Faces of Evil Page 3

  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 not prepared to handle.

  Even so, a mother’s instincts can be a powerful thing. Alice claims that, around the first week of September, 2001, she became almost frantic to find LaShondra. When she insisted on seeing the little girl, Connie told her that she’d put LaShondra into a psychiatric facility. Alice demanded to visit LaShondra and Connie agreed.

  But on the day they were supposed to visit the facility, Alice pounded on Connie’s door and found the house completely empty.

  The family—Connie Knight, her common-law husband, Raymond Jefferson, Jr. and her children—had fled in the night. No one in the family had heard from them. No one knew where they were. At that point, Alice’s own mother passed away and she didn’t have time to worry about a daughter who tended to pick up and leave whenever things got too hot for her.

  Using Jefferson’s employment records, Sgt. Douglas traced the family to Louisiana, where they had been living since LaShondra’s death.

  All three of the surviving children, ages four, thirteen and sixteen, who lived in the home with Connie and Raymond, denied ever even having seen LaShondra. When Sgt. Douglas showed a photograph of LaShondra in happier days to the thirteen-year-old, she started to shake—violently—from head to foot, but maintained that she had not seen LaShondra. The children each swore, adamantly, that they did not even have a sister.

  Raymond swore he didn’t even know the girl and for several hours, Connie maintained LaShondra was still in Georgia with relatives.

  So Sgt. Douglas showed them Jefferson’s employment records, in which he’d claimed LaShondra as a dependent, and witness statements from Houston neighbors that there had been “another child” who was not allowed outdoors. He showed them photographs of the blue fleece blanket and he showed them photographs of the closet from their house in Houston, the one with human feces smeared on the walls and floor.

  Finally, Connie cracked. At first, she confessed that she had been responsible for LaShondra’s death and she was arrested. The children became hysterical and refused to speak, not to police, not to social workers, not to counselors, not to anyone. In his calm, reassuring way, Sgt. Douglas left word that, when they were ready to talk, he was ready to listen.

  After several weeks, Sgt. Douglas’s patience was rewarded. He was contacted by family members who told him that the girls were finally ready to talk. They admitted that, although both parents had been horribly abusive to their sister, it had been Raymond who had killed her.

  Confronted with her children’s truth-telling, Connie changed her story. Although he continued to deny even knowing LaShondra, ultimately, Raymond Jefferson, Jr. was charged with injury to a child, failure to stop her mother from abusing her and denying her proper medical attention. Connie was also charged with injury to a child. They were both jailed in Harris County.

  Family members, filled with shame, rage, guilt and grief, buried the tiny girl, giving her, at long last, the funeral that Clarence Douglas and Darcus Shorten had so longed for. The d
etectives attended the service. On the funeral program, above a smiling and happy picture of a younger LaShondra, were printed the words from the Twenty-third Psalm: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil…”

  Weeping relatives said a few words about how LaShondra had to die because “God needed another flower in His garden.”

  But little “Angel Doe” did not have to die; nobody should ever have to die the way she did.

  The rest of the story, when Clarence and Darcus finally pieced it all together, was grim.

  Because she’d been ripped from the only home she’d ever really known, where she was loved, and thrown into a house full of strangers thousands of miles away, LaShondra did not behave like the adoring daughter her mother and Raymond thought she should be.

  So they threw the little girl in a closet.

  And left her there.

  She was not permitted to leave the closet to go to the bathroom, but when she soiled herself or used the closet floor, she was terribly, horribly punished. And she was starved by her morbidly obese mother.

  The other children were told that LaShondra was “crazy” and to leave her alone, but at night or when her parents were out of the house, the thirteen-year-old daughter would sneak LaShondra out of the closet and feed her or creep past and throw parts of her own meals into the closet—LaShondra’s only food.

  Sometimes the girl slipped her brother’s training potty into the closet to help out her sister. On cold nights, she let LaShondra slide in under the covers and sleep with her, but they had to hurry her into the closet very early the next morning, because if Connie found them out, she would beat LaShondra.

  LaShondra was never enrolled in school. She was not allowed outdoors. She was repeatedly hit, kicked and burned with cigarettes by both her parents.

  When LaShondra’s sister asked her mother why LaShondra had to stay in the closet, Connie only said, “Because she doesn’t know how to act,” or, “because that’s where I want her to stay.”

  All the children were forced to keep the secret from their grandmother.

  On the night of September 7, 2001, little LaShondra said or did something that Raymond didn’t like and he kicked her so hard that she fell back onto the heater, cracking her skull, and began “to shake all over,” said the sisters in trial testimony. Raymond went to the store and brought back some ice, but nothing helped. Finally, he and Connie told the children that they were taking LaShondra to the hospital.

  When their sister did not return, Raymond ordered the children never to speak her name again or “I’ll take you to the same place I took her.”

  During her testimony at the trial, the closest sister suddenly put her face in her hands, threw back her head and keened with grief so wrenching that District Judge Mary Lou Keel stopped the proceedings.

  In a dull monotone, Connie testified that Raymond made her drive him and the blanket-wrapped child to a secluded spot. While she waited in the car, he took the little girl into his arms and walked some distance from the car. “Then,” Connie testified, “I heard a splash.”

  Other than that, the only other things she would say on the stand were, “I don’t know,” or “I don’t remember.”

  In an agonizing jury deadlock, the first trial of Raymond Jefferson was declared a mistrial. Eleven of the jurors wanted to convict him, but one was not entirely convinced that Connie had not killed the child herself, as she originally claimed.

  But prosecutors Casey O’Brien and Sylvia Escobedo would not be deterred. Within a few weeks, they mounted a second trial.

  After all we’d been through with our little Angel Doe, I couldn’t stand not being there myself this time. When a witness canceled a composite sketch appointment and rescheduled it for later, I grabbed my purse and headed for the courthouse.

  At the trial’s final proceedings, as I sat in the spectator gallery, I could see Raymond Jefferson in profile and I studied him. He was a big man, six feet tall and weighing more than 200 pounds. He had fists like cement blocks. I kept thinking about what those brutal fists had done to that child’s face and it was all I could do not to throw up.

  But his face? His face was bland.

  The thing is, when you see a monster like him in court, you expect him to look, well, like a monster.

  But they never do.

  The prosecutors were rewarded for their determination and I was quietly pleased when this trial resulted in a conviction for Raymond Jefferson, Jr. It took that jury less than three hours to pronounce justice for little LaShondra.

  On August 22, 2003, LaShondra’s stepfather was given the maximum sentence—life in prison. (As of this writing, his attorneys have filed an appeal with the Fourteenth Court of Appeals.) He will be eligible for parole in 2018, when he is sixty-five years old. Connie Gazette Knight pled guilty and was sentenced to fifty years in prison.

  Later, I asked Clarence whether Connie herself might have been a victim of Raymond’s abuse, which could have contributed to her own abuse of her daughter.

  Solemnly, he shook his head. “Connie Knight would never put up with any abuse from anybody,” he said firmly. “She’s plenty big enough to take care of herself,” and added, “No…The truth is, she’s just plain mean.”

  A few months before Officer Shorten brought me the death photos of little LaShondra, I read a Newsweek cover story in the May 21, 2001 issue on the nature of evil. In it, psychologist Michael Flynn of York College in New York was quoted, “I spent eighteen years working with people who everyone would call evil—child molesters, murderers—and with a few exceptions, I was always struck by their ordinariness.”

  I know what he means. If you want to know what the face of evil looks like, well, it looks like your neighbor, or your boss, or your lover.

  I know, because I’ve drawn more than three thousand evil faces and most of them did not “look” evil. When I see them in court, these murderers and rapists, they always have what I call a “shark-eyed look.”

  Just blank. Like they’re there and yet not there.

  At least, that’s when they’re in court or standing in front of a mug-shot camera. But when they’re in the process of raping and murdering, that bland expression can change dramatically.

  I know, because I’ve seen it for myself. I’ve looked right into the eyes of a man who was trying to kill me and I know what the face of evil really looks like—right then—not later, all cleaned up for court.

  I know what it means to feel like a helpless victim, to feel caged in the terror and powerlessness of one day, one moment that can change you forever, an endless, heart-stopping moment when you are fighting for your life, sense it draining out of you as you choke for breath… when the world goes dark and you’re all alone… facing evil.

  Chapter Two:

  “We’ll Have to Date Again”

  Never in my life had I looked into the face of evil until the day I found myself being killed.

  There are some crime victims in this world to whom violence comes as no surprise. They’ve grown up with it, both at home and in their neighborhoods, in so many ways that they don’t know anything different. I once heard an account of a woman who was kidnapped by a brutal serial murderer who had killed all his other victims, but when he put the gun to her head, she simply nodded in weary recognition and said, “Go ahead. Pull the trigger. You’d be doing me a favor.” He was so surprised that he actually spared her life and let her go free.

  I wasn’t like that.

  The picturesque, homey setting of the old television series, The Waltons, starring Richard Thomas, would, if you’ve ever seen it, give you a pretty good idea of what my childhood was like. It’s the kind of lifestyle seen in nostalgic Hallmark Christmas specials and I’ve got a lot of brothers and sisters who could back me up. I was born on a farm in Missouri on February 25, 1950, to Eva and Don Herbert, the second of five kids. When it came time for Mama to go to the hospital, they took her in a horse and carriage. Mama was college e
ducated. She had been a school teacher before she got married and Daddy had a gift for carpentry, so they moved their growing family to Kansas City, to a house with only one bedroom, where he soon found all the work he could handle. All my growing-up years, Daddy was building on to that house. The sounds of hammering, sawing and Daddy whistling Tennessee Waltz was the soundtrack of my childhood.

  We lived at the top of a hill on a dead-end street and in wintertime, Daddy climbed onto a big sled he’d fashioned and piled as many kids on his lap as he could fit and down the hills we went, screaming with glee in the sun-sparkled cold.

  There was so much love everywhere I looked. Artistically gifted and (like most creative types) a very sensitive child, I was what you might call a “goody two-shoes,” always trying to please, doing well in school, making my parents proud. My sister Adonna was two years older than me and, like Mama, a born teacher. From the time I was a toddler, Adonna made it her business to teach me whatever she had learned that day. When I started school, everyone thought I was precocious because I seemed to know my lessons before they were taught. But for years, I suffered from bouts of self-doubt, fearing that the only smart one in the family was my older sister. I didn’t know if I was really intelligent or just well-trained, like a good dog.

  In high school I twirled baton with the marching band, but I wasn’t what you would call “popular.” I tended to rely on my sisters to be my girlfriends and, though I dated boys, I wasn’t really aware of the fact that others felt I was turning into something of a beauty.

  I wanted to go to college, but there was no way my parents could afford it, especially since they still had three young children at home. After struggling to take classes at Wichita State University and Kansas University while working part-time, I decided that there had to be a better way. Even though I’m an artist, I have a very practical nature and I knew that even entry-level jobs in a city like Los Angeles paid a great deal more than those same jobs did in Kansas City. I figured I could find work out there and, if I lived very frugally and saved my money—something all us Herbert kids knew how to do—I could come back to Kansas after a year or so and be able to afford at least a year or two of college without having to work part-time while going to school.