MISSING 9-YEAR-OLD FOUND DEAD - BODY OF GIRL DISCOVERED IN WILDLIFE AREA
St. Louis Post-Dispatch - Sunday, November 28, 1993
Author: By Kim Bell ; Of the Post-Dispatch Staff ; Tommy Robertson of the Post-Dispatch staff contributed information to this story.
The 10-day search for Angie Marie Housman ended Saturday morning when a deer hunter found the child's body near a wooded ravine in the August A. Busch Wildlife area in St. Charles County, police say.
"Our worst fears have materialized," said Sgt. Robert Lowery Jr., deputy commander of the St. Louis Major Case Squad.
"We feel very confident this is Angie Housman . I'm about 100 percent convinced it is the right girl. Now this is a homicide investigation," he said.
The hunter found the body of the 9-year-old St. Ann girl at 11:15 a.m. on a bitterly cold day, just west of Miller School Road near Highway 94 and just south of U.S. Highway 40 (Interstate 64), police said.
Debbie Skaggs of St. John, Angie's aunt, said police told her that Angie had been shot in the hand.
"They said she had to have been killed by someone she knew," Skaggs said.
Skaggs is the sister of Angelo D'Andrea, Angie's biological father. D'Andrea is a mechanic in the moving business, Skaggs said. "He's fallen to pieces," she said. "My brother will not stop until he finds out who did this."
At 4 p.m., Angie's stepfather, Ron Bone, and other family members left the St. Ann police station and hurriedly got into a car. Bone's hand shook violently as he held a cigarette in the back seat.
"We can't talk," said Bone, 34.
The girl was last seen about 4 p.m. Nov. 18, a Thursday, when she hopped from her school bus and walked north on Wright Avenue toward her parents' duplex.
Almost from the outset, police thought the girl had been abducted as she walked the half-block from the bus stop to her home in the 3500 block of Wright Avenue.
Lowery, a Florissant police sergeant, declined to say how the girl died or what she was wearing when her body was found. He said he didn't know whether the girl had been sexually assaulted.
"We don't have any suspects," Lowery said. "We hope the crime scene will give us some."
While police say they're certain Angie's body was found, they still need to make a positive identification through an autopsy and other tests, which should be conducted Sunday.
All along police had been optimistic the child would be found alive, Lowery said - even as the search for her became more desperate.
Saturday afternoon, Jon and Jeanette Bone, the parents of Angie's stepfather, visited Angie's parents, Ron and Diane Bone.
Jon Bone, who lives in Woodson Terrace, said a neighbor came to the house after 2 p.m. and told them she had heard on television that Angie might have been found. A St. Ann police car then pulled up to the house and took the family to the police station.
Jon Bone said the police told them: "There's a person who's been found. There's no positive ID. There's a very good possibility it might be her."
The family returned home from the station and hurried inside the single-story home. A sign from Angie's classmates at Ritenour's Buder school, where she was a fourth-grader, decorated a front window.
"Come home Angie, we miss you," said a large sign on the front door.
St. Ann canine officer Kevin Jacobs was stationed outside to help the family keep their privacy.
Earlier Saturday, Ron Bone had been trying to get names of people who might have had information about Angie's disappearance. A neighbor had driven Diane Bone to the bank and to a store to pay for Christmas toys on layaway for Angie and her 2-year-old brother, Ronnie. The little boy spent part of the afternoon staring out the front window as reporters gathered in the street.
"Diane had been at the station earlier this morning," Jon Bone said. "She had been in such a state that the wife and I thought it would be good for her to get out of the house."
Earlier Saturday, Jeanette Bone said family members were trying to keep their hopes up.
Police stopped at the Bones' home earlier in the morning to get more of Angie's clothing, Jeanette Bone said.
"The police aren't telling us very much," one of Ron Bone's brothers told a reporter on the telephone.
Sgt. Jim Mantle of the St. Ann police department said late Saturday that the Bones hadn't seen the body.
The Rev. Wally Jones, pastor of the Fee Fee Baptist Church, was with the family, Mantle said.
"Just tell them that justice will be done," Mantle told the pastor before he left for the Bones' house.
During the search for Angie, police used dogs and helicopters equipped with infrared sensors. As many as 40 officers from St. Louis County searched the banks of Cold Water Creek and five parks around St. Ann.
The FBI and other law agencies participated in the search. Detectives from the Major Case Squad tracked hundreds of tips.
Last week, police were trying to determine whether the girl's disappearance might have been connected to an attempted abduction in Maryland Heights on Nov. 8.
In that case a man grabbed an 11-year-old girl who looked similar to Angie just after she got off her school bus.
The girl managed to pull free and run away.
Angie was last seen carrying a blue-and-white Christian Hospital Northeast book bag. She wore blue jeans, white tennis shoes and a long hooded pink overcoat.
Barely 5 feet tall, Angie had blue eyes, brown hair and a cheerful personality, her mother said. She recently spoke of her child's bright smile as she came home from school.
As darkness fell Saturday evening, Jon Bone, a hulking man with broad shoulders, stood on the front porch of Angie's house.
"We've gotten a lot of help from people we don't even know," Jon Bone said. "What we needed was a little more help." Caption: PHOTO, MAP
(1) Color Photo by Wendi Fitzgerald/Post-Dispatch - Jon Bone, step-grandfather of Angie Marie Housman, stands outside the girl's home in St. Ann, after hearing that a body found Saturday in St. Charles County is almost certainly hers. (2) Color Photo Headshot of Angie Marie Housman - Disappeared 10 days ago (3) Photo by Jerry Naunheim Jr./Post-Dispatch - Police detectives and sheriff's deputies near the scene in the August A. Busch Wildlife area in St. Charles County, where a body believed to be Angie Marie Housman's was found on Saturday. (4) Color Map - Post-Dispatch map showing the place where Angie Marie Housman's body was found near Miller School Road in the Busch Wildlife Area in St. Charles County. A second map ran showing the area of detail and the location of Angie's home in St. Ann, St. Louis County, also ran.
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FBI AGENTS JOIN SEARCH FOR MISSING 9-YEAR-OLD - THOUGHTS OF CHE SIMS CASE HAUNT SERGEANT
St. Louis Post-Dispatch - Sunday, November 21, 1993
Author: By Kim Bell ; Of the Post-Dispatch Staff
Seven FBI agents were working Saturday with St. Ann police on the disappearance of 9-year-old Angie Marie Housman, who is presumed to have been kidnapped after she got off a school bus three days ago.
St. Ann Police Sgt. Jim Mantle said a crew of nearly 20 law enforcement officers started fresh - but uncovered little new information by nightfall.
"Is she alive? My gut reaction is, `I don't know,' " Mantle said.
"Every time a creek or woods are mentioned, Che Sims flashes through your mind. That was very devastating on everyone."
Che Sims was the 12-year-old honor student from Breckenridge Hills who was abducted Sept. 17, 1990, then raped and slain along a creek bed near her home. Two young men have been convicted of Che's murder and two others are awaiting trial.
With little else to go on, police searching for Angie have gone to the creek where Che died, to area parks and woods near Angie's home.
Copies of the fourth-grader's school picture are on "Missing" fliers posted in nearly every shop along St. Charles Rock Road.
Angie, who attended Ritenour's Buder School, was last seen about 4 p.m. Thursday. She had just left a school bus and was beginning to walk north on Wright Avenue toward her pfamily's duplex, about eight doors away.
A police dog tracked her scent along Wright Avenue, then lost it about halfway to her home, Mantle said. The dog had gone to work about 18 hours after Angie disappeared.
"We don't know if the wind blew the scent away in that time, or if she got into a car at that spot," Mantle said.
"She couldn't just vanish. We don't know what happened."
The FBI reinterviewed Angie's friends and family Saturday. Angie's mother, Diane Bone, said that Angie was happy and wouldn't leave on her own.
"I'm just hoping the FBI will come through," Diane Bone said.
Police got about 300 calls Friday about Angie's case. Some reported suspicious people, but police said they exhausted all the leads.
However, police were still looking for a man who on Nov. 8 tried to grab an 11-year-old Maryland Heights girl who looks similar to Angie. Caption: PHOTO, MAP
(1) Photo Headshot - Angie Housman (2) Map by Post-Dispatch - WHERE ANGIE DISAPPEARED Showing area where the school bus stopped to drop Angie off about 4 p.m. Thursday; Angie's home on Wright Avenue is a few blocks away.
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POLICE FOLLOW HEARTS IN CASE OF MISSING GIRL - SEARCH GETS SPECIAL TREATMENT AS AN `OBLIGATION' TO A CHILD
St. Louis Post-Dispatch - Wednesday, November 24, 1993
Author: By Daniel R. Browning and Kim Bell ; Of the Post-Dispatch Staff
About 40 police officers from St. Louis County searched the banks of Cold Water Creek and five parks around St. Ann on Tuesday looking for clues to the disappearance of 9-year-old Angie Marie Housman. They found nothing.
Angie vanished about 4 p.m. Thursday in the four blocks between her school bus stop and her home in the 3500 block of Wright Avenue in St. Ann.
Ron Bone, 34, the girl's stepfather, said police were interrogating family members. He said he took a lie detector test Monday. "I told 'em if they want me to take one, I'll take one," Bone said in an interview Tuesday. "It doesn't matter."
Bone, an auto mechanic at the Sears store in Northwest Plaza, said he last saw Angie at 8 a.m. Thursday when he left for work. He got home just after 5 p.m. and found that she had never returned home from school, he said.
"She's been my daughter since she was 1," Bone said. "I'm hanging on to her as my daughter, and she calls me Dad."
Angie's mother, Diane Bone, 29, spent nearly four hours Tuesday morning at the police station, Ron Bone said. He said his wife was exhausted afterward and went to sleep.
Bone said he understood that police must investigate the family, if only to rule out his wife and him as suspects.
St. Ann police, the St. Louis Major Case Squad, the FBI and the St. Louis County Municipal Mobile Response Team were on the case Tuesday.
This is only the second time in 28 years that the Major Case Squad has stepped into something other than a murder investigation. The first exception was in 1967, when a 13-year-old girl was raped in Maplewood.
The Angie Housman case "does not fit the criteria of the Major Case Squad rules, but we went with our hearts and not with the written law of the bylaws," said the head of the squad, Florissant Police Chief Robert Lowery. "We're all fathers, some of us grandfathers, and we thought we had an obligation to this 9-year-old girl."
Lowery insisted that the case was being handled as a missing person case but said he hopes the Major Case Squad's involvement does not set a precedent.
"This is not your run-of-the-mill missing person case," he said.
"A kid's usually gone to a neighbor's house and shows up in 24 hours. Here, it's been five days. It seems different. It seems to me something dreadful has happened."
As detectives with the Major Case Squad tracked down hundreds of tips, the countywide Mobile Response Team slogged through nearby woods and parks in search of Angie's school bag or any other evidence.
"America's Most Wanted" broadcast Angie's picture Tuesday night, and St. Ann sent a police officer to Washington to field phone calls and tips from viewers.
Tim Gaeng, whose daughter, Jenny, 7, and son, Jeff, 9, ride Angie's bus, said neighborhood parents were working out an agreement to meet the children at the bus stop and walk them home.
"It's hard to even believe she could disappear that fast," Gaeng said. "We just watch every move the kids make now."
Ron Bone walked three children home Tuesday.
Scott Walters, 11, a fifth-grader who rides Angie's bus, cut across a neighbor's lawn by himself after school Tuesday. He told a reporter: "We all know Angie. They're all talking about how we want her back real bad. She's our friend."
Meanwhile, Angie's family is trying to stay positive.
Jeanette Bone, Angie's stepgrandmother, said psychics "are the only ones keeping our hopes alive."
Ron Bone said: "They started calling us Friday, then Saturday, then Sunday. We didn't really ask them - they just started calling. According to the psychics, she's alive. She's dressed warm. And they are feeding her."
One woman dreamed that Angie was in trouble but said Angie was afraid to come home because she feared she would be spanked.
"We just want her to know - if anyone can get a message to her - she isn't in any trouble," Jeanette Bone said.
"She isn't going to get spanked." Caption: PHOTO, MAP
(1) Color Photo by Scott Dine/Post-Dispatch - Police officers search Cold Water Creek in St. Ann on Tuesday for Angie Marie Housman, 9, of St. Ann. She disappeared Thursday. Angie remained missing Tuesday. (2) Color Photo by Scott Dine/Post-Dispatch - Ron Bone (right), Angie Marie Housman's stepfather, talks Tuesday with Tony Thomas, a neighbor. Thomas' children often play with Angie. (Appeared in Three Star edition.) (3) Color Map by Anthony E. Glover/Post-Dispatch - AREA OF SEARCH