What happened to college student Jennifer Kairis?

Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, is a small liberal arts college designed to feel like a sanctuary. “We used to call it the Country Club because it’s on a lake and it’s just beautiful,” former student Shannon O’Grady recalls. Accident, suicide or murderin episode 4 of season 5. The peace was shattered when the popular and beautiful student Jennifer Kairis was found dead in her dorm room.

Kairis was studying theater and had a new friend, Paul, who was a member of the school’s Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity.

When she missed her morning class on March 31, 1998, her best friend Shannon knew immediately that something was wrong. “It wasn’t like her to skip class,” she said.

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The crime scene

After spending the whole day asking friends about her whereabouts and Kairis’ When Shannon no longer recognized her parents (who were also desperately trying to reach her), she took matters into her own hands and asked the student RA (resident assistant) to unlock her door with his master key. It was 9:30 p.m.

Attorney Carlos Barcia remembered that terrible night on Accident, suicide or murder“I knew immediately that something was wrong. I felt it,” he said through tears.

Kairis’ body was lying on the floor, already stiff, one leg propped up unnaturally on the bed. “I felt like I was spinning,” he said.

Winter Park Police Department first responder John Flinn described the chaotic scene. “She was face down and there appeared to be fluid coming out of her mouth. I believe it was blood. She had bruises on her legs. Her skirt was hiked up in the front and her underwear was pushed to the side,” he recalled.

Crime scene photos show a room in disarray, with clothes piled up in the corners and pill bottles on the dresser. Jenn had been prescribed the antidepressant Wellbutrin. But by all accounts, the 19-year-old was not a messy person. “I had the feeling that something had gone wrong here,” said her mother Barbara.

Police immediately suspected attempted molestation and the possibility that she was abusing pills, but the crime scene was so strange that they treated the case as a murder from the start. There was a lot of work to do: using a rape kit, pulling hair for a DNA test, and combing through the mess for clues.

While her body was sent for an autopsy, detectives immediately headed to Rollins College and questioned everyone around her. They soon discovered that she had spent the night partying with friends and ended up at her boyfriend Paul’s fraternity house, where she got into a heated argument with him. He claimed she was so drunk she could barely walk and assigned one of his younger students, Tim, to escort her to her dorm room around 3 a.m. After laying the nearly unconscious student on her bed, Tim noticed “foam or bubbles” coming from her mouth, but according to Detective Flinn, he ran off, leaving the dorm room unlocked.

“Everyone’s memory seems hazy, but they all said she seemed more absent than they had ever seen her. She wasn’t the kind of girl to get drunk… something wasn’t right,” Shannon said.

The mysterious 18-hour window

Kairis was dropped off at her dorm room at 3 a.m. but wasn’t found until 9:30 p.m. That left an 18-hour window in which anything could have happened, especially if the door to her room had been unlocked. Questions swirled: Was it a rape? Had she been given date rape drops or drugs? Did she take anything willingly? Investigators hoped the autopsy and toxicology report would provide answers, but instead they plunged into a deep mystery.

By the end of the investigation in 2004, there were three different reports with three different causes of death. Ultimately, her boyfriend Paul and her fraternity brother Tim were ruled out as suspects.

The manner of death

Accident, suicide or murder met with the medical examiner who had originally worked on the case. Dr. William Anderson found several bruises on her body, including a significant hemorrhage in the neck area. The toxicology report had more surprises: she was not drunk that night. Instead, toxicology tests showed traces of several painkillers and prescription drugs, as well as an oddly high level of the heart medication propranolol. The rape kit results were negative, but as Detective Flinn astutely pointed out to the show’s producers, that doesn’t mean there wasn’t an attempted rape.

“Putting two and two together, it looks like her heart was sensitized by the drugs and she had a neck compression that led to a lack of oxygen for a period of time, which caused the (fatal) cardiac arrhythmia,” concluded Dr. Anderson.

On September 1, 1998, the case was publicly announced as a cold case. But her friend Shannon noted, “It seemed like someone didn’t want it to be a cold case.”

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Three different reports with three different results

Shortly after her death was classified as an unexplained homicide, the Winter Park Police Department requested a full review of the autopsy by their chief medical examiner, Dr. Gore, who disagreed with the findings to date – particularly with one crucial detail in determining murder. At the autopsy, neck trauma was changed from significant bleeding to “minimal bleeding.” Her cause of death was now officially an accidental overdose, and the case was closed in 1999.

“If it was an overdose, where did the marks on her neck come from?” her mother Barbara asked the show’s producers.

Her father John added that the “bruises on her legs were never fully explained.”

“It was highly unusual and probably not good practice to reject a decision without a serious discussion with … the two pathologists from the original autopsy,” said Dr. Anderson. He and the other pathologist had taken several photographs of the neck area to support their findings, but then discovered that all but one had disappeared from the file.

“The bottom line in this case is that she suffered unexplained neck trauma, and that’s why the unexplained disappearance of these photos is a really big problem,” Dr. Anderson said.

Six years later, in January 2004, a reporter from Orlando Sentinel The newspaper took an interest in the case and published a report that pointed to gross mismanagement. The lead investigator kept the rape kit – with many perishable swabs – for ten weeks. A hair found in Kairis’ mouth was never examined. In addition, the lead investigator had never worked on a murder case before and was later dismissed from the police force.

Unfortunately, all files and evidence were destroyed in 2002 after Kairis’ death was ruled an accidental overdose. When the story came to light, Dr. Gore was criticized for errors in autopsies unrelated to the case, and he quickly retired.

From unsolved murder to accidental overdose to suicide?

“It was clear to all of us that this needed to be re-investigated,” Shannon said. After the newspaper report, the Florida Attorney General reopened the case and brought in toxicologist Dr. Bruce Goldberger, who reviewed the findings without the photos of the neck injuries and determined that she had committed suicide by intentional overdose. He assumed that she woke up, took the pills and then locked the door.

Dr. Goldberger suspected that the bruising on her body was caused by cramps, but Kairis’ mother still didn’t believe it. “Where are you going to hit yourself that you have these deep scars on your neck?” she asked the show’s producers.

In 2004, the parents took the case to the office of then-Governor Jeb Bush, who authorized a final review of all three findings. Miami’s Chief Medical Officer agreed with Dr. Goldberger’s assessment that it was a suicide.

“I think a lot of us young women in the arts, dance and theater were a little too critical of how we looked or how well we performed, and Jenn was definitely one of those people,” Shannon said. “She might have seemed like a total extrovert to the rest of the world, but she also had this other side to her that was sad at times, and she didn’t let everyone see that.”

But Shannon added a crucial caveat: She still doesn’t believe Jennifer Kairis committed suicide.

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