https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...-unsolved-death-of-fairfax-teen-annie-mccann/
The mystifying death of 16-year-old Annie McCann in 2008, found in a Baltimore housing project far from her Fairfax County home, has always been accompanied by the mystifying investigation of the Baltimore Police Department. The police concluded that Annie committed suicide by drinking the antiseptic Bactine, a vile-tasting substance that numerous experts, including the manufacturer Bayer, have said could not have killed her at the amounts found in her body.
For more than seven years Annie’s parents have fought ferociously for a fuller explanation, and now they have a powerful ally: Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Grassley on Monday released letters he sent last week to the Baltimore police, the FBI and Bayer asking some of the many unanswered questions surrounding Annie’s death. Grassley’s letters in another Fairfax County case, the 2013 police shooting of John Geer, led to a judge’s order that forced police to finally provide information to Geer’s family in January 2015 about who shot Geer and why.
The discovery of Annie’s body near a dumpster at the Perkins Home apartments in Baltimore, at 3 a.m. on Nov. 2, 2008, was the shocking end to a life lived almost totally in the Alexandria area of Fairfax County, where Annie was a well-liked junior at West Potomac High School. The Baltimore police said there were no obvious signs of trauma, though Annie’s parents Daniel McCann and Mary Jane Malinchak-McCann have since learned otherwise. With no “signs of foul play,” the Maryland chief medical examiner turned to toxicology and ruled that Annie had ingested a fatal amount of lidocaine, one of the active ingredients in Bactine. She had a bottle to spray on her recently pierced ears, her parents said.
“Annie drank Bactine,” Baltimore homicide Maj. Terrence McLarney told The Post in 2009. “It’s just a poison. People drink poison. It’s true we can’t find another one with Bactine. When they decide to kill themselves, they use what is there. The point is, she poisoned herself.”
Renowned pathologist Michael Baden told The Post that Annie would have had to drink five or six bottles of Bactine to ingest the amount of lidocaine found in her system. A Bayer Corp. representative told the family the same thing. Other experts have said even trying to drink Bactine is nearly impossible, and would leave burns or noticeable internal damage, which Annie didn’t have.
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And then there is Annie’s body. Her fingers were heavily wrinkled, “like she had been in water,” said Diana Downey, manager of Demaine Funeral Home in Alexandria which received Annie’s body after the autopsy. “She was in a shower or bathtub to take away evidence.” The McCanns repeatedly requested the rape kit that had been done on their daughter at the autopsy, but the Baltimore Police have refused to provide it for more than seven years
Last year, the McCanns purchased autopsy photos from the medical examiner which they hadn’t previously seen. There they saw what appears to be a cigarette burn above Annie’s left eye, described in the autopsy report as “an old abrasion.” Then on Annie’s lower leg, the McCanns spotted what appeared to be “a stylized capital letter ‘J’ on Annie’s left ankle,” they wrote in a recent online post about the case, “followed by a stylized banner, or another letter, perhaps a capital ‘D,’ distorted around the natural curve of Annie’s ankle. But there’s nothing natural about that ‘J’ or ‘JD.’ Anyone can plainly see — it’s man-made. Not livid and red. Clear and white. It looks like a tag or a pre-brand, commonly used by human traffickers.”
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Then last November, Downey from the funeral home wrote a long letter to Grassley. “Our staff at the funeral home always believed that Annie was raped (sodomized) and beaten,” Downey wrote, based on an examination of her body. The McCanns continued to request the rape kit from the police, and were denied.
Grassley’s letter to Baltimore Police Commissioner Kevin Davis asks how the police investigated and confirmed the science behind a Bactine-related overdose, whether the police gave Annie’s rape kit results to the FBI, and why the police have withheld the rape kit from the McCanns for seven years. The senator’s letter to the FBI, citing his committee’s oversight of the Justice Department, requests non-redacted copies of all records related to the FBI’s involvement in the case. Grassley asked Bayer for their findings on the lethality of lidocaine in Bactine and the company’s communications with Baltimore police.
