The Abduction and Murder of Jennifer Day

In the early hours of June 23, 1985, fourteen-year-old Jennifer Leigh Day opened Preston Road Donuts in North Dallas for her usual Sunday shift. She brewed the coffee, stocked the shelves, and rang up her last customer at 6:20 a.m. Fifteen minutes later, the shop was silent. Jennifer’s purse and jewelry sat untouched on the counter, her apron on the floor, and the cash drawer still full.

Three days later, construction workers discovered her body in a field off Preston Road and State Highway 121 in Plano—eleven miles north. Jennifer had been bludgeoned and stabbed through the throat.

Her murder shook a city that believed it was safe. Detectives followed every lead, chased sightings of a white 1970s sedan, and combed the area for evidence, but the case went cold within weeks.

Jennifer’s mother, Patsy Day, turned heartbreak into advocacy, helping other families navigate life after violent loss. Decades later, the case remains unsolved, but her daughter’s story endures as one of North Texas’ most haunting reminders of how quickly ordinary moments can change forever.

If you have any information about the abduction and murder of Jennifer Leigh Day, please contact the Plano Police Department’s Crimes Against Persons Unit at [phone], or go to this Plano Police website where you can submit a tip anonymously: https://www.planocoldcases.com/case/1985-7/jennifer-leigh-day

Sources: The Plano Star-Courier, The Dallas Morning News, The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, KXAS-TV archives accessed on texashistory.unt.edu

You can support gone cold and listen to the show ad-free at https://patreon.com/gonecoldpodcast

Find us at https://www.gonecold.com

For Gone Cold merch, visit https://gonecold.dashery.com

Follow gone cold on Facebook, Instagram, Threads, TikTok, YouTube, and X. Search @gonecoldpodcast at all or just click https://linknbio.com/gonecoldpodcast #SanAntonio 

#JusticeForJenniferDay #Dallas #Plano #TX #Texas #TrueCrime #TexasTrueCrime #ColdCase #TrueCrimePodcast #Podcast #ColdCase #Unsolved #Murder #UnsolvedMurder #UnsolvedMysteries #Homicide #CrimeStories #PodcastRecommendations #CrimeJunkie #MysteryPodcast #TrueCrimeObsessed #CrimeDocs #InvestigationDiscovery #PodcastAddict #TrueCrimeFan #CriminalJustice #ForensicFiles

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/gone-cold-texas-true-crime--3203003/support.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Gone coll Podcasts may contain violent or graphic subject matter.
Listener discretion is advised. Even North Dallas can be quiet
in the early hours in the suburbs. Sometimes the only
sounds you'll hear are sprinklers, air conditioners, and the low
hum of traffic from the highways and main roads. On

(00:23):
one Sunday morning in June of nineteen eighty five, someone
still unknown, took advantage of the relative stillness, moving both
beneath it and brazenly out in the open. Before the
first rays of heat touched Preston Road, a teenaged girl
unlocked the door to a small doughnut shop tucked inside

(00:46):
a sleepy strip mall. She'd done it many times before.
The smell of glaze soon filled the air, the coffee hissed,
and the hum of the refrigerator and fluorescent lights drowned
the silence. Sometime after six point twenty, the shop went
quiet again. A customer walked in minutes later to find

(01:06):
the girl's purse on the counter, the register untouched, and
no one behind it. By the time the sun burned
off the morning haze, a child was missing, and three
days later, a city's sense of safety would vanish with her.

(01:50):
In nineteen eighty five, Dallas was shining. The skyline glimmered,
new glass towers caught the sun, cranes hung over downtown construction.
Oil money still flowed, banks were bold, and the city's
boosters swore Dallas had become the business capital of the Southwest.

(02:12):
Even the nation saw the city through a kind of
glossy filter. The TV show Dallas was still one of
the most watched programs in America, a primetime soap opera
about power, greed, and family betrayal that made South Fork
Ranch a household name. That year, viewers gasped as Bobby

(02:33):
Ewing was killed off, only to learn a season later
it had all been a dream. For the rest of
the country, the twist was pure melodrama, but in Dallas, Texas,
it felt fitting. The real city was living its own dream,
one that looked too good to last. Away from the

(02:53):
bright lights and skyline shots, cracks were showing. The same
boom that built the towers also strained the streets below them.
Real estate speculation had turned frantic. Banks were over extended,
and in neighborhoods south and east of downtown Oak Cliff
South Dallas Fair Park, poverty and drugs were creeping in fast.

(03:18):
The crack cocaine epidemic had just arrived, and with it
came violence that Dallas wasn't ready to face. In nineteen
eighty five, the city logged three hundred and one homicides,
nearly one every day. Detectives worked long nights, juggling cases
that blurred together domestic killings, bar fights, robberies gone bad,

(03:42):
young people caught in the crossfire of drug violence. More
than half of those murders happened inside homes, quiet and personal.
Others played out on the streets of neighborhoods struggling to
hold on to outsiders. Dallas was still the place of
cowboy hats, cadillacs, and high stakes business deals, a symbol

(04:06):
of the Texas dream. Inside the city limits, the line
between ambition and desperation was wearing thin. Developers called it growth,
police called it stress. Reporters called it a paradox, a
boomtown built on shifting sand. By the summer of nineteen
eighty five, Dallas stood between two versions of itself, one

(04:30):
reflected in mirrored skyscrapers and television screens, the other in
police reports and more glogs. And just like that famous
TV twist, the one where death was only a dream.
The city's illusion of prosperity would soon wake to something
far darker. Jennifer Lee Day was born on June thirtieth,

(04:53):
nineteen seventy, the second child of Dawn and Patsy Day,
and little sister to Jeff. The Day family lived a
few blocks off Preston Road in North Dallas, close enough
that you could hear rush hour traffic rolling down the
busy thoroughfare, or on the weekend's Sunday traffic spool up

(05:13):
after church. The doughnut shop where Jennifer worked sat on
Preston Road, a small place inside a quiet strip center
where the routine rarely changed, and only a couple blocks
away from home. Jennifer, fourteen years old in June of
nineteen eighty five, had done the early shift for about
a year. She was the responsible kid who took off

(05:36):
her rings to work dough kept her purse on the
counter where she could see it, and called the manager
as soon as she had the lights on and the
first pot of coffee going. She had just finished eighth
grade at Saint Rita and planned to start at Ursuline
in the fall. Both Catholic academies, following the track her

(05:57):
mother knew well. Jennifer's brother had worked at the donut
shop before her, and for both of them, Sunday mornings
were predictable. Sunday, June twenty third, nineteen eighty five was
no different. Not at first. Jennifer was inside before sunrise,
lights on the coffeemaker, hissing, perhaps thinking longingly about her

(06:20):
upcoming fifteenth birthday, which was exactly a week away. At
around five thirty five am, she checked in with her
boss after opening. By six twenty am, she had served
at least two customers, but at about six thirty five
am a customer, a former employee, found the store empty.

(06:42):
Jennifer's purse and hand to jewelry were still on the counter,
Her apron was on the floor just behind it. The
register still held cash. Nothing was broken, nothing rifled through,
just a room that looked like work had paused mid tap.
When the owner arrived, he called police. They came quickly

(07:05):
and found their only witnesses within minutes. Across Preston Road,
a roofing contractor had been waiting with his crew. They
reported a white late nineteen seventies General Motors sedan, possibly
a Pontiac Catalina or Lamond's. A blonde female had gotten

(07:26):
in the driver's side door, first, followed by a man,
after which the car sped away. The report was consistent
with someone being taken against their will abducted beyond the lookout.
Alerts were issued, but searches were a shot in the dark.
Back at home, Patsy Day was still asleep when her

(07:48):
husband down kissed her goodbye just before leaving to play golf.
At six fifty three am, the phone rang. On the
other end was Fred hit, the owner of the donut shop.
The day family nightmare began. Jennifer's brother, Jeff, was also
sleeping when the call came in. Patsy woke him up

(08:11):
and asked if he knew where Jennifer might be. Her mind,
refusing to give in to her darkest thoughts, Jeff told
his mother that he had no idea where she was,
closed his eyes and went back to sleep. About fifteen
minutes later, he woke up again the question of where
his sister could be repeating over and over in his head.

(08:34):
Jeff went to the kitchen and asked Patsy what was
going on. After being filled in, he drove to the
donut shop where the Dallas police were dusting for fingerprints.
When he saw that, he knew this wasn't just his
sister's teenaged brain finally kicking in. Something was terribly wrong.

(08:55):
By the next morning, detectives were reporting the worst to
the local per Foul play was suspected, though there were
no signs of a struggle, and Jennifer Day had vanished
during a tight time window of about fifteen minutes. The
Dallas Police Department Youth Division's Lieutenant David Clary put it simply,

(09:17):
based on who she was and what she left behind,
they were almost certain it was an abduction. The neighborhood
tried to help. The shop posted a twenty five hundred
dollars reward, An anonymous donor added ten thousand calls, rolled
in tips, guesses and things someone might have seen. None

(09:38):
of it turned into a viable lead, let alone a name.
At the Day home. The hours stretched, the family fielded
calls and waited for a doorbell that never rang for
the reason they so desperately hoped. That's the part the
papers never got quite right, the way time behaves when

(09:59):
a child is missing. Seventy two hours of dread, awkward
kindnesses and prank calls, a small stack of hopes that
don't always hold. Before the week ended, the searches center
of gravity moved north off Preston Road, passed the county
line into a field near the New Highway Wednesday, June

(10:34):
twenty sixth, nineteen eighty five, eleven and a half miles
north of the donut shop where fourteen year old Jennifer
Lee Day was last seen. The construction site off Preston
Road and State Highway one twenty one was supposed to
be quiet that morning. Bulldozers idled in the sun. The

(10:55):
ground was still slick from earlier rain. At around seven
fifteen am, an operator looked up from his cab and
noticed something in the grass. When he got closer, he
realized his eyes hadn't deceived him. It was the body
of a girl. Police from Plano arrived first, then Dallas detectives.

(11:18):
What they found lay in two foot tall weeds east
of Preston Road, north of Carpenter Road, and south of
the new one to twenty one extension. The body was
nude and was already decomposing. Investigators believed it had been
there since Sunday, even before official confirmation, police knew the

(11:41):
body belonged to Jennifer Day. Justice of the Peace Tom
Kelly later confirmed the cause of death multiple stab wounds
to the neck. Dallas Police spokesman Bob Shaw told reporters
that there were few leads and no suspects. The department
was getting plenty of phone calls from people who were

(12:03):
trying to help, but so far no solid leads had developed.
The autopsy was grim. Jennifer had been stabbed four times
through the throat, her head struck with a blunt object.
Her clothes blue jeans and a pink shirt with checkerboard trim,
were missing, but her confirmation pendant still hung around her neck.

(12:27):
Rain and heat had stripped away what little evidence might
have been left behind. The Days were notified around ten
thirty am that a body had been found, but the
positive identification didn't reach them until five that evening. Between
those hours, the family lived in that suspended state familiar

(12:49):
to every parent who's ever waited for confirmation they prayed
would never come. Lieutenant David Clary told reporters, we're still
as concerned about it now as we were from the start.
By then, the Preston Road Donut shop had a handwritten
sign taped to its glass door, closed until further notice.

(13:09):
In God We Trust, jurisdiction fell to Plan OPD, but
Dallas Homicide worked beside them. They all said the same thing.
Robbery was ruled out as a motive. Jennifer's purse, jewelry,
and the cash register had all been left untouched. By

(13:30):
June twenty seventh, the reward fund reached forty two thousand
dollars after the shop's initial twenty five hundred dollars and
an anonymous ten thousand dollars had grown with community donations.
Captain William Gentry told The Morning News the family asked
to cap it there enough money. He said that anyone

(13:51):
who truly knew something should come forward. It was a
sum worth around one hundred and twenty five thousand dollars
in twenty twenty five money. The newspaper headline the next
day called it simply. No new leads were reported in
probe of girl's death. Dozens of tips had poured in

(14:11):
hundreds of phone calls, but nothing solid. Police still hunted
the white nineteen seventy seven sedan seen leaving the area
around six thirty am Sunday, investigators searched for any sign
Jennifer knew her abductor. They found none. Witnesses customers said

(14:32):
she hadn't looked afraid. She'd made multiple register entries as usual.
She apparently had several customers come in the store. Police
spokesman Bob Shaw repeated they didn't think she was under
any kind of duress. By week's end, the story had
left the front page, but not the city's nerves. Parents

(14:54):
kept their children close. The local papers ran pieces under
headlines like hours is a Dangerous World and inside the
day Home. Laughter was replaced by silence. By Friday, June
twenty eighth, the day family was in seclusion. Friends answered

(15:14):
their phone, telling reporters they'd asked for time to be alone.
One neighbor said, softly, everybody is pretty shook up about this.
She was a good kid. Police weren't saying much either.
They had no suspects, no motive, and no clear crime scene.
The question hanging in detectives conversations was where where had

(15:39):
it happened? Plano police spokesman Stephen van Notte told the
Fort Worth Star Telegram that they couldn't say whether Jennifer
had been slain in that field or dumped there later.
Even the experts weren't sure. The only certainty was that
she'd been gone from the shop before six thirty five
that Sunday morning, and the field had hidden her for

(16:02):
days under the sun. Lieutenant David Clary, the Dallas Youth
Section veteran who had first called it a kidnapping, told
reporters he still couldn't believe that after all the media attention,
no one had reported seeing something. We're as concerned about
it now as we were from the start, he said
about solving the case. The Dallas Morning News captured the

(16:25):
quote beneath a photograph of police combing through the weeds.
The autopsy gave them little to build on. Four stab
wounds to the throat, at least one heavy blow to
the head, no clothing, no personal belongings. Yet, according to detectives,
Jennifer had not been sexually assaulted. Other than that, evidence

(16:48):
and witnesses were scarce. Officers from Dallas, Plano and the
Collin County Sheriff's Office compared notes, hoping someone had missed
a small detail the other might catch they hadn't. The
roofing crew's siding of a white car speeding away with
a blonde passenger remained the only actionable lead, and even

(17:11):
that was fading fast. Police asked that anyone who had
been in the Preston Forest shopping Center early Sunday come forward,
but calls that followed were the kind that frustrate investigators,
most psychics, dreamers, neighbors convinced they saw something long after
it could possibly matter. Lieutenant Clary told the press that

(17:35):
there still wasn't much to work with. He had investigated
child abductions before, but this one had a different waight.
It turned out to be a homicide, and it was senseless.
The Day's house on Preston Haven Drive became a gathering
point in the days after the funeral, neighbors dropping off food,

(17:56):
church friends coming to sit with Patsy. Beyond those gestures,
the quiet grew heavy. The investigation seemed just as quiet.
By mid July nineteen eighty five, a story out of
Louisiana stopped Dallas detective's cold. In Baton Rouge, twenty five

(18:18):
year old Teresa Moore had vanished from the grocery store
where she worked alone in the pre dawn hours. Days later,
her body was found in a field, stabbed through the
throat and back at the store, money still in the
till and purse still on the counter. Dallas homicide detective
JJ Coughlin called the parallels too close to ignore. A

(18:41):
woman working a small business at dawn, abducted without robbery,
discovered days later in an open field. Even the car
sounded familiar, a light colored sedan driven by a white
male in his twenties. The Dallas Morning News quoted detective
Coughlin saying quietly, if it's a traveling killer, he'll be caught,

(19:04):
but not before he kills more people. Investigators traded photos
and reports with Baton Rouge police. They found no physical overlap,
no shared suspects, but the coincidences were enough to keep
the Dallas phones ringing. Editorials began to link the two

(19:24):
cases under a single fear randomness. Both girls one fourteen
one twenty five had done everything right. Both disappeared between
one customer and the next. Both were found face down
in fields within sight of new highways with constructions stretching
toward the suburbs. In a morning News column, Dallas is

(19:47):
described as a city that prides itself on safety, but
added that it may be time to admit that violence
does not stop at the city limits. For detectives, The
column hid a nerve North Texas had entered a new
era where the line between urban and suburban danger had disappeared.

(20:08):
The years that followed scattered attention across a grim constellation
of similar crimes. After the investigation into the abduction and

(20:29):
slang of fourteen year old Jennifer Lee Day went cold,
her case continued to come up again and again for
reasons most unfortunate and tragic. In nineteen eighty six, Christie Proctor,
nine years old, disappeared from Garland. Her remains surfaced in
a field off Plano Parkway, several miles south of where

(20:51):
Jennifer's body was found in April of nineteen eighty eight.
Even considering the differences in age, police compared the case.
Detectives from Dallas, Plano, and Garland met with the FBI
to compare notes. Chief Chuck Roar of Plano pointed out
the geography both Jennifer and Christie recovered from fields only

(21:15):
miles apart. It would be stupid not to look for
tie ins. Sergeant W. A. Stepchinsky said they reviewed timelines,
composite sketches, and suspect lists. One man stood out as
more suspicious than the others, according to Lieutenant Clary, but

(21:35):
there wasn't enough evidence for an arrest. The meeting ended
the way cold case meetings often do. Polite but frustrated
and unresolved. Each department carried its own boxes back to
its own evidence room. By nineteen ninety three, the Dallas
Morning News revisited the pattern years of child abductions across

(21:59):
North Texas. Only a handful solved. Jennifer Day's name appeared
again shorthand for the case that first told suburban Plano
parents their children were not untouchable. Detective Martha Pania said,
the cases take a piece out of you every time
another child goes missing. She added, you feel it Plaino

(22:23):
officers who had been rookies in nineteen eighty five now
carried badge's worn smooth from years of service. When they
spoke about their careers, Jennifer's name still came up. It
was one of the first major child abduction cases the
growing suburb had ever faced. It shaped the way they
handled everyone after. Patsy Day told one friend she refused

(22:49):
to let anger consume her. We can take that anger
and energy and do something constructive to make our community safer,
she said, Considering what it had happened to her daughter,
she still managed to speak with grace. Within a year,
she turned that conviction into work. Alongside other parents of

(23:11):
murder victims, she helped build what became Victim's Outreach, a
Dallas organization providing counseling, court support, and a place for
families whose cases remained unsolved. Patsy became its heart and voice,
guiding other parents through the same impossible terrain. In later writings,

(23:33):
she confessed what that strength cost. We buried Jennifer in
a pink coffin, She wrote today. Months later, I contemplate
another box. I'm trying to go through her room to
pack things away. I cannot put her life in a
box any more than her murderer could. That single paragraph,

(23:54):
printed years later, said more than any press conference ever could.
Organization Patsy built eventually expanded into a statewide network of
victims' rights advocates. She lobbied the legislature for counseling funds
and spoke at memorial services for families she'd never met.

(24:15):
Police and prosecutors alike described her as relentless but kind.
When the media revisited Jennifer's case in the late nineteen eighties.
Patsy was no longer simply a grieving mother. She was
a force behind the scenes, an advocate who refused to
let her daughter's name disappear into a list of cold cases.

(24:38):
At home, jeff Day grew into adulthood under the shadow
of the loss of his sister. He remembered his mother's strength,
her prayers for the man who'd killed Jennifer. She believed
forgiveness was the only way to keep from drowning in anger. Still,
as anniversaries passed, the absence never changed. Jennifer would have

(25:02):
been sixteen, then eighteen, then twenty one. Each milestone sharpened
the need for answers that never came. After Patsy's death
in twenty fifteen, Jennifer's case had long faded from the headlines,
but never disappeared from police mines. The file sat thick

(25:24):
and weathered in Plano's archives, but every few years it
came back to light, usually when another body was found
along the same highway corridor, or when reporters revisited the
old North Texas abduction cases. The city changed around it.
Plano grew fields turned into subdivisions. The stretch of Preston

(25:48):
Road that had once been farmland was now six lanes wide.
Detectives moved in and out of the unit, each one
briefed on the unsolved from the nineteen eighties. In some
cases ended in convictions thanks to DNA, but Jennifer's stayed frozen.
There wasn't enough left to test, or what existed didn't

(26:10):
meet the threshold for the technology of the time. In
twenty twenty five, nearly forty years after Jennifer's disappearance, Plano
detective Aaron Benzick decided it was time to bring her
name back into the light. He'd already been cataloging decades
old unsolved cases, working to digitize files and see what

(26:32):
modern forensics could still reveal. Then an email arrived from
Jeff Day, Jennifer's brother. Jeff's message was simple, Is there
anything left to test? Benzick replied. The same day, they
met at headquarters, spending hours reviewing the file, flipping through

(26:53):
yellowing photographs, and typed reports. For the first time in decades,
Jennifer's case was officially open again. Benzick founded a nonprofit
called Solve the Case, a website devoted to making sure
forgotten victims had a presence online. He pointed out that

(27:14):
some victims don't exist on the internet at all. If
these cases aren't even being talked about, he said, how
are witnesses going to be found? How are they going
to be reached? He added Jennifer's story to the site.
The page included the facts, the timeline, and the number
for Plano Police. If the renewed attention brought in any tips,

(27:38):
its obvious nun were earth shattering. New DNA analysis, genealogy databases,
and trace testing were discussed. The evidence collected in nineteen
eighty five was being reviewed for viability. For Jeff the
process offered a kind of peace he hadn't expected. It

(27:59):
would be nice to have closure, he said. I think
it would mean a lot to the community to be
able to know who did this. Jennifer Lee Day would
be fifty five years old today. Instead, she is forever fourteen,
a girl who just wanted to earn her own way,
who trusted her community, and who should have worked her

(28:22):
shift and made it back home after her mother once wrote,
I cannot put her life in a box any more
than her murderer could. For every detective who's opened that
case file, for every parent who's whispered a prayer for her,
and for every listener who hears her name again. After
forty years, those words still hold because the story of

(28:46):
Jennifer Day isn't only about what was taken. It's about
what remains. Love that outlasts silence, and the hope that
even after decades, the truth will surface and justice will come.
If you have any information about the abduction and murder

(29:07):
of Jennifer Lee Day, please contact the Plano Police departments
Crimes against Persons Unit at ninety seven two nine four
one two one four eight, or go to the Plano
Police website, where you can submit a tip anonymously. We'll
provide a link in the show notes. We'd like to

(29:29):
thank these new Patreon members for their support, Amen and
Joshua s. We appreciate y'all. If you're a Patreon member
and we somehow missed shouting you out, please let us
know by sending us a message there. If you'd like
to join con Cold's mission to shine a light on

(29:50):
unsolved homicides and missing persons cases, get the show at
free and have access to bonus content, you can at
Patreon dot com slash Gone Cold podcast. You can also
support the show by leaving a five star rating and
written review on Apple Podcasts or wherever else you listen.

(30:10):
However you choose to support Gone Cold, we appreciate you.
Thanks for listening, y'all.