Rilya Wilson

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1:21Rinse takes your laundry and hand delivers it to your door. Expertly cleaned and folded. so you could take the time once spent folding and sorting and waiting to finally pursue a whole new version of you. Like tea time you. Mmm. Or this tea time you. Or even this tea time you. So did you hear about Dave? Or even tea time, tea time, tea time you. Mmm. So update on Dave. It's up to you. We'll take the laundry. Rinse. It's time to be great. Voices for Justice is a podcast that uses adult language and discusses sensitive and potentially triggering topics, including violence, abuse, and murder. This podcast may not be appropriate for younger audiences.

2:06All parties are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Some names have been changed or omitted per their request or for safety purposes. Listener discretion is advised. My name is Sarah Turney and this is Voices for Justice.

2:26Today, I'm bringing you the story of 4-year-old Relia Wilson. In the year 2000, Relia was living with her sister and foster parents in the Miami, Florida area. During this time, all documentation indicates that her caseworker was checking on her regularly and making visits to the home, specifically notating that all was well with her care. But by April 2002, the Florida Department of Children and Families assigned a new caseworker to oversee Rilia's care, and when they went to go do a home visit, they discovered that no one had seen Rilia in nearly two years. Her case has since sparked legislation that has changed the Florida foster care system forever.

3:09But nearly 25 years later, Rilia's whereabouts are still unknown. This is the disappearance of Rilia Wilson. Remember, I love you always. This is the phrase-turned-acronym that inspired Rilia's name. On September 29, 1996, Rilia was born into a challenging life. Her mom, Gloria, suffered from substance use disorder and used during her pregnancy. Gloria knew that she was struggling and couldn't provide the care that Rilia needed, so she arranged for a woman named Pamela Kendrick to care for her. Pamela Kendrick is the daughter-in-law of one of Gloria's close family friends, So she took Rilia to her home in Brownsville, Florida, and cared for her for the first three years of her life.

4:01Throughout these three years, a caseworker would come by and check on Rilia. And by most accounts, she had a pretty good life with Pamela Kendrick. She dressed her in frilly Easter dresses, took her to church, and had a birthday party for her every single year at Chuck E. Cheese. I mean, Rilia called Pamela Kendrick mom. and their neighbor said that Rillia seemed happy and well taken care of while with Kendrick. They remember her as sweet and well-mannered. However, Pamela Kendrick was investigated by the Florida Department of Children and Families, or DCF. This happened in 1998, after it was reported that her older, biological daughter showed up to camp with bruises and burn marks on her body.

4:46In the end, the caseworker found that there was some indication that she had sustained those bruises at home, but neither Rilia or the other child were removed from Kendrick's care. Now, Rilia was not Gloria's only child. She has an older sister named Randy who was cared for by a local pastor and his wife, and she had a younger sister named Roderica. She was born in the late 90s, and she was placed in the care of two local Miami-area women, Gerilyn and Pamela Graham, who claim to be sisters. In a custody hearing for Roderica, the Grams learn that the baby had an older sister, Rilia, so they get in touch with Pamela Kendrick and set up a time for Rilia to meet her baby sister.

5:32Pamela Kendrick has no problem with this. She even let them take Rilia out with Roderica to spend some time together. She says that when they dropped Rillia off, she and Gerilyn Graham chatted about the girls getting together again soon. But when the Grams went home, they called DCF and filed a report against Pamela Kendrick, saying her house was filthy and unfit for a child. Gerilyn told the caseworker that when she walked into the house, Rillia was sitting on the floor next to a pile of human feces, trying to eat a piece of bread. They described it as subhuman conditions. So DCF looks through Rilia's file, and finds that on multiple visits, her caseworker, Deborah Muskelley, had noted that her house was in disarray.

6:19But she didn't report anything like the conditions that Gerald and Graham reported. Nevertheless, DCF did remove Rilia from the home, and placed her in the care of Pamela Graham. Now, it was apparently only Pamela Graham who was appointed as her legal caregiver. because Pamela cared for Gerilyn, who reportedly suffered from numerous health issues after a car accident in the late 90s. Gerilyn also claimed that her son Keith was both Rilia and Rodericka's biological father. But Rilia's true paternity has never been proven. In April 2000, when the Grams took Rilia in, Gloria Wilson's parental rights were formally terminated in court.

7:04Those documents listed a man named Manuel Cash as Rilia's prospective biological father. In 2002, Cash was in jail, but claimed he was Rilia's father, and prior to his arrest, he had visited her at Pamela Kendrick's home. Either way, we don't know for sure. But for two years, DCF thought that both Rilia and Roderica were in a safe, loving home with the Grams. They had no reason to believe otherwise, because the girls' caseworker, Deborah Muskelly, always gave positive reports after checking in on the girls. However, early in 2002, Muskelly's credibility was questioned when the department made a shocking discovery.

7:48She'd been falsifying records for years. They discovered that she had a second job as a substitute teacher, and she frequently billed time to the state for casework when she was actually teaching at nearby elementary schools To make up for all that lost time, Muskelly falsified documents, claiming she had conducted in-home visits with multiple children when she had not It's an awful situation Deborah Muskelly and her supervisor, Willie Harris, both resigned from DCF before they could be terminated. But the agency still had a big mess to clean up. They now had to check on all of the children formally assigned to Muskelly and all the other caseworkers that Harris supervised.

8:33And this did include Rilia and Roderica Wilson. So a caseworker sent to the Grams' home for a visit. Rodrigo is home, but when the counselor asked about Rilia, Gerilyn asked, Are you bringing her back? And the caseworker is understandably confused. They're like, What do you mean? Rilia's not here. Where is she? And Graham told them that on January 18, 2001, a caseworker from DCF picked Rilia up and took her for a mental health evaluation. And she said no one ever returned her. But DCF had no record of Rilia being removed from the home, and now the women who were responsible for her care had not seen her in 16 months.

9:23Muskelly's progress notes for Rilia ended in January 2001. But in August of 2001, a court-ordered review of Rilia and Rodericka's care found that both children were living happily with the Grams. In the review, Muskelly wrote, quote, custodians are addressing children's needs. They are providing the support these girls need. The current caretakers are planning to adopt the children at this time. This is the best placement. Since last hearing, there has not been any educational disruptions, end quote. So, Muskelly lied. Now the state was faced with a lying employee and a missing child, who they were 16 months behind in searching for her.

10:06Of course, their first question was which DCF employee took Rilia from the Graham home. She was described as a black female, who spoke with an accent that could be African. The woman was familiar with details of Rilia's case, and that Muskelly was aware of her visit and Rilia's removal for evaluations. Gerilyn claims that Rilia suffered from behavioral problems. She says that in February 2001, another DCF employee came to the house to collect some of Rilia's clothing and toys so that she'd be more comfortable in her new surroundings. But she did not tell her where Rilia went. The Grams were shown a photo directory of every DCF employee, but couldn't identify any of them as the person who took Rilia, or the employees who came in February to get the toys and clothes.

10:57Gerilyn is defending herself. She's saying that all these people are coming to the house, that her caseworker knew that Rilia was gone, and she says that she repeatedly called DCF to check on Rilia's status for over a year and was denied any answers. Pretty soon, the news was out. The state of Florida had completely lost track of a child in their custody for over a year. And of course, like Gerilyn, DCF was quick to defend themselves. the organization's secretary and top official, Kathleen Kearney, released a statement calling what happened to Rilia an isolated incident. She puts all the blame on Muskelly, saying that she lied and was deceptive in her reporting.

11:41The organization was scrambling, but there was hope that Rilia had simply been lost within the system. After days of agency officials placing blame on each other, Gerilyn told the Miami Herald, quote, I'm getting a little frustrated. Instead of trying to find where the baby is, it seems people are trying to point fingers. The child is somewhere. End quote. But the word was out and the tips started coming in. A foster mom in Pasco County came forward, saying her foster daughter matched Rilia's description, but this child was quickly ruled out as being Rilia. Probably the most promising lead in this case was a Jane Doe that was found in Kansas City, Missouri.

12:26I actually spoke about this same Doe last week in the episode about Tika Lewis. On April 28, 2001, a three-year-old girl was found deceased in a wooded area outside of Kansas City. She was given the name Precious Doe. However, as we know, she was later identified as Erica Michelle Maria Green. Her mother and stepfather were later charged and convicted of her murder. It's not Rilia, but no one knows that just yet. Of course, investigators also look into Gloria Wilson, but she was not suspected to be involved. She was living in Cleveland at the time and had no contact with her kids. Gloria was heavily criticized in the media, but she spoke out.

13:11She says that no matter what happened in her past, the state was at fault for losing Rilia. This feels like a tale as old as time at this point. DCF was under extreme scrutiny again, and many people felt like they really just wanted to cover their tracks. One columnist for the Miami Herald, Fred Grimm, wrote that Kansas City cared more for a faceless, nameless child than the entire state of Florida did about Relia Wilson. He said, quote, the missing child was shrugged off in South Florida. No memorial service. No outrage demonstrations. Just another embarrassed news conference by a DCF official trying to explain how a child under the state's supervision could be lost, and maybe murdered, end quote.

14:04Obviously, with so much time being lost in this case, the search for Rilia just looked really different than we see in traditional missing children cases. Dogs did search on and around the Grams property for traces of Rilia, but they came up short. They checked local hospitals and preschools for her, but they just couldn't find anything. Meanwhile, then-Florida Governor Jeb Bush continued to defend Kathleen Kearney and DCF as an organization, saying more needed to be done to hold caseworkers responsible. He began working on legislation to criminalize social workers falsifying documents. Gerilyn Graham continued to blame DCF for neglecting Rilia.

14:47She said that she told Muskelly that due to Rilia's so-called behavioral problems, she believed she'd been mistreated in her previous home with Pamela Kendrick. But she says Muskelly told her that that couldn't be proven and that she needed to drop it. Gerilyn says that Rilia's behavior got progressively worse and that she would do things to harm herself, like banging her head against the wall. She says that she reported this to Muskelly in November 2000, saying something had to be done or else Rilia would seriously hurt herself or her younger sister. And she says Muskelly told her to not rock the boat, or the adoption process might be delayed.

15:28She says that when this person came to take Rilia for testing, she thought that she was finally getting the help that she needed, but then she just never came back. Gerilyn reiterates that through those 16 months, she spoke to Muskelly multiple times, asking her when Rilia was coming back. And apparently Muskelly just kept saying that they were working on it. So basically, Gerilyn Graham is saying that they had been trying to find Rilia this entire time. But the state wasn't taking Gerilyn at her word. Then, in late April, Roderica was removed from the Graham home. They fought back against this, saying that the state had already lost one of their children and shouldn't be able to take the other one.

16:15Meanwhile, more information about Gerilyn was coming out in the press. A doctor came forward and said that she was suffering from a psychiatric condition similar to schizophrenia that was supposedly the result of a bad car crash she had in 1996. After the crash, she suffered severe memory loss. However, her lawyer said that she was cured of these conditions by 2002. Gerilyn was also known for using aliases, and a lot of them. She served some time in a Tennessee state prison in the 80s, using the name Gerilyn Savage, with Gerilyn spelled a different way. On a 1986 disability application, she admitted to using the names Geraldine Thomas, Geraldine Williams, Jerri-Ann Eskridge, Jerri-Ann Johnson, Jerilyn A.

17:06Savage, and Jerri-Ann Jackson. And her lawyer again combats this and says that all of this was to hide her from an abusive boyfriend. Jerilyn also admitted to accepting payments from the state for Aurelia's care even after she was removed. Like Rilia being removed, though, she says she told DCF about this, that she was still getting this money when she shouldn't be, and they told her to just keep it. So we've got a lot of information that puts Gerilyn Graham's character in question, but none of these things prove that she was violent or capable of doing something terrible to Rillia. Both Gerilyn and Pamela Graham were given polygraph tests, and the results came back as inconclusive.

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19:051-800-CONTACTS. Now, Rowling's case is gaining traction. Pretty soon, there's a$25 ,000 reward being offered for information leading to her, and her case was featured on America's Most Wanted. It also sparked new legislation. The law criminalizing falsification of documents by caseworkers was soon passed. Now, of course, Muskelly was not off the hook. She was charged with 41 counts of misconduct related to her role at DCF, and one charge of grand theft for double billing the state for social work and substitute teaching at the same time. She pled guilty to exactly one charge of official misconduct.

19:49Every other charge was dropped. It came out that Muskelly had been demoted and reprimanded by the agency multiple times before she was caught falsifying documents. But of course, people wanted to know how she was able to get away with so much before she resigned, and they were in no way satisfied in blaming just Muskelly for DCF's failures. People demanded change and answers for what happened to Rilia, saying that her case was unraveling decades of problems in the state's system. In 2000, a runaway specialist with DCF, Ruben Benticourt, studied DCF's handling of runaway cases, and found that DCF did not follow protocol in 73 % of the 129 cases he studied.

20:4173%. He wrote, quote, this reporting is not being done, end quote. At this time, of the 374 children DCF could not locate, all of which they said were runaways, Only 143 of them were in the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's database. It took DCF six days to officially report Relia missing after they knew that she was gone. And there are policies around this. They are required to notify the Missing Children Information Clearinghouse of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children within three business days of not being able to find a child.

21:32This, of course, did not happen for Aurelia Wilson. In early May, Kearney issued a mandate that all DCF supervisors in the Miami district visit the home of every child in foster care or in the care of a non-custodial relative. She mandated that caregivers, and in some instances older children, sign a form when a caseworker visits them. This was actually already being done in Tampa, but this was put into effect immediately in Miami. Some Florida state lawmakers began advocating for an expansion to the DCF Guardian program. They wanted to appoint lawyers as advocates or guardians for some of these kids in the foster care system who had been deemed to be neglected.

22:16Now, this was not a new idea that was sparked by Rilia's case. This is something that had been previously put forward and struck down after Kearney lobbied against it. She said that she didn't want lawyers looking over her shoulder. Then, on May 11th, DNA tests confirmed that Precious Doe was not Rilia Wilson. While, of course, everyone wanted Rilia to be found alive, this was really the one and only credible lead generated in the investigation so far. It was all they had at this point, and now they were back at square one. On May 15th, a judge ruled that Roderica was neglected of the medical care that she needed by the Grams.

23:02The judge ruled that the Grams could not regain custody of her, and she was placed with another family who eventually adopted her. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children did produce an age-progressed photo of Rillia. This was put in Walmart stores across the country. By mid-May, the Miami-Dade police asked officials in the Bahamas to help search for her, because the Grams claimed that she was born there, though there doesn't appear to be any evidence to back this up. But either way, it really can't hurt. Rillia's photo was distributed to schools in the Bahamas, printed in newspapers and shown in an ad.

23:40No leads came from it. And then, finally, investigators get a lead that they can actually work with, and it completely shakes Gerilyn Graham's timeline. They claim that in February 2001, they saw her go to a doctor's appointment with Gerilyn and Rodericka. But right now, this kind of just sits. In the meantime, the blue ribbon panel came back with their suggestions for improving DCF. This included enforcing monthly visits, setting up a hotline for foster parents to call when they don't receive those monthly visits, and requiring background checks on all prospective foster parents. They also gave a September 1st deadline for DCF to update their web database for children, including fingerprints, birth certificates, and updated photos.

24:30They also recommended purchasing fingerprint scanners by August 1st. They said that they would get the results in 48 hours instead of two months, which was apparently considered the norm at the time. In the least shocking news in this entire episode, the panel did not find Kearney at fault for what happened to Rilia. Meanwhile, she was establishing new policies of her own. After a woman reported that two men claiming to be DCF employees came to her house and tried to take her child away, Kearney implemented a new policy that a uniformed police officer has to accompany a DCF worker when a child is removed from the home, and that all employees would now be required to carry photo identification when making any visits.

25:15By early June, DCF announced that they'd completed their headcount of every child in state care, and that Relia was the only one unaccounted for. However, this headcount included 401 runaways, 135 victims of kidnapping by a non-custodial parent or relative, and 421 children living out of state. So, one could argue that many children were not accounted for, since they literally could not locate them, but this seems to be more of a technicality of putting a label on missing children related to circumstances versus actually accounting for their whereabouts. Soon after, a longtime employee of DCF who supervised those responsible for Aurelia's care is fired.

26:06Then, wouldn't you know it, in July 2002, tragedy struck again. Alfredo Montes, a one-year-old foster child in DCF care, was beaten to death and left on the side of the road in Tampa. He was allegedly killed by a babysitter who was angry at him for soiling his diaper. And here's the thing. His caseworker lied about visiting him on the same day he was murdered. So again, these new rules are not working, or at least are not being enforced. In August, Kathleen Kearney resigned, followed quickly by Charles Oslander, the DCF director for the Miami-Dade region. But Relia is still missing, and the police continue to suspect that the Grams knew more than what they were saying.

26:56They just didn't have enough to charge them with anything related to her disappearance. But that doesn't mean that they escaped other charges. On October 3rd, Gerilyn, Pamela, and two of their relatives were arrested on fraud charges. Gerilyn was charged with seven counts of public assistance fraud, one count of forgery, driver's license fraud, title fraud, and making a false affidavit. Pamela was charged with six counts of aiding and abetting public assistance fraud, five counts of welfare fraud, and one count of grand theft. They were both accused of stealing over$14 ,000 in nutrition assistance and welfare funds, including payments for Rilia's care that they knowingly accepted after her disappearance.

27:45Police were hoping that while they were in custody, they would get more answers about Rilia. Police were not shy in talking about how they felt about the Grams. At a press conference, Doyle Jordan, the regional director of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, said, quote, We think the people arrested today are the people who know where Rilia Wilson is. End quote. Now, because Gerilyn had all these aliases, she was actually charged as Jane Doe. Authorities said that they didn't know her real legal name. Her bond was originally set at$600 ,000, but both women's bonds were soon reduced, and Pamela was able to bail out.

28:29And the reward for information leading to Rilia skyrocketed to$100 ,000. In December, Gerilyn was convicted of fraud for using a friend's social security card and driver's license to buy a car She got three years in prison In 2003, Pamela pleaded guilty to fraud and grand theft She was ordered to pay fines and sentenced to two years probation This episode is brought to you by 20th Century Studios upcoming comedy, Ella McKay From Academy Award-winning writer-director James L. Brooks, Emma Mackey plays Ella McKay, an idealistic young woman who juggles family and work in a story about the people you love and how to survive them.

29:12Featuring an all-star cast including Jamie Lee Curtis, Jack Loudon, Kumail Nanjiani, Iowa Debris, Julie Kavner, with Albert Brooks and Woody Harrelson. Ella McKay, in theaters December 12. While the Grams were not budging on any information about Rilia, more witnesses began coming forward, and pretty much everything starts to come out. One former friend said that they used to lock Rilia in a dog cage, and investigators confirmed that they removed a dog cage large enough to hold a small child from the Grams' home. Eventually, Gerilyn admits to hitting Rilia with a switch, causing welts on her legs.