trash bags, cleaning gloves, an electric carving knife, and a bottle of ammonia/bleach, and then returned to the salon for a few more hours. It was then that she seemingly abandoned Joleen’s car. The fact that Kimberly had looked up “coworker guilty of murder missing person body not found” two weeks before that fateful day, and Joleen’s name 457 times in 48 hours after that day, didn’t help her case either. In the end, after less than an hour of deliberations, the jury found Kimberly guilty of murder, following which she was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole in 2022. The convict has since tried appealing her case several times, but to no avail, so today, at the age of 57, she remains incarcerated at the mixed-security Lowell Correctional Institution in Marion County, Florida.
