PACE, Fla. -- Kimberly McZinc, age 4, starved to death in a mobile home on a dirt road here in the Florida Panhandle. The refrigerator was stocked with food. Four other children in the home were plump and beloved.

Kimberly's mother, in the grip of twisted fundamentalism, is a college graduate with a masters in public administration. She believed her spunky little girl was possessed by demons.

To exorcise the evil, she denied Kimberly food and made the weakened child run "with Jesus," her tightly braided pigtails flying behind her.

Kimberly's death took five tortured months. During that time, the state Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services received two reports -- one that Kimberly was abused, a second that she was malnourished.

HRS workers investigated and closed both reports as unfounded.

"Why couldn't they see it before it was too late?" asked neighbor Barbara Savage.

The state's failure to save Kimberly's life lay hidden in confidential files until last month. In response to a Miami Herald request for the agency's investigations of child deaths, HRS released a 10-page report on Kimberly's case but blacked out her name and place of death.

In Santa Rosa County, the case of the little girl who died Feb. 8, 1988, is notorious.

HRS Deputy Secretary Pete Digre said her death is a case study of what goes wrong when workers are overburdened, inadequately trained and badly supervised. At that time, HRS managers had no way to monitor investigations with computerized tracking. Now they do.

Since Kimberly died, HRS has dramatically changed its system for investigating child abuse. "Unless you had massive falsification of records, you could not have a case like this today," Digre said.

On Nov. 15, the state Legislature will convene to consider emergency funding for the child welfare system.

Although abuse investigations have improved, protection of children living with foster parents or troubled families is still "primitive" in comparison, Digre said. Many HRS workers are still crushingly overloaded and inadequately trained. And though there is computer tracking of abuse investigations, there is no such system for tracking children with foster parents or troubled families.

The death of Kimberly McZinc appalled this community about 10 miles north of Pensacola.

State Attorney Kim Skievaski prosecuted the mother, Darlene Jackson, 33, for first-degree murder. While a jury deliberated in March, the mother pleaded guilty to murder in the third degree (without design to kill). Judge George Lowrey gave her seven years.

Another woman, Mary Nicholson, 39, an evangelist, is also accused of the murder. She and her four children lived with Kimberly and her mother in the mobile home. Trial is set for January.

Based on interviews, the autopsy, the HRS report, depositions of 25 witnesses, court records and Pensacola News Journal accounts, this is what happened:

Kimberly lived the first four years of her life in New York City. Her mother, a South Carolina native, received a college degree in community mental health and a masters in public administration from the University of South Carolina.

She got a job as a computer specialist for AT&T in New York City and began seeing an older man, Kenneth McZinc, an international examiner for the IRS. They had a child but did not marry.

Darlene Jackson was the model single parent -- a Sunday school teacher who organized reading programs for inner-city youngsters and church fashion shows. She quit the AT&T job to be a schoolteacher so she could spend more time with Kimberly.