It was Sunday, November 4th, 2001, when fourteen-year-old Joseph Stillwell Middle School student Jennifer Medernach told her mother that she and a friend were planning to walk to a convenience store near their neighborhood on the West side of Jacksonville, Florida.
The pair of friends set out, but Jennifer never returned. At first, her mother wasn’t alarmed, as Jennifer would sometimes stay with friends for long periods without informing her mother where she was. Besides that, Jennifer had a minor argument with her mother earlier on the day she disappeared, though there was no indication that she planned to run away.
Finally, though, on the 5th, Jennifer’s mother became concerned enough to report her daughter missing.
On November 8th, the teenager’s nude body was discovered floating face down in the shallows of Long Branch Creek along County Road 217. She had been stabbed multiple times. Authorities believe she was killed in her home county of Duval, then dumped in northwestern Clay County where she was found.
In 2002, law enforcement announced they were investigating the possibility that suspected serial killer Richard Evonitz had murdered Jennifer. Evonitz was being pursued by police in late June of 2002 in connection with the kidnapping and rape of a teenage girl in South Carolina, but he shot himself before he could be apprehended.
Though there was no concrete evidence that Evonitz had been in the Duval County area at the time of Jennifer Medrnach’s murder, he had lived in Clay County in the late 1980s while being stationed at the Mayport Naval Station and still had ties to the area. He was further suspected to have perpetrated four murders in Virginia in 1996 and 1997.
In 2015, new DNA evidence came to light that had been obtained from the handle of a hunting knife that had been found near Jennifer’s remains. The blade of the knife was never recovered.
Despite some promising leads, the case went cold and is still unsolved as of this writing.
Crime Immemorial 