Missing Girl’s Mom Clings to Hope for a Lonely Year

TACOMA, Wash. —  Theresa English only looked away for a minute.

It was Jan. 23, 1999, and English was watching her 2-year-old daughter play in the video arcade of a crowded bowling alley. The mother of five walked over to the lane where her friends and family were bowling, then quickly returned to the video games.

Teekah wasn’t there.

English scanned the crowds of children and adults that filled Tacoma’s New Frontier Lanes that Saturday night. She checked the spaces between the video games, in case Teekah was playing hide-and-seek. She walked into the women’s restroom, where a cousin was changing her baby’s diaper.

“Have you seen Teekah?” English asked, checking the stalls.

“No,” her cousin replied.

English ran out of the bathroom and found an off-duty police officer, who started searching with her. Over the loudspeaker, a voice announced that a 2-year-old was missing.

People went on bowling, cheering for strikes and groaning for gutter balls. But English knew something was seriously wrong. Teekah was a mama’s girl who cried when others tried to hold her. She wouldn’t even let uncles or aunts pick her up.

English pushed open a side door near the arcade and stood in the cold night air, the heavy door muffling the clonk and clatter inside the bowling alley. She called her daughter’s name again and again, her shouts fading into the woods surrounding the alley. Teekah was scared of the dark.

English felt panic welling up but pushed it back down.

“She’s going to come back,” she thought.

That night was the last time English saw her daughter.

One year later, investigators say Teekah’s disappearance is a rare and baffling case that defies the pattern of most child abductions.

For weeks stretching into months, hundreds of police and volunteers searched the woods and neighborhoods near the bowling alley. Television, newspaper and radio reports carried Teekah’s photograph and her description. Twenty-five detectives worked full time for a month on the case.

Tips poured in, but nothing led to Teekah.

Family Not Likely Suspects

At first, English and her family were prime suspects, if only because detectives knew the statistics: In 97% of all child abductions, the child is taken by a relative.

English seemed too calm, some investigators thought. An early police report described how her face remained blank when she picked up a newspaper with Teekah’s picture on the front page. She stared at it briefly, then casually leafed through the pages.

But what looked like coldheartedness was shock, English says. The 28-year-old mother can’t explain her demeanor in those first days any more than she could explain her reactions in a nightmare.

Even now, English hides her emotions. She doesn’t cry, at least not in front of strangers. Her voice is a low monotone, her face expressionless, except when she’s talking to one of her four other daughters. That’s the only time she smiles.

The Tacoma Police Department, with help from the FBI, conducted parallel investigations from the start. One focused on the family, while the other looked at the possibility of abduction by a stranger.

Teekah’s father, Robert Lewis, is serving his third year of a four-year prison term for theft, and police don’t consider him a likely suspect.

No one except Theresa English has been ruled out. But after a year of investigation, Tacoma Police Detective Larry Lindberg says, “There isn’t any evidence the family had anything to do with it.”

Investigator Is Haunted by Case

Lindberg says police have interviewed nearly all 300 people who were at the bowling alley that night, many of them twice.

From those interviews, they have two slim leads. Somebody saw a car careen out of the parking lot a bit too fast that night. It was a maroon Pontiac Grand Am, late ‘80s or early ‘90s, probably a four-door, with tinted windows and a spoiler.

And a teenage boy said he saw a man who might have been following a little girl near an exit. The man was white, in his 30s, with a pockmarked face, mustache and shoulder-length brown hair. He was wearing jeans and a blue checked flannel shirt. He had “a big fat nose,” the teenager said.

Lindberg knows those leads aren’t much, but they’re all he has. He and Detective Becky Zeutschel sometimes read through the Teekah reports--six blue three-ring binders, each about four inches thick--hoping to find something they missed.

Lindberg, a 25-year police veteran, says he tries not to let it get to him. But Zeutschel, who has dealt more closely with the family, has trouble shaking Teekah from her mind. English sometimes calls her in the middle of the night, crying and asking about the case.

If the family is frustrated by the lack of progress, so is Zeutschel. At a prayer vigil for Teekah, she listened as one of English’s brothers complained that the case hadn’t been solved.

She took him aside and said she was trying her best. “This case almost haunts me,” she told him.

Teekah’s memory haunts the home where she lived with her mother, a one-story house with a mossy roof and cinder-block steps, across the highway from the Port of Tacoma.

Pictures of her line the walls, and her smiling face stares at visitors until she seems to come alive, running down the hallway to hug her mother’s leg.

But that’s Tameeka, Teekah’s younger sister. She is almost 2, the age Teekah was when she disappeared. Tameeka looks so much like her sister that a neighbor recently called police to report that Teekah wasn’t missing after all--she was in the yard, playing with her mother.

Tameeka awakens her mother in the morning and says, “Mommy, I want cereal,” just as Teekah did. She loves french fries, Teekah’s favorite food. Tameeka kicks off her shoes as soon as her mother’s back is turned, the same way Teekah did. They share the same shy smile.

English misses the little things the most--fixing Teekah’s cereal or watching Winnie the Pooh together. Sometimes she sleeps with the pink fleece jacket Teekah wore to the bowling alley that night.

Teekah’s bed is covered with Pooh bears, including her first one, its fur rubbed off in places where a little girl held it tight.

English has bought all the special-edition Poohs, each new bear marking another holiday without her girl--Valentine’s Day, Easter, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas. When Teekah comes back, English says, she doesn’t want her daughter to feel as if she has missed anything.

On second thought, English says, she’ll want to get rid of the bears when Teekah returns. It makes sense, she says, when you consider what must have happened: Teekah was stolen by a couple who wanted a mixed-race child but couldn’t have a baby of their own. (English is part Chippewa Indian and Lewis is black.)

The kidnappers have Teekah locked up in a white house way out in the country, spoiling her rotten, English figures. When Teekah cries for her mother, they tell her, “Your mommy and daddy don’t want you no more.”

“They’ve probably showered her with gifts of Pooh,” English says, looking at the bears on Teekah’s bed. “She probably won’t be a Pooh fan no more. We’ll probably just give them away.”

The police have their own theories. They expected to find something, perhaps a body, when the property next to the bowling alley was excavated for development. Nothing turned up.

“If you talked to a hundred police officers, they would all probably say she’s dead,” Lindberg says. “They would say she’s near the bowling alley somewhere--we just haven’t found her.”

English will not listen to such talk.

“Teekah was my heart,” she says. “I wait for the day the police tell me they have my daughter. They have to find her. I know she’ll come home.”

A Tree Full of Ribbons

English woke up on Christmas Eve feeling certain that the phone would ring with good news. She waited at home all day. But she didn’t get one call.

That night, she drove to her mother’s house for a big family dinner, videotaping the visit for Teekah. The tape starts in the jerky way that home videos do, with a whirl of color and muffled sound, and then slowly focuses on a house dressed up in blinking lights for Christmas.

“This is what Grammy’s house looks like,” English’s voice says from behind the camera.

“This tree has ribbons for every day you’ve been gone,” she says, then she starts to cry as the camera sweeps across hundreds of ribbons fluttering in the wind.

“Teekah, Mommy misses you. She loves you. Wherever you’re at, I hope the person that has you gives you the best Christmas ever.”

The rest of the family has gone inside where it’s warm, gathering in the kitchen and around the Christmas tree. But English stays outside on the porch, the camera shaking as she shares a few more words with her daughter.

“There’s not a day goes by that I don’t think about you. I’ll never give up the search for you. I love you, Teekah.”