A child’s murderer could be freed. Does anyone in L.A. care that there was a second dead child?

Staff Writer

Published Oct. 31, 2024 Updated Nov. 14, 2024 11:49 AM PT

Madie Moore went to prison in 1995, convicted of murdering her 8-year-old niece, LaToya. The little girl’s battered body was found stuffed in a trash can, encased in concrete, in a shed behind the family home.

Moore had gone in at 45. At 74, in a wheelchair and blind in one eye, she was trying to get out.

As she spoke to the California parole board from a prison in Chowchilla in May, Moore recited Psalm 23 from memory: “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”

Then the woman who hoped Moore wouldn’t go free addressed the board. Her daughter.

“Why,” Candice Moore asked, “are we not talking about Kenny?”

Kenny

Kenneth Eugene Gridiron Jr. was born in Los Angeles on April 9, 1983, ahead of a crack epidemic that ensnared his mom.

His father, Kenneth Eugene Gridiron Sr., described Kenny as a happy baby, who came out “with a lot of hair.” Gridiron Sr. said Kenny’s mom, Zhandra Soils, took the boy away from him. The last time he saw his son, Kenny was a year old.

As his mom wrestled with her demons, Kenny wound up in Moore’s care. She was his aunt, his troubled mother’s sister. It was around 1986. His cousin Candice doesn’t remember much about Kenny, beyond his bright eyes and his desire for affection.

The boy barely made an imprint on the world.

And then, he disappeared.

John Doe No. 245

Dana Orent searched the coroner’s website from his office in 2016, trying to find an unidentified body matching the description of a 2-year-old child who had gone missing from the Antelope Valley decades earlier.

Since his medical retirement as a Pasadena police detective, Orent worked as a criminal investigator for defense attorneys, as well as on claims of wrongful convictions. He took on cold cases — without pay — in his spare time. His goal was to gather enough evidence to prompt renewed law enforcement interest in them.

Dana Orent confirmed the identity of a little boy encased in cement in 1995 as Kenneth Gridiron Jr.

As he investigated the Antelope Valley case, Orent stumbled on an unrelated report of a different child, one who was found encased in concrete at a storage unit in 1994. The boy had never been identified. He was known as John Doe No. 245.

Police had learned of the boy from an anonymous caller who alerted them to the trash can. Inside the 45-gallon aluminum garbage bin were remains skeletonized beyond recognition.

The deputy medical examiner described a head covered with “black kinky hair.” A plastic diaper. A red, white and blue Kmart sweatshirt. She wrote that there were fractures in the child’s ribs.

The cause of death was listed as “undetermined.” The rib fractures were included under “other significant conditions.” The examiner checked the box for homicide.

Dana Orent looks through the case file in his home office.

“Typically those cases are solved fairly quickly, because everybody wants to help with a child being found and being murdered,” Orent said. “I was just blown away that here it is, 20-something years later, and nobody even knows who this child is.”

As Orent scanned the coroner’s report, he saw an investigator had jotted down the case number of a homicide authorities believed was related.

That dead child was LaToya Harris.

Authorities initially believed the remains could be Kenny, LaToya’s older brother, who had last been seen around February 1987. But DNA testing, still relatively new, ruled him out.

Orent decided to investigate the unsolved case. He studied the coroner’s report on LaToya’s death and used public records and social media to track down more than a dozen family members for interviews.

“The more I worked it, the more I felt it’s this kid, little Kenny,” Orent said.

Eventually, Orent tracked down Gridiron Sr., who still lived in L.A. and who had always wondered what had happened to his son. The father gave a DNA sample for the coroner to test against John Doe No. 245.

In October 2016, the test results came back. It was Kenny.

‘Monster’

Now that the long forgotten boy had a name, Orent wanted justice.

Through his interviews with LaToya’s family members, the investigator had learned all about the woman locked away for that child’s murder. The woman he said her family called a “monster.”

Madie Moore was one of at least seven children born to a mother who went to prison for murdering another woman, according to the parole board. As her family tells it, she beat the woman to death with the heel of her shoe.

Moore was 17 when she gave birth to Candice. It was the same year she was arrested for robbing a cabdriver with her boyfriend. There was a malicious mischief charge for breaking her grandmother’s window. Drunk driving. An arrest, but no conviction, on suspicion of attempted murder after an altercation with another woman escalated into a shootout. A felony conviction in 1984 after she hurled a Molotov cocktail into a neighbor’s home.

Missing from that criminal record cataloged at her parole hearing, Candice said in an interview, is the abuse Moore inflicted on the children in her life. She gave similar testimony about that abuse at parole hearings throughout the years.

After Candice, Moore had two more kids, a son and daughter. Although Candice did not grow up with her mother, she recalls being made to visit and seeing Moore drunk and beating her younger brother, Maurice. Another time, Moore pulled her youngest daughter’s arm out of the socket, Candice said.

“My mother yanks and slams up against walls and punches,” Candice said. “That’s who she is, that’s who she’s always been, that’s how she lives.”

Madie Moore went to prison in 1995, convicted of murdering her 8-year-old niece, LaToya A. Harris.

Despite Moore’s history, one after another of her sister Soils’ children wound up in her care. The beatings expanded, Candice said, with Kenny and LaToya getting it the worst.

Then one day, Kenny was gone.

Moore told Candice that Kenny had gone to live with his cousins. Seeing the way her mother treated him, Candice said, she felt relieved that Moore had sent him away.

“I thought that she had, for once in her life, done a selfless act,” Candice said.

The abuse continued. Soils’ daughter, Lisa Moore, said she once witnessed Soils and Moore holding LaToya’s hand over the stove. The brown of her sister’s hand looked like paper disintegrating.

After a report from Moore, Soils was convicted in 1992 of burning LaToya on the hand. She was placed on probation, according to a Los Angeles Times article.

Police received the first call about a body encased in concrete the following year.

Maurice called the Los Angeles Police Department to report LaToya had been killed. He confessed he had helped his mother cover it up, encasing the girl in concrete.

As Candice remembers it, Moore “ruled” Maurice’s life, even threatening him with a gun at times.

Maurice was convicted of being an accessory to the crime after the fact and served two years.

“Him calling the LAPD like he did, he saved us all,” Lisa told the Times. “I think he saved us all.”

As Moore awaited trial for LaToya’s death, police received an anonymous call about another body encased in concrete, this one in a storage unit rented to Maurice. It was 1994. The police and the coroner’s investigators tried to identify the little body but failed.

Gridiron Sr. said they tested his DNA. At that time, it wasn’t a match.

“They pushed that to the side and went on with the case they had,” he said. Afterward, Gridiron Sr. said, he turned to drugs and alcohol to numb his pain.

During Moore’s 19-day trial in downtown Los Angeles, a medical examiner testified that the little girl had suffered a long history of abuse. There were scars, the back of LaToya’s head had been punctured, and there was a cigarette burn on the child’s arm, according to the autopsy report.

The 8-year-old’s official cause of death was an overdose of drugs and alcohol, according to the report. The 55-pound child had a blood alcohol level of 0.14%, almost twice the legal limit. Her body also contained an excessive amount of the antidepressant drug desipramine: eight times what would have been toxic for an adult.

“Battered child syndrome” was listed as another significant condition on the autopsy report.

Fighting tears, 9-year-old Lisa testified to seeing Moore pour pills down LaToya’s throat on the evening of the girl’s death.

A jury convicted Moore of second-degree murder. During her sentencing, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Morris B. Jones blasted Moore for calling the court’s bailiff — not to ask for mercy, but to see if her sister could bring her a pork sandwich.

Jones sentenced Moore to 15 years to life in state prison. He said that, if he had the authority to give her more time, “I would gladly give it to her.”

“She has no remorse of any kind,” he said.

Locked up

Two small objects hold down a piece of paper on the ground.

After the coroner identified Kenny’s body in 2016, Orent backed off the case. He told Gridiron Sr. that the LAPD would soon be knocking on his door.

But months passed and no one came.

Meanwhile, freedom seemed within Moore’s reach. She had gone before the parole board in July 2014 to plead her case. She was 64 at the time and told commissioners she couldn’t walk well and was blind in her left eye.

“I’m a good person,” she said. “If released from prison, I’ll still be incarcerated in the prison cells of mental anguish and remorse for my actions.”

Moore admitted to giving LaToya an overdose of pills, telling the commissioners she “was tired and trying to get some rest.” She said her niece “was acting out, and I just wanted her to lay down.” Aside from spanking LaToya, Moore denied ever physically abusing the little girl.

“Whatever happened to Kenneth?” one commissioner asked.

“I don’t know,” Moore said.

When asked about the identity of the second child encased in concrete, Moore again said, “I don’t know.”

Later, Candice stood before the board. She was 18 years sober, dressed in an Armani suit, her flawless makeup giving no indication that she’d cried the whole almost-four-hour drive to the prison.

“My mom is sinister,” she said, according to the hearing transcript. “My mom is evil.”

Candice told them Moore would lock the doors in the house from the inside and keep the key. She described blood on the walls of a closet where LaToya was kept.

If she believed her mother had remorse, Candice said, she wouldn’t be there.

“My mom is not remorseful. She’s never going to be remorseful,” Candice said, as her mother sat there, emotionless. “Whatever that gene is, she doesn’t possess it.”

The board returned in less than half an hour with its decision. In denying her parole, Arthur Anderson, the presiding commissioner, said Moore had not taken responsibility and accountability.

“I sit here as a disinterested observer and evaluator from the state of California,” Anderson told Moore, “But ma’am, you are evil.”

Fight for justice

With no movement on Kenny’s case, Orent wrote a June 2017 letter to then-LAPD Chief Charlie Beck, citing his “frustration and embarrassment” that Gridiron Sr. had still not been contacted by the department.

“You can imagine the grief and anger this father is feeling and has expressed,” Orent wrote. The investigator added that he was confident detectives would be able to “bring little Kenny’s killer to justice after some 30 plus years.”

Orent got no response, so he contacted a local news outlet, hoping to put pressure on the police. Soon after, the LAPD reached out to Orent and met with Gridiron Sr.

The investigator handed over a 60-plus-page report he had compiled, detailing his interviews, including Facebook posts from family members about Moore and his own thoughts on what happened to Kenny.

But the case dragged on, Orent said, before the Police Department turned it over to the district attorney’s office. It’s unclear when. As more years passed, Orent wrote another letter, this time to Dist. Atty. George Gascón. Gridiron Sr., Orent said, “feels no one cares.”

“He also questions if the lack of interest is due to he and his son being African American from the low economic area of South Central Los Angeles,” Orent said. “I’m at a loss for words as to why a child’s murder continues to fall on deaf ears on so many levels, causing me to question if this would occur had the case originated out of an economically affluent area.”

Orent expressed concern that Moore would continuously come up for parole. Those fears proved prescient.

In May, Moore came before the parole board once more, this time over video. She appeared to have a cross pinned to her white and blue prison shirt. Moore told the board that, before LaToya’s death, she had shoved the little girl into a door, according to the hearing transcript.

“She wanted to run all around the house and play instead of getting some places, being still,” Moore said. “Sometimes I need a break, I need a rest, but there’s nobody to get a break or anything because I’m the one taking care of everybody else’s kids when they get taken.”

Moore added that she hadn’t meant to hurt and kill LaToya.

“I just wanted her to get someplace and be still. If I had known that was gonna happen, I would’ve never done it. ... I had anger issues, then I was tired, um, under a lot of stress, which is no excuse.”

When asked how she coped with her anger now, Moore told the panel that she read her Bible. She also said that her son had offered for her to come live with him in Alabama, but she wanted to stay in California and one day “get a little ranch.”

Candice was now 28 years sober, owned her own company and facilitated trauma-healing wellness workshops. She urged them again not to release her mother. Moore, she said, “has not resolved any of the trauma that drove her.”

“When my mother says she wanted to be the caretaker for everyone, I think that she did,” Candice said. “Honestly, I think that she did because, when you are sick, the way you love hurts. And I believe that she demonstrated love the best way she could.”

After a 15-minute deliberation, the presiding commissioner said the board had been required to give special consideration to Moore’s “age, long-term confinement and diminished physical condition.”

“We find that you do not pose unreasonable risk to public safety,” the commissioner told Moore. “Accordingly, the panel finds you suitable for parole.”

She was not asked about Kenny.

The decision was eventually reviewed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, who in September referred the decision back for a review by the full board.

Over a video call from his apartment in South L.A., Gridiron Sr., who has long been sober, told the board Kenny had gone missing as a toddler.

Moore, he said, “should spend life in prison.”

Candice called her mother “sadistic.” She told the commissioners that she believes in people’s capability to change, but said her mother has not accounted for Kenny.

“How much is the life of this little black girl and little black boy worth?” Candice asked. “It is not OK that she’s even up for parole. She has not changed.”

As the board weighed its decision, Moore waited.

‘Swept it under the rug’

No sooner had Gridiron Sr. answered the phone and said hello when Candice blurted out the news: “They’re going to release her.”

Gridiron Sr. reared back as if slapped.

“What?” he said, his voice rising. “What?”

The day before, the parole board had affirmed the decision to release Moore.

“So they swept it under the rug again,” Gridiron Sr. said as he pounded his fist on his kitchen table.

“They certainly did,” Candice replied.

In a statement, the LAPD’s Central Bureau Homicide said the murder of Kenny “remains an active and ongoing investigation.”

“We recognize the public interest in this case and are committed to securing justice for the victim and their family,” the statement read.

A spokesperson for the district attorney’s office said Kenny’s case is under investigation and being reviewed by the Complex Child Abuse Section.

When reached by The Times, Maurice declined to comment. Moore did not respond to a request for comment.

Days after learning of Moore’s impending release, Gridiron Sr. searched for his son’s burial site at the Evergreen cemetery in Boyle Heights. A worker helped guide him to the “1995” marker.

The ashes of more than 1,800 people who had been cremated — including Kenny‘s — were buried in the same grave. Of those, 41 were Jane and John Does.

Gridiron Sr. peered down at his son’s grave.

The patch of ground and a single grainy photograph — wide eyes, finger in his mouth — are all that’s left of the little boy.

This year, Kenny would have been 41.