Link: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Parthenon/6865/jd.html
Tuesday, March 2, 1993
Section: NEWS</FONT>
HEADLESS GIRL STILL NAMELESS AFTER 10 YEARS
By Bill Bryan
Of the Post-Dispatch Staff
She was about 11 years old when someone sexually attacked her and then cut off her head in what police say is the only case of its kind in a country that has grown used to ghastly crimes.
Ten years later, St. Louis police are no closer to learning the identity of the child they know only as Jane Doe - or to finding her killer.
Sunday marked the 10th anniversary of the discovery of the body in the basement of a vacant building in the Cabanne neighborhood.
"It's certainly bizarre," said St. Louis Homicide Sgt. Joe Burgoon, who has been the main investigator for several years.
The FBI agency that documents and studies unsolved murders reported this is the only decapitation in the country involving someone so young, Burgoon said.
A remote lead was dispelled last week when the Armed Forces Medical Examiner's Office in Washington reported that a skull recovered in May in St. Louis County was not the murder victim's.
"It was a long shot but worth pursuing," said Dr. Mary Case, the St. Louis County medical examiner, who had sent the skull to Washington.
Dr. William Rodriguez, a forensic anthropologist, determined that it was too old to be the girl's skull.
A Charlack police officer got the skull from a man he had questioned at a storage shed on St. Charles Rock Road, near Interstate 170.
The man, Danny L. Davis, 34, of Pagedale, said he bought the skull for $35 in the late 1970s at a souvenir-gift shop on Lindbergh Boulevard near Northwest Plaza shopping center.
Davis said he was told the skull was that of a young Indian woman who had been killed by a tomahawk.
The body of the girl, who was black, was found Feb. 28, 1983 by two men rummaging in the basement of a vacant apartment building at 5635 Clemens Avenue. The body was clad only in a dirty yellow sweater; the hands were tied in back with a red and white nylon rope.
Police determined that the girl had been killed elsewhere.
"Back then, I believed this would be an easy case to crack," Burgoon recalled. "We'd find out who the girl was, and that would lead us to the killer."
That never happened.
Burgoon hasn't given up hope.
"There's somebody out there who knows who this little girl was."
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Thursday, March 3, 1994
Section: NEWS</FONT>
CARING DETECTIVE STILL GRIEVES FOR UNCLAIMED CHILD
By Christine Bertelson
THE HEADLESS body of Jane Doe haunts Leroy Adkins.
Eleven years ago, Adkins was the cop in charge of investigating the murder, rape and decapitation of an unidentified child. Every year about this time, Adkins relives the agony of the unsolved case. This year, the recent murders of Cassidy Senter and Angie Housman have made the pain that much harder to bear.
"Each year I feel that this case will finally be solved," Adkins said. "Each year I am disappointed in myself and in mankind. I will never forget, never rest, never be at peace with myself until this case is solved."
Adkins, 62, retired from the St. Louis Police Department in 1992. He now is chief of security at Lambert Field. In 34 years of police work, no case ever touched him as much as Jane Doe's.
It was Feb. 28, 1983, when Adkins - then commander of the city's homicide division - got the call for a dead body in the basement of an abandoned building at 5635 Clemens Avenue. Amid filth and debris, two men scavenging for copper had stumbled on the body of a girl about 9 years old. She had been murdered, raped and decapitated. Her hands were tied behind her back with a red-and-white nylon rope. She was wearing only a dirty yellow orlon sweater with the label cut out. She had two layers of red nail polish on her fingernails.
The girl had medium-to-dark skin, was about 5 feet 4 inches and weighed about 70 pounds. Her body showed no signs of previous abuse - no bruises, scars or broken bones, and she appeared to be well-nourished. Because there was no blood at the scene, police suspect Jane Doe was murdered and decapitated somewhere else and dumped into the basement of the building.
Adkins and his detectives spent thousands of hours on the case. Letters sent to every state police agency in the nation turned up nothing. City school records, woefully disorganized, yielded no clues to her identity. Adkins pleaded with the public to come forward with any scrap of information that would help identify the little girl.
No one did.
The child's body lay in the city morgue for several months, drawing a crowd of gawkers like some ghoulish carnival attraction. One day, a state legislator, with an entourage of people claiming to have psychic powers, showed up and demanded to see the body.
Jane Doe was finally buried Dec. 2, 1983, in a pauper's grave on the southern side of Washington Park Cemetery. Four mud-covered gravediggers carried her small, white casket adorned with a single spray of pink, white and yellow flowers. The ceremony lasted five minutes. Months later, a group of schoolchildren raised money to buy Jane Doe a tombstone.
Adkins went to the funeral, hoping that a friend or relative of Jane Doe might show up.
No one did.
Even though Adkins never wants to forget Jane Doe, he never visited the grave again. "I don't think I could bring myself to do it," Adkins said. "I get chills just thinking about it."
Over the years, an occasional lead revives the case. Several weeks after the murder, someone wrote a letter to the police, naming the supposed killer. Last year, police recovered a human skull purchased in a souvenir shop near Northwest Plaza. A forensic anthropologist determined the female skull was too old to be that of Jane Doe.
Police are now checking the life history of Samuel Ivery, a 35-year-old man sentenced to death for beheading a woman in Mobile, Ala. Ivery is a suspect in the 1992 beheadings of two women in East St. Louis. Between stints in mental hospitals, might Ivery have been in St. Louis at the time of Jane Doe's murder? For the moment, it's just a theory.
For 11 years, Adkins has had recurring nightmares about Jane Doe. In the dreams, he is standing in the cold basement at 5635 Clemens, looking at the body. Like the meticulous cop he was, Adkins is searching for clues, trying not to overlook anything. But there is something he misses - the tiny detail that could crack the case. He wakes up in a cold sweat. Now and then, Adkins will see something in a magazine - mention of a missing black child about the same age Jane Doe would be today - and mail it to Sgt. Joe Burgoon. Burgoon, one of the detectives originally assigned to the Jane Doe case, is still working on it. Last weekend, Burgoon teletyped a description of Jane Doe's body to every police department in the country. Maybe somebody, somewhere, knows something.
"The case is never closed," Burgoon said.
It is not the brutality of the crime that troubles Adkins after all this time; he has seen plenty of brutal murders. What bothered him then, bothers him still, is the thought of a child no one would come forward to claim.
"If we just knew who she was, I think it would be a burden lifted from my shoulders," Adkins said. "Where is the mother? Where is the father? Where are her brothers or sisters? Where are her relatives? Where are her playmates, friends or classmates? Where are her neighbors, her teachers? Where are the people who knew and cared for her? It's almost as if she didn't exist."
Almost.
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As a St.Louis resident the thing that irks me the most is even if something occured, someone was from, or a job was available in any of St.Louis's many suburbs or neighboring any St.Louis suburbs its still listed as St.Louis city. This crime occured in U-City, I as a St.Louis City employee cannot access county records. County is County and City is City ( I do background checks and retrieve police reports and if it occured in county which if it occured on this part of Tamm being county/different jurisdiction I don't have access to nearly as much as a county LE civilliam employee). I met someome who asked me where) I was from on the metro and I said Saint Louis City (Soulard) he said me too, I asked him where in city and he said Union (which isn't even in St.Louis County). When I looked for a job in Saint Louis will narrow it to St. Louis City and most of the listings will be in the county. Even the most west suburbs of West County will list themselves as St. Louis city. Its a very big pet peeve of mine.
