Diana Ferris (10 of Hearts, Connecticut)

It was about 6 p.

M when Claudie Rice arrived at his brother's apartment complex on Hartford's north side to do an unofficial welfare check. His brother Harold, better known as Pookie, was locked up on a robbery charge. And no one had been able to reach his live-in girlfriend Diane for a few days, which was out of the ordinary, so Claudie agreed to go check on her. He went up and knocked on the apartment door, but there was no answer.

The door was locked, so he contacted a maintenance man to let him in. As they set foot inside the small one-bed, one-bath unit, nothing immediately seemed off, but when they peeked into the bedroom, they saw a sight they could never unsee. Sprawled out on the bed was a woman who appeared to be Diane. She was covered in blood and had a spiral telephone cord around her neck.

In a complete panic, Claudie and the maintenance man ran out of the apartment to get help and happened upon a police car just driving by. They flagged down the officer, Sergeant Ed Moringer, and told him about the horrifying scene they'd just found. Here's Detective Drew Jacobson explaining what Sergeant Moringer did next.

She had a pillar on her face, there was a spiral telephone cord wrapped around her neck.

But regardless, they cut out the wall plaster and kept it as evidence. While the scene was still being processed, police were questioning Claudie, but he didn't have much to say. I mean, he knew Diane was in her mid-30s, but I mean, honestly, he didn't even know her last name. His brother, Pookie, had only been dating her since November, about five months, and he'd just come over at the behest of his mother, who hadn't been able to get a hold of Diane for the past few days, as the investigation was just getting started, word was spreading around town that Diane had been murdered. And people started showing up, including a man we'll call Cecil, who seemed noticeably distraught as he stood outside, looking on.

He told police that he was a good friend of Diane's and Pookie's, and then he said something that threw up some major red flags. He told them that he had been sleeping with Diane while his buddy, Pookie was incarcerated. Now why he randomly admitted to this, I don't know. Maybe just wanting to get it all out there before it came to light, or perhaps wanting to throw a disclaimer out there. If anything of his was maybe found at the crime scene. But a man sleeping with the victim, who also happens to show up at the scene, sketchy at best.

So right away, Cecil's name was penciled in at the top of the person's of interest list. Now, the following day, the autopsy got underway, and that's when the woman was officially ID'd as 34-year-old Diana Ferris. Cause of death ligature strangulation. She was five months pregnant with a baby boy who was sadly stillborn, and it was at the autopsy that authorities got a better grasp of how long she'd been dead.

Mummification had begun to set in on her fingers, and given that there was no rigor mortis present, they assumed that she'd been there for at least 36 hours. The M.E. found no appearance of genital injury or sexual assault, but there was also obvious distortion from the severe decomposition. So they couldn't be 100 sure either way. But of the tips that were already starting to trickle in, they suggested a motivation that wasn't sexual. Some of those tips were implying that perhaps this was a robbery gone wrong.

As the days dragged by, there were other rumors surfacing like maybe her death was connected to another murder. A murder that she was believed to have been at the scene of a few years prior. In 1993, according to the Hartford Courant, Here's what happened Diane gave 37-year-old Thomas Myers a ride to a downtown housing project.

She got out of the car and police believed that she was supposed to return. While Thomas was waiting. He was ambushed and stabbed to death. Now. At first, Diane was painted as a person of interest, but it seems that police later changed their minds and considered her a potential witness. No matter what she was labeled. The local paper reported that she was, quote, reluctant to give police information. Thomas case was still unsolved by the time Diane was murdered.

So investigators on her case looked into a possible link. But it didn't quite make sense for someone to wait three whole years to kill a witness or to get revenge. And it's not like that case was getting any closer to a resolution or a trial that maybe she was planning to testify at. So police weren't exactly ready to call it their working theory, but they kept it in their back pocket as they continued their investigation. Now, another rabbit hole police went down was probing a potential habit that Diane had.

Oh, this letter was from a man who will call Mark, and we actually got our hands on a copy of this letter. So I'm going to have a voice actor read it, in part, with real names changed to pseudonyms.

Matthew pulled out a package of cocaine, which from my point of view, had to be about a quarter of an ounce. So I said, Where did you get all that from? Jimmy said, Remember Big Pookie's white girl? I said, Yes, Jimmy said me and Matthew had her out there tricking for cocaine.

Mike said after she got out of the car with her last customer, him and Jimmy was waiting on the side of the building for her. When she got out of the car, she said, Guys come upstairs, then Jimmy said he made sure all of the doors was locked. Matthew said. He told the white girl, Come up with the rest of this before we kill you, Matthew said. The kept denying that she didn't have nothing else.

Matthew said We tied the jump and started beating this out of her. Jimmy said. She was screaming so loud until she started choking, until she passed out. I Mark said, That's how you got all the cocaine. Jimmy, and Matthew said, Hell yeah, then Matthew said to Jimmy, I think we killed her.

After a few days went by, I heard on the news that a pregnant white woman was murdered. The same day I saw Jimmy and Matthew, I said to Matthew and Jimmy, you all know, I know you killed that white woman. Jimmy said, What you going to tell on us? I said, No.

Then Matthew said to Jimmy, What about our fingerprints in the apartment? Jimmy said, Don't worry, Matthew. If this comes down, I say I was renting a room there that will take care of the fingerprints.

Also, Mark himself did have a criminal history. So maybe they just took what he said with a grain of salt. That's the best I can come up with. But still seems like some major follow up would have been the bare minimum. But for whatever reason, Mark's letter faded into the background, and Diane's investigation was once again deadlocked. The lack of movement frustrated Diane's family, especially her oldest daughter, Miranda Van Deventer, who was just 16 when Diane was killed. Not only did Miranda have to finish growing up without the love of her mother, but she had to do so without any answers to comfort her.

And so did her two younger brothers, who were nine and 13.

The three of them hadn't lived with their mother in quite some time due to her struggles with substance use disorder. But they knew that she loved them and they loved her all the same.

And she always showed that love and that affection, and I feel like that made a huge difference in my life and my two younger brother's lives. My mom always had a really great personality, she was fun-loving, she was funny.

She had a great laugh and some of my fondest memories are just car rides, listening to music and her joking about something. And because I was the oldest, I was pretty much always the passenger. So I have really good, vivid memories of being right there beside her, with music going and windows down.

I'm so glad that you're there, visiting your brothers. And then passed the phone around to both my brothers. And then it was, and I love you, and that was our last conversation. We always said, I love you before getting off the phone.

And it's something that is just kind of ingrained in myself and my brothers. That you don't leave a conversation with somebody you love without those final words of, I love you. So definitely give us some solace, I guess.

Eventually, Matthew Stephen Johnson was charged with three of the murders on that list. And if that name rings a bell, it may be because I talked about him in our previous episode on Elizabeth Miller. You may remember that the murders he was convicted of were those of Aida Quinones, Rosalie Jimenez and Alicia Ford. You also might remember that those women had been stomped to death, a far different MO from how Diane had been killed. So soon enough, just like all the leads before, the serial killer theory fizzled out and the case was back to stagnant.

And it pretty much stayed that way until 2011, 15 years after the murder. That's when Detective Jacobson picked up the case, dusted it off and got to work. Jacobson spent countless hours familiarizing himself with the case file and evaluating what more could be done, specifically, what could be tested for DNA. Which was something that hadn't been possible in the years prior and had never been done. Remember that bloody fingerprint smudge that I mentioned earlier?

When Detective Jacobson read about it in the case file, he was hopeful that it had been well-preserved. And if it was left by the killer, he hoped they'd be able to easily lift the killer's DNA from it.

Those names that he got from Codis were Cecil and Jimmy. Now remember? Cecil is the friend of Diane and Pookie's, who showed up to the scene the day of and claimed to have been sleeping with Diane while Pookie was incarcerated. And Jimmy is one of the guys Mark implicated in his letter.

It is truthful and accurate. I agree with everything I wrote in the letter and there's nothing that I want to change at this time. I can't think of anything else that I need to add. I signed and printed my name at the bottom of each page of the letter.

What happened?

But, of course, it's not that easy.

Now he's still working to get that testing, even though all signs seem to be pointing to Jimmy and Matthew. Jacobson knows he's got to avoid tunnel vision. So for him, nothing's off the table, even the seemingly far-fetched possibility that Diane's murder is connected to Thomas Meyers.

And none of us have drug addiction in our lives. None of us, luckily, have gone down that same path that my mother and my stepfather went down. And I think that's a testament to the security we had of knowing that we were loved and knowing that they wanted better for us. My mother and my stepfather both wanted us to live better lives than what they had been living. And that was one thing that I promised. When I spoke at her funeral, in her eulogy, promised her that I would look out for my brothers and that we would make her proud.

And that has always stayed true and I was very loyal to my word and we've all made her proud.

And so that gives me peace, having my faith that justice will be served regardless.

But my hope would be to have that closure before I die, just to know it's solved and to put just a small piece behind me. I would love to look the person or people in the face who murdered my mother and my baby brother. And let them know how that changed our lives and how that impacted our lives. But I would also like to let them know that it also made us stronger. And that, despite what they took from us, my brothers and I, that we've continued to make our mother proud.

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