by Lois Gibson
What I had to do was basically a skull reconstruction, because most of the flesh on her face had already rotted off due to water damage.
Steeling myself, I began.
I started, as always, from the top. This keeps me from smearing the pastel chalks with my hand as I lean on the paper. Usually, I do my sketches in warm black and white, but I knew that for purposes of identification, it would be better to use full color on my rendering of the little girl. With a black-and-white sketch, I can usually complete the job in an hour or so, but since this was a full-color reconstruction, with little to go on, it would most likely take me half a day.
That is, under normal circumstances. But 9-11 was anything but “normal.”
The top of the child’s head was relatively intact and I could see from the photographs that she had short, black hair, so I drew that. I knew I could go back later if I wanted and give it more of a style. The forehead was visible, so I was able to match the color of her skin as I worked my way down to her eyebrows.
Before I got very far, the phone rang. It was Dr. Baker, the medical examiner who had done the autopsy on the child.
In a kind, gentle voice, he said, “I know you don’t have much to work with there with those photos.”
“That’s true,” I agreed.
“Would you like me to get you something, er, better?” he asked. In a sad but determined voice he went on, “I could give you a prepared specimen.”
A prepared specimen is a nice way of saying that, in order to make my job easier, the good doctor was prepared to remove the child’s head and put it through a process known as maceration. This involves immersing the skull into a solution of 60% hydrogen peroxide. (What is used for household purposes is a 3% solution of hydrogen peroxide.)
This high content solution dissolves the soft tissue away, leaving the skull clean and intact. For an artist, this is an ideal way to depict the contours of that particular person’s face.
“It’s so kind of you to offer,” I said. “And you’re right; it would make my job easier. But I think I’d rather do this as quickly as possible, for one thing and for another, well, she’s such a tiny little girl. I’d really rather not this time.”
It was a form of respect for the body that he understood. I thanked him though, because I knew his offer was made with the sincerest form of kindness. He was trying to spare me having to go through what I was going through now: staring at what used to be a face, trying to draw it as it was in life.
I turned back to my task and glanced up at the television just in time to hear the horrifying news that a plane had crashed into the Pentagon. For a while, I watched the TV compulsively, hoping for some fragment of news that would somehow make sense of everything. The president released a statement that we were under attack by terrorists.
What could I do? I cried, I watched a while longer…and then, glancing back and forth from the horror on television to the horror on my drawing board, blotting my eyes with a tissue, I picked up my chalk and went back to work.
Eyebrows lie on top of the bones of the skull in a specific way and since I could see her superciliary arch (the brow ridge), I was able to place the little girl’s eyebrows just right. They would be fine, pre-pubescent hair and probably not very noticeable. Not much drawing, just some wispy child eyebrows.
The eyebrow follows the shape of the brow ridge. If people have a high, distinct arch to their eyebrows, it means that the bone is rather thick and takes a sharp curve as it travels downward. As I looked closely I saw this child had a small bone with a shallow curve.
Just as I was about to start drawing the eyes, Two World Trade Center, the North Tower, suddenly collapsed. It was… horrible? Terrifying? Mesmerizing? I searched in vain for words to describe what I was viewing.
There just weren’t words to explain what I saw as I stared, transfixed, helpless, and watched people die. The grief, which I realized all who watched felt, was speechless, unspeakable. Heedless of the chalk I was holding, I clapped my hand over my mouth, cried, “No, no, no,” and sobbed.
For a long time, I could not work. My eyes were too blurred with tears; I couldn’t even see what I was doing.
I was still sitting, the chalk in my limp hand, when the South Tower collapsed.
Bawling, blowing my nose, praying, trying to compose myself, a few minutes later I heard the report about yet another plane that had crashed in rural Pennsylvania, southeast of Pittsburgh.
“The world has gone mad,” I whispered.
For a long time, I was hypnotized by the images on television, but eventually, when reporters began repeating themselves and it was clear that nobody really knew anything new, I took a deep shuddering breath and turned my attention back to the little lost child whose image I was trying to capture.
The eyes of a person have specific places that attach to the inner corners of the eye socket. Since the flesh had decomposed and disappeared and the eyeballs were gone, I could clearly see the “landmarks” that told me how wide-spaced her eyes would be. The fold above the lid would be smooth and dark, since there would be almost no fat in the pad behind and the eyelids would be visible. (Lack of body fat lets that nictitating membrane curve over the eyeball.) So I drew tiny eyelids.
Meanwhile, it seemed as if our whole country was under attack and nobody knew where these evil monsters would strike next. I even glanced out my office window, picking out taller buildings, trying to assess if my own was at risk.
Then I scoffed at my own nervousness and went back to work, back to crying, back to praying, back to watching the TV, spellbound, like everyone else.
In police work, there is a peculiar phenomenon that occurs whenever there is a child murder, especially one so gruesome and emotionally wrenching as this one. When the detectives who “catch” the case “make the scene,” meaning, they go to the crime scene before the body is removed and begin their investigation, other police personnel slowly begin to show up at the scene.
They may be office workers, supervisors and so on. What they are doing is offering mute moral support, quiet, steadfast presence. In many ways, it’s like a silent memorial to honor this most innocent of victims.
But I wasn’t at a crime scene. I was alone in my office, coping with the horrors both without and within.
The phone rang again. This time I recognized the voice of homicide Lieutenant Steve Arrington and I knew instinctively that he wasn’t trying to intrude or check up on me or bother me.
He was hurting as badly as I was at what we were seeing happen to our country and to the tiny girl.
“Are you all right?” he asked. “Can you still work despite the horror of what’s going on in our country?”
I assured him that despite my own shock I was working.
“Lois, can you make her smile, like when she was alive?” he asked, a bit embarrassed at making such a request at this moment.
He knew and I knew that I could. The phone call wasn’t really about that and we both knew it, but I was so grateful for his support. “Sure I can,” I said softly.
“Make her pretty,” he said quietly, “like I know she was in life.”
“I will,” I said.
“I know you will,” he said. “I know you can. Help us find her, help us nail whoever did this to her and pray for our country.”
I promised that I would and we hung up. I felt as if I had been hugged. It gave me strength.
Once again, I went back to work.
In order to tell how to draw the “iris to eye opening” ratio right, I glanced at photographs I had in my office of my two children, Brent and Tiffany. They were teenagers now, but I had some pictures from when they were small children that I used as references. The iris, I found, would occupy more of the eye opening than it would in an adult, but less than in an infant. I worked out a good balance and gave the little girl nice eyelashes.
Her ravaged little face was beginning to come to life. It gave me hope. While the somber television news anchors tried to sor
t out what was going on in our country, I listened and kept working.
The nose, I decided, would be smooth. The bridge that I could see from the crime scene photographs was smooth and lay low to the facial plane. The outer edges of the bottom part of the nose would start about one-half to two millimeters outside of the nasal hole, which was visible through the last film of flesh that hadn’t dissolved in the water. I gave her average-sized nostril holes.
The cheeks were easy. I covered those bones with the appropriate muscles and the smooth, brown, little girl skin.
It was time to draw her smile. Her alveolar ridge—the bony arch from which the teeth protrude—was wide as I faced her, so I drew it that way. The bottom teeth were arched so wide that I felt certain she would show them along with the top teeth when she smiled, so I drew the bottom teeth just above the full bottom lip as they would appear during a happy grin.
Of course, one thing an artist has to do at this point is depict the tongue peeking through as the light hits it, along with a glistening shine, because a live person’s mouth is always wet.
The little girl was missing one tooth and the other was tilted. I needed to know a strong estimation of this child’s true age. Height and weight would not tell the true story.
So I put in a call to the forensic dentist, Dr. DeLattre, who had examined the body.
Dr. DeLattre said, “Her front teeth were all adult teeth but the back teeth were deciduous or baby teeth.”
That told me two things. One, this child was six or seven years old, not four, as Darcus had said the officers who found the dead child thought, due to her tiny, shrunken size. And two, she had not lost that front tooth naturally. It had been punched out and during the same incident, the tooth next to it had been jammed up back into the socket in a crooked way.
This was a sickening development that caught me by surprise. I’d assumed…well, it just hadn’t occurred to me that this precious child had been punched in the mouth.
I asked, “How long before she died do you think that tooth was knocked out?” Dentists can tell by how much the bone has grown shut after tooth loss.
Her voice sad, she said, “About six weeks to two months.”
Poor, sweet baby.
I decided to use the lost tooth as a sort of “gap-toothed grin” when I sketched her smile. I made her as pretty as Arrington had asked and I thought she once had been as I reflected on how much she’d been through.
After completing her smile and drawing the chin, I sat for a moment and stared at the blue plaid shirt she was wearing. It was only visible at a distance from the shot where she lay on the red plastic body bag on which she’d been placed by personnel from the medical examiner’s office. I tried to reproduce it as closely as possible, because it was another clue to her identity.
Finally, I put some shadows on her neck under her chin and fluffed up her hair a bit, as if it had just been washed.
My sunny, windowed office is located on the seventh floor of the Travis building. Ironically, this houses the Robbery division of the Houston Police Department. Robbery detectives seldom see the kinds of violence I have to deal with all the time. Their work is usually not as emotionally wrenching as it can be for homicide detectives or those who work in Juvenile Sex Crimes. Sometimes the detectives are surprised at the dreadful things I often have to deal with and even on this frightening day in which there were so many horrible sights, as I worked, some of the detectives drifted by and commiserated on the shock and horror affecting our country and the shock and horror of the photographs pinned to my board.
One of the detectives said something I’ll never forget. “They’ve checked all the area schools, looking for a child who has been missing from class and is unaccounted for or who would otherwise fit her description,” he said. (In Houston, school starts in August, so a child absent for several days this far into the semester would be noticed.) “She’s not been 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.