As Aaron Hernandez’s murder case gripped greater Boston, a nurse quietly vanished. Her family is still seeking answers

The first clue something was wrong came when Jennifer Mbugua’s gray Toyota Camry turned up overnight behind a Shell station in a Boston suburb. Its engine was off and its doors were shut. Her car keys and one sandal were beside a nearby Dumpster.

It was early morning on May 28, 2014. A gas station attendant called police after noticing the empty car parked crookedly at the entrance of the station’s car wash in North Attleboro, Massachusetts. Investigators believe it was left there between midnight and 3 a.m., adding to the mystery.

The gas station was roughly 30 miles from Mbugua’s apartment in Fall River, Massachusetts. By the time anyone noticed the abandoned car, the 31-year-old nurse had vanished.

Her sister, Lisa Mbugua, learned she was missing when North Attleboro police called that spring morning to ask whether she knew Jennifer’s whereabouts.

“It didn’t make sense because she lived in Fall River,” she says now. “I was so confused … why is her car in North Attleboro?”

Her disappearance made headlines in a few small media outlets but went largely unnoticed.

At the time, much of the Boston area – and the nation – was captivated by a more sensational case: murder charges against star NFL player Aaron Hernandez. The Connecticut native, who had caught a touchdown pass for the New England Patriots two years earlier in the Super Bowl, was in jail on charges of gunning down a friend in North Attleboro, where Hernandez owned a sprawling mansion.

The day Jennifer’s car was discovered, Hernandez pleaded not guilty to additional murder charges in the killing of two men in Boston. Images of the shackled, tattooed tight end dominated news coverage across New England.

Jennifer’s family has long wondered whether that media frenzy drowned out their search for answers.

“Everything was about Aaron Hernandez at the time. His case seemed like a priority for the police, the prosecutors, everyone,” Lisa Mbugua says. “With everyone’s focus on Hernandez, was something missed?”

The Massachusetts State Police, which investigated the Mbugua and Hernandez cases, declined to comment on the agency’s relative efforts. A spokesperson for North Attleboro police referred all questions to other law enforcement agencies.

A dozen years later, Jennifer Mbugua still hasn’t been found. Her sister has revisited the details of her disappearance and considered every possibility, every conversation, every missed clue. She never imagined her family would still be searching all this time later.

“We all thought, ‘OK, tomorrow we’ll find her and this will all be over,’” she says. “Sometimes it feels surreal that she’s still missing.”

Jennifer kept much of her life private, her sister says, making it harder to piece together her final days.

Only after she disappeared did her family start to get new glimpses into her life.

She left a gym card, a wallet and lots of questions

Jennifer Mbugua’s disappearance follows a pattern in missing-person cases across the United States. Some start with an initial burst of attention, followed by years of uncertainty as leads dry up and interest fades.

More than 26,350 missing persons’ cases remain open nationwide, including over 220 in Massachusetts, according to the Department of Justice. A disproportionate number of missing people in the US are Black — about 40%, according to federal statistics, even though they make up only about 14% of the population.

Some disappearances dominate headlines. Most, like Mbugua’s, unfold mostly in the shadows.

Her last confirmed sighting was in her apartment building parking lot, where a neighbor reported seeing her sorting through papers in her car two days before it was found, her sister says.

Inside the abandoned Camry, police found Mbugua’s wallet, a gym membership card and storage facility paperwork. They contacted Lisa Mbugua, hoping she could explain why her sister’s car was in North Attleboro, about a 45-minute drive from her apartment.

But no one knew the reason. Her family hadn’t spoken with her for several weeks, Lisa Mbugua says.

Jennifer Mbugua came to the US from Kenya in August 2001 on a student’s visa to join her oldest sister Lisa, who’d arrived five years earlier. Jennifer attended Quincy College, where she studied to become a licensed practical nurse and graduated in May 2005.

Like her older sister, she built a career in nursing.

Jennifer worked through a staffing agency and picked up overnight shifts in hospitals and nursing homes across Fall River, her sister says. She wasn’t tied to one permanent hospital, which gave her flexibility and unusual hours.

With a night schedule, she often slept during the day and barely returned calls, her sister says. Her family blamed it on her late working hours and didn’t read much into it.

“That’s just how she’s always been. Her privacy wasn’t a red flag. It was who she was,” Lisa Mbugua says. “She had a phone, but she never answered it. During the day, if you called her, she’d be sleeping. And at night, she was working.”

But at the time her car was found, that silence had stretched longer than usual.

Lisa Mbugua says she called her sister repeatedly in early 2014 and sent her messages through Facebook. Her efforts went unanswered.

In March, she asked Fall River Police to conduct a welfare check, according to police records. Later that month she drove more than an hour from her home in Dracut, Massachusetts, to her sister’s place to check on her. She says when she arrived, Jennifer brushed off her worries, jokingly calling her “Mother Hen.”

But in retrospect, she says, something felt off that day. Jennifer seemed frazzled, and her apartment was in disarray with clothes and shoes strewn everywhere.

After that visit, Jennifer went quiet again. In April, Lisa returned to the apartment, but no one answered the door. She assumed her sister was sleeping and didn’t think much of it at the time.

“It wasn’t unusual for us to go a month without talking,” Lisa Mbugua says.

Only later did she learn that her sister had already moved to another apartment in Fall River.

“When I saw her in March, something seemed off, but I could not really put my finger on it. I remember feeling very uneasy,” she says.

“If I knew what would happen two months later, I would not have left her alone.”

A trio of law enforcement agencies worked Mbugua’s case: Fall River and North Attleboro police, along with the Massachusetts State Police. The state police also investigated the allegations against Aaron Hernandez.

Lisa Mbugua says she is not accusing police of overlooking Jennifer’s case. But she often reflects on how her sister’s disappearance unfolded in the shadow of the Hernandez saga. Eight months after she went missing, Hernandez went on trial in Fall River. He was convicted of the North Attleboro killing and sentenced to life in prison.

The former football player died by an apparent suicide in his jail cell in April 2017, five days after being acquitted in the double homicide case in Boston.

Meanwhile, Jennifer Mbugua’s case remains unresolved. Sgt. Ross Aubin, a spokesperson for Fall River Police, says the case remains open but there are no substantial leads or a suspect.

In February, CNN filed a request for Mbugua’s case records with the Massachusetts State Police, which did not respond. CNN has since filed an appeal with the state’s Supervisor of Records.

Investigators continue to pursue leads across the country, but none have led to a breakthrough, says Massachusetts State Police Sgt. Hollis Crowley.

A Fall River Police incident report says Jennifer was single when she disappeared. Afterward, investigators learned she’d struggled with depression and financial problems, Crowley says. She left her phone in the apartment, but her passport was missing, her sister says.

Crowley declined to share details on information recovered from Mbugua’s phone or storage facility, saying they did not yield any leads.

Canine searches near the gas station turned up nothing, Crowley says. A surveillance camera pointed at the car wash was not working that night and security footage inside the gas station showed no record of her entering, she says.

“All effort was exhausted to try to determine what direction the car came from,” Crowley says.

There’s been no activity on Mbugua’s bank accounts, and state police flagged her passport with federal authorities so any international travel would trigger an alert, Crowley says. Investigators also entered Lisa Mbugua’s DNA into national databases and routinely compare it with unidentified human remains for familial matches.

The goal is to find answers, no matter how long it takes, Crowley says. She asks anyone with information to call 1-855-627-6583 or email [email protected].

“My oldest missing persons case is from 1969 … It doesn’t stop until it’s resolved one way or the other,” she says. “And if it’s not by me, hopefully it will be by my successors until we can get the family some kind of resolution.”

Lisa Mbugua stumbles over which verb tenses to use when talking about her sister.

Sometimes, the past tense slips out. She pauses midsentence and starts again, choosing her words carefully.

“I don’t want to use past tense because I don’t know that she’s gone,” she says. “But then the last time I saw her was so long ago, can she still be alive?”

About a week before Jennifer disappeared, their mother arrived from Kenya to spend time with her daughters. Lisa had told her how distant Jennifer had become, and they planned to stage an intervention that week, hoping she’d open up.

“But we never got the chance,” she says.

Only after her sister’s disappearance did Lisa begin to learn more details about her life.

When she filed the missing person’s report, she entered what she believed was Jennifer’s address at the time. Investigators later notified her that the landlord informed them she moved out on April 7, according to a police incident report.

Three days after her car was found, her family got her new Fall River address and drove there. But by then, the landlord had cleaned out her apartment and taken her personal items — including her phone, clothes and pocketbook — to the basement, the incident report says.

Lisa Mbugua says she later learned Jennifer was going to meet a friend the week she disappeared to discuss becoming a salesperson for Mary Kay cosmetics. She was planning to quit nursing, her sister says.

Five days before her car was discovered, Jennifer appeared on surveillance video at a Fall River library, where she checked out several items, the incident report says. Police have not revealed what she borrowed.

Then two years ago came another surprise: A man contacted the family and said he’d gone on a few dates with Jennifer shortly before she went missing, Lisa Mbugua says. The family notified investigators about it, she says.

Crowley declined to comment on the man. Meanwhile, each new detail about Mbugua’s final weeks has left her family with more questions.

Lisa Mbugua says she sometimes thinks about Amanda Berry, an abductee who escaped in 2013 from a Cleveland house where she’d been held captive for a decade. With no evidence of blood in Jennifer’s car or apartment, she wonders if her sister met a similar fate.

“As long as there’s no closure, it means there’s a possibility she’s out there,” she says. “As long as there are no identifiable remains, until we’re told otherwise, there’s hope that she could be alive.

Jennifer attended church regularly. She loved contemporary gospel music and rarely went anywhere without her headphones. Christmas was her favorite time of the year.

She was always the first in her family to decorate during the holiday season, her sister says. Her tree glowed with red and green nutcracker figurines tucked throughout the branches. At the top, she often placed a tiny Santa in a golden sleigh.

Each holiday season, Lisa Mbugua and her two children decorate their Christmas tree with her sister’s ornaments.

She tells her kids about the aunt who vanished when they were toddlers. It’s her way of keeping her sister’s spirit alive.

Their mother, who lives in Kenya, declined to speak with CNN. But at the start of every year, Lisa says, her mother calls with the same message about Jennifer, the third of her six daughters.

“This is the year she’s coming back,” she tells her. “I know it. I feel it.”