Jessica Cole, a 41-year-old Black woman from Washington, D.C., was known in her Park View neighborhood by the nickname “Bird,” a charismatic, funny presence who had grown up in the city, married her high school sweetheart James Cole, and helped run a small cleaning business even as drug addiction gradually pulled her into more dangerous corners of street life.
Neighbors remembered her as a sharp-tongued cut-up who could make anyone laugh, a woman who doted on her children and knew nearly everyone along the blocks of Quincy Place and nearby Princeton Place.
By the mid-1990s, the Petworth and Park View sections of Northwest D.C. were reeling from the crack epidemic and a string of mysterious deaths. Bodies of local women involved with drugs and the street economy began turning up within a few blocks of each other, many clustered around Princeton Place NW near the intersection of Georgia and New Hampshire avenues. Investigators quietly began to suspect a pattern, while longtime residents watched fear creep into familiar streets. Jessica knew those streets well—she had once lived on Princeton Place, knew several of the women who would later be counted among the dead, and was by then drifting in and out of the same high-risk world of addiction and survival sex that made women in the neighborhood especially vulnerable.
In October 1997, Jessica disappeared. One account placed her last on a stoop along Princeton Place on or around October 10, chatting in the same narrow strip of rowhouses where other victims had lived or been found. When her family realized she had not come home, dread settled in quickly; James Cole later recalled that their oldest son, Duane, seemed to know in his gut that something terrible had happened. At the same time, rumors spread through Petworth that a serial predator might be stalking the neighborhood, preying on women who were already living close to the edge.
On the morning of Columbus Day that October, a passerby walking along Meridian Place NW noticed a damaged plastic garbage bag behind a building in the 1400 block. Inside was a human torso, dismembered and left without identifying features. For detectives, even in a violent city, the discovery was shocking; dismemberment stood out as an unusually brutal and rare act, different from the other nearby deaths where bodies had been dumped intact. Initially the torso was simply another case, but as investigators compared physical details and missing-person reports, they began working under the assumption that it might be connected to Jessica’s disappearance. In time, authorities confirmed that the remains were hers, tying the horrific find on Meridian Place to the mother who had vanished from Princeton Place only days earlier.
The investigation into what had now become five suspicious deaths in the area intensified. D.C. police, aided by the FBI, began re-examining autopsies, retesting toxicology samples, and building a computer database to track similarities among the cases. Four of the women already known to be dead—Lateashia Blocker, Emile Dennis, Jacqueline Birch, and Priscilla Mosley—had ties to Princeton Place, and Jessica had lived or socialized on the same block. The cluster of victims, their overlapping social circles, and their connections to the local drug trade pushed detectives toward the idea of a single predator operating in and around the neighborhood. At community meetings, however, residents complained that authorities had been slow to respond because of the women’s addictions and street reputations; one neighborhood leader recalled an officer dismissively referring to the victims in crude terms, deepening the sense that official concern had come too late.
Suspicion quickly settled on a local man named Darryl Donnell Turner, who lived in the 700 block of Princeton Place and worked at a nearby liquor store. Several victims’ bodies had been found in or near properties linked to him, and neighbors whispered that women kept being discovered disturbingly close to his front door. Jessica herself had been seen with Turner during the weekend she disappeared, according to relatives, and when she went missing he abruptly vanished from the street, as if going into hiding. Over the next few years, the pattern around him hardened: Blocker, Dennis, Birch, Mosley, and others were all drawn into the growing web of what journalists and police would later call the Princeton Place killings.
Turner was eventually arrested and prosecuted—not for Jessica’s death, but for two others in the series. In 2002, he received a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole for the rape and murder of Jacqueline Birch and a younger victim, Dana Hill, whose body was found in an abandoned fast-food restaurant across town. Other bodies had been discovered in crawl spaces beneath his townhouse or in vacant houses on Princeton Place, cementing his reputation as a serial predator. Years later, another article would describe how he had also been charged in two earlier killings in Northeast Washington, underscoring the scope of his violence.
Yet even as many in law enforcement focused on Turner, another name kept surfacing among Jessica’s family: John Slack, a professor and small-time property developer who owned several buildings in Park View, including the one where Turner lived. Slack cultivated an image as a kind of neighborhood patron, but Jessica had publicly accused him of exploiting vulnerable tenants for sex and drugs, and their arguments were known on the block. One day, not long after Jessica’s Columbus Day weekend disappearance and before the torso had been officially identified, Slack and a colleague were seen passing through the yard of one of Slack’s properties. Duane Cole and his friend Gary Jones, convinced Slack had something to do with Jessica’s disappearance, attacked him in a fury. When police intervened, they broke up the fight but did not haul the young men away, a detail James Cole would later interpret as a sign that investigators themselves harbored suspicions about Slack. Still, no charges were ever brought against the landlord in connection with Jessica’s death.
More than a decade after the murder, in 2008, the case took a decisive turn inside a prison interview room. Detective Danny Whalen, revisiting unsolved homicides, sat down with Turner for another round of questioning. This time, Turner admitted killing Jessica. D.C. police publicly classified him as “a convicted serial sexual murderer,” and officials announced that they had sufficient probable cause to charge him with Jessica’s slaying. But because he was already serving life without parole for other murders, prosecutors chose not to pursue new charges. Instead, they approved closure of the case on paper, and the Metropolitan Police Department marked Jessica Cole’s homicide as solved through what critics describe as an “administrative closure”—a file closed by confession and internal sign-off rather than a formal arrest and trial.
That decision did not end the debate. Some investigators close to the case, including retired detective Jim Trainum, questioned whether Turner’s confession was genuine. Jessica’s dismemberment, and the disposal of her torso in a garbage bag on Meridian Place, did not resemble Turner’s established pattern of strangling victims and leaving their bodies intact in or near vacant buildings associated with his home. There were practical doubts, too: critics argued that Turner lacked the tools and private space needed for such a dismemberment. Forensic details added to the unease—hairs found on Jessica’s torso were traced to an unidentified man and to a rare breed of dog, and people who suspected Slack noted that he was known for breeding large dogs at his properties. For Trainum and others, these inconsistencies suggested that Turner’s confession may have been a convenient way to file away a difficult case while the true circumstances of Jessica’s death remained unresolved.
Within Jessica’s own family, the question of who killed her has never had a single answer. James Cole and his sons came to believe Slack was ultimately responsible, convinced by Jessica’s earlier accusations against him and by the strange leniency shown when police intervened after Duane’s assault on the landlord. Jessica’s sister Arlene Ford, by contrast, has long believed Turner murdered her younger sister and bristles at efforts to shift blame or reopen old wounds, especially since Slack later died in a house fire on Capitol Hill in 2017, beyond the reach of any future prosecution. What unites them is not agreement about the suspect but the sense that the system, in closing Jessica’s case without a trial, never fully accounted for what happened to her.
For those who loved her, the official labels—missing person, dismembered torso, victim in a serial-murder investigation, case closed by confession—never managed to capture the person they called Bird. They remember a quick-witted prankster who would pinch an old man just to make him yelp, a woman who could defuse a sulk with a purposely outrageous imitation until everyone in the room was laughing. James Cole has complained that when the public record reduces his wife to “a drug addict” or “a prostitute,” it erases the years she spent as a devoted mother, a loyal friend, and the irreverent neighbor who lit up the block. In the paperwork of the Metropolitan Police Department, her homicide now sits in the “cleared” column. In the memories of her family and community, it remains a wound that has never truly healed, a story whose ending still feels unfinished.
