Chandra Jennings: Happy-Go-Lucky

Chandra Jennings and Kraig Jenkins had been dating for just over two years. The couple was attending a party together, drinking, smoking and having fun. A short argument later and Jennings asked to go to a bar, so Jenkins took her. Before he even stopped, Jennings hopped out of the car and slammed the door. Little did the couple know, this would be the last time they would see each other. Jennings was soon reported missing, and Jenkins became a suspect in the case.

Chandra Jennings, or Sharon Jennings as she was known by friends, went missing in late April of 2003 in Milwaukee. The 36-year-old lived with her mother at the time of her disappearance and left behind two brothers, a sister, and a son. Police followed leads for a little over a year, but did little else when that didn’t pan out. Her name never appeared in any newspapers, according to multiple newspaper public databases.

Chandra is one of 570 open missing persons cases in Milwaukee right now. Many of these cases have gone almost unnoticed by news media which academic research shows are more inclined to cover cases of missing white blonde women. The Milwaukee Police Department investigated the case but gets thousands of missing people reports each year.

 A team of 12 student journalists spent three months investigating 18 open missing people cases, most of them people of color in Milwaukee. The students spoke with family members and detectives and filed open records requests.

Police have granted Media Milwaukee access to the complete police files through an open records request; the following account contains details from the file.

Media Milwaukee also spoke to Kraig Jenkins, who is now 67 and still living in Milwaukee. He has grandchildren and is currently being treated for pancreatic cancer but longs for answers about the case that is over two decades old. He denies having anything to do with Jennings’ disappearance.

Who Is Chandra?

On a backdrop of Milwaukee’s northwest side, Jennings worked on and off as a bartender at Club Deville and occasionally cleaned houses on the side, police reports show. She often frequented bars around the area as well, coming in multiple times a day to chat with people, which Jenkins said perfectly described her “happy-go-lucky” personality.

“She could mingle with anybody, other than myself, I’ve never seen her arguing and lose her temper with anybody. She pretty much got along with everybody,” Jenkins said.

Yet Jenkins and Jennings both struggled with what he called a “chemical dependency” on cocaine and alcohol. The couple’s issue represented a larger concern in Milwaukee of the influx of cocaine into the inner city.

“It was just rampant; it was an epidemic. A lot of people were using it; there was money to be made,” former Milwaukee police Detective Ruben Burgos says about crack cocaine in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s. He is now a senior lecturer of Criminal Justice & Criminology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

“Sometimes these victims and individuals fall into the drug world and just kind of fall off the face of the earth.”

Because of these issues, Jennings had struggles with both Jenkins and her mother, Flossie Holloway, the police reports say. Holloway told police that the couple would fight often and that Jennings would have black and blue marks and bruises on her face or body.

When asked about these bruises during a 2004 interrogation, Jenkins admitted that they physically fought on several occasions but said “he would hit with an open hand and never punch,” the police reports say. He also said that he also received abuse from her, they add.

In a recent interview with Media Milwaukee, Jenkins reiterated similar sentiments, saying the police were never called and no one was hospitalized because of the fights.

Jenkins also said Jennings and her mother had struggles.

“They would have their little spats and Sharon wouldn’t come home for a couple of days or Flossie would tell her to stay away for a couple of days, but they always mended their bridges,” Jenkins said.

But family, friends and Kraig all knew that something was wrong after more than a few days without so much as a phone call from Jennings.

Chandra Goes Missing

On April 29, 2003, Chandra disappeared. At around 10 a.m., the police file says she returned home to change clothes before attending the wake of a friend’s mother. She was seen by both her sister Carla Holloway and her son Jarrell Stovall. After leaving, she said she was going to take the bus to 2^nd and Center St. and then take Jenkins’ car to the wake. That was the last time the family saw her.

_{Chandra Jennings, pictured left, who went missing in 2003. Credit: Facebook – Jarrell Stovall}

Her mother, Flossie Holloway, reported Jennings missing on May 11, 2003, though police did not interview her until August 29. Much of the investigation would not take place until 2004.

The police came across multiple leads throughout the investigation, but Jenkins was the largest part. He said the police towed multiple of his cars and interrogated him multiple times. Police files show both his son and aunt were interviewed and fingerprint tests ran.

Jenkins expressed concerns with the interrogation process.

“If I remember correctly, they were the nastiest, disrespectful police detectives I’ve met in my life, and I’ve seen YouTube videos and that crap and I think they’ve got them beat as far as being out of place,” Jenkins said.

Police have declined to answer specific questions about the case although, as noted, they did provide the entire file after an open records request.

He said he remembers they interrogated him five to six times, once for 72 hours, pressing him to confess, while providing zero hard evidence against him.

“They were pressing me to tell them where her body was, and what happened to her, and all the angles they come at to make you just break down,” Jenkins said. “I was mentally and physically messed up at the time, I was at the point where I was ready to tell them anything just so I can get them off my case.”

One detective who interrogated him retired, but the other later became an assistant chief of police.

According to police files, detectives located Jenkins’ car, which was abandoned at the time, and found bags of Chandra’s clothes in the back along with a jigsaw with blood on it. Jenkins said the jigsaw was for his construction work, and the blood was his own.

Other Leads

Detectives also received other compelling leads, through Jennings’ father, Andrew Holloway. According to files, Jennings’ father called her mother in the beginning of March 2004 to tell her that Chandra was a witness to a homicide, where members of the Vice Lords gang beheaded a woman. The father would not reveal how he got this information. Additionally, files did not have record of any interview of him throughout the investigation, though detectives today said older cases were not always properly documented.

Another rumor during the investigation was that Chandra had gone to the south side to get drugs. Jenkins said he was unsure about this theory.

“I’ve never known her to go on the south side. Somebody she knows or she was comfortable had to take her over there,” Jenkins said.

Andrew Holloway later spoke with Flossie again, reiterating that theory. He said that Chandra and two of her friends had gone to a drug house on the south side and found out they had received bad drugs. Chandra supposedly went inside alone and her friends left without her. The police interviewed one friend but did not locate the other.

Media Milwaukee attempted to contact Andrew Holloway and the two friends who supposedly went to the drug house with Chandra. We received no response.

Media Milwaukee also asked current detectives about these leads and they refused to comment on them, citing it as an ongoing investigation.

Jenkins Interrogation

While focusing on Jenkins, the police interrogated him on April 10, 2004. While arrested on misdemeanor charges for contempt of court, he was investigated by two detectives about Jennings’ case.

“They treated me like crap, and I got to the point where after I made a statement, I wasn’t going to help them anymore,” Jenkins said. “I can understand their point of view that a husband, boyfriend or close friend is the one you look at in this situation…but after that I didn’t care, I would have lawyered up if they would have come to me again.”

After Jenkins’ interrogation, the case went cold, and investigators didn’t look into any of the aforementioned leads.

“It would be nice if it was a cold case and they brought it up and investigated it because somebody has to know what happened to her,” Jenkins said. “It was like after the first few months of harassment, they swept it under the rug.”

Media Coverage

Jenkins also said he was not happy with the media coverage.

“I’ve never, since all this happened, seen any write-up in a newspaper or in the news about [Chandra],” Jenkins said. “I figured they said it’s just another Black couple in the ghetto ruining their lives so what the hell, we aren’t putting this in the news, but I didn’t understand that, especially after they came to the conclusion that she was missing.”

For Jenkins, this case was a shock. He said when the reality of the situation sank in, it changed his life and caused him to sober up.  

However, for Jennings’ son, Jarrell Stovall, watching his mother go missing at age 17 was rough. He has been convicted of multiple felonies throughout his life and received a life sentence in 2020 for a homicide. He was interviewed by WUWM during his 2013 prison sentence, saying that when his mom, Chandra, went missing, his life “spiraled down to raw anger.” 

_{Most recent Facebook profile picture of Stovall in 2020. Credit: Facebook – Jarrell Stovall}

Stovall was a basketball fanatic, according to Jenkins. He said he remembers that they were playing basketball in front of Jennings’ mother’s house one day with a group of neighborhood kids when Stovall dunked on him, and that brought the neighborhood down.

Stovall’s crimes have been covered by Milwaukee’s major media outlets three different times. His missing mother’s case, however, was only covered 12 years after the fact. No coverage of her case showed up on newspapers.com or the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel archives accessed via the Milwaukee Public Library. The first major coverage came from CBS 58 in 2015.

But the question remains, what would have happened had the media covered this case properly the first time?

Twenty-one years later, Chandra’s case remains cold and Jenkins and the police are eager for answers.

Contribution by Ava Carmody

---

This story is part of a semester-long investigative reporting project into missing people’s cases in Milwaukee and Wisconsin. It was created by an advanced reporting class in the Journalism, Advertising, and Media Studies program at UW-Milwaukee. Other stories from the project are available here.