Girl Waits in Vain to Hear Where Slain Mother's Body Is

All Akelia Fye wanted was to say goodbye to her mother.

So yesterday in D.C. Superior Court, the 12-year-old girl turned to the man who was Marion Fye's boyfriend and begged for the chance.

"Can you tell us where her body at?" she asked Harold Austin.

It was a plaintive, almost polite, final plea from the Fye family.

"Please," Akelia said.

And then she waited, and waited, for the man convicted of killing her mother to say something. The courtroom was still until what was clear to everyone else was finally clear to the child:

On the day when he would be sentenced to 40 years in prison for killing Fye, Austin, 33, would offer no salve to a family still shaken, no hint of what happened to Fye after she was killed in November 2003.

It is the aching question that still hangs over this rarest of homicides, a case in which the body was never found but that police and prosecutors were nonetheless able to take to trial and win a conviction.

So it was not only Akelia, or her brother Jimmy, or her aunt Cecelia asking questions in court.

The judge, Erik P. Christian, told Austin at the start of the hearing that he still had time to do something right in all of this. "It's never too late," Christian said.

Austin had confessed, the judge pointed out, and despite his later denials, a jury convicted him.

"You can bring some type of closure, accept some type of responsibility, so everybody can move on," Christian told Austin.