The FBI will search at a Charlton County, Ga. landfill for possible evidence in the case of a Nassau County woman missing since the day before Mother's Day.
Our News4Jax partner reports the Nassau County Sheriff’s Office and the FBI jointly announced at a Friday afternoon news conference that an organized search for would begin Saturday morning at the Chesser Island Landfill - a Waste Management facility. The search will run from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. for seven days.
This is the same landfill where the body of 7-year-old Somer Thompson was found in 2009.
Joleen Cummings was last seen May 12 at her job at a hair salon in Yulee. Her former coworker, Kimberly Kessler, was charged in connection with her disappearance.
Authorities said they obtained video of Kessler appearing to put a white trash bag into a dumpster about the time of Cummings' disappearance. The Sheriff's Office asked Waste Management to hold five million pounds of trash received on May 14 so it could be searched at a later date.
Nassau County Sheriff Bill Leeper said they waited to search the landfill because they wanted to exhaust other leads first.
"Our main focus is to find Joleen's body in order to bring some sort of closure to her family," Leeper said. "We've now determined a search of the landfill is necessary to ensure we've done all we can do to find clues and answers for Joleen's family, based on what we know at this point."
Special Agent in Charge Charles Spencer said a specially-trained search team of 25 from FBI offices including Jacksonville, Atlanta, Tampa and Boston would conduct the search.
Her mother, Ann Johnson, has expressed full confidence in the investigation and posted on Facebook about the heartache of not having a daughter.
On Wednesday, she posted about celebrating the Fourth of July without Joleen.
“There will be no more holidays, milestones with her children– back-to-school school years and graduations; weddings that will never be; grandchildren she will never meet. I will always and forever remind her children how much their mother loved them and continue to celebrate all holidays in spite of my pain,” said Johnson.
Cumming’s SUV was found in a store parking lot not long after she was reported missing. It’s on one of the main pieces of evidence in the case.
The Sheriff's Office has named Kessler as the prime suspect in Cummings' disappearance.
She was seen on surveillance parking the car and stepping out of it. Kessler was arrested in May and is behind bars in the Duval County Jail, after being moved there following a hunger strike in June.
"Over the past several weeks, we've continued to track down Kessler's strange past history, collected valuable physical and forensic evidence, reviewed telephone records, interviewed hundreds of potential witnesses, searched through hours and hours of surveillance from various businesses and locations and following every lead the public has provided to us," Leeper said Friday. "We don't know what items were placed in the dumpster but we believe, based on what we know, it's worth our time and effort to find out."
