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I once kept Natalie Osborne’s photo thumbtacked beside my computer.

I wanted it there to remind me that every victim has a story. For years, I’d be deep into another tale about another tragedy, I’d see Natalie’s smiling snapshot, and I’d tell myself, “Remember the victim.”

Natalie was just one such victim. But of all the crimes and all the court cases I’ve covered, I’ll always remember her. I was there in the beginning, and what I saw and what I wrote made me heartsick for years.

She was raped and killed by her mother’s fiance, Jeff Kandies, 16 years ago. Her naked body was stuffed in a garbage bag, tossed in Kandies’ closet and hidden beneath carpet scraps and dirty clothes. Natalie was only 4.

Since then, Natalie has stayed in the back of my mind – until this week, when I ventured into a Randolph County courtroom to hear what fate awaited Meredith Kandies, the sister Natalie never knew, the daughter Jeff will never see.

It’s another twist to a story I can’t seem to shake.

For me, it began on a Tuesday, in April of 1992. I was single, nearing 30, working as a reporter for the News & Record in Randolph County, when heavy rains turned a creek in north Asheboro into a river.

As the rain fell, I found a worried Patricia Craven, Natalie’s mother, sitting on her couch, looking out her window. Natalie had disappeared.

“There is a line I don’t want to cross about being upset because if I cross it,” she told me, “I won’t come back.’’

A few feet away stood Jeff Kandies. He didn’t say much. He barely looked at me. He paced around the apartment, jittery as a hamster, as rescue workers and Asheboro cops searched the creek just outside.

By Friday, everyone’s worst fears were confirmed. Natalie Osborne, Craven’s daughter from her first marriage, was dead. And Kandies was the prime suspect.

Kandies told the cops he accidentally ran over Natalie with his pickup. He said he was trying to revive her by stripping off her clothes and putting her in the bathtub when he accidentally strangled her in an alcohol-induced panic.

He then stuck her body in a garbage bag and hid her in a closet of his house near Randleman because he said he was scared.

But the evidence told a different story. Natalie’s head had been fractured in seven places and a portion of bone  went into her brain. Natalie’s autopsy also showed signs of what a forensic pathologist called “forced intercourse.”

I read that report. But worse, I saw the video — the body of a blond-haired girl, curled in a fetal position, crammed into a garbage bag with a blood-splattered pink bib and a crumpled sunsuit, wadded in a ball, on top of her.

Two years later, I sat in a High Point courtroom when Kandies was sentenced to die. Jurors found him guilty of first-degree murder and first-degree rape in the death of Natalie Osborne, the little girl with the beautiful smile.

Kandies was adamant to the end.

“I didn’t do it!” Kandies said to the jurors, with venom in his voice. “I said the truth, and it got twisted around, and I hope you can all … live with it!”

Today, Kandies is 47. He’s one of 162 inmates on North Carolina’s death row.

I don’t think about Kandies much anymore. But I do think about Natalie. A few years back — and a few jobs later — I plucked her photo from a bulletin board beside my computer and stuck it in a folder. From there, the photo disappeared.

But this week, I pulled her photo from the News & Record library, and everything came back to me in a rush — the beautiful smile, the gut-wrenching video, the court outburst of an abusive alcoholic looking for someone to blame.

I unearthed Natalie’s photo because of a shooting earlier this month at an Asheboro elementary school involving Meredith Kandies, the 16-year-old sister Natalie never knew.

It sent me back to my old terrain: an Asheboro courtroom. And there, I saw Patricia Craven, her new fiance and Meredith Kandies, the girl in Craven’s womb when I first talked to Craven that rainy Tuesday 16 years ago.

A Randolph County judge dismissed the involuntary manslaughter charge against Meredith. Testimony showed she didn’t kill her boyfriend, Jeremy McMillan. It showed McMillan struggled with Kandies for a gun after a schoolyard fight, and the gun went off.

After the hearing, I found Craven and her daughter. They didn’t say much.

“I’d like nothing of my father to be told,” she said to me.

I couldn’t do that. But I did something else. Sixteen years ago, I took her father’s picture as he walked from a courtroom to an Asheboro jail cell. But this time, I kept my digital camera by my side.

Maybe it’s because I’m older, married, with two young kids of my own. But as Meredith walked away, with her head on the shoulder of Craven’s fiancé, all I saw was a scared little girl in a black pin-stripe suit, haunted by a past she wants to forget.

Probably, she can’t. I know I can’t. It’s because of Natalie, that little girl with the beautiful smile.

Contact Jeri Rowe at 373-7374 or jeri.rowe@news-record.com