The Jessica Lunsford tragedy The picture of innocence Some images just stick with you, especially when they're of lost children. JonBenet. Adam Walsh. The girl in the pink hat. By MICHAEL KRUSE Published February 11, 2007
The photo of the little girl in the pink hat has been the singular, iconic image of Jessica Marie Lunsford.
HOMOSASSA
It was taken high in the sky on a ride at the state fair in Tampa the Sunday night before she was kidnapped, raped and killed. It was used by authorities to try to find her, it was used by newspapers, Web sites and TV stations to cover the story, and it was used by politicians to toughen the state's sex offender laws. It will be used by prosecutors in Miami in the criminal case against John Evander Couey.
Since Feb. 24, 2005, the picture of the little girl in the pink hat has been the singular, iconic image of Jessica Marie Lunsford.
"Everywhere I go, that's the picture they have. Everywhere," Mark Lunsford said not long ago in the double-wide mobile home in Citrus County where he lived with his daughter and his parents.
"That's the picture you see."
What the picture captured - what lingers - was a shared moment that was then shared with everybody else. The image is at once intimate and thoroughly public. It shows innocence just before evil and life even after death.
"It made you like that kid," said Bob Thompson, a professor at the Newhouse School of Communications at Syracuse University in New York. "It's that great American toothy innocent smile that evokes so many utopian ideas of childhood."
Some images just stick. Especially of children who get stolen and hurt.
JonBenet. Adam Walsh and his missing front teeth and the baseball bat.
Now this one.
Jessie on the sky ride
The life of the picture with the pink hat began on Feb. 20, 2005, when Mark Lunsford bought a small digital camera at Wal-Mart on the way to the fair and then won the pink Kangol bucket hat for his daughter by shooting BBs at a target. He took a lot of pictures: Jessie riding a mechanical bull, Jessie climbing a rock wall, Jessie sitting in the driver's seat of a shiny red convertible. The ones from later in the evening show her mugging for her dad with the lights of the Ferris wheel off in the distance.
The picture everybody still sees was taken on what's called the sky ride.
"We were sitting in the same seat," Mark Lunsford said a year and a half later, "and she kind of turned sideways, and I kind of turned sideways. And I took the picture."
Three days later, after a 911 call shortly after 6 a.m., deputies showed up at the doublewide and asked for photos to help find her. They were given two shots.
There was the picture with the pink hat.
There also was what Jessie called her "driver's license" photo. Her grandmother had taken her to the Department of Motor Vehicles two and a half weeks earlier to get her a state ID card so she could put it in her just-bought billfold and feel like a grownup. The smile she has in that photo is smaller, even bashful, which friends and family members say is the way she was around strangers.
It's everywhere
Early in the search, that "driver's license" photo was put on telephone poles and in windows of homes and businesses and on stands on the side of the road in Citrus, Pasco, Hernando, Sumter, Levy and even Pinellas counties.
And then it wasn't.
Then it was pretty much just the pink hat.
Susan Candiotti on CNN called Jessica the "little girl with a fuzzy pink hat and a brilliant smile." Nancy Grace on Headline News called her "the third grade girl under the pink hat." Oprah called her "the adorable girl in the pretty pink hat."
The picture was sent by the Citrus County Sheriff's Office to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and also to the media around the state and the nation. Sheriff's spokeswoman Gail Tierney says she distributed the picture with the pink hat just because it was the more recent of the two. No real conscious decision.
It was on the front of the program at the memorial service in March at the church in Lecanto. It was the first image and the last image in the slide show there.
It was on Mark Lunsford's tie in May in Tallahassee when then-Gov. Jeb Bush signed "Jessie's Law," mandating a prison sentence of 25 years to life for people who do these things to kids younger than 11.
Later, that first summer, Mark Lunsford put it on his own skin. Tattoo artist Michelle Gallo at Pleasure Points in Spring Hill inked it onto his lower right rib cage over several sittings and 16 hours. Gallo, usually mellow, says she cried the night before she started it, then again that morning on the way to work.
A picture of . . .
Different people see different things when they look at the picture with the pink hat.
"An innocent little kid," said Linda Foster, owner of the Saloon on U.S. 19, where Jessie sometimes went with her dad to sing Saturday night karaoke.
"Nine years old," said Cheryl Puterbaugh, event coordinator at Harley-Davidson of Crystal River, the end point of the annual Jessie's memorial ride.
"I see her radiance," said the Rev. William LaVerle Coats, the pastor of her church, Faith Baptist of Homosassa Springs. "I see her joy."
Jimmy Brown sees her hat.
"That's what makes that image unique," the Brooksville lawyer said.
Susan Mango Curtis sees her eyes.
"Her eyes are so crystal clear," said Curtis, a professor of visual journalism at the Medill School at Northwestern University.
"It's an intimate photograph," she said, "that could only be created in a moment shared between two people who cared deeply for each other."
Jessie told her family friend and tutor the last night she was alive that she had had such a good time that day and night at the fair with her dad. It had been just her and him. And that was important to her.
"That was their day," said Ruth Lunsford, her grandmother.
The beauty of the image is that it shows a side of Jessica Lunsford she didn't show to just anybody. She was happy and friendly but also timid around those she didn't know well, say the people who knew her, and typically was more like she looked in the "driver's license" photo. Now, though, everybody gets to see the part of her personality she saved only for those to whom she felt the closest.
One more irony: Most of those people who were close never even saw the pink hat. That day and night at the fair is the only time she wore it. Mark Lunsford says he has the hat, and that it's in a safe place, and he won't say any more than that.
"When I look at that picture," said Sharon Armstrong, her friend and tutor, "I think of her being gone. It doesn't represent life to me."
A silent witness
For so many others, though, all the people who knew her name only after she was dead, the picture with the pink hat does just the opposite: It keeps her alive.
Someone from Canada even wrote a poem about it. Angels in Pink Hats is posted on www.jmlfoundation.com.
You shall see me
I will smile and light up the world again
You will know it is me
Because I am the one in the pink hat
The picture is on Mark Lunsford's business cards for the foundation. It is on the fliers for the third annual memorial ride coming up Feb. 24. It is at the Harley place in Crystal River and at her favorite restaurant, Luigi's on U.S. 19, and at the Museum Cafe in Old Homosassa.
It's on a stone memorial behind Faith Baptist. It's in a frame in the foyer by the sanctuary.
It's in the doublewide, on a big white candle, by the TV in the family room.
It's on the wall above the couch.
It's in the window of her room looking outside into the yard.
And it almost certainly will be in the courtroom in Miami. A trial, some say, is a competition for the emotions of the members of the jury, and the picture with the pink hat will be important over these next few weeks for the same reason it has resonated over the past two years.
Look at it.
The picture with the pink hat says what needs to be said.
Michael Kruse can be reached at mkruse@sptimes.com or 352 848-1434.
HOMOSASSA - From wall to wall and in every room of the modest double-wide mobile home, Jessie's giggling mug smiles from underneath the floppy brim of a pink fuzzy hat.
The now-iconic photo is joined by dozens, perhaps hundreds, of similar pictures of the 9-year-old girl. One picture, however, is missing.
None of the shots of Jessica Marie “Jessie” Lunsford includes her dad.
Mark Lunsford said he has only one photo of himself and Jessie together. He keeps it for his own personal memories. He won't share.
Like the now-famous picture, the one Lunsford won't share was taken at the end of a wonderful day, at the end of a wonderful weekend, at the end of a wonderful life.
Jessie and her father had visited the Florida State Fair days before her abduction and death. The pink hat was new, won by her father who shot targets with a BB gun. He also threw enough darts at enough balloons to win Jessie a purple stuffed dolphin.
“She's that little girl in your life that you would die if anything happened to her,” Lunsford said last month from the living room of the mobile home.
Sometime in the next several days, Lunsford will push his Harley Davidson Road King into a trailer, hook it to the back of a white, Chevy pickup truck and head south.
Several lawyers and a judge are working diligently in Miami, trying to select the jury that will decide if 48-year-old John Evander Couey is guilty of kidnapping, raping and killing Jessie. The trial is expected to last well into March.
Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty. Couey, a sex offender who had failed to register, lived with his sister in a mobile home just 150 yards from the Lunsfords.
If Lunsford stands on his front steps, if he looks past the trees planted in Jessie's honor, if he looks past the stone monuments carved with prayers for Jessie, if he looks past the street where Jessie once rode her bicycle, he can see a small wooden porch. Under it, sheriff's deputies told him, Jessie was buried alive.
Jessie, the youngest of Lunsford's four children, had a special relationship with her father. Several years ago, Lunsford and Jessie’s mother divorced. He gave up his North Carolina roots and the two moved to Homosassa to live with his parents. Each night and each morning, Lunsford would get his “Jessie hug.” Now, a tattoo of his daughter is affixed permanently to his abdomen – a forever Jessie hug.
“She once said to me, ‘I love you this much,' ” Lunsford said while pinching together his index finger and thumb, “‘because nothing could come between us.' I don't know how to describe that kind of love.”
Jessie's two half-brothers and her half-sister are all grown and living in Ohio.
Joshua Lunsford, at 18, is finishing his senior year of high school. He's a state-champion wrestler, an A/B student and is expected to be the first in the family to attend college.
Someday, Mark Lunsford said, Joshua wants to take over the Jessica Marie Lunsford Foundation – an advocacy group run by his father.
Gerald Lunsford is 24 and has a family of his own.
Elizabeth Lunsford, now Elizabeth Packett, is 21 and raising 4-year-old and 3-year-old boys. Jessie loved those boys, Packett said earlier this week.
“She loved the fact that she was so young and had nephews,” Packett said.
When Jessie saw Brandon and Blake she had a tendency to boss them around a bit, being the older aunt and all, Packett said. But never for long. They always ended up playing together. Now, Packett said, her boys see Jessie's face on television from time to time. They know she has died but are too young to truly understand the tragedy.
“She's their angel, they say.”
Like her father, Jessie was the quiet type, Packett said. She had just started to grow out of her shyness.
“When she was younger, if she didn't know you, she wasn't going to get to know you,” Packett said. “As she got older, she was getting used to meeting people.”
Around family, Jessie was more raucous.
She owned a karaoke machine and loved to sing along with country songs, Packett said. Singer Toby Keith was one of Jessie's favorites and she often belted out “I Wanna Talk About Me” to her father and grandparents.
Although Jessie is gone, her budding personality remains in the Lunsford home. A hand-written sign on the door to Jessie's room still warns family and friends to knock before entering.
Jessie's grandmother, Ruth Lunsford, said the bedroom has changed just a touch since Jessie died.
Over spring break, Jessie and Ruth had planned to hang new curtains, install some shelves, buy a new dresser. Jessie hated her dresser, Ruth said.
Now, the curtains are new, the dresser replaced and shelves hold toys, cards and other gifts provided by well wishers.
Jessie left the room for the last time a few weeks before spring in 2005.
Prosecutors contend that Couey walked into the house as Ruth Lunsford and her husband slept. Mark Lunsford was away for the night.
Couey crept into the room, past the sign demanding that people knock, and motioned for her to follow, he would later tell authorities. She grabbed the purple dolphin on the way out.
It was found with her body In a statement Couey made to detectives, he said Jessie never put up a fight. She never screamed for help or tried to get away. She was “very polite,” Couey would say.
Couey is the only person alive who knows what truly happened that night – and authorities have questioned the veracity in some of his statements.
Couey isn’t likely to provide more details. His statements to detectives will not be read to jurors. A judge ruled that he had asked for an attorney and was not provided one.
Regardless of what happened the night of Jessie’s abduction, Mark Lunsford can never forget the next morning. He walked into his home and heard his daughter’s alarm clock beeping. Her room was empty.
Bonnie Bucqueroux, who runs a victim's advocacy program at Michigan State University, said she has worked with parents of murdered children and has seen the devastating affects. The idea of closure and moving on is a fallacy, she said. Society wants to believe that grieving parents can overcome their loss.
Expecting parents to move on and to forget, “that's just asking too much,” Bucqueroux said. “You find the parents who have lost a child really have entered the seventh circle of hell. Many of them feel guilty for years if they should, say, go out and have a good time. It bubbles up again when they realize they have forgotten, even for a minute.” Lunsford said a group of firemen took him to Gasparilla this year. He said he had fun but thought of Jessie the entire time.
Asked if he feels guilty when he has a good day, Lunsford shook his head and offered a wry smile.
“I'll let you know when I have a good day,” he said.
Information from Tribune archives was used in this report.
Reporter Thomas W. Krause can be reached at (813)259-7698 or