For `Poor Girl,' Tragic End
Bones Belong To Former Symbol Of Despair
December 06, 2006|By DAVE ALTIMARI; Courant Staff Writer; Courant Staff Writers Fulvio Cativo, Greg Seay and David Owens contributed to this story.

It was a powerful photograph -- a third-grade girl stands frozen behind the glass door of a china cabinet, watching a parade of adults enter her Hartford home so her mother could locate their veins to shoot heroin.

That picture, part of a 1992 Courant series on drug use in Hartford, made Jessica Muskus, 9, a symbol of the plight of drug addicts' children and briefly thrust her and her family into the news. Appalled state officials removed the girl and her brother from the home. Hundreds of readers reacted to the picture and the story for weeks.

Then her story faded -- until the summer of 2004, when Jessica, then 22 and the mother of a 4-year-old girl, left her family's home in the Bunker Hill section of Waterbury to go visit a friend and never returned.

On Tuesday, the state medical examiner's office announced that a skull and bones found just off Route 8 in Litchfield belonged to Jessica Muskus. She would have been 24 years old.

The cause of death is undetermined, but police are treating it as a likely homicide.

Her bones were found within a short distance of where the remains of three Waterbury women were found between 1988 and 1993. Police believe a serial killer dumped two of the women there; a man was convicted of murder in the third death. Police are not saying, though, whether they believe Jessica is another serial-killer victim.

``Oh my God, what a horrible thing to happen to that poor little girl,'' said Kanani Bell, the former Hartford school social worker who tried to help Jessica and her older brother Christopher.

``This was an elementary school child in the worst possible conditions doing the best she could,'' Bell said.

The family's plight was featured in the 1992 series about the drug-infested world of neighborhoods barely a mile from the golden dome of the state Capitol. The haunting photo of Jessica in the china cabinet prompted hundreds of calls to state officials begging them to get involved and take the child from their mother.

The state immediately removed Jessica and her Christopher from the house two days after the photo ran in January 1992.

The siblings remained in the custody of what was then the Department of Children and Youth Services for more than a year, their mother said when interviewed Tuesday.

``I wasn't an evil person. I just needed to get some help,'' said Linda Alley, who was known as Linda Muskus when those stories ran in 1992.

At the time, Linda Muskus was known for her ability to find veins in people's arms and legs even after years of heroin use had turned them into pincushions.

Jessica and Christopher would sometimes watch when drug users came to see their mother. Jessica's place was inside the china cabinet.

In the 1992 story, Linda Muskus said she started doing drugs after getting sick with a tumor.

"I just started a couple years ago,'' she said. ``I never did drugs. I gave up. I had a brain tumor. And started getting fed. I got fed drugs and drugs and drugs and I started liking them. I told them. I told [the children] I was using drugs. I told them it was a sickness. A disease. They wanted me to stop it because they know it's going to kill me."

The Courant's story described the living conditions in the Broad Street apartment: ``Christopher sleeps curled up on the floor of the closet. He feels safer there. Night and day, the junkies come and go. They rap on the door, go into the back room and shoot up.

``On the wall of the living room, in the place of honor, hangs a painting done by Jessica. It is a basket of grapes, apples, oranges -- ripe, yet with a fearful darkness about them.

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