The note found on her bed reads more like a retraction than an expression of a will to die. And what person planning suicide runs away, as Annie did, with the $1,000 she had saved, a trunkful of clothes, nearly all her jewelry and a big box of Cheerios?
And who, the night before planning to kill herself, stays late, as Annie did, at school to work on extra credit for an Advanced Placement psychology class? Or shops for Halloween candy? Or leaves happy notes for her parents telling them she can't wait to see them when she gets back from the store?
And what about the white male in his 30s with a goatee whom a teenager in Perkins Homes told police he saw abandon Annie's white Volvo with her body on the back seat, a body the teenager and two friends told police they moved so they could steal the car and take it for a joy ride? And who is the woman with dark hair a clerk in Little Italy saw with Annie the day before her body was found?
The couple is concerned that the Police Department's decision to shift the death file to the cold case squad is a signal that the active part of the investigation has ended. The medical examiner ruled that her manner of death was an overdose of lidocaine but that the cause of death is "undetermined."
The McCanns are at a painful crossroads; anxious to push detectives overwhelmed with other murder investigations to do more without angering them, but unable, with so many questions lingering, to accept that their daughter took her own life.
I met twice with the McCanns over the past week and talked with the detectives in homicide on Friday. They differed on some points. The family said Annie's body was "soaking wet," as if she had been in a shower, while Maj. Terrence McLarney, head of the homicide unit, described it as damp from an overnight drizzle. The family said the teens found her facedown in the back seat; police said that's not precisely correct but wouldn't go into further detail.
The key difference is how the police and the McCanns interpret evidence as to whether Annie took her own life. What they do agree on is that after four months, investigators have no idea what happened to Annie between the time she left Alexandria and was found dead in Baltimore. There are no e-mails, no text messages, no calls and only tentative sightings that police have not been able to verify.
"She did a very good job of disappearing off the grid," the lead investigator, Detective Sean P. Jones, told me, adding that he has never had a case in which someone committed suicide with lidocaine.
