Missing woman’s kin sues police to get file

The family of Jennifer Kesse, an Orlando woman who disappeared almost 13 years ago, is suing the Orlando Police Department hoping to get records from her case file.

Kesse’s family have said they want detectives to give them the documents so that, after more than a decade without answers, they can try to conduct their own investigation. They filed the lawsuit Monday.

“We have secured a team of lawyers and investigators; we feel it’s time,” Drew Kesse, Jennifer’s father, said in January. “We have gone through the process of asking for public information, and it comes back completely redacted.”

Spokespeople for the Orlando Police Department declined to comment Tuesday, saying the city hasn’t been formally served yet, and called the case “open and active.”

Kesse, 24, went missing Jan. 24, 2006. She was a University of Central Florida graduate working for Westgate Resorts and living at Mosaic at Millenia, a condo complex on Conroy Road. Police think she was kidnapped when she left for work — when her family got to her condo that afternoon, they found a wet towel and

clothes laid out in the apartment. Kesse’s car was missing.

Police found the car two days later about a mile from her complex. A surveillance camera nearby captured someone parking Kesse’s car and walking away, but police could not identify the person. The camera only snapped a photo every three seconds, and the person’s face was obscured by fence posts in every photo.

Kesse hasn’t been found, and police have not arrested or publicly named any suspects in the case.

As the years went by, Kesse’s parents and brother decided to try to conduct an investigation themselves, the family has said.

On Oct. 2, 2017, an attorney for the Kesse family

filed a public records request asking for documents related to the case, court records show. It took a month for city officials to get back to him. They released one page of a missing-person report and denied the rest of the request on Nov. 3, 2017, claiming the case is still under active investigation, according to records filed with the Kesses’ lawsuit.

The case file is massive: about 14,600 pages kept in 40 binders, plus recordings and other materials, Assistant City Attorney Austin Moore told the Kesses’ attorney in a Nov. 13 email filed with the complaint.

“The detective on the matter said that the entire file is active criminal investigative information,” Michael Kest, another attorney for the Kesses, wrote in the complaint. “They could go through the entire file and redact it at significant cost, but that would likely result in the production of nothing but a pile of mostly blacked out records.”

And even that would cost the family $18,648 to cover the hourly rates of the detective and paralegal going over the documents, according to an email from Moore filed with the Kesses’ complaint. Moore estimated that it would take them 278 hours, or almost seven 40-hour work weeks.

“The Legislature obviously never intended for criminal investigative information to remain exempt indefinitely or it would not have legislated that such information be considered ‘active’ to remain exempt,” Kest wrote.