Zahra Baker was 10 years old and had already won a battle that very few adults could win.
As a baby, she survived bone cancer that cost her a leg and much of her hearing. She walked with a prosthesis, listened with hearing aids, and smiled as if none of it weighed on her. She had moved to North Carolina, United States, with her father after he married a woman named Elisa Baker. No one imagined that house would become the place where Zahra would end up disappearing, first little by little, and then forever.
In October 2010, her parents reported a kidnapping. They said someone had entered and taken her. But the neighbors hadn’t seen her for weeks, and no one at school remembered having her in class. When the police turned up the pressure, Elisa confessed: Zahra was already dead before the report was filed. She had abused her for months and eventually killed her. Then, together with Zahra’s father, she mutilated the body to destroy evidence and fabricated the kidnapping story. Her remains appeared little by little, in different places, and were never all recovered.
She won a war against cancer as just a baby. She couldn’t defeat the woman who slept under the same roof.