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.
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