JESSICA CHAMBERS (FEBRUARY 2, 1995 TO DECEMBER 7, 2014)

  

Jessica Chambers

(Photo: The Chambers family)

INTERNET SOURCE: http://www.clarionledger.com/story/news/2015/12/05/one-year-later-jessica-chambers-case-far-from-cold/76633118/

One year later: Jessica Chambers case far from cold

Therese Apel, The Clarion-Ledger 8:01 p.m. CST December 5, 2015

Just a year ago, a tiny blonde ex-cheerleader named Jessica Chambers worked at Goody's in Batesville.

The sassy 19-year-old had a dog named Roscoe at the home she shared with her mom, and she was getting ready for Christmas — her favorite holiday. She was like so many other teenage girls.

Dec. 6, 2014, started off like a normal Saturday. After hanging out with friends, Jessica went to the store. She took a nap on the couch. Then she got a phone call and left her house for what would be the last time.

That night, Jessica died a gruesome death, leaving a crater in the world around her.

Just after 8 p.m., Chambers was doused with gasoline and set on fire in her car next to the gate of some private land on Herron Road, under several trees that still bear the burns from the heat of the flames. She got out of the car and was found on the road with burns over most of her body. She was able to give firefighters a name, but after interviewing more than 150 people, authorities still haven't been able to pin it to a specific person.

Her car was burned beyond recognition, with any useful evidence that might have been inside destroyed.

She lived a few more hours, long enough for her family to tell her goodbye. Jessica's mother, Lisa Daugherty, said she was on a ventilator, unconscious and clinging to life until Daugherty told her everyone was there and she could go if she was in pain.

Her family isn't the same. Her friends, her community, the law enforcement on the case — they've all been changed by the labyrinthine investigation that began that night.

'It has tormented me'

"It has been a year that I cannot find the words to express the loss of Jessica. It controls my every thought," Daugherty said. "I have been trying to keep her out in the spotlight. I have fought to remove people from profiting off of her name. My life is, every day, hoping I will wake up and hear my daughter has justice."

  

Ben Chambers and Jessica Chambers 

(Photo: Chambers family)

Jessica's father, Ben Chambers, works at the Panola County Sheriff's Department as a mechanic. He said it almost drives him crazy to be there every day, so close to the investigators who are sorting through the huge amount of information that has been gathered.

"It’s been terrible. There have been so many ups and downs, thinking that they’ve caught them and then we’ve been let down. It has tormented me," Chambers said. "It’s worse on me now than I believe it was when it started. It’s like the longer it goes on the worse it is."

A team of personnel from the Sheriff's Department, the U.S. Attorney's office, the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms, and the district attorney's office work the case daily, officials said. Rarely does a day go by that there's not a sit-down meeting or conference call between at least three or four of them updating the information they have gathered. Resources are constantly available from the FBI and the U.S. Marshals if needed.

Yet there are critics on the street, in the public, on the Internet who say the case has gone cold.

"You consider '48 Hours,' that’s on TV, and when it gets beyond that is when real investigators get to work," said Panola County Sheriff Dennis Darby. "It’s quiet because there’s nothing fresh and new in the news media, but it’s very, very active."

Various resources have been used throughout the investigation, District Attorney John Champion said. Some technological methods have helped narrow down leads, rule out suspects and track Jessica's movements in her last hours. Other techniques and resources have not been so successful, such as the art of criminal profiling.

"We attempted to use the behavioral sciences unit with the FBI, and for what reason I’m not 100 percent certain, but this type of case, according to what we’ve learned, they couldn’t be of help to us," Champion said.

"You look at who is capable of doing this, and a large majority of the population is ruled out, because they’re not capable. But that doesn’t mean that someone who wouldn’t be capable couldn’t start for the first time," he said. "We think we know what type of person did this, but until we actually know who did this, it’s hard to say if our speculations are accurate or not."

Throughout the case, investigators have commented on the fact that despite a $54,000 reward, there's a distinct lack of street chatter or informants passing information to police. Champion said the people who have been questioned have been surprisingly cooperative.

"I’ve worked homicides for 22 years, and typically we have people who don’t want to cooperate or don’t want to talk to us, but we’ve yet to have that in this case. Every single person we’ve decided we wanted to interview, everyone we wanted to polygraph has agreed," Champion said. "We’re building up a DNA database, and everyone we’ve asked for a sample, we haven’t had a single person yet refuse to do any of these things."

  

One year later, Jessica Chambers' grave is adorned with all her favorite things. 

(Photo: Therese Apel/The Clarion-Ledger)

'These guys are perfectionists'

With a lack of talk on the street from early in the case, authorities have said finding Jessica's killer would probably come down to technology. Darby said the investigators leading the case are just the team that will be able to put those electronic puzzle pieces together.

"We’ve got some of the best right here; I’m learning that. Because of them, we’re going to make an arrest. How soon I don’t know because we have to do it right. You can’t mess anything up in something like this," he said. "These guys are perfectionists; they don’t halfway do anything. They get their heads together and work together, and until you can see the team at work, you can’t understand. It hasn’t gotten cold for one second. They wake up in the morning working on this thing."

Champion said the sheer amount of data processed has been hard to fathom.

"We have a tremendously large phone database with close to 20,000 numbers downloaded into our system," he said. "It’s not unusual for people to change phones, and with every phone that we’ve accessed, whether through consent or subpoena, the information we’ve received, we’ve downloaded everything in their systems, whether it's a phone they had before Jessica died, at the time Jessica died or a phone they subsequently have amassed."

Current subpoenas for further phone records, which can take from days to months to get back, will add to those numbers and to the man hours put into sifting through them. Even then, it still may take a lucky tip to break the case.

"We have extremely well-qualified, smart people working on the case, but it basically boils down to even if we had all the technology in the world available to us, the person doesn’t need to be a rocket scientist, but if they don’t use their phone and they don’t use the Internet and they don’t talk, these cases are difficult to solve," Champion said. "Everyone watches all these things on TV, but it’s not like that in the real world."

'We fight together'

"This has been one of the more bizarre cases because we’ve had at least four occasions where we’ve said, ‘We've got this case solved,’ and then when we actually start following up on it, it all falls apart," Champion said. "Our hopes have been really high on so many occasions to be let down when it didn’t pan out like we thought it was going to."

The probe has led them all over the state. It has also taken them to Iowa, Tennessee, Alabama and Louisiana, officials said.

"Just because there hasn’t been a lot of coverage doesn’t mean we’re not working the case, because we are. We’ve had numerous sit-downs, especially over the last four to five months, where we’ve been through everything we’ve done piece by piece," Champion said. "I’ve run it past some other seasoned investigators and said, 'Is there something we’ve done, something we’re missing? Are we making it too difficult?'"

While Jessica's case is at the front of his mind constantly, Darby said he has other cases, too.

"I don’t think anyone should be so naive as to think this couldn’t happen anywhere, because it can. It happened here," Darby said. "The toll that it’s taken is in the not knowing. When you don’t know and you look at your cohort next to you that’s just as determined as you are, it gives you energy and determination, and you don’t give up.

"We fight together. It takes a toll physically and mentally, but we wouldn’t do anything else, and we want to die doing it. We swore that we’d do our job," Darby continued. "Swearing, to some people, doesn’t mean the same thing it does to the good ones. Our hearts are out there to help people."

'We will track you down'

Jessica's sister, Amanda "AJ" Prince, said it makes her sick thinking that Jessica's killer is living a normal life as the search continues. She knows the things she would say to that person or those people if she could.

"You got to spend Christmas, New Year's, birthdays, Easter, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving and many more holidays with family and friends. It looks like you do again. When you see your family and friends at the holidays, do you think of us or my sister?" she said. "Jessica will never get married, have children or celebrate birthdays. She will never become a doctor, write a book or sing a song. She will never get to call us, text us or hug us. We will never again hear her say, 'I love you.' Jessica will never get a future, all because of what this coward took from us."

Ben Chambers said he clings to faith.

"I just have to put my trust in the Lord that they’re going to be caught. I know someday they’re going to be judged, one day or another on this earth or the next. I believe that with all my heart," he said. "They just don’t realize how they’ve messed up so many lives with what they did, the evil they did. They don’t understand it."

There's very little doubt, as far as Champion is concerned, that Jessica's killer knew her.

"I think this was very personal between whoever did this and Jessica. To pour gasoline on someone is very personal. To set them on fire is a very personal deal," he said. "We may be totally wrong on that; it may not be. But from my years of doing this and the year we have been investigating this case, we all believe it was very personal."

Daugherty's wish is simple: "Justice. I just want Jessica never to be forgotten."

To at least the team of men fighting to put a name and a face to the evil of Dec. 6, 2014, she never will be.

"We want people to know that the oath that we took has been applied and that we do work together. The determination is there," Darby said. "We’re here to work for the good people, and the bad ones better be careful because we’ve warned you. It may take a year. It may take two or three years. But we will track you down. An oath is a promise."