It was a bitter winter when 17-year-old Angela Morris vanished.

A gifted singer with a voice that could quiet a church and bring tears to a crowd, Angela had just finished choir rehearsal at St. Mary’s Baptist on the South Side. She was supposed to walk home — a short route she’d taken hundreds of times before.

But that night, she never made it.

Her songbook was found on a bench near the church steps, still open to “Amazing Grace.” The streetlight above it flickered in the wind.

By morning, her disappearance was the lead story on every Chicago station.

Angela lived with her father, Deacon Harold Morris, a widower, well-known in the community for his soft voice, firm handshake, and unwavering faith.

When reporters asked how he was holding up, Harold would bow his head and say quietly, “God gives, and God takes away. I just pray she’s safe.”

He became the symbol of grace under tragedy — the grieving father who kept leading Sunday prayers, who thanked neighbors for casseroles, who organized vigils for his missing daughter.

He told police Angela had been “seeing an older man.”

When she didn’t come home that night, he said he assumed she’d run off with him.

The story fit — or at least, it seemed to.

For months, the community searched rivers, alleys, bus stations. Flyers faded on lampposts. Hope dimmed, but Harold never faltered.

For thirteen months, he played the part perfectly.

The Break in the Case

Then, in February of 1996, a neighbor called 911.

She said she’d seen something strange — a man in Harold’s backyard at 2 a.m., dragging heavy trash bags toward the cellar door.

Police arrived expecting to find garbage, maybe something suspicious but minor. What they found instead was a locked steel door bolted from the outside.

When officers asked Harold to open it, he said calmly, “That’s just storage. Nothing in there but old tools.”

But when they pried the lock off, the smell hit first — thick, chemical, wrong.

Inside, beneath layers of tarp and concrete dust, they uncovered the remains of Angela Morris.

She hadn’t run away.
She’d been there the whole time — less than twenty feet below where her father had led Sunday prayers and given interviews about her “disappearance.”

The truth came out in fragments — from neighbors, from evidence, from Harold himself when the weight of silence finally cracked.

Angela, investigators learned, had been planning to apply to a music program in New York. She’d told her choir teacher she wanted to leave Chicago, to chase her dream — but she was afraid of her father’s reaction.

When police examined her room, they found torn acceptance letters stuffed in the bottom of her dresser.

On the night she disappeared, Angela had confronted him.

The argument turned violent. The coroner determined she died from blunt-force trauma — not premeditated, perhaps, but covered up with deliberate cruelty.

After the killing, Harold hid her body in the cellar, pouring concrete over it the next morning — then played the grieving father for over a year.

The City That Believed Him

When the news broke, the entire community reeled.

People who’d prayed with Harold felt sick. Choir members refused to return to the church. The pastor publicly wept, saying, “We trusted him with our hearts. We never saw the devil behind the cross.”

At trial, Harold showed no emotion. Prosecutors presented evidence of financial control, isolation, and manipulation — a man who used faith as a mask.

He was sentenced to life without parole.

Angela’s songbook — the one found on the church steps — now sits in a glass case at the Chicago Museum of Justice, open to the same hymn she rehearsed the night she vanished.

On the wall behind it, engraved in bronze, are the words she wrote in the margins of that page: “My voice is how I’ll be free.”

And in a way, she was right.

Her voice — her story — outlived the lie.

The house was torn down, the cellar filled, the church rebuilt. But the memory of what police found that night still haunts Chicago — a reminder that evil sometimes hides in the most trusted places.