On October 8th, 1996, a farmer in Decatur, Texas stumbled upon the nude body in a pile of dead branches. It appeared the girl had been raped and strangled, though cause of death was not entirely clear, due to the state of decay. The victim bore no particular distinguishing marks, and would eventually come to be dubbed Brush Girl. Authorities at first believed that she was between twenty and forty years old, of a small build, and with hair that was bleached blonde.
However, in 1998, a facial reconstruction and a comparison of dental records confirmed the identity of the victim as fourteen-year-old April Dawn Lacy, who had been reported missing by her mother only five days before she was found dead.
April had never really had a chance in life. Born in Oklahoma City in 1982, her parents were both drug addicts and lived an itinerant existence in cheap motel after cheap motel, shoplifting and scrounging through garbage cans to find items to sell for a few dollars. April’s mother Jacqueline allegedly worked as a prostitute, and may have pimped out April as well, though Jacqueline denied this strenuously. The Lacys also had a younger child, a boy, who had earlier been removed from their care by the Department of Human Services.
On October 3rd, Jacqueline told police, she and April had had an argument, supposedly about the marital problems that Jacqueline was having with her husband Dale. April had run away before, she said, and threatened to again on this particular day. Jacqueline claimed that she left the motel room where the pair of them had been staying, and when she returned, April was gone. She had not been alarmed at first, she asserted, because April had not taken her purse with her, but after a few hours, Jacqueline purportedly became concerned and phoned police to report her daughter missing. Dale Lacy also reported April missing, in January of 1997; at this point, April’s body had already been found, but she was still unidentified.
Once investigators surmised that Brush Girl was actually April Lacy, they attempted to inform Jacqueline and Dale of this fact, but the couple refused to believe it, not only because they deemed the dental and facial reconstruction comparisons insufficient, but also because initially, authorities thought the victim was much older than fourteen.
There was also the seemingly inconsistent fact that April’s body was found dramatically decomposed only five days after her mother claimed to have last seen her. Though the Lacys used this as another argument as to why they needed more proof that the body actually belonged to their missing daughter, detectives looking into the case hypothesized that perhaps April had been dead far longer than five days, and that her parents might have known more about her death than they were letting on, or at least had not reported her missing until long after she had vanished.
A DNA test was eventually performed on the girl’s remains, which definitively confirmed that Brush Girl was April Lacy. It is uncertain whether Jacqueline or Dale Lacy knew anything about their daughter’s disappearance or murder. Authorities have also pursued a few other leads, including the possibility that April might have been slain by a serial killer. Some speculation has her death linked to the Redhead Murders, though this series is thought to have ended in 1992 at the latest.
The grim saga of April’s life and death is still a mystery.
Crime Immemorial 