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 it was time for LaShondra to start school, her grandmother offered to take her back and the couple reluctantly agreed.
But it wasn’t Alice who came to pick up the child. It was Connie.
Since Alice Curtis had custody of LaShondra and since she did not object, there was nothing the heartbroken couple could do, legally, to keep the little girl. Alice Curtis never notified Child Protective Services of her decision to allow Connie to take LaShondra back. If she had, CPS caseworkers would have visited the home, made reports as to the condition of the child and evaluated her new home. But they never knew.
Time and time again, I have seen cases where unworthy, uncaring parents demand the return of their children and I don’t believe it has anything to do with love. Some people regard their children as possessions and often don’t rest until that “thing” has been returned to them. Whatever Connie Knight’s motives for yanking LaShondra away from the home she loved and dragging her back to Texas, one thing is certain: from that moment on, LaShondra’s life became a living, bloody hell.
Soon, she disappeared from sight.
Alice Curtis claims she phoned her daughter frequently, asking to speak to LaShondra, and visited the house. Apparently, she was easily manipulated by the former drug addict, who convinced her elderly mother, time and again, that LaShondra was out of the house, staying off and on with a distant relative of her stepfather’s.
When Alice became naggingly persistent, Connie allowed her to speak with LaShondra—briefly—on the phone. “I never got any signals anything was abnormal,” Alice said later.
What the old woman didn’t realize at the time was that she wasn’t speaking to LaShondra at all. Connie had put up one of her other daughters to pretend to be LaShondra whenever her grandmother called.
“I never got alarmed, because I saw the other children and they were fine,” Alice said.
Yes...the other children. What about the other children?
In the June 30, 2002 Houston Chronicle, Dr. Curtis Mooney, president of DePelchin Children’s Center, which provides counseling for children and families in the Houston area, including those suffering abuse, stated that it is not unusual for a parent or parents to pick one child out of a family to use as the family’s “scapegoat,” which means that child will suffer more serious consequences for misbehaving—even being locked up.
“That child becomes the one everything is blamed on...Such a victim can be targeted because he or she is seen as a ‘problem child,’ or perhaps has a more aggressive personality than the other children,” said Mooney.
Whenever Alice called Connie and asked why LaShondra wasn’t there, Connie would always tell her mother that the little girl was uncontrollable and that other relatives had better luck with her, saying, “She has mental problems.”
It’s hard not to judge Alice Curtis. Most of us who have children feel, when months and months have gone by without a sign of a grandchild who was supposed to be living only a couple of blocks away, that we would be hugely concerned, we would do something—especially if we knew that this same child’s mother had had drug addiction problems in the past.
But Alice, whose health was not good, was caring for her own dying mother during those days. Distracted, unwell and manipulated by her daughter, she let herself believe that LaShondra was being taken care of somewhere by someone who loved her.
As I said, the human brain is capable of blocking out things it’s
