• April 04, 2005
• Vol. 63
• No. 13

Two Little Girls Lost, Two Tragic Endings

By Bob Meadows

The Search for Jessica Lunsford Ends in Heartbreak and An Arrest, While the Disappearance of Rilya Wilson Takes a Turn with Charges Against Her Caregiver

Police and volunteers searched the length and breadth of Citrus County for little Jessica Lunsford. But when they finally found the 9-year-old's body March 19, it was in a 2-ft.-deep grave, wrapped in a plastic bag, just 150 yards or so from her Homosassa, Fla., home. "It's very hard for me to realize that all this was happening right under my nose," Jessica's father, Mark Lunsford, told PEOPLE while sitting in his living room. "I'm sad. I'm angry. There's a small part of me that is relieved we have some closure, but I was hoping for another outcome."

So was a mournful nation. For three weeks, Jessica's disappearance baffled investigators. Then on March 17 they arrested registered child molester John Evander Couey, 46, who was staying across the street from the Lunsfords when Jessica vanished. Cops say Couey, who had moved into the mobile home of his half sister Dorothy Dixon, 47, shortly before the kidnapping, slipped through the Lunsfords' unlocked front door on Feb. 23, put his hand over the half-asleep girl's mouth and led her to Dixon's trailer. Authorities don't know how long Jessica was alive after being abducted, but say she was sexually assaulted.

Couey, who lived in Homosassa off and on, has a troubled past. A cousin says Couey's father died when he was young and his mother was frequently absent from his life, so he was constantly shuttled between relatives around Florida. "You could see the anger in him," says the cousin, who didn't want his name used. "He never seemed to have remorse for the things he did. He'd go to jail and laugh about it." Couey was arrested 24 times beginning in 1977, including a 1991 conviction for fondling a child younger than 16. He was also fired from a dishwashing job in the early 1990s for writing a sexually explicit love letter to a 14-year-old coworker. "He was a creepy man. Something was wrong in his head," says his former boss George Kanaris.

Police, while interviewing registered sex offenders in the area, discovered the unemployed Couey had moved to Dixon's trailer, which she shared with her daughter and boyfriend, without alerting authorities as required. Telling his housemates police would be looking for him, he fled to Augusta, Ga., where authorities tracked him down.

Prosecutors are expected to push for the death penalty, a notion that gives some comfort to Lunsford. "I want him to stand up like a man and take his death penalty," he says. Thinking of Jessica, Lunsford's tone changes. "She's in a better place," he says. "I just wish she was here with me."

Bob Meadows. Steve Helling in Homosassa, Polly Powers Stramm in Savannah and Siobhan Morrissey in Miami

• Contributors:
• Steve Helling,
• Polly Powers Stramm,
• Siobhan Morrissey.

More From This Article

Rilya Wilson: Caregiver Indicted in Her Murder

An unknown child care worker took Rilya Wilson away for a psychological evaluation and never returned her. That's the story Geralyn Graham, Rilya's caregiver, has stuck with since a counselor from Florida's Department of Children and Families came looking for the little girl in April 2002. A Miami grand jury, however, didn't buy the story. On March 16, Graham, 59, was indicted for murdering Rilya in December 2000, when the child was 4. Prosecutors are pressing the case even though Rilya's body has never been found. "No crime scene. No body. It makes it harder," admits Miami-Dade state attorney Katherine Fernández Rundle, who thinks Rilya was smothered or beaten to death and dumped near a canal.

Rilya's case first made headlines three years ago because DCF—charged with making monthly visits to the girl—didn't learn about her disappearance until 16 months after the fact. Rilya's caseworker even filed reports from fictional home visits, including one from August 2001 that said the girl was doing well. In the wake of the scandal, three DCF employees were fired and two resigned. In May 2002 Gov. Jeb Bush signed legislation that made it a felony for welfare workers to falsify documents regarding individuals in state care. But there are still about 20 children DCF can't find. "Are things better than they were? Probably not," says child advocate Bernard Perlmutter, director of the Children and Youth Law Clinic at the University of Miami. "We have a long way to go."

Whatever happens, it's too late for Rilya, who underwent horrific abuse. Born to a cocaine-addicted mother, she was placed with a family friend, Pamela Kendrick, when she was only 8 days old. But 3½ years later, Graham, who by then was caring for Rilya's younger sister Rodericka, lobbied hard to unite the girls. DCF took Rilya to her in April 2000. But almost immediately the abuse began, says Graham's partner, Pamela Graham, 40. She told police last summer Geralyn would put the child in scalding water, and not feed her or lock her in a laundry room for days to punish her. Rilya was also forced to sit in a dog cage. "She was handcuffed to a bed to keep her from climbing at night. Her hands were tied with these plastic ties," Pamela Graham said. Geralyn was charged with the girl's abuse in August 2004 and, prosecutors say, confessed to a fellow inmate. Graham's lawyer Brian Tannebaum scoffs that the informant "is a jailhouse snitch who is lying to get herself out of jail." Though Rilya's cousin Charles Wilson, 54, hopes Graham will be tried and swiftly punished, he recognizes she wasn't the only one who failed the little girl. "Somewhere in the mix," he says, "a lot of people did not do what they should have or could have done."