A Child’s Murder Haunts Kansas City

Someone, somewhere must miss her.

She was just a little girl, 3 years old or maybe 4, with light brown skin and big dark eyes. Doesn’t anyone wonder where she is? She had long hair in tight braids, pierced ears, round cheeks, a chipped front tooth behind full lips. Doesn’t anyone miss her smile?

It’s been more than two months since her body was found in a wooded lot here--naked and decapitated. Her head was wrapped in a double-knotted garbage bag, wedged between a tire and a rock several hundred yards away. No one has come forward to claim her body. Police have no idea who she was.

The investigation has consumed this city.

Eight detectives have been hunting for the girl’s next-of-kin full time for 10 weeks straight. Volunteers have distributed 80,000 fliers: Can you help us identify this child? Prostitutes and dope dealers have handed out her picture. Taxi drivers have posted it in their cabs. Inmates at a nearby prison are taking up a collection to add to the $15,000 reward.

She was someone’s daughter. Someone’s niece? Three feet tall, about 41 pounds. Someone must have poured her milk. Someone might remember her giggle. Doesn’t anybody know her name?

Investigators have tried all the obvious leads. They have canvassed local schools, pediatricians and day care centers. They have knocked on doors in the neighborhood where she was found. The case has been featured twice on “America’s Most Wanted.” Scouring national missing person reports, the FBI has identified two dozen families looking for a daughter about the same age. They have taken blood samples to compare to the Kansas City girl’s DNA. Results are still coming in, but so far there have been no matches. And every one of the hundreds of tips that have poured in from around the country has so far checked out false. The little girl remains anonymous.

There are plenty of theories about why no one has claimed her. She could have been abducted from another state, far from the publicity blitz that has saturated Kansas City. Her parents could have been killed too. Or they could have been the killers. Maybe her relatives are illegal immigrants, afraid to speak with police. Perhaps it was a secretive cult murder. Or maybe the girl just grew up isolated, in the care of a lone adult who later turned on her in violence.

Innocence Mourned

The theories make good sense. But detectives--and ordinary folks in Kansas City--refuse to accept them as the final word. They simply will not believe that the girl will remain unclaimed. Someone must have braided her hair. Someone might have wiped her tears. They will not rest until that someone comes forward with her name.

Across the street from the woods where she was found, a memorial grows more elaborate by the day. There are hundreds of stuffed animals under a metal awning, and balloons, baby dolls, a little red drum, the picture book “Harry Goes to Day Camp.” Someone put a baseball trophy there. There are fresh flowers and a plush Mickey Mouse. It’s all for her, if only she could know it. For the girl they call Precious Doe.

“I’ve been here 11 years, and this is the biggest community outpouring I can remember,” said Sgt. David Bernard, the lead detective on the case. “The fact that someone could not only take her life but her identity--that really rings a chord.”

Indeed, from the day the news broke, this case has stirred uncommon passion.

Detectives accidentally stumbled across the body April 28. They had been searching an East Kansas City neighborhood at dusk for an elderly man who had wandered from his home. As they walked a gravel path inside the wooded lot, they saw the girl. She was lying, uncovered, on her stomach just a foot or two off the path. Her head was gone.

Unity Among the Living

Police searched the woods with dogs until after midnight but could not find her head. The next day and the next they hunted. Volunteers began to comb the woods too, sickened but determined. On May 1, one found the garbage bag.

Police will not say how the child was killed. They focus instead on the reconstructed sketch of the girl as her relatives would have known her: a wide-eyed tot in cornrows.

That sketch is all over Kansas City. It’s on T-shirts. It’s on billboards. Even the porn shop around the corner from the wooded lot has it posted in the window.

Community activist Betty Brown named the girl Precious Doe. And Kansas City does seem to hold her precious. Mourners by the dozens attend vigils every Saturday to pray for justice on her behalf. They write poems and send her sympathy cards: “May your voice outshine the other angels that surround you.” “All our prayers and thoughts will be with you as we watch our children grow.” “I am so sorry that we failed you.”

Carol Coe, a local attorney, has spent hours answering a tip hotline and distributing Precious Doe’s picture. “It’s like she is a member of the family,” Coe explained.

Added City Councilman Alvin Brooks: “It’s become an obsession with some of us.”

Volunteers say the tragedy has unified the city: black or white, rich or poor, urban or suburban, the outrage is universal. They see other bright spots as well. Staff members of the nonprofit group Move Up have persuaded several parents to set up “safe houses” for neighborhood kids who need a refuge from the streets. They have also arranged for some churches to host summer youth programs so kids don’t wander off alone.

Desire for the Truth

But much as they try to focus on the living, they remain haunted by Precious Doe. She had a crescent-shaped birthmark on one arm. Someone, somewhere must miss her.

“I still wake up at night, thinking about her,” Brown said, tears spilling down her cheeks. “My heart’s desire is to find out who this child is, and who did this to her.”