Weeks before Annie McCann disappeared from her suburban Washington home and turned up dead in Baltimore, her mother, Mary Jane, noticed something strange: The 16-year-old had started attending 6:30 a.m. Mass.
Annie was a devout Catholic, an altar girl who shows up in snapshots with the Washington cardinal, but pre-dawn weekday services are sparsely attended, and a lone teenage girl tends to stand out. Annie didn't go to her family's church, but one closer to home, where the pastor didn't know her parents.
Mary Jane asked whether something was wrong. It wasn't, Annie assured her, and her mother concluded that, at best, her daughter was becoming more spiritual and, at worst, was conflicted but at least had turned to the church for help. Annie had asked about confession times and confided that she had sought counseling from a priest.
Then, on Oct. 31, Annie ran away. Two days later, her body was found next to a trash bin in the Perkins Homes public housing complex east of downtown.
Looking back, four months later, Mary Jane and her husband, Daniel, can't help but wonder whether their daughter was crying out for help and whether those cries hold the clues to her disappearance and death.
Today, the McCanns are holding a news conference to press Baltimore police to do more, to ask people who might have seen Annie to come forward, and to post a $10,000 reward for help in solving the case.
City homicide detectives say suicide is a compelling explanation for Annie's death - she drank a 5-ounce bottle of Bactine, which contains lidocaine and can be lethal if ingested orally. But they have few leads as to what happened from the time she was last seen alive in Alexandria, Va., to when she was found dead in Baltimore. The medical examiner says the case is open, the cause of death listed as pending.
Annie McCann had left wearing jeans and a red pleated jacket, carrying a blue book bag and the box of Cheerios her father had bought the night before. She took not only her savings, a car trunkful of clothes and earrings, but also a fistful of cash her father had placed in a kitchen jar. She took her cell phone and iTouch, and apparently drove off in the white Volvo S60 sedan.
A Fairfax County police officer found a note on her bed stating that she had thought about killing herself but had changed her mind and decided to run away instead.
