The Slumber Party

In March 1995, twelve-year-old Jessica Thornsberry went to a slumber party at a friend’s home in Louisville, Kentucky. Late on the night of March 29, she slipped outside to talk with two neighborhood boys who had come to the door. She later went back into the house, but by morning she was gone.

That same morning, county workers found Jessica’s body in Iroquois Park, about four miles from the house. She had been strangled, and she was wrapped in straw netting of the kind used on a nearby drainage project. Suspicion soon settled on someone close to the party itself. The host family’s seventeen-year-old son, Jeremy Gipson, admitted that Jessica had come down to the basement while he was there in the early hours, that he attacked her, and that he then drove her body to the park.

It then emerged that Gipson already had a juvenile record for sexually assaulting a seven-year-old girl. Kentucky law kept juvenile records confidential, so Jessica’s mother had no idea of it when she let her daughter stay over with her best friend, April Gipson. The case raised hard questions about that secrecy and about who deserves to know when a young offender lives in the home. Gipson pleaded guilty and received a life term, with a chance at parole after twenty-five years. The parole board turned him down in February 2020.