Guy Calls Station About '82 Cold Case, Gets Arrested

Jose Ferreira confessed to cops about killing 13-year-old Carrie Ann Jopek in 1982
By Jenn Gidman,  Newser Staff
Posted Oct 19, 2015 7:30 AM CDT

In 1982, 13-year-old Carrie Ann Jopek went missing in Milwaukee after she got suspended from school. Her body was found 17 months after she vanished, buried under a neighbor's porch, but the search for her killer eventually went cold, the AP reports. Now her mom, Carolyn Touisgnant, may finally have answers after a man called a local news station and confessed. Jose Ferreira, 50, called WISN 12 on Oct. 11 and described exactly what had happened on that March day. "His story was very detailed—disturbingly so," the station's newsroom director told the AP; he says the station called cops because of "several red flags," leading to Ferreira's arrest on second-degree murder charges. Ferreira had also apparently called a crisis line and told an acquaintance about his crime, though it's still unclear why he came forward now.

A more recent WISN 12 story says Ferreira confessed to cops that when he was 17, Carrie Ann changed her mind about making out with him at a house party, so he shoved her down a flight of stairs, breaking her neck. He said he buried her body under the porch and then denied knowing anything about it for the past three decades, even after her body had been found. "She spent two of her birthdays underneath that porch," Touisgnant says, per the AP, adding that she sometimes still blames herself because she let Carrie Ann walk home from school that day instead of picking her up. Still, there's some peace in the prospect of getting justice. "Everytime [I'd] watch Cold Case or some other detective show, I would hope and pray one of these days [we'd] get the person who did that to Carrie," she says, adding to WISN 12: "Now he's gonna pay for what he did to her." (Is this the 20th century's most baffling cold case?)

Get the news faster.
Tap to install our app.
X
Install the Newser News app
in two easy steps:
1. Tap in your navigation bar.
2. Tap to Add to Home Screen.

X