Annie McCann thought about killing herself.
She wrote about suicide in three notes, but they were found with large X's drawn over the words, crumpled and tossed under her bed in her suburban Virginia home. The one Annie apparently meant to be read, she left lying on her bedsheets on Friday, Oct. 31, the day she went missing.
"This morning I was going to kill myself," the note reads. "But I realized I can start over instead. I don't want help and I'm no longer scared. If you really love me you'll let me go. ... Please don't go looking for me."
Further down the page, the 11th-grader assured her parents she had everything under control: "Just know for the first time in my life I'll be happy. I love life, and I'm ready to live."
Two days later, early on a Sunday, a man taking out his trash found Annie's body lying next to a bin in the Perkins Homes projects on Lombard Street east of downtown Baltimore, propelling her parents, Daniel and Mary Jane, from a frantic search for their missing daughter to a determined mission to learn how and why she left home, how she died and whom she might have met along the way.
The couple is planning a public campaign starting with a news conference tomorrow to push Baltimore police into doing more to solve the case, to work harder to find people who might have seen her in Baltimore when she was alive and the teens who confessed to moving her body after she had died. They are paying for four billboards on the city's sports stadiums and highways to enlist the public's help and are offering a $10,000 reward for tips the family hopes will lead to answers.
They know authorities are leaning toward suicide. Annie ingested a 5-ounce bottle of Bactine, which her mother gave to her to disinfect her newly pierced ears. Bactine contains the numbing agent lidocaine, which was found in Annie's system, and can be lethal if taken orally.
"They worked the case hard when there was nothing to work," Annie's father, Daniel McCann, said of Baltimore homicide detectives. "As clues emerged, they have worked it less hard. We understand there are 36 murders in Baltimore this year, but there is basic police work that needs to be done here that hasn't been done."
The McCanns feel there are too many unsettling and unresolved leads to close this case now, leads that suggest Annie was not alone when she roamed the streets of Baltimore and died, leads that the family believes contradict or at least raise doubt about suicide.
