ONE BILLBOARD Who killed Jody?
Inspired by the film ‘Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri’, Jenny Carrieri takes her sister’s 1996 murder case public, determined to catch her killer
Born only two minutes apart, Jenny Carrieri and her twin sister Jody were inseparable, sharing clothes, playing lacrosse on the same team and finishing each other’s sentences. So on March 2, 1996, when Carrieri couldn’t get Jody on the phone, she felt an uneasy dread. “It was this disturbing feeling in the pit of my stomach,” Carrieri tells WHO. “I got a really bad feeling.”
Her foreboding turned out to be tragically true: several hours later Jody Lecornu, 23, was found fatally shot behind the wheel of her white Honda Civic, not far from her home in Baltimore where she was a student at Towson University.
In the nearly 23 years since Jody’s murder, her twin sister has agonised over the unsolved case, at times feeling overwhelmed and helpless. But watching Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri changed that feeling. The film, which follows a woman who rents three billboards to call attention to the unsolved case of her daughter’s rape and murder, has given the Easton, Maryland stay-at-home mum of three new hope. Last October, for two months, Carrieri, 46, paid for a billboard about a mile from the crime scene, at the cost of $4900 a month. She displayed her sister’s picture, details of the case and a reward for credible information leading to the killer’s arrest. Despite raising the reward money from US$32,000 to $100,000 after a month, no arrests have yet been made. A Baltimore County police department spokesperson says that the billboard has generated some tips but declines to comment further on the open investigation. Still, the effort makes Carrieri feel like her sister’s case is staying fresh in the minds of everyone who passed the sign. “I loved the movie and the whole billboard idea,” she says. “I related to the main character because my mission is and always has been to keep Jody’s case out there until it’s solved.”
On the night of the murder Jody had been at Baltimore’s Mt. Washington Tavern. Police believe after she left, her killer approached her in her parked car, speaking with her briefly before firing a single shot into her back. Witnesses described a man with a stocky build, wearing a drab or green-coloured army-style coat, fleeing the area in a white BMW, but that man was never identified, and the case went cold. Still, police say they have re-examined evidence and reinterviewed people connected to the case.
“We’re also trying to develop DNA off of some of the items we’d collected from the scene where previously we couldn’t,” says Det. Carroll Bollinger, who heads up the investigation. “We are going over video taken at the time using new technologies.”
Says Mike May, a lawyer and former cop who has investigated the case on his own, pro bono, at Carrieri’s request: “They are doing everything they can be doing.” And so is Carrieri, who will continue to push for answers. “Every time she looks in the mirror,” he says, “she sees her sister.”
For the Lecornu family, every day that goes by without an arrest is difficult. Carrieri – who still sleeps with her sister’s baby blanket – believes that Jody’s murder hastened the death of their father, John, a former prosecutor who succumbed to non-hodgkin’s lymphoma at age 68, in 2007. “He had very little will to live after Jody’s murder,” Carrieri says.
Her mother, Linda Lecornu, 79, is holding out hope Carrieri’s sign will pay off. “The billboard was a wonderful idea,” Linda says. “I’m hopeful it will jar somebody’s memory and bring someone out who maybe wasn’t willing to talk to police before.” It’s a sentiment Carrieri clings to. “I can’t sleep some nights because it hurts so much knowing that the person who took her from us is still walking around,” she says. “Someone knows something.”