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In the spring of 2002, a Florida state worker went looking for a four-year-old girl in a foster home. She wasn't there. The woman caring for her said a stranger claiming to work for the state had taken her away for an evaluation, fifteen months earlier. In that time the Department of Children and Families had kept paying for her care, and one court report said she was safe in her caretaker's home.

This is the case file on Rilya Wilson. I follow the case from her removal as a baby to her placement with a caregiver whose own record the agency never uncovered, then to the caseworker whose visits stopped while her paperwork continued. I cover the 2013 conviction of Geralyn Graham, and I say plainly what the court record leaves unresolved: Rilya's body has never been found, and no court has ruled on what happened to her.

I also draw on more than fourteen years of social work practice to look at six areas: the gap between records and reality, caseworker caseloads, background checks that can't see a person using dozens of names, the money that kept flowing, and what accountability looks like when a child is never found. The episode ends with six questions for professionals.

Chapters (approximate):

• Cold open: the visit that found nobody
• Rilya's early life and the fragmented family
• The caregiver the agency didn't check
• The caseworker and the fifteen months
• How the disappearance came to light
• The investigation, the charges and the trial
• What the court record does and doesn't establish
• Six strands for professionals
• Questions to take back to your practice

Content note: The episode discusses the abuse and death of a child. The script deliberately leaves out some details from the court record. Discretion advised