The laundry basket
Then investigators came to Friday, May 3, the day Vence said he set off for the airport with both children.
That day, a neighbor’s camera recorded Vence walking out of the apartment carrying a large blue laundry basket. Inside it was a large black trash bag. He walked out of the frame with it. About three minutes later he came back. The basket was gone.
At about 6:47 that evening, a camera caught him leaving the apartment again, this time with his young son and cleaning supplies, including a bottle of bleach. Maleah was not with them.
Inside the apartment, officers found drops of blood in the hallway leading to the bathroom and on surfaces in the bathroom itself. When they sprayed a chemical agent, it lit up more blood that nobody could see. Police later said the blood was Maleah’s.
What the dogs found
On Thursday, May 9, police found the silver Nissan Altima. It was sitting in a parking lot in Missouri City, just southwest of Houston.
In the trunk was a blue laundry basket that looked like the one on the video. Next to it was a gas can.
Houston police brought in two dogs trained to find human remains. Both of them reacted to the trunk. In court, prosecutor Pat Stayton said the dogs were “responding to the scent of human decomposition in the vehicle.”
There had never been any sign of three men in a blue pickup. There was only the car Vence said had been stolen, with the basket from the video in its trunk.
Arrested
On Saturday, May 11, a fugitive task force arrested Derion Vence at a relative’s home in Sugar Land. He was charged with tampering with evidence, specifically a human corpse.
At his first hearing that night, the prosecutor cited “evidence of deception” in what Vence had told police and asked for a high bond. The judge set it at $1 million.
Maleah was still missing. Police also asked the public for help with one more question: who had sold Vence the gas can.
Maleah’s short life had already drawn the attention of child protection workers. In August 2018, Child Protective Services had removed her and her two brothers from the home while it investigated a head injury that left Maleah needing brain surgery. The children were returned in February 2019, three months before she disappeared. Her mother said the injury was from a fall.
A ditch in Arkansas
For almost four weeks, volunteers searched ditches, fields and bayous around Houston.
Then, at the end of May, the community activist Quanell X, who had been advising Maleah’s mother, went to see Vence in jail. Afterward he told reporters that Vence had confessed to him. Vence said Maleah’s death was an accident, according to Quanell X, and told him he had dumped her body in Arkansas.
Houston police went to Arkansas. On Friday, May 31, 2019, a child’s remains were found in a black garbage bag beside Interstate 30, near the small town of Hope in southwest Arkansas.
On June 3, the Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences confirmed it was Maleah.
The medical examiner ruled that she died of “homicidal violence.” Court records later alleged that Vence had restricted her breathing with an unknown object and struck her with a blunt object.
In a jailhouse interview with KTRK-TV in June 2019, Vence still insisted he was innocent. “I ain’t no killer, bro,” he said. “I would never do anything to hurt her. That’s not me.”
Guilty
In August 2019, prosecutors added a second charge: injury to a child. They never charged him with murder.
On Thursday, May 27, 2021, two years after the “kidnapping,” Derion Vence stood in a Harris County courtroom and pleaded guilty to injury to a child and tampering with a corpse.
He was sentenced to 40 years in prison for injury to a child and 20 years for tampering with a corpse, to be served at the same time. Had a jury convicted him at trial, he could have faced life.
“Children are the most vulnerable members of our community and young Maleah’s death is tragic,” Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg said. “We may never have all the answers in this case and our thoughts are with her family.”
He had told police that three men in a blue pickup took her on the way to the airport. The cameras around his own front door had recorded something else: a little girl in a pink skirt walking home behind him on April 30, and a blue laundry basket going out the door on May 3.
