Moms of the Missing, page 12
“The first time I reached out and she did not react, I knew something was wrong. She always responded right away. But this day ten, fifteen, thirty minutes went by without a reply. Then an hour, then two hours. I tried to [give] the benefit of the doubt, but I just had this feeling that something had happened,” Jo Ann recalls.
Instead of waiting at home, Jo Ann decided to drive to the restaurant. When she got there she found out it was closed.
“I just freaked out,” Jo Ann remembers.
For a couple of minutes she sat in her car trying to figure out what to do before calling Ali’s father, John, from whom Jo Ann had recently separated. John tried to calm down his former wife, and together they decided to wait to alert the police until they had called all Ali’s friends to find out if she was with them.
“We just called everyone we could think of,” Jo Ann says.
Around eleven p.m. the parents realised that no one had seen their daughter after she got off the school bus to walk to the restaurant. At that time, she was wearing a gray hooded zip-up sweatshirt, black-and-white checkered “skinny” jeans, and black sneakers. Jo Ann finally called the local police department—but their response was less urgent than what Jo Ann had been hoping for.
“I was so disappointed with the way the police reacted,” Jo Ann says.
According to Jo Ann, law enforcement tried to convince her and her former husband that, given their daughter’s age (sixteen), she was probably just a runaway teenager who would soon be home again. Jo Ann says the police made it very clear they would rather wait for Ali to return by herself than launch an unnecessary search; therefore, police did not issue an AMBER Alert.
“They just told me to wait for her, but I have now been waiting almost ten years for her to return,” the mother says.
FAMILY FIRST
Jo Ann tried to convince the police that her daughter had been taken, because Ali’s makeup, purse, clothes, money, and phone charger were still in the house—everyday stuff a runaway teenager would normally bring with them when they left. And when the family checked Ali’s phone records they were even more certain a crime had been committed. Ali constantly spoke on her phone, and she sent thousands of texts every month. But ever since she got off the school bus her phone has not been used except for a text she sent ten minutes later asking her friend, Jay, to come over to her house later that afternoon.
Jo Ann says that in spite of all these facts law enforcement took several weeks before acknowledging that Ali had not run away but was more likely the victim of a crime. When the police department finally accepted this conclusion, the case was escalated to the homicide unit, with the promise of using more resources to find Ali.
Although the police were finally showing the urgency Jo Ann had been hoping for from the beginning, the escalation of the case also meant the homicide detectives now started directing their investigation towards Ali’s family. Her brother Mason and the father John were both taken to the station for questioning. Jo Ann says the police kept her son in the interrogation room for hours and that they accused him of getting into an argument with Ali that escalated into a fight resulting in him killing his little sister.
“They tried to force Mason to confess. It really scared him. He was nineteen years old and just a teenager. It scarred his heart, being accused of having killed his sister. Afterwards he would not talk about it, but you could see the pain in his eyes. Today, it is still very emotional for him to talk about, because it traumatises you, being accused of having killed a person you love deeply,” Jo Ann says. She describes the children as growing up in a close-knit family where the siblings were each other’s best friends.
Ali constantly wanted to be with her brother. Jo Ann recalls how she would rather play with Mason’s action figures than with her own Barbie dolls.
“Like all siblings they had their rivalry. ‘Mom, he looked at me’ or ‘Mom, she’s playing with my toys’. That type [of thing]. But their love for each other was so obvious and deep,” Jo Ann recalls.
A few years after Ali’s disappearance, Mason moved to Seattle, Washington. There were too many sad memories connected with the town of Spring, Texas.
“I still get upset when I think about how law enforcement treated this innocent young man,” Jo Ann says.
Her son was not the only family member being questioned by detectives. The police department also interrogated Ali’s father, John. Before the investigators cleared him as a suspect, the father had to take a polygraph test to prove he did not kill his own daughter.
The interrogation took a toll on the entire family. Each family member not only had to prove their own innocence, but they also were forced to accept the fact that law enforcement often investigates the involvement of the victim’s family’s first, before considering other suspects, Jo Ann says.
“It was hard. We were under suspicion—and at the same time we felt that we were losing important time. Instead of questioning us, they should have been searching for Ali. Time is crucial in abduction cases,” Jo Ann observes.
Therefore, the family decided to launch their own investigation. Ali’s father, John, watched surveillance footage from the school bus company. The footage showed his five foot, two inch tall, 145-pound daughter getting off the bus then walking in the direction of Burger Barn. But security footage from a nearby gas station indicated that Ali never made it to the restaurant.
The family also hired two private investigators, who came up with different suggestions regarding what might have happened to Ali. But shortly after Ali’s disappearance, one of the private investigators came across an important piece of information that brought the family closer to having an explanation regarding what might have happened to their daughter.
On the day Ali disappeared, she had ridden the school bus with an acquaintance.
“This guy had a crush on Ali, and when he invited her out on a date, she told me that she had turned him down,” Jo Ann recalls.
When the young man was questioned by the private investigator Jo Ann had hired, he said he had spoken to Ali on the bus. She had problems with her cell phone, and he helped her fix it.
“That would have given him the chance to disable the phone so she could not reach out for help later,” Jo Ann says, striving to find an explanation for why her daughter never replied to her texts.
Surveillance videos from the bus later showed that the young man was lying. He had never been on the bus.
The private investigator, Amber, could not prove that the teenager had anything to do with Ali’s disappearance, though his story changed several times while being questioned. Still, Amber found his explanation so suspicious that she decided to continue investigating him and his family. Her findings were shocking.
“It turned out that his older brother was involved with drugs and human traffickers in the state of Ohio,” Jo Ann explains. “We now feared that the little brother had been so angry with Ali rejecting him, that he had convinced his older brother to abduct her and force her into prostitution in Ohio. Amber also found out that there was a trafficking ring between Texas and Ohio,” Jo Ann adds.
A MURDERER IN TOWN
Around the time Amber made her discovery about the older brother, a woman called Jo Ann from Columbus, Ohio. The woman said she had seen Ali’s picture on a missing persons website, and that Ali looked similar to a girl she had recently noticed in her local community. Amber, the private investigator, traveled to Columbus to follow up on the lead. Once in Ohio she worked together with local police and undercover agents. She visited crack houses and brothels. At the same time, a cop told Amber that he had seen a girl that reminded him of Jo Ann’s daughter. The girl went by the name Ali Cat. Furthermore, the police officer said that he was aware the woman was from Texas, but not that she had been reported missing. A police informant also confessed to having seen Ali: She recognised her by a scar on her forehead. The informant lead Amber to a brothel where she had claimed to have seen Ali. In the brothel Amber saw a girl who looked like Ali. However, Amber had no authority to intervene as a private investigator; instead, she alerted local law enforcement. A plan was put together, but when the police finally obtained a warrant to raid the brothel, the women who had worked there were nowhere to be found. Amber visited the brothel after the raid took place. She, too, reported that the women who had formerly worked there no longer were on the premises. She believes that the Ali look-alike had been moved to another brothel.
“Perhaps because someone tipped off human traffickers about the raid,” Jo Ann explains. “At least, this is what some people suspected. I still have a percentage [of faith] left in me that believes she could still be in Columbus.”
Jo Ann explains that is why she has made several trips to Ohio, 1,200 miles north of Texas, and that she will follow any tip that seems reasonable.
Following Ali’s disappearance Jo Ann created a Facebook remembrance page for her daughter. The mother explains how the family often received tips about her daughter’s whereabouts. The tips, she wrote in a post on Facebook in 2014, came “from everywhere. Alaska, San Diego, all the way to Miami and everywhere in between (and some of them at the same time).” In the same Facebook post, she described why she specifically followed up on the tip indicating Ali was seen in Ohio:
For me this one just seemed a little different so we decided to travel to Ohio to investigate deeper. While there we did not find the girl everyone was saying was Ali. But a few months after…Columbus police did arrest two different girls they believed to be my Ali. Both of these girls were lookalikes and one of them has been identified as the girl everyone was seeing.
To this day we continue to get leads of people seeing Ali in different states. And we continue to follow those leads. Ali is still missing and her whereabouts still unknown. We do not know why she was taken or by whom. But I continue to hold onto hope that she is still alive out there and that we will find her. I will never give up my search to find you. I miss you bunches.
Besides investigating whether Ali became a victim of human trafficking, Jo Ann has watched other leads develop. Two years after Ali’s disappearance, a man named Brandon Lavergne confessed to killing two women in Louisiana. Brandon had relatives in Spring, Texas, whom he had been visiting around the time Ali went missing. He had earlier been a suspect in the case. When Ali’s disappearance was made public a witness reported to the police that he had seen a man try to lure Ali into his white truck near the Burger Barn. The witness had even managed to grab a few numbers off the truck’s licence plate. When the police checked the numbers they discovered that they matched part of the plate on Brandon Lavergne’s car, which was later discovered burned about fifty miles from Spring. The police questioned Brandon Lavergne about his involvement in Ali’s disappearance, but a former employer provided him with an alibi. Law enforcement was never able to prove he had any connection to the case.
No matter what might have happened to Ali, Jo Ann says she can’t imagine what Ali might have been going through. But if she were to be given a chance to decide her daughter’s fate, she says, without hesitation:
“I have rationalised that she could be forced into prostitution; and the other scenario is that she is being held hostage in a basement somewhere. I know it sounds bad, but of these two possibilities I hope she would be forced into prostitution. I see that as [the] lesser evil,” Jo Ann explains.
However, there is another possibility, an outcome that Jo Ann will not accept.
“I admit, I struggle a lot with if I believe she is alive or not. Until there is a body I am gonna believe that she is still alive. And until she is found one way or another I am gonna keep searching,” Jo Ann notes.
Although Ali’s disappearance adversely affects Jo Ann’s life in so many ways, she still tries to turn her pain into knowledge and wisdom that others can benefit from. Today, Jo Ann has accepted there is nothing she can do to change her daughter’s destiny; instead, she can enlighten other parents about the dangers that certain parts of our society can pose to their children.
“My eyes have been opened to this epidemic of missing people that we are facing in America. I just wish I had become aware of this earlier. There are so many parents going through this nightmare every day. Earlier I just closed my eyes and followed others. But today I am so much stronger, thanks to Ali. Now I speak my mind, and I seize every opportunity to put [the public’s] focus on this problem,” Jo Ann explains.
EXPLOITED BY OTHERS
One way to put the focus on what Jo Ann calls “this epidemic of missing people” is by constantly encouraging parents to tell the story of their missing children. Another way is to constantly remind authorities that they have a responsibility to both prevent and solve these abductions.
To remind society of its responsibility, Jo Ann tried for years to make Texan lawmakers adopt a resolution to recognise April 26, the day Ali went missing, as “Texas Missing Persons Day.” Finally, in 2017, lawmakers did.
“At times I feel I can conquer the world,” Jo Ann proclaims. “And at times I feel that if I had the chance to capture the person responsible for Ali’s abduction I would end up in prison with him because of what I would do to him. I am no longer a bystander in my own life. Today I stand up and act—unfortunately on a sad background.”
Besides dealing with the worries and pain resulting from her daughter’s abduction, Jo Ann also has to deal with the ruthlessness of other people. Jo Ann still receives many tips about her daughter’s whereabouts, but some of the tips simply reveal how cruel certain people can be.
“Over the years I have received numerous messages from people claiming to know where Ali is, but they will not tell [me] until I pay them thousands of dollars. We have experienced so much exploitation from other people who try to benefit from our daughter’s disappearance. It happens to a lot of families who are missing their children,” Jo Ann says.
She has reported most attempts to exploit her daughter’s disappearance to law enforcement. Meanwhile, in times of sorrow and pain she finds comfort in her family and ex-husband. The couple was separated at the time of their daughter’s disappearance, but they both still support each other and are the best of friends.
“We have always been a team when it came to the kids. We have always been there for each other. [Near] the beginning of her disappearance John was the driving force when it came to the search groups. He was the strong one. But a year after her disappearance he began to take things a lot harder. When I asked him for follow-ups on tips he had no answers, because he no longer had the strength to follow up. He put so much into it, and then the sorrow caught up with him. Today the roles are reversed. Now he comes to me for follow-ups,” Jo Ann says, emphasising that ten years after Ali’s abduction the entire family still is struggling from the consequences of the crime.
For Jo Ann, the most difficult part is not knowing whether Ali is still alive. But she often feels her daughter’s presence.
Jo Ann still lives in the same house in Spring, Texas, in case Ali returns home. And the mother always keeps the door to her daughter’s old bedroom open. At times Jo Ann gets the feeling that her daughter is sitting on the bed, drawing, just like she used to.
“Other times,” Jo Ann reveals, “I dream of her. I have a dream where I am in a public place, and then I see Ali sit at a different table with friends. In the dream I just walk up to her and ask where she has been and if she is all right,” the mother explains.
Another way Jo Ann finds she can feel a connection with Ali is by writing her poems. Jo Ann posts the poems on Facebook. At other times she makes crafts, just as Ali always did.
“I think of Ali while doing it. And I give a lot of craft[s] to other families. When I do, I feel I create something beautiful for others, just like Ali always did,” Jo Anns says. She adds that she will continue hoping that one day Ali will be back home to do crafts with her, just like she used to.
“Today, Ali is twenty-five years old, and she still has life ahead of her. She often expressed her desire to have her own family. I hope that one day that wish will come true. I can’t give up that hope, because I want Ali to keep believing in it no matter where she is. And I will forever be looking for my daughter and not her body,” Jo Ann says.
8
PROFILE OF AN ABDUCTOR
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children has analysed a decade of attempted abductions and related incidents committed by individuals unknown to the victimised child. The incidents involved more than 9,800 children; they were committed by 9,027 perpetrators.
The analyses showed that 96 percent of the perpetrators were men whose average age was 36. In almost nine out of ten of the cases studied, the perpetrator worked alone. The children included in the study tended to be older when they were victimised by a male perpetrator, in comparison to incidents involving female perpetrators; the latter tended to victimise infants and toddlers.
Over the years law enforcement has become more aware of who the perpetrators of child abductions tend to be. Police have generally intensified the fight to prevent abductions and, of no less importance, their hunt for the kidnappers. In 2006, the FBI created the Child Abduction Response Deployment task force, also known as the CARD team. According to the FBI the team “works to recover victims as quickly as possible and helps apprehend those responsible for taking them”.
The team consists of more than sixty agents and can be on the scene within one or two hours after the crime has taken place. The team establishes on-site command posts to centralise investigative efforts, working hand in hand with state and local law enforcement agencies. The CARD team also helps identify registered sex offenders in the area, coordinate forensic resources, and incorporate the FBI’s technical assets, “which play an increasingly larger role in investigations where every minute counts”, as the bureau describes it.
Instead of waiting at home, Jo Ann decided to drive to the restaurant. When she got there she found out it was closed.
“I just freaked out,” Jo Ann remembers.
For a couple of minutes she sat in her car trying to figure out what to do before calling Ali’s father, John, from whom Jo Ann had recently separated. John tried to calm down his former wife, and together they decided to wait to alert the police until they had called all Ali’s friends to find out if she was with them.
“We just called everyone we could think of,” Jo Ann says.
Around eleven p.m. the parents realised that no one had seen their daughter after she got off the school bus to walk to the restaurant. At that time, she was wearing a gray hooded zip-up sweatshirt, black-and-white checkered “skinny” jeans, and black sneakers. Jo Ann finally called the local police department—but their response was less urgent than what Jo Ann had been hoping for.
“I was so disappointed with the way the police reacted,” Jo Ann says.
According to Jo Ann, law enforcement tried to convince her and her former husband that, given their daughter’s age (sixteen), she was probably just a runaway teenager who would soon be home again. Jo Ann says the police made it very clear they would rather wait for Ali to return by herself than launch an unnecessary search; therefore, police did not issue an AMBER Alert.
“They just told me to wait for her, but I have now been waiting almost ten years for her to return,” the mother says.
FAMILY FIRST
Jo Ann tried to convince the police that her daughter had been taken, because Ali’s makeup, purse, clothes, money, and phone charger were still in the house—everyday stuff a runaway teenager would normally bring with them when they left. And when the family checked Ali’s phone records they were even more certain a crime had been committed. Ali constantly spoke on her phone, and she sent thousands of texts every month. But ever since she got off the school bus her phone has not been used except for a text she sent ten minutes later asking her friend, Jay, to come over to her house later that afternoon.
Jo Ann says that in spite of all these facts law enforcement took several weeks before acknowledging that Ali had not run away but was more likely the victim of a crime. When the police department finally accepted this conclusion, the case was escalated to the homicide unit, with the promise of using more resources to find Ali.
Although the police were finally showing the urgency Jo Ann had been hoping for from the beginning, the escalation of the case also meant the homicide detectives now started directing their investigation towards Ali’s family. Her brother Mason and the father John were both taken to the station for questioning. Jo Ann says the police kept her son in the interrogation room for hours and that they accused him of getting into an argument with Ali that escalated into a fight resulting in him killing his little sister.
“They tried to force Mason to confess. It really scared him. He was nineteen years old and just a teenager. It scarred his heart, being accused of having killed his sister. Afterwards he would not talk about it, but you could see the pain in his eyes. Today, it is still very emotional for him to talk about, because it traumatises you, being accused of having killed a person you love deeply,” Jo Ann says. She describes the children as growing up in a close-knit family where the siblings were each other’s best friends.
Ali constantly wanted to be with her brother. Jo Ann recalls how she would rather play with Mason’s action figures than with her own Barbie dolls.
“Like all siblings they had their rivalry. ‘Mom, he looked at me’ or ‘Mom, she’s playing with my toys’. That type [of thing]. But their love for each other was so obvious and deep,” Jo Ann recalls.
A few years after Ali’s disappearance, Mason moved to Seattle, Washington. There were too many sad memories connected with the town of Spring, Texas.
“I still get upset when I think about how law enforcement treated this innocent young man,” Jo Ann says.
Her son was not the only family member being questioned by detectives. The police department also interrogated Ali’s father, John. Before the investigators cleared him as a suspect, the father had to take a polygraph test to prove he did not kill his own daughter.
The interrogation took a toll on the entire family. Each family member not only had to prove their own innocence, but they also were forced to accept the fact that law enforcement often investigates the involvement of the victim’s family’s first, before considering other suspects, Jo Ann says.
“It was hard. We were under suspicion—and at the same time we felt that we were losing important time. Instead of questioning us, they should have been searching for Ali. Time is crucial in abduction cases,” Jo Ann observes.
Therefore, the family decided to launch their own investigation. Ali’s father, John, watched surveillance footage from the school bus company. The footage showed his five foot, two inch tall, 145-pound daughter getting off the bus then walking in the direction of Burger Barn. But security footage from a nearby gas station indicated that Ali never made it to the restaurant.
The family also hired two private investigators, who came up with different suggestions regarding what might have happened to Ali. But shortly after Ali’s disappearance, one of the private investigators came across an important piece of information that brought the family closer to having an explanation regarding what might have happened to their daughter.
On the day Ali disappeared, she had ridden the school bus with an acquaintance.
“This guy had a crush on Ali, and when he invited her out on a date, she told me that she had turned him down,” Jo Ann recalls.
When the young man was questioned by the private investigator Jo Ann had hired, he said he had spoken to Ali on the bus. She had problems with her cell phone, and he helped her fix it.
“That would have given him the chance to disable the phone so she could not reach out for help later,” Jo Ann says, striving to find an explanation for why her daughter never replied to her texts.
Surveillance videos from the bus later showed that the young man was lying. He had never been on the bus.
The private investigator, Amber, could not prove that the teenager had anything to do with Ali’s disappearance, though his story changed several times while being questioned. Still, Amber found his explanation so suspicious that she decided to continue investigating him and his family. Her findings were shocking.
“It turned out that his older brother was involved with drugs and human traffickers in the state of Ohio,” Jo Ann explains. “We now feared that the little brother had been so angry with Ali rejecting him, that he had convinced his older brother to abduct her and force her into prostitution in Ohio. Amber also found out that there was a trafficking ring between Texas and Ohio,” Jo Ann adds.
A MURDERER IN TOWN
Around the time Amber made her discovery about the older brother, a woman called Jo Ann from Columbus, Ohio. The woman said she had seen Ali’s picture on a missing persons website, and that Ali looked similar to a girl she had recently noticed in her local community. Amber, the private investigator, traveled to Columbus to follow up on the lead. Once in Ohio she worked together with local police and undercover agents. She visited crack houses and brothels. At the same time, a cop told Amber that he had seen a girl that reminded him of Jo Ann’s daughter. The girl went by the name Ali Cat. Furthermore, the police officer said that he was aware the woman was from Texas, but not that she had been reported missing. A police informant also confessed to having seen Ali: She recognised her by a scar on her forehead. The informant lead Amber to a brothel where she had claimed to have seen Ali. In the brothel Amber saw a girl who looked like Ali. However, Amber had no authority to intervene as a private investigator; instead, she alerted local law enforcement. A plan was put together, but when the police finally obtained a warrant to raid the brothel, the women who had worked there were nowhere to be found. Amber visited the brothel after the raid took place. She, too, reported that the women who had formerly worked there no longer were on the premises. She believes that the Ali look-alike had been moved to another brothel.
“Perhaps because someone tipped off human traffickers about the raid,” Jo Ann explains. “At least, this is what some people suspected. I still have a percentage [of faith] left in me that believes she could still be in Columbus.”
Jo Ann explains that is why she has made several trips to Ohio, 1,200 miles north of Texas, and that she will follow any tip that seems reasonable.
Following Ali’s disappearance Jo Ann created a Facebook remembrance page for her daughter. The mother explains how the family often received tips about her daughter’s whereabouts. The tips, she wrote in a post on Facebook in 2014, came “from everywhere. Alaska, San Diego, all the way to Miami and everywhere in between (and some of them at the same time).” In the same Facebook post, she described why she specifically followed up on the tip indicating Ali was seen in Ohio:
For me this one just seemed a little different so we decided to travel to Ohio to investigate deeper. While there we did not find the girl everyone was saying was Ali. But a few months after…Columbus police did arrest two different girls they believed to be my Ali. Both of these girls were lookalikes and one of them has been identified as the girl everyone was seeing.
To this day we continue to get leads of people seeing Ali in different states. And we continue to follow those leads. Ali is still missing and her whereabouts still unknown. We do not know why she was taken or by whom. But I continue to hold onto hope that she is still alive out there and that we will find her. I will never give up my search to find you. I miss you bunches.
Besides investigating whether Ali became a victim of human trafficking, Jo Ann has watched other leads develop. Two years after Ali’s disappearance, a man named Brandon Lavergne confessed to killing two women in Louisiana. Brandon had relatives in Spring, Texas, whom he had been visiting around the time Ali went missing. He had earlier been a suspect in the case. When Ali’s disappearance was made public a witness reported to the police that he had seen a man try to lure Ali into his white truck near the Burger Barn. The witness had even managed to grab a few numbers off the truck’s licence plate. When the police checked the numbers they discovered that they matched part of the plate on Brandon Lavergne’s car, which was later discovered burned about fifty miles from Spring. The police questioned Brandon Lavergne about his involvement in Ali’s disappearance, but a former employer provided him with an alibi. Law enforcement was never able to prove he had any connection to the case.
No matter what might have happened to Ali, Jo Ann says she can’t imagine what Ali might have been going through. But if she were to be given a chance to decide her daughter’s fate, she says, without hesitation:
“I have rationalised that she could be forced into prostitution; and the other scenario is that she is being held hostage in a basement somewhere. I know it sounds bad, but of these two possibilities I hope she would be forced into prostitution. I see that as [the] lesser evil,” Jo Ann explains.
However, there is another possibility, an outcome that Jo Ann will not accept.
“I admit, I struggle a lot with if I believe she is alive or not. Until there is a body I am gonna believe that she is still alive. And until she is found one way or another I am gonna keep searching,” Jo Ann notes.
Although Ali’s disappearance adversely affects Jo Ann’s life in so many ways, she still tries to turn her pain into knowledge and wisdom that others can benefit from. Today, Jo Ann has accepted there is nothing she can do to change her daughter’s destiny; instead, she can enlighten other parents about the dangers that certain parts of our society can pose to their children.
“My eyes have been opened to this epidemic of missing people that we are facing in America. I just wish I had become aware of this earlier. There are so many parents going through this nightmare every day. Earlier I just closed my eyes and followed others. But today I am so much stronger, thanks to Ali. Now I speak my mind, and I seize every opportunity to put [the public’s] focus on this problem,” Jo Ann explains.
EXPLOITED BY OTHERS
One way to put the focus on what Jo Ann calls “this epidemic of missing people” is by constantly encouraging parents to tell the story of their missing children. Another way is to constantly remind authorities that they have a responsibility to both prevent and solve these abductions.
To remind society of its responsibility, Jo Ann tried for years to make Texan lawmakers adopt a resolution to recognise April 26, the day Ali went missing, as “Texas Missing Persons Day.” Finally, in 2017, lawmakers did.
“At times I feel I can conquer the world,” Jo Ann proclaims. “And at times I feel that if I had the chance to capture the person responsible for Ali’s abduction I would end up in prison with him because of what I would do to him. I am no longer a bystander in my own life. Today I stand up and act—unfortunately on a sad background.”
Besides dealing with the worries and pain resulting from her daughter’s abduction, Jo Ann also has to deal with the ruthlessness of other people. Jo Ann still receives many tips about her daughter’s whereabouts, but some of the tips simply reveal how cruel certain people can be.
“Over the years I have received numerous messages from people claiming to know where Ali is, but they will not tell [me] until I pay them thousands of dollars. We have experienced so much exploitation from other people who try to benefit from our daughter’s disappearance. It happens to a lot of families who are missing their children,” Jo Ann says.
She has reported most attempts to exploit her daughter’s disappearance to law enforcement. Meanwhile, in times of sorrow and pain she finds comfort in her family and ex-husband. The couple was separated at the time of their daughter’s disappearance, but they both still support each other and are the best of friends.
“We have always been a team when it came to the kids. We have always been there for each other. [Near] the beginning of her disappearance John was the driving force when it came to the search groups. He was the strong one. But a year after her disappearance he began to take things a lot harder. When I asked him for follow-ups on tips he had no answers, because he no longer had the strength to follow up. He put so much into it, and then the sorrow caught up with him. Today the roles are reversed. Now he comes to me for follow-ups,” Jo Ann says, emphasising that ten years after Ali’s abduction the entire family still is struggling from the consequences of the crime.
For Jo Ann, the most difficult part is not knowing whether Ali is still alive. But she often feels her daughter’s presence.
Jo Ann still lives in the same house in Spring, Texas, in case Ali returns home. And the mother always keeps the door to her daughter’s old bedroom open. At times Jo Ann gets the feeling that her daughter is sitting on the bed, drawing, just like she used to.
“Other times,” Jo Ann reveals, “I dream of her. I have a dream where I am in a public place, and then I see Ali sit at a different table with friends. In the dream I just walk up to her and ask where she has been and if she is all right,” the mother explains.
Another way Jo Ann finds she can feel a connection with Ali is by writing her poems. Jo Ann posts the poems on Facebook. At other times she makes crafts, just as Ali always did.
“I think of Ali while doing it. And I give a lot of craft[s] to other families. When I do, I feel I create something beautiful for others, just like Ali always did,” Jo Anns says. She adds that she will continue hoping that one day Ali will be back home to do crafts with her, just like she used to.
“Today, Ali is twenty-five years old, and she still has life ahead of her. She often expressed her desire to have her own family. I hope that one day that wish will come true. I can’t give up that hope, because I want Ali to keep believing in it no matter where she is. And I will forever be looking for my daughter and not her body,” Jo Ann says.
8
PROFILE OF AN ABDUCTOR
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children has analysed a decade of attempted abductions and related incidents committed by individuals unknown to the victimised child. The incidents involved more than 9,800 children; they were committed by 9,027 perpetrators.
The analyses showed that 96 percent of the perpetrators were men whose average age was 36. In almost nine out of ten of the cases studied, the perpetrator worked alone. The children included in the study tended to be older when they were victimised by a male perpetrator, in comparison to incidents involving female perpetrators; the latter tended to victimise infants and toddlers.
Over the years law enforcement has become more aware of who the perpetrators of child abductions tend to be. Police have generally intensified the fight to prevent abductions and, of no less importance, their hunt for the kidnappers. In 2006, the FBI created the Child Abduction Response Deployment task force, also known as the CARD team. According to the FBI the team “works to recover victims as quickly as possible and helps apprehend those responsible for taking them”.
The team consists of more than sixty agents and can be on the scene within one or two hours after the crime has taken place. The team establishes on-site command posts to centralise investigative efforts, working hand in hand with state and local law enforcement agencies. The CARD team also helps identify registered sex offenders in the area, coordinate forensic resources, and incorporate the FBI’s technical assets, “which play an increasingly larger role in investigations where every minute counts”, as the bureau describes it.
