Flowers for Baby Jane Doe
Santo Tomas Drive was in flower: the ultraviolet radiance from the untidy blooming of jacaranda trees, the tight Crayola bundles of roses and carnations in the hands of those who came and went on the pleasant business of Mother’s Day.
Even in the alley that runs behind Santo Tomas, at a spot where the slope starts its rise to the heights and prices of View Park, a dusty tumble of nasturtium, safety-vest orange, ornamented the hill.
Left undisturbed, the nasturtium can come back year after year from its own seeds. So, too, can memory return, forcing its way up through the layered clay of time and the anodyne topsoil of habit.
On Santo Tomas Drive, on Mother’s Day, the seeds of recall planted nearly 12 years before also rose and flowered again. They were planted on an August morning when the starved and frozen body of an infant girl, a nameless child with pierced ears and four new teeth, was found in this Southwest Los Angeles alley.
*
I remembered the long-dead child at once, remembered the stories I had written in hopes of finding her name, and then, perhaps, her killer’s. I remembered the child, but she had not haunted me as she had Alice Beard, the social worker who had not, in reading my story, deplored the state of the world and then turned the page on the dead face of Baby Jane Doe No. 61.
She had collected $135 toward a reward. She had arranged a memorial service. It was not enough. For these dozen years, Alice Beard had seethed and grieved.
And so on this Mother’s Day Sunday, she brought her 8-year-old son, Jean-Benjamin, and her friend Hazel to Santo Tomas Drive. Door after door opened to her knock, and to the scent of home cooking or the thunder of rap music, she said “Happy Mother’s Day” and her plea:
We must stop this nonsense, how could this happen, did you live here, do you remember?
And then she took from Jean-Benjamin three sheets of paper. On the white one was the image of the baby, the particulars of the crime, and Beard’s phone number. On the yellow, the question, who murdered Baby Jane Doe No. 61, and a hint of a reward. And on the red, “a letter to a murderer”--her indignation over this “precious life” taken, the police phone number to call to confess, the promise that “even for you, there is hope . . . there is an all-seeing God. . . . Ask him in your heart to make your way clean before it is too late.”
In this neighborhood where moving vans come and go almost as often as mail trucks, the chance of someone remembering is small; even 12 years ago, after pathos-laden news stories, the telephone in the LAPD’s child protection section sat silent.
But after all, she had remembered, hadn’t she?
And over the off-pitch chiming of the ice cream truck--Brahms’ Lullaby on tape-loop--they all promised they would try.
*
Like Peter Pan, Baby Jane Doe No. 61 will never grow up. She is forever 10 months old, a black girl who was starved down to 14 pounds before she died of malnutrition, and then was kept frozen until someone left her in the alley.
Everyone else has grown, advanced, aged. The lieutenant is now a division captain, the detectives now senior in their rank.
In a cigar box of odds and ends that he keeps in his desk, Det. Michael Buttitta still has a composite drawing of Baby Jane Doe No. 61, left from the hundreds he handed out in 1985, when the crime was still fresh and any scenario was worth considering.
His partner was Connie Castruita, and now and then, one or the other of them brings it up, as if the years could give them some insight that immediacy had not.
Officers working juvenile homicide tend to burn out fast or stay for 10 years. Not six months after No. 61 entered the files, Buttitta transferred to organized crime. That, at least, had some logic to it, if greed and revenge can be counted as logic. This baby’s murder, no more than all the others, did not.
*
The news is a pauseless waterwheel of events, where no same drop passes through twice.
It trumps its own ace day after day, each outrage more outrageous than the one before. But sometimes the mind pauses to draw a line at some horror or mystery that nothing thereafter transcends. Mine is the day I sat in a courtroom with a child killer. To call him a killer is inadequate: He kidnapped a 2-year-old girl, raped her and strangled her. I had never heard of vise grips until I heard what uses Theodore Frank had put them to in torturing Amy Sue Seitz.
By the day after Mother’s Day, the unsold bouquets were marked down to half price. They were drooping anyway, the petals of roses like the skin of old ladies that seems near the end of life to return to the soft, fine texture of babyhood.
