Faces of Evil. Lois Gibson
was never enrolled in school. She was not allowed outdoors. She was repeatedly hit, kicked and burned with cigarettes by both her parents.
When LaShondra’s sister asked her mother why LaShondra had to stay in the closet, Connie only said, “Because she doesn’t know how to act,” or, “because that’s where I want her to stay.”
All the children were forced to keep the secret from their grandmother.
On the night of September 7, 2001, little LaShondra said or did something that Raymond didn’t like and he kicked her so hard that she fell back onto the heater, cracking her skull, and began “to shake all over,” said the sisters in trial testimony. Raymond went to the store and brought back some ice, but nothing helped. Finally, he and Connie told the children that they were taking LaShondra to the hospital.
When their sister did not return, Raymond ordered the children never to speak her name again or “I’ll take you to the same place I took her.”
During her testimony at the trial, the closest sister suddenly put her face in her hands, threw back her head and keened with grief so wrenching that District Judge Mary Lou Keel stopped the proceedings.
In a dull monotone, Connie testified that Raymond made her drive him and the blanket-wrapped child to a secluded spot. While she waited in the car, he took the little girl into his arms and walked some distance from the car. “Then,” Connie testified, “I heard a splash.”
Other than that, the only other things she would say on the stand were, “I don’t know,” or “I don’t remember.”
In an agonizing jury deadlock, the first trial of Raymond Jefferson was declared a mistrial. Eleven of the jurors wanted to convict him, but one was not entirely convinced that Connie had not killed the child herself, as she originally claimed.
But prosecutors Casey O’Brien and Sylvia Escobedo would not be deterred. Within a few weeks, they mounted a second trial.
After all we’d been through with our little Angel Doe, I couldn’t stand not being there myself this time. When a witness canceled a composite sketch appointment and rescheduled it for later, I grabbed my purse and headed for the courthouse.
At the trial’s final proceedings, as I sat in the spectator gallery, I could see Raymond Jefferson in profile and I studied him. He was a big man, six feet tall and weighing more than 200 pounds. He had fists like cement blocks. I kept thinking about what those brutal fists had done to that child’s face and it was all I could do not to throw up.
But his face? His face was bland.
The thing is, when you see a monster like him in court, you expect him to look, well, like a monster.
But they never do.
The prosecutors were rewarded for their determination and I was quietly pleased when this trial resulted in a conviction for Raymond Jefferson, Jr. It took that jury less than three hours to pronounce justice for little LaShondra.
On August 22, 2003, LaShondra’s stepfather was given the maximum sentence—life in prison. (As of this writing, his attorneys have filed an appeal with the Fourteenth Court of Appeals.) He will be eligible for parole in 2018, when he is sixty-five years old. Connie Gazette Knight pled guilty and was sentenced to fifty years in prison.
Later, I asked Clarence whether Connie herself might have been a victim of Raymond’s abuse, which could have contributed to her own abuse of her daughter.
Solemnly, he shook his head. “Connie Knight would never put up with any abuse from anybody,” he said firmly. “She’s plenty big enough to take care of herself,” and added, “No...The truth is, she’s just plain mean.”
A few months before Officer Shorten brought me the death photos of little LaShondra, I read a Newsweek cover story in the May 21, 2001 issue on the nature of evil. In it, psychologist Michael Flynn of York College in New York was quoted, “I spent eighteen years working with people who everyone would call evil—child molesters, murderers—and with a few exceptions, I was always struck by their ordinariness.”
I know what he means. If you want to know what the face of evil looks like, well, it looks like your neighbor, or your boss, or your lover.
I know, because I’ve drawn more than three thousand evil faces and most of them did not “look” evil. When I see them in court, these murderers and rapists, they always have what I call a “shark-eyed look.”
Just blank. Like they’re there and yet not there.
At least, that’s when they’re in court or standing in front of a mug-shot camera. But when they’re in the process of raping and murdering, that bland expression can change dramatically.
I know, because I’ve seen it for myself. I’ve looked right into the eyes of a man who was trying to kill me and I know what the face of evil really looks like—right then—not later, all cleaned up for court.
I know what it means to feel like a helpless victim, to feel caged in the terror and powerlessness of one day, one moment that can change you forever, an endless, heart-stopping moment when you are fighting for your life, sense it draining out of you as you choke for breath... when the world goes dark and you’re all alone... facing evil.
Never in my life had I looked into the face of evil until the day I found myself being killed.
There are some crime victims in this world to whom violence comes as no surprise. They’ve grown up with it, both at home and in their neighborhoods, in so many ways that they don’t know anything different. I once heard an account of a woman who was kidnapped by a brutal serial murderer who had killed all his other victims, but when he put the gun to her head, she simply nodded in weary recognition and said, “Go ahead. Pull the trigger. You’d be doing me a favor.” He was so surprised that he actually spared her life and let her go free.
I wasn’t like that.
The picturesque, homey setting of the old television series, The Waltons, starring Richard Thomas, would, if you’ve ever seen it, give you a pretty good idea of what my childhood was like. It’s the kind of lifestyle seen in nostalgic Hallmark Christmas specials and I’ve got a lot of brothers and sisters who could back me up. I was born on a farm in Missouri on February 25, 1950, to Eva and Don Herbert, the second of five kids. When it came time for Mama to go to the hospital, they took her in a horse and carriage. Mama was college educated. She had been a school teacher before she got married and Daddy had a gift for carpentry, so they moved their growing family to Kansas City, to a house with only one bedroom, where he soon found all the work he could handle. All my growing-up years, Daddy was building on to that house. The sounds of hammering, sawing and Daddy whistling Tennessee Waltz was the soundtrack of my childhood.
We lived at the top of a hill on a dead-end street and in wintertime, Daddy climbed onto a big sled he’d fashioned and piled as many kids on his lap as he could fit and down the hills we went, screaming with glee in the sun-sparkled cold.
There was so much love everywhere I looked. Artistically gifted and (like most creative types) a very sensitive child, I was what you might call a “goody two-shoes,” always trying to please, doing well in school, making my parents proud. My sister Adonna was two years older than me and, like Mama, a born teacher. From the time I was a toddler, Adonna made it her business to teach me whatever she had learned that day. When I started school, everyone thought I was precocious because I seemed to know my lessons before they were taught. But for years, I suffered from bouts of self-doubt, fearing that the only smart one in the family was my older sister. I didn’t know if I was really intelligent or just well-trained, like a good dog.
In high school I twirled baton with the marching band, but I wasn’t what you would call “popular.” I tended