On the morning of June 11, 2003, 30-year-old Dawan Ferguson called 911. In a conversation that lasted less than 30 seconds, he calmly told the dispatcher his severely disabled nine-year-old son had been in the backseat of his SUV when it was carjacked just moments ago from the corner of Page Boulevard and North Skinker Parkway in the north-county neighborhood of Wellston.
When police arrived, Ferguson told them his son, Christian, had a rare condition that required life-saving medication be administered multiple times a day. Christian had been throwing up all last night. That morning, when Ferguson tried to wake Christian, he'd found the boy unresponsive. As Ferguson rushed his son from his home in Pine Lawn to St. Louis Children's Hospital, he stopped at the pay phone to call ahead to the hospital to let the staff know they were on their way. He said when he looked back from the pay phone to his car, it was gone. Vanished.
Frederic Wolf, at the time a 15-year veteran of the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, was one of the first officers to respond when Ferguson's call came in. He directed the initial search for Christian, whom police believed to be in the back of a car that was most likely being taken for a joy ride.
"Time was of the essence," Wolf later testified. "The latest information we had was that the vehicle was headed east on Page. I wanted officers to start [searching] the two to three blocks immediately to the east headed toward the city."
Wolf described Ferguson as upset, nervous and pacing.
Police cars from other districts and even other police departments joined in the search.
"We were tearing everything apart trying to find this [SUV]," Wolf said.
When Christian's mother, Theda Person, heard that her son had been taken, she suffered a breakdown. Her husband at the time (she and Ferguson were divorced) took her to DePaul Hospital.
"I remember crawling on the floor at the hospital," she tells the RFT. "I didn't know what else to do."
On one of the televisions in the hospital, she saw a news anchor reporting live about Christian's disappearance.
She knew immediately that her son hadn't been in the back of the carjacked SUV.
"I'm a mother, and I know Dawan," she says.
In just two hours, police found Ferguson's SUV parked in a residential neighborhood about five miles away (to the west) from where Ferguson made the initial 911 call. When police found the car, they expected Christian to be in the back seat. But the nine-year-old was nowhere to be found.
This immediately raised red flags. Car thieves "want a ride, not a kidnapping charge," Wolf later testified.
Police requested that Ferguson accompany detectives to the police station downtown "due to the suspicious nature of the case," according to a police report.
When they asked him to take a polygraph, Ferguson declined, "adding that he did not wish to make any further statements and wished only to speak with an attorney."
Police asked Ferguson's then-wife, Monica, if she or Ferguson knew anyone who lived near where the SUV was recovered.
They did: Lakisha Mayes.
When police went to interview Mayes at her Ferguson home, her car wasn't in the driveway. She told investigators that for a short while she had lived with Ferguson and been involved in a menage-a-trois with him and his wife. The living situation had fallen apart, but Ferguson still had keys to Mayes' Chevrolet Malibu. Police asked her where the Malibu was and Mayes said that she assumed either Ferguson or Monica had taken it to look for Christian.
Later in the day, Mayes spoke on the phone with Ferguson and he acknowledged he had borrowed the car without asking.
Mayes later testified that she asked how Ferguson had been able to get to her car if his SUV had been stolen many miles away.
Ferguson's reply was ominous: "He said he didn't want to involve anyone else," Mayes recalled. Then "he told me that I didn't have to talk to [police]."
News of an abducted, severely disabled child spread fast throughout St. Louis. By 8 a.m., Fox 2 was at Page and Skinker reporting live about the incident. Later on, when investigators took a closer look at the news footage, they saw the very Malibu Ferguson had borrowed parked at the intersection.
Ferguson said he borrowed it to look for Christian after he left the police station. But what was it doing already parked at the intersection where the whole bizarre kidnapping saga began?
Meanwhile, law enforcement and volunteers scoured north county and beyond for Christian, who couldn't survive for more than a day or two without his medication. Civilian search groups were quickly organized. People waded into drainage ditches and underbrush. They searched vacant buildings. Others distributed fliers. Search coordinators made maps of north county with already-searched areas shaded in.
"I'm expecting a miracle," Person told the Associated Press the Monday after her son's disappearance. "Please bring my angel Christian back to us."
However, after a week without finding Christian, a grim reality set in. He couldn't survive without his medicine. The search parties switched from using dogs trained to find missing people to dogs trained to find cadavers.
Christian's disappearance remained a blot on the city's conscience. The public was befuddled by the lack of charges brought against his father, who seemed so clearly guilty. He'd gotten away with killing his own son, and for nearly two decades it appeared as though he always would. Then suddenly, seemingly out of the blue, Dawan Ferguson found himself on trial, and his depravity was shown to be greater than anyone in the public would have ever guessed.
Theda Person, now 50, has spent nearly the last two decades raising awareness about missing children and working with parents of missing kids as they navigate the impossible. She's a poised and resolute self-described empath. She can't help but feel other people's pain. And when she feels that pain, she can't help but do something about it. She's been trying to put pen to paper to record all that she's been through, but she doesn't think the story can fit in a single book.
Person and Ferguson met in high school where she played volleyball and he played soccer. A little older than Ferguson, she was already a student at Harris-Stowe State College when she became pregnant in 1993. Ferguson was 19 and working odd jobs. The two weren't married.
Christian was born October 9, 1993, and went into a coma on the second day of his life. Christian was so sick, doctors thought he was going to die; they diagnosed the newborn with citrullinemia, a rare inherited disorder that left him unable to digest protein.
Christian had to take six medications a day and eat a strict diet so that he never ingested more than a few grams of protein per day. The young couple also had to be on constant alert for vomiting, loss of balance or confusion — telltale signs that Christian was entering a coma and needed to be rushed to the hospital.
Already faced with the difficulties as a young couple of raising a baby, now Ferguson and Person found themselves cajoling an infant to swallow medicine from a syringe multiple times a day.
Person and Ferguson married on Valentine's Day 1994, when Christian was four months old. They welcomed a second baby, Connor, eight months later. And their efforts at keeping Christian healthy were not only paying off, but being noticed. KSDK did a story in 1995 about the couple caring for their son.
The report, filed by reporter Kay Quinn, shows Ferguson and Person at a doctor's visit and later at home with Christian. Christian drinks from his bottle and squirms in his mother's lap. Anyone watching the piece with the sound off would have never known the boy's health was so perilous.
In the piece, Person tells Quinn her biggest worry is that when Christian eventually heads off to school she won't be able to monitor his diet so closely.
Quinn ends the piece, "If Christian takes his medicine and sticks to his diet, he should lead a normal, healthy life."
Christian would later become known across the city as the severely disabled boy who had gone missing. But as the KSDK piece demonstrates, his disability hadn't always been so severe.
"Even though he had special circumstances, he could play like a typical child. He could talk, walk, dance, sing, get in trouble," Person says with a laugh.
Home videos from when Christian was a toddler show him clowning for the camera, walking around while wearing adult shoes too big for his feet. In another, Christian giggles as he shakes and squirms happily, his socked feet sliding around the floor as Luther Vandross plays in the background. At one point, he falls down only to gamely get back up again and run toward his mother, a smile on his face. "You can't slam dance to a slow song," Person jokes in the video.
When Christian was four, Person and Ferguson separated.
"We were fighting all the time," Person recalled in a 2009 Riverfront Times article. The fights even became physical.
A few weeks after Christian's birthday on October 26, 1997, Person left Ferguson's house with Christian and Connor to move in with her parents. By 1998, Ferguson had filed for divorce and wanted full custody of the children, plus child support.
At the time, Ferguson's legal representation, as well as his life in general, was being bankrolled by John Steffen, a construction magnate who met, fell in love with and married Ferguson's mother, Dawana, in 1989. (Person recalled double dating with the couple in the early days of her and Ferguson's relationship.)
Steffen grew up in north city and, in 2010, the St. Louis American said Steffen mixed more naturally in Black business circles in St. Louis than any other white businessman. Ferguson worked periodically for Steffen's company, lived in a house Steffen owned and was represented in court by Steffen's attorneys.
One year after Christian's disappearance, Ferguson was heard ominously saying that there was no jam so big that his stepfather, a "powerful white man," couldn't get him out of it.
This did not bode well for Person. "There were so many lawyers who showed us right to the door when they heard we were up against the Steffens," Person told the RFT in 2009.
Still, when Ferguson and Person divorced in November 1998, Person originally got full custody, with Ferguson receiving visitation rights.
However, only five weeks later, the judge reversed course. Ferguson claimed that Person was not bringing the children according to the agreed-upon schedule. Person said Ferguson was touching the children inappropriately and not taking care of Christian, who routinely got sick within 24 hours of visiting his father.
The judge gave Ferguson full custody on the advice of the guardian ad litem, leaving Person with visitation rights three Saturdays a month as well as an obligation to pay child support.
Person continued fighting for custody. She called Child Protective Services on him frequently, but most of her calls were deemed harassment. Even a doctor calling CPS on Ferguson did not change the custody agreement.
"They all were disrespectful to me," Person says of the judge and court staff. "They all told me I would not get my children."
After Ferguson got full custody, Christian found himself living with his father at 3720 Sylvan Place in Pine Lawn in what would later be called a "house of horrors."
The horrors began with Ferguson's carelessness and neglect, but eventually progressed to egregious, inhumane abuse.
On several occasions when Ferguson took Christian to the emergency room, doctors discovered that Christian had not received his medication for several days. This medication was lifesaving and was supposed to be administered multiple times daily.
Citrullinemia causes ammonia to build up in the blood, eventually to toxic levels. During the emergency-room visits, hospital staff recorded Christian as being dehydrated and smelling of ammonia. Because Christian was on medication that lowered the ammonia levels in his system by removing it through his urine, the hospital records indicated that Ferguson must have been allowing his son to soil himself again and again.
Christian's pediatrician later testified that she should have seen him for checkups at least once every three months, yet an entire year lapsed without her seeing him for care. Pharmacy records indicated that Christian's medication refills were so behind schedule that he was missing as many doses as he received.
At this time, Christian shared a room with his younger sibling, who at the time went by Connor but now goes by Lin.
Lin remembered in the early days of her father having full custody that Christian still enjoyed a relatively normal life. "We'd watch Pinky and the Brain and play a Rugrats computer game. Christian was more active than me," she later testified.
Everything changed on January 16, 2001. Christian was lying in a pool of vomit that morning and unresponsive when his father tried to wake him. At the hospital, Christian suffered a three-minute-long seizure in the emergency room.
As hospital staff attended to Christian, Ferguson and Person came to blows. Ferguson filed a restraining order, and Person was limited to 12 hours a week of supervised visitation at the hospital.
Christian fell into a coma and didn't wake up for a month.
When Christian came out of the coma, he'd suffered severe brain damage due to a prolonged lack of oxygen. The ability to talk, walk, read and write — things that had been hard won for Christian — were now completely gone. The debilitations defined the final two years of his life.
Ferguson, never a particularly diligent or doting father, resented the extensive care his now severely disabled son required.
"Christian was an inconvenience Dawan didn't want to be bothered with," said the prosecutor who eventually put Ferguson in jail.
The conditions at Ferguson's household deteriorated further. Christian's condition qualified the family for at-home nursing. In that capacity, Trdell Overbey was a steady presence at the house. Christian "never had clean clothing," she said later at Ferguson's trial. "I would let him wear my son's clothing. I didn't mind. I wouldn't let him go out like that."
Overbey said she bought food for Christian to eat. Often there were no sheets on the bed in Christian's bedroom, which typically smelled overwhelmingly of the ammonia-heavy urine.
Overbey tells the RFT that Ferguson was a profoundly selfish man who refused to do anything for his son. Ferguson refused to expend his time, energy or money even when it came to basic necessities, like food, for the boy.
"It was always no. Everything was just always no," says Overbey. "He did not want to have any responsibilities."
Overbey says she also went out of her way not to make Ferguson mad. "He was intimidating," she says.
Ferguson, who was working as a bounty hunter, routinely wore a gun tucked into a shoulder holster around the house. Overbey worked to conceal from Ferguson where she lived, always watching when she left his house to make sure he didn't follow her home. She had two small boys at the time and worried Ferguson might do something to them as they waited for the school bus.
One weekend when Overbey wasn't at the home, Christian's feeding apparatus fell out and was on the floor on Monday morning when she arrived at the house. She says she took Christian to the hospital herself. Ferguson said he did not want to go.
"He was very, very thin," Christian's sibling Lin testified. "You could see the notches in his spine, his pelvic bones. You could see his bones basically."
During this time, Ferguson had married Monica Linwood-Ferguson. She and her two daughters moved into Ferguson's house, but according to witnesses, Monica did not like Christian and did not concern herself with his care. Lin testified that Christian was often tied to the bed in their room.
"There was a comforter that was usually tied around his abdomen area, and it was tied in a knot behind the bars of the bunk bed, so he could not get away from that bed or out of a cross-legged position," she said.
She recounted one time when Ferguson took the rest of the family to the Renaissance Hotel for dinner, leaving Christian tied up in the dark.
It took almost two decades, but it would eventually come to light that Christian was fed so little he resorted to eating diapers.
"I never knew that my child was eating [his] own diapers. Diapers? How inhumane," Person says. "And to think my other child was in that room, slept in that room, too."
Theda Person continued to fight in court for more access to her children. By 2003, with Ferguson failing to show up to court hearings, she seemed increasingly close to being granted partial, if not full, custody of Christian and Lin.
Ferguson was often late bringing the kids to the court-appointed resource center where he was to drop them off for their limited time with Person. Staff at the center described Ferguson as agitated and on edge.
During this time, Person's sister Sharon Williams acted as a go-between for Ferguson and Person.
Williams later testified that in 2003, when Person was trying to regain partial custody of Christian, Ferguson told her he didn't want to go back to court. She added that Ferguson was so "agitated" about the situation that he told his ex-wife she would see Christian "over my dead body."
Williams didn't recall the exact date when she heard Ferguson make the comment. But she knew it was only a few months later that she got the news Ferguson was claiming Christian had been kidnapped.
In the weeks after Christian's disappearance, newspaper articles referred to police being "openly skeptical" about Ferguson's carjacking story. His story's inconsistencies as well as the fact that he had a cellphone on him when he stopped to use the pay phone became public knowledge. An arrest seemed imminent.
Police searched Ferguson's home in Pine Lawn multiple times. Court records later revealed that Ferguson instructed his cleaning lady to bar officers from entry when they showed up, but she allowed them in anyway. Later, Ferguson hired his own private investigators to sweep the house and remove any potential evidence.
In October 2003, friends and family gathered at Person's house to mark Christian's 10th birthday. Dawan Ferguson was not among the attendees.
Whether or not to prosecute Ferguson would have fallen to St. Louis City Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce. But because Ferguson had worked as a bounty hunter for the city, she asked the county's prosecuting attorney to handle the case.
Person says that prosecutor Bob McCulloch wanted to find Christian's body before bringing charges.
Current St. Louis County Prosecutor Wesley Bell, whose office would eventually put Ferguson behind bars, says that it is "extremely difficult" to prosecute a murder case when there's no body because the person on trial has a readymade defense. Counsel for the defendant can argue the victim might still be alive or that the alleged crime did not happen the way the state is claiming.
"Those can be powerful defenses and arguments to a jury," Bell says.
Person recalls, "I thought that if I just go to the police and tell them the truth, they have a system and everything would be taken care of, done, it's over. But it's really not like that."
Years passed. Public awareness of the Christian's story faded, but never died. Person wouldn't let it.
Starting in 2004, she began holding annual remembrances on the anniversary of Christian's disappearance. The walks and other events always received media attention, which Person used to keep her son's name in the public conscience as well as spread the word about other missing children. She said at the time that finding Christian and helping families of other missing children consumed her life.
Even as Ferguson remained a villain in the public's memory, he hid from the public's eye, going to work for his stepfather, whose business was booming. By the mid-aughts Steffen was being called a "real estate baron" by the Post-Dispatch.
Even those who thought Ferguson killed Christian had no idea how depraved the man was. It would take almost 20 years for the full extent of his crimes — more gruesome than anyone could imagine — to come to light.
By 2010, Steffen's construction empire began to crumble. He was federally indicted for fraud, though the charges were later dropped. His holdings included 2 million square feet of real estate in downtown St. Louis. Over-extended, the company had to transfer $600 million worth of assets to other developers.
In 2018, Bell — then a Ferguson City Council member — was elected as St. Louis County prosecuting attorney, replacing McCulloch, who had held the position for almost 30 years. In addition to promising overarching criminal-justice reform, Bell also vowed that his office would bring a "fresh set of eyes" to old cases.
Bell tells the RFT that when he took office, his chief investigator Ron Goldstein approached him about the case. Goldstein had been an investigator for the office back in 2003.
"He made it clear that reopening this case is going to be tough, that we were going to have to put resources into it," Bell says. "And it was going to be hard to bring home a case that was, what, at the time, 16, 17 years old."
"We knew [Ferguson] was guilty," Bell says. But given the age of the case and that there was still no body, it was a very real possibility Bell's prosecutors could end up losing at trial. Bell says he knew bringing charges was the right decision. "I can live with what comes."
Slowly the wheels of justice, previously so completely stalled, began spinning again. In October 2019, Ferguson was living in the Castle Point neighborhood when police took him into custody. He was charged with first-degree murder and child abuse.
Until recently, what exactly Ferguson had been doing for most of the 16 years between June 11, 2003, and his 2019 arrest remained shrouded in mystery.
In 2019, Monica Linwood-Ferguson, Dawan's wife when Christian supposedly disappeared, filed for divorce after 18 years of marriage. Her divorce filings came with horrific allegations that Ferguson had sexually abused two minors and had even fathered a child with one them.
Three weeks after being charged with murdering his son, Ferguson was charged with two counts of statutory sodomy, child molestation and two counts of statutory rape.
"Look at what he was doing in 2001 and 2003 and look at the other stuff he's accused of more recently," Person says. "You then, I think, can understand what he's been up to."
The two and a half years after Ferguson's arrest were filled with preliminary hearings and other delays, but after 19 years, Dawan Ferguson finally stood trial in the last week of June this year.
Outside the courtroom, Person saw the guardian ad litem who was supposed to be responsible for Christian and Lin when they lived with Ferguson during the custody battle. He was there to testify. Person wanted to go up to him and not-so-gently remind him that the whole ordeal was in large part because he didn't do his job.
"But you still have to keep your composure and keep your cool, stay focused," Person says. "You don't [want to] be a diversion in the midst of a criminal trial. So that is hard."
Though it was two decades in the making, Ferguson's five-day-long trial was mostly an anti-climax.
No longer enjoying the largesse of Steffen, Ferguson was being represented by public defender Jemia Steele.
Steele rightly pointed out multiple times during the trial that the state's case was entirely circumstantial, that it was theoretically possible Christian Ferguson was still alive.
In her opening argument, Steele outlined to the jury a theory of the case in which all the witnesses who would speak disparagingly of Ferguson in the coming week had been coached by Person. In essence, Ferguson was a victim of a conspiracy perpetrated by a bitter ex-wife.
The strategy made sense given the circumstantial nature of the state's case.
But by the second day of testimony, it crumbled entirely.
On that day, the prosecution focused on Ferguson's story about what had happened on the morning of his son's supposed abduction.
At the core of the day's testimony was that Ferguson told police that a little after 6 a.m. his SUV was stolen with Christian inside. However, multiple residents of Ronbar Lane in Ferguson testified that Ferguson's vehicle had been left on their street about an hour earlier, and it remained there until being discovered by police later in the day.
Andrea Murphy-Johnson lived on Ronbar at the time. She testified she was awake at 5 a.m. when she heard a noise and looked out her bedroom window to see the SUV parked by her house.
Another resident of Ronbar, Mark Ellis, testified that he also saw the SUV in the early dawn hours.
It seemed unlikely, though conceivable, that Person may have persuaded several friends and family members to conspire against Ferguson. But Ellis and Murphy-Johnson were essentially random people, their only connection to the case being that Ferguson had arbitrarily chosen their street to ditch his SUV before making the 911 call. The public had long considered the kidnapping story to be bogus, and by the second day of testimony it was looking increasingly likely that the jury would as well.
In addition to having what the prosecution called Ferguson's "cover story" contradicted in court, his fitness as a father was called into question by witness after witness during trial.
Overbey, the nurse who worked with Christian in Ferguson's house, took the stand. At times she struggled to fight back tears as she described the signs of abuse and neglect she said she witnessed on a nearly daily basis as Christian's caregiver.
On day four of the trial, Lin testified that the day before her older brother was allegedly abducted, he had an arduous day in which he was clearly in severe pain, moaning loudly.
The moaning continued into the night until her father came and took Christian into the living room.
At that point, Lin testified, she heard what sounded like her older brother struggling, gasping, then there was silence. A few hours later, shortly before daybreak, Lin testified that her father wrapped her silent brother in a bed comforter, took him outside to the car and drove away.
On the penultimate day of testimony, the defense produced their main witness, Dion Dupree. Dupree told the court that in 2003 he was 10 years old and attending a summer day camp near Skinker and Page. Dupree stated that on the morning of June 11, 2003, he saw a maroon SUV "taking off" from the intersection around 6 a.m., the time when Ferguson says his SUV was stolen.
However, the proceedings took an unusual turn when, under cross-examination by prosecutors, it was revealed that Dupree's brother Ja'Vonn had been represented by Steele in a quadruple homicide case in which Ja'Vonn had been found guilty.
The trial was called to a halt. The jury was dismissed. Both defense and prosecution met with the judge in his chambers.
When they returned, Steele was visibly upset, drying her eyes with tissue.
The witness Dupree was not called back to give any additional testimony, and the sight of Ferguson's public defender in tears portended the guilty verdict that came after only a few hours of jury deliberation the next day.
"God already told me the truth was coming out, it was just a matter of time," Person says. "When the jury said murder first, I already knew we'd won."
After the guilty verdict, Person appeared outside the court with a host of family and other supporters, standing beside Wesley Bell and the prosecutors who had successfully tried the case.
"I heard the words; I know it's real, but I'm still allowing it to sink in. I'm so grateful this day has come," she said. "When you have the right people in the right places at the right time, then things like this can happen."
She added: "I always had Christian in my heart, in my mind."
Ferguson is scheduled to be sentenced on Tuesday, September 27. Most court watchers expect he'll receive a life sentence.
One month after the guilty verdict, Ferguson was in court again, this time on the sexual abuse charges. While he was abusing Christian, and after Christian's disappearance, Ferguson was also abusing two other minors — from 2000 until 2013.
The first victim, whom Ferguson attacked in 2000, was over the age of 14 when the assaults took place. She took the stand and described Ferguson groping her and getting into bed with her. Later, he said that is what happens when adults drink. The other victim was 11 when Ferguson started grooming her in 2007 and 13 when she became pregnant due to Ferguson raping her.
The victim, now 26, recounted happening across Ferguson while he was masturbating. This started her "sex education" which included showing her pornography on her Minnie Mouse TV.
He raped her first when she was 11 and regularly after that. When she became pregnant, Ferguson took the victim to an abortion clinic, but she was too far along in the pregnancy to safely have the procedure.
Ferguson then instructed her to conceal the pregnancy by wearing a tight girdle. He told her to start exercising, running up and down hills, as if she were just trying to lose weight. He also told her to say that some boy from her school had gotten her pregnant.
Later on, Ferguson visited the victim again at her college. He had sex with her, and she became pregnant a second time. This pregnancy ended in abortion.
"I can only imagine the terror that those children dealt with and had to live with for most of their lives, living with this individual," Bell says.
The victim's daughter is alive today and a paternity test established that Ferguson fathered the child.
When the daughter was eight years old, the victim told her that her father was actually Ferguson.
"He hurt you," the daughter replied while the victim cried.
The victim testified that up until that point she hadn't thought of Ferguson's behavior as wrong, because the abuse had been so extensive and begun when she was so young.
In 2018 the victim disclosed to her mother what had happened. Soon thereafter she told her story to police.
Faced with this seemingly overwhelming evidence, Ferguson took the stand and testified in his own defense. He admitted that there was a child of which he was the father and the unnamed victim the mother; however, Ferguson denied having sex with the victim.
Ferguson instead claimed that the 13-year-old found a condom Ferguson had used to masturbate, and inseminated herself with it. (Ferguson testified that he often masturbated into condoms in the hopes it would cure his erectile dysfunction.)
Bell referred to Ferguson's farfetched testimony as a performance put on by a man who is "a narcissist of the highest order."
Bell adds, "I think, in his mind, he thought he was smarter than everyone and he could talk his way out of hard DNA evidence.
"That performance, and that's the word I'll use for it, reminded me of a quote from one of my favorite movies, Pulp Fiction," Bell says. "'My name's Pitt, and your ass ain't talking your way out of this shit.'"
The same day as that outlandish testimony, Ferguson was found guilty on all charges. Bell anticipates that not only will Ferguson spend his life in prison, but also that if he is reincarnated, he'll spend those lives in prison as well.
When the RFT talked to Person a month after Ferguson was found guilty of murder, she was still grateful her ex-husband had been served justice. But some of the ebullience that had been so apparent outside the courthouse on the day of the verdict had faded. Now she had her mind on all those who had failed Christian but who never faced any consequences for it.
She mentions the family-court judge who awarded Ferguson custody and the guardian ad litem who was supposed to look after Christian's well-being as two people in particular who haven't been held accountable.
There's also the unanswered question of where Christian's remains are.
A prevailing theory is that Ferguson used his knowledge of Steffen's construction business to hide his son's body beneath the foundation of a house that was being built.
Only one man knows for sure where Christian's body is, and it seems unlikely Dawan Ferguson will divulge the location — not so long as he thinks the secret gives him a modicum of power over Person, police and anyone else who takes an interest in Christian's story.
Person says that sometimes her son does come to her in her dreams. Sometimes the dreams have to do with her looking for Christian so she can feed him. She's haunted by how he went hungry in her ex-husband's house.
"I want to relax, I want to be able to look at my pictures, and remember the precious memories, and not always be in fight mode [or] defense mode because the system failed here and the system failed there," she says.
It's something she's still working on.
