What Happened to Alexis Patterson?

Alexis Patterson left her house in tears on the morning of May 3, 2002. It was her snack day at Hi-Mount Community School, and the 7-year-old had promised her friends that she would bring cupcakes. Her mother had taken her to a grocery store the night before, and she had bounced with excitement as she left with the cupcakes she had carefully picked out. That morning, though, her mother learned Alexis hadn’t completed her homework like she said she had, and as a punishment, she refused to allow her to take her cupcakes to school. No amount of pleading could get her mom to change her mind, and Alexis was very upset about it when her stepfather escorted her on her one-block walk to school. She was still crying as she joined her fellow students on the playground. Numerous kids would remember seeing her that Friday morning, but she never made it to class. Somewhere between the playground and the door to her school, Alexis disappeared.

Alexis lived with her mother and stepfather, Ayanna and LaRon Bourgeois, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She was a feisty and sometimes bossy little girl who adored the color pink and could strike up a conversation with anyone. She enjoyed going to school; she always got excellent grades and had perfect attendance prior to her disappearance.

Alexis normally finished all her school assignments on time, but there had been some concerns on the part of her parents over the quality of her work recently. Like most little kids, she didn’t always pay close attention to directions, and her parents wanted to make sure to correct this behavior before it got out of control. Since she wasn’t used to getting punished, her mom’s refusal to allow her to bring her snack to school really upset Alexis, and may have been the catalyst for her deciding to skip school that day.

The school Alexis attended had a policy of only calling parents if a student was absent for two days in a row, so Ayanna and LaRon had no idea Alexis wasn’t in class that day. When she failed to come home at her normal time, they weren’t overly concerned; they assumed she was still angry about the cupcakes and was simply delaying her return home. After waiting more than an hour for Alexis to walk in the door, Ayanna called the school to see if she was still there. She was shocked to learn her daughter had been marked absent that day, and immediately called the Milwaukee Police Department to report Alexis missing.

When officers arrived, LaRon told them he had last seen Alexis at 8:00 am, when he walked her down to the crosswalk across from her school. He left as a crossing guard escorted Alexis across the street to the entrance of the schoolyard. Ayanna explained that Alexis had been upset when she left that morning, and she believed the child may have attempted to run away from home as a result. She had never skipped school or run away before, so they had no idea where to even start looking for her.

Police began their investigation on the assumption that Alexis had made a conscious decision to skip school that day. It seemed probable that Alexis wasn’t actually missing or lost, but just hiding from her parents. This was supported by the fact that several different students recalled seeing Alexis on the playground both before and after school, though no one had seen her inside the building. Friends said she had still been crying when they saw her after school, but no one knew where she might have gone at that point.

Police started their search in the area immediately surrounding Hi-Mount Community School. They found nothing to indicate that Alexis had remained on school property. They checked with classmates, friends, and neighbors and were able to rule out the possibility that Alexis was hiding out in someone’s home. Concern grew as hours went by without any sign of the child, and the search area was expanded. Dozens of officers worked throughout the night, checking in trash cans and down alleys. By dawn, they began to worry that Alexis might have been the victim of foul play.

Two weeks before Alexis went missing, an unknown male tried to abduct a small boy near Hi-Mount Community School. The school administration sent a letter to the parents of all students warning them of the attempted abduction. After reading the letter, Ayanna reminded Alexis that she was never to talk to any strangers. The following week, Alexis had been seen talking to an unknown woman near her school, and her mother repeated her warning about strangers. Alexis was a friendly girl, though, and her mother’s warning failed to make a lasting impression. Two days before she went missing, she was again seen speaking with the same unknown woman behind her school. Now, Ayanna worried that this woman might have something to do with her daughter’s disappearance.

Ayanna and LaRon had missing person fliers printed up and spent the weekend hanging them on every telephone pole, tree, and store window in the area. Volunteer search teams spread out across the neighborhood, looking for Alexis and making sure all residents were aware that the child was missing. Ayanna made a public plea for her daughter’s return, saying she could forgive whoever took Alexis if they would just bring her back to her family.

The search effort intensified on Monday. The Milwaukee Police Department reached out to the Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Office for help, and deputies were sent to assist in the search. A mobile command unit was set up in Milwaukee’s Washington Park, 10 blocks away from where Alexis was last seen. Teams worked around the clock, using helicopters and horses to increase the amount of ground they could cover. Police divers scoured the Washington Park Lagoon while volunteer searchers helped police comb through the area between Hi-Mount Community School and Washington Park. They found nothing related to Alexis.

While the physical search for Alexis was going on, detectives continued their investigation behind the scenes. As more time passed, foul play seemed more likely. As in all missing person investigations, detectives started by interviewing family members. On Tuesday, LaRon and Ayanna underwent an intense 10-hour interrogation. LaRon criticized detectives for focusing more on them than on finding Alexis, and detectives responded by giving polygraph examinations to both of them. Ayanna passed hers without any problems, but LaRon was determined to be deceptive when asked if he knew the whereabouts of Alexis. He continued to maintain that he had no idea what happened to the girl after he left her with the crossing guard, and detectives eventually let him leave. He would remain under a cloud of suspicion for most of the investigation, though police admitted that there were witnesses who saw Alexis long after LaRon had returned home that morning.

Several students at Hi-Mount Community School told police that they had seen a red SUV with dark-tinted windows idling in the area around the school several times the previous week, including on the day Alexis disappeared. None of the students recognized it as belonging to anyone at the school, and it hadn’t been seen since Alexis went missing. Police made a note of the sighting, but were never able to positively link the SUV to Alexis.

The television show “America’s Most Wanted” profiled the disappearance on May 11th, bringing some much-needed publicity to the case. Several new leads came in as a result, and detectives followed up on each one. Unfortunately, each one led only to a dead end.

On May 13th, police announced that the disappearance of Alexis was being reclassified from a missing person investigation to a criminal investigation. They noted that the circumstances surrounding the disappearance were suspicious, but they had no suspects or persons of interest.

Although Alexis’s case would dominate the local news for the next month, no real progress was made on the case. Detectives followed up on several potential sightings of Alexis, but none of them led to the missing girl. The task force continued to work around the clock, but community involvement in the search effort began to dwindle. The family began collecting money to start a reward fund, hoping the offer of money would generate more interest.

A few weeks after Alexis disappeared, someone distributed offensive fliers asking why the white community should care that a black child was missing. Some were taped to the front of America’s Black Holocaust Museum, others were placed on car windshields and in shop windows on the east side of Milwaukee. Public outcry over the incident led to the arrest of 22-year-old Brian Werner, but he was eventually released without charges. The deputy district attorney explained that - as offensive as the fliers were - bringing charges would be against Werner’s First Amendment Rights. It wouldn’t be the last time the issue of race would come up in relation to this case.

On June 3rd, about 75 people came together to hold a candlelight vigil for the one-month anniversary of Alexis’s disappearance. They gathered on the front steps of Hi-Mount Community School and prayed for the safe return of the missing first grader. Ayanna was optimistic that her daughter was still alive, and urged the community to keep looking for her.

Two days after the candlelight vigil, the issue of racism would emerge once again. On June 5th, 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart was abducted from her home in Utah. Her abduction immediately made front-page news across the country, and every national newscast sent reporters to Utah and provided constant coverage of the case. This was in stark contrast to Alexis’s case, which had failed to receive any national news attention except for a brief mention on one “America’s Most Wanted” episode. The differences between the way the cases were covered soon became the subject of a national debate on race. Ironically, the uproar created by the disparity between the two cases got far more coverage than Alexis’s actual disappearance.

Five weeks after Alexis went missing, police dismantled the mobile command unit that had been set up in Washington Park. They stressed that they were still actively investigating the case, but the number of new tips coming in had decreased and they no longer needed the help of the Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Office to manage the workload.

In August, an anonymous caller told a Milwaukee television station that Alexis’s body would be found in a certain section of the Milwaukee River. A police dive team was sent into the river to investigate but found nothing to substantiate the information.

Shortly before the one-year anniversary of Alexis’s disappearance, LaRon was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct while armed and battery after he threatened Ayanna with a knife and told her he would kill her. She told police he had beaten her in a jealous rage after she received a page from an unknown number. He was eventually convicted, and Ayanna filed for divorce.

As time went on, the case lost momentum. Detectives continued to investigate possible sightings of Alexis, some from as far away as California, but never got any closer to finding her. They admitted that the likelihood of finding her alive decreased with each passing day, but they hadn’t found anything to indicate she was dead. Alexis literally disappeared without a trace.

Over the years, detectives have followed up on hundreds of possible leads. When a convicted prisoner claimed that Alexis had been killed and buried outside of Baton Rouge city limits, three detectives flew to Louisiana to investigate. They found nothing.

In 2016, a man in Ohio called detectives and insisted that his ex-wife was actually Alexis. The woman had no recollection of her childhood, looked remarkably like the age progression photo of Alexis, and even had the same lump on her pinkie finger that Alexis had. The woman thought the idea was ludicrous — she didn’t remember her childhood but was certain she had lived in California, and she was seven years older than Alexis. Still, she submitted to a DNA test anyway, and it was determined she definitely wasn’t Alexis. It was a letdown for Ayanna, who tried not to get her hopes up but had been convinced when she saw a picture of the woman that she really was her daughter.

Alexis’s case has been assigned to the cold case division since 2009, but detectives are optimistic that they will one day get the information needed to discover what happened to the little girl. They are certain someone in the Milwaukee area has the answers they’re seeking.

Ayanna has never given up on the hope that Alexis is still alive and they will one day be reunited. She remains active in the search for her daughter and refuses to let people forget that Alexis is still missing.

LaRon Bourgeois died in January 2021 of a drug overdose; his death made headlines in Milwaukee because he had been the last person to see Alexis, and the publicity has renewed interest in the case and generated a few new tips. Although LaRon had been closely looked at by detectives during the early days of the investigation, they eventually decided that he was telling them the truth about the morning Alexis disappeared and he was not a suspect in her disappearance.