Stolen Beauty

A Young Teacher And A Financial Analyst Vanish. Are Their Cases Linked?

(CBS)  Once police learned of Jennifer's concern for safety, they realized she wouldn't have gone out at night alone to mail that cell phone. They now believed she must have been abducted the next morning.

"Her condo was just as if she'd gotten ready for work and took off out the door for work," says Orlando homicide Detective Joel Wright. "And since her door was locked and there were no signs of forced entry, a good deduction would be that she did make it at least out the door."

The next day, detectives interviewed family members and boyfriend Rob. "They started asking me if you'd had an argument with her, or if you'd had disagreements or you'd done something to her. I mean, it was kinda nerve-wracking," he remembers.

But nothing raised suspicions, and Rob's alibi checked out. He was at work two and a half hours away in Fort Lauderdale that day and his cell phone was pinging down there.

"I would consider Rob not a suspect," Wright says.

Meanwhile, huge numbers of volunteers and police were looking everywhere for Jennifer.

Two days after Jennifer’s disappearance, investigators got a major break in the case when her car was spotted at a housing complex just a mile from her condo.

Luckily, there were security cameras nearby. When police checked the tape, they watched as someone pulled her Chevy Malibu into the lot. Then, a ghostly figure emerges (video) from Jennifer’s car and calmly strolls away as if on an afternoon walk.

This person is the main suspect in Jennifer's abduction, and should be easy to identify. But because the security cameras only take a photo every three seconds, his face is obscured on the surveillance footage.

Investigators can't even say for sure if the person is a man or a woman - all they know is it's someone 5'3" to 5'5" tall.

"Now the clothing looks to be maybe someone who is a painter or some type of worker," Wright remarks, commenting on the clothing.

The inside of Jennifer's car provided more frustration for investigators and her family: there was no sign of a struggle, no blood, no identifiable fingerprints except for Jennifer's.

But there was one item found that bothered detectives: a DVD player.

That DVD player hadn't been stolen. Asked what that tells him, Sgt. Brennan says, "It didn’t appear that it was a robbery. Didn’t appear that it was a car theft. It didn't appear that it was a carjacking."

Bloodhounds were called in to track any scent from Jennifer’s car. Brennan says one of those dogs essentially tracked back to her complex.

Could Jennifer's abductor be someone who lived in her own complex? Detectives discovered there was extensive remodeling going on, including some work in Jennifer’s own unit, and Jennifer had complained to her family that some of the workers were making her feel uncomfortable.

Asked what she said, Joyce says, "They would stop and stare. …Leering stares is what she would say."

"Were these guys mostly day workers?" Van Sant asks.

"It was large groups of crews that had traveled together. And many of them were staying right there in several of the units in the complex itself," Wright says.

In fact, of the 447 units in Jennifer’s complex, only 250 were occupied at the time, and workers were allowed to live in the empty units. But Brennan says tracing these people is "extremely difficult."

Police could not search all of the units in Jennifer's complex because many were privately owned. They also couldn't count on getting any reliable forensic evidence from Jennifer's condo. "Anywhere from a half dozen to two dozen people were in the condo over the course of the first 24 hours," Brennan says, explaining that that contaminates the crime scene.

At this point, the best clue in Jennifer’s disappearance remained that grainy video.