Faces of Evil. Lois Gibson
reported missing by a single school.”
I looked up at him, as he leaned against the doorjamb of my office.
“You know what that means,” he added.
Yes, I did know.
“It means that she has been deliberately kept out of school by somebody,” he said. “She’s been locked up someplace, hidden away.”
Over the drawing board, our glances met.
“She’s a closet child,” he said.
They called her Angel Doe.
Police investigators searched databases for similar cases nationwide. In Kansas a little black girl near the same age had been found beheaded and discarded about four months before Angel Doe turned up in Houston.
Though investigators didn’t find any connection, I found one difference truly heartbreaking. Kansas City police had been inundated with more than 800 leads when they first started investigating their own case. There had been a tremendous public outcry and a candlelight vigil.
But when poor Angel Doe was discovered in Houston, the entire country was reeling from the horrendous national tragedy of September 11. News outlets were dominated by that story and consequently, an unidentified little black girl found in a ditch full of water and old tires in southeast Houston drew little attention.
Not for lack of trying—Sgt. Douglas and Officer Shorten did everything in their power to keep the story alive and copies of my sketch displayed (what Officer Shorten called “foot-work,” just walking through the neighborhood, posting copies of my sketch with pertinent information), but in those early weeks, they had little response.
An Internet search turned up several possible leads; another one in Kansas, one in North Carolina and one in Houston, but none panned out.
Houston’s Child Protective Services caseworkers combed their files and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children entered Angel Doe into their database... all to no avail.
Jerry Nance, a caseworker for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, was quoted in the Houston Chronicle, “Facial identification is the only thing that will solve this case,” adding, “A child that young doesn’t have fingerprints, a driver’s license or DNA on file.”
The detectives felt terrible about all this and I felt as badly as they did. By this time, we all had an emotional investment in this case. The way Sgt. Douglas put it was, “This case is deeply imbedded.” He meant, in our souls.
“Not knowing who she is has really been trying to me personally,” Officer Shorten said. It bothered her deeply that the police could not put a name to this child. She even pinned a copy of my composite drawing on the bulletin board behind her desk.
Sergeant Douglas wanted, more than anything, to identify Angel Doe and give her a decent burial before Christmas, but as time passed with no new leads on the case, it was looking unlikely.
In Kansas, concerned citizens paid for a funeral and buried their little nameless child. They had been searching for her identity for seven months and they wanted at least to give the tiny child a proper burial.
Slowly, the country began to recover from the initial shock and horror generated by the events of 9-11. Rescue efforts evolved into body recovery. Our national grief was nowhere near healed yet. But as New York firefighters, police and steel workers—and, down in Washington, D.C., soldiers and firefighters—combed through smoking wreckage for the remains of the lost, the rest of us slowly returned to the vestiges of our normal lives, even as we knew that things would never be quite the same again.
A somber Christmas came and went.
Houston never has much of a winter and the days began warming up. In early March, local and regional events once again began to creep into city newspaper and evening news headlines. In that period, Sgt. Douglas and Officer Shorten renewed their efforts to publicize Angel Doe’s case.
A police spokesperson released a statement to newspapers: “The worst part is that no one has come up to say this child is missing. No parents or friends or relatives,” he said. “It’s as if she never existed.”
That week, police, assisted by Crimestoppers Child Watch of North America volunteers and other civic leaders, printed up numerous flyers with my sketch on it and posted them throughout the neighborhood where Angel Doe’s body had been found. They released a photograph of the blue blanket that had been used to wrap her body. They held news conferences and redistributed my sketch to news outlets, patiently answering repeat questions, doing all they could to get the word out.
I felt as frustrated as they did.
“How will this case get solved?” I asked Clarence.
“A grandmother will have to call it in,” he said. “It will have to be a grandmother who solves this case.”
He was right.
It was the child’s grandmother, Alice Curtis, who finally recognized my sketch. Alice says that she does not watch television other than religious programming and (we can only assume) does not read the newspaper. This is how she explains the fact that, although my composite sketch of her granddaughter LaShondra was televised and printed in the paper, off and on, for six months, she did not see the sketch.
When detectives held the press conference in early March of 2002 and, once again, displayed my composite drawing of “Angel Doe,” Alice says that day she was “flipping channels” when she came across the news conference. She says she “knew right away” that it was her granddaughter.
She called the police. “That’s my child,” she told Sgt. Douglas. He says she insisted on meeting with him that very night; he could not convince her to wait until morning. After several extensive interviews with Alice and two of her other grown daughters, Sgt. Douglas believed they had finally identified Angel Doe.
Although prosecutors would refer to her as “nobody’s child,” this was not really the case with LaShondra.
To my way of thinking, a “nobody’s child” is one who is never loved and is shunted around from foster home to foster home until he or she either winds up in juvenile lock-up, becomes a streetwise runaway or turns up dead at the hands of a drug dealer or pimp or suffers some other tragic fate. It’s deeply depressing to me when I think how many, many children fit that description in this, the richest country in the world.
Although LaShondra’s brief little life started out tough, she was not unwanted. She was born to a crack-addicted mother who already had four other children. Though the infant was treated for drug addiction at birth and put into foster care as a newborn, her grandmother, Alice Curtis, wanted to raise the child. Once Child Protective Services decided that LaShondra would have a good home with her grandmother, Alice took custody of the baby. LaShondra’s birth mother, Connie Knight, did not object.
LaShondra was a jolly, bright baby who was the light of Alice and her husband Roger’s lives.
“She was the kind of child, you could not help but love her,” Alice told a newspaper reporter later. But when LaShondra was just a year old, Alice had a sudden stroke that rendered her incapable of taking care of an infant.
Still, LaShondra had family who cared. Living in another state was one of Alice’s sons and his wife. They did not have any children of their own and gladly took the baby into their home.
When Clarence and I spoke of these things later, he always had to blink back tears. “She never wanted for anything there,” he kept saying. Her new parents adored her and LaShondra began calling them Mommy and Daddy. The child, who was known to be bubbly and sweet, thrived.
But back in Texas, three years after LaShondra’s birth, Connie claimed to be drug-free and she began to pressure her mother to let her have her daughter back. She started calling her brother and sister-in-law frequently, demanding that they allow her to take LaShondra. She even called local police where the couple lived, claiming that they had stolen her baby. Finally, when