A Name Stolen From a Grave: The Murder of Joleen Cummings

Author

Benjamin Hayes

Publication Date

January 2, 2026

Joleen Rebecca Cummings was 33 years old, a hairstylist at Tangles Salon in Fernandina Beach, Florida, when she disappeared on May 12, 2018, after finishing her shift at 5 p.m. The following day was both Mother's Day and Joleen's own birthday, and she was scheduled to meet her ex-husband in Hilliard, Florida, to pick up their three children. She never arrived. What investigators eventually uncovered was not simply the story of her murder, but the story of the woman responsible for it, a coworker of barely a month who had been living for more than a decade under an identity stolen from the grave of a teenage girl who died in a car accident on another continent.

A New Coworker

At the time of her disappearance, Joleen worked alongside a woman who had only recently joined the salon staff, going by the name Jennifer Sybert. Sybert had been employed at Tangles for about a month, and according to investigators, she was the last person known to have seen Joleen alive. Joleen herself was a mother of three, well liked by clients and coworkers alike, someone whose entire routine that week revolved around the ordinary logistics of a holiday weekend, arranging her schedule around picking up her children from her ex-husband so they could spend Mother's Day together. When Joleen failed to show up the next day to collect her children, her mother reported her missing, setting off an investigation that would eventually expose far more than anyone initially expected.

An Abandoned Car and a Fleeing Coworker

Investigators located Joleen's car, a beige 2006 Ford Expedition, abandoned in a Home Depot parking lot in nearby Yulee, Florida. Surveillance footage showed an unidentified person driving the vehicle away from the direction of the salon in the early morning hours after Joleen vanished, at 1:17 a.m. on May 13. When detectives visited Tangles Salon to follow up, they learned that Jennifer Sybert had left the scene the moment she noticed police were present, a detail that immediately elevated her from simple witness to primary person of interest.

A Salon Lit Up With Blood

A forensic examination of the salon using luminol revealed an alarming amount of blood residue spread across chairs, walls, cabinets, and a sink. Investigator Wayne Herrington later described the scene starkly, saying the whole salon lit up, with blood everywhere that had obviously been cleaned up, mop marks still visible on the floor where someone had attempted to scrub the evidence away. DNA testing confirmed the blood belonged to Joleen. Additional evidence connecting both Joleen and her coworker was later recovered from a storage unit rented under the Sybert identity, including a sock and a pair of boots stained with Joleen's blood, along with one of her own fingernails.

An Arrest at a Rest Stop

The woman calling herself Jennifer Sybert was ultimately arrested driving Joleen's stolen Expedition at a highway rest area, initially facing a charge of grand theft auto. Officers who took her into custody noticed fresh lacerations and band-aids on her face, the kind of injuries consistent with having been in a violent physical struggle. It was during the routine background check that followed her booking that the case took its strangest turn. The woman's fingerprints revealed that Jennifer Sybert was not a real, currently living identity at all. Her actual name was Kimberly Lee Kessler, and Jennifer Sybert had, in fact, been a thirteen year old girl who died in a car accident in Germany back in 1987, buried afterward in Butler County, Pennsylvania, the very county from which Kessler herself had vanished under her own name in 2004.

Fourteen Years and Eighteen Aliases

Kimberly Kessler had been reported missing by her own mother from Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 4, 2004. In the fourteen years between that disappearance and her eventual arrest in Florida, investigators determined that Kessler had lived under at least eighteen different aliases across more than thirty cities in fourteen states, apparently constructing and abandoning entirely new identities on a rolling basis since as far back as 1996. The Jennifer Sybert identity, lifted from a dead teenager's tombstone, had simply been her final and most enduring alias, sustained for years before it finally connected her to Joleen Cummings's murder.

Warning Signs on a Phone

As investigators built their case, they recovered troubling evidence from Kessler's own phone, including searches conducted before Joleen's disappearance related to tourniquets and to a phrase referencing a coworker guilty of murder. Receipts recovered separately showed purchases of zip ties, trash bags, an electric knife, and ammonia, items prosecutors argued pointed toward premeditation rather than a spontaneous act of violence. Prosecutors ultimately alleged that Kessler had murdered and dismembered Joleen inside the salon, disposing of her remains in trash bags left in a dumpster behind the building, a disposal method that meant Joleen's body has never been recovered.

A Disruptive Defendant

Kessler's own conduct in the years following her arrest, and during her eventual trial, was marked by repeated erratic behavior. During one pretrial court appearance in December 2021, she had an outburst serious enough that Judge James Daniel ordered her removed from the courtroom entirely, requiring her to watch the remainder of opening statements from a separate holding room by video feed rather than in person. While incarcerated awaiting trial, Kessler also engaged in a dramatic hunger strike, at one point reducing her body weight from around 170 pounds down to approximately 80 pounds, a stark physical decline that underscored just how unstable her behavior in custody had become.

A Swift Verdict

Kessler's trial proceeded in December 2021, with her defense arguing that whatever had happened between her and Joleen lacked the premeditation necessary to support a first degree murder charge specifically. The jury was not persuaded. After deliberating for less than three hours, jurors found Kessler guilty of first degree murder along with grand theft auto in connection with Joleen's stolen vehicle. She was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Kessler pursued an appeal of her conviction, which was ultimately unsuccessful, with the ruling against her upheld in 2024.

A Body Still Missing

More than seven years after Joleen Cummings failed to arrive to collect her children on Mother's Day, her remains have never been found, believed lost somewhere in the waste disposal system connected to the dumpster where prosecutors say her dismembered body was placed. Her killer, meanwhile, remains a woman whose entire adult identity was built for years on the stolen name of a dead teenager, a fact that came to light only because Joleen's own disappearance was thorough enough, and the forensic evidence left behind damning enough, to finally unravel more than a decade of careful concealment.

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