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Police Arrest Rilya Wilson's Former Caregivers

Pamela, Geralyn Graham Face Fraud Charges

POSTED: 12:59 p.m. EDT October 2, 2002
UPDATED: 1:10 p.m. EDT October 2, 2002

Four people involved in the case of Rilya Wilson are being questioned by police today and some are facing serious charges.

Geralyn Graham Former caregivers for the missing girl, Geralyn (pictured, right) and Pamela Graham were arrested on fraud charges, and Channel 10 reporter Connie Hicks has learned that Geralyn's son, Leo Epson, is being questioned and Rilya's former caseworker, Deborah Muskelly has also been arrested.

Geralyn and Pamela Graham, who say they are sisters, are facing several charges related to Rilya's disappearance, said Ed Griffith, spokesman for the Miami-Dade State Attorney's Office, and John Coffee, a Florida Department of Law Enforcement special agent.

Coffee said the charges include public assistance and driver's license fraud, but he would not give further details. Police say that they do not necessarily believe the charges will lead to the finding of the missing girl.

Griffith said other relatives would also be arrested but would not give details. The state attorney scheduled a 2 p.m. news conference to discuss the arrests.

Pamela Graham's attorney, Joshua Fisher, said his client was "not informed they were going to be arrested or why they were arrested."

Rilya Wilson Rilya (pictured, left), whose sixth birthday was last month, lived with Geralyn Graham, who had claimed to be her paternal grandmother, and Pamela Graham, who had legal custody, from April 2000 until January 2001.

That's when Geralyn Graham said a state child-welfare worker took her away for evaluation, never to be seen again. The little girl was supposed to receive monthly state visits but was not reported missing until last April 25 because of a bureaucratic blunder.

The case resulted in the resignation of top child welfare administrators at the Department of Children & Families, including DCF Secretary Kathleen Kearney.

Geralyn Graham, 56, has at least 33 aliases and a long history of criminal and civil court cases, according to court records. In reams of documents, lawyers question whether Graham is a con artist or severely mentally impaired. A judge thought both might apply.

FDLE Director Tim Moore said Geralyn Graham's background "gives every reasonable citizen pause to doubt that she is telling the truth about other things, most notably the whereabouts of Rilya."

Moore said there is still no information on what happened to Rilya or whether she is alive.

"I'm an eternal optimist," he said. "We hope for a successful, happy ending but facts and statistics are not on our side."

He said the reward for information leading to Rilya's recovery was raised Wednesday from $75,000 to $100,000.

"Somebody somewhere knows where Rilya is and the circumstances behind the disappearance," Moore said.

After Rilya's disappearance was discovered, a blue-ribbon committee investigated the DCF's inner workings. It blamed Rilya's disappearance on deception by two low-level workers and her caregivers, but it recommended 21 short-term priorities and nine long-term objectives for an agency "engulfed in scandal."

And it turned out that Rilya's disappearance while under DCF supervision wasn't an isolated case.

In July, the agency acknowledged losing track of 532 children in its care and suffered more embarrassment when a newspaper found 22 of them by checking public records and doing a little legwork.

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