For a few dreadful days in 2002, South Florida wondered if Precious Doe was Rilya.

It was a desperate theory. The decapitated body of a small child had been discovered the year before on a wooded lot 1,250 miles away. But the unidentified remains of the little girl in Kansas City seemed roughly the same age as Rilya Wilson, the undersized foster kid who had vanished in Miami.

In their futile search to find the child who had become the latest symbol of Florida's dysfunctional foster-care system, investigators had chased down meager clues in five states and the Bahamas. The trip to Missouri would be just one more empty lead.

Last week in Kansas City, a 29-year-old drug addict named Harrell Johnson was convicted of killing the child known as Precious Doe. Her name was Erica Michelle Marie Green, age 3. Johnson, her stepfather, had bashed her head in a drugged-out fury. Then he and his equally addled wife, instead of calling for help, allowed the dying child to languish. Johnson dismembered Erica with garden shears and tossed the head and torso into the woods.

The remains were discovered on April 28, 2001, and the unidentified girl became an obsession in Kansas City. Marches and weekly vigils were staged; 80,000 fliers were distributed. A memorial was built by that patch of woods. The Precious Doe case gripped Kansas City in ways never quite evident in the city that lost Rilya Wilson.

COMMUNITY-WIDE TRAGEDY

The Rilya case did lead to reforms within the Florida Department of Children and Families after investigators learned that 15 months had lapsed before the agency discovered that one of its children had disappeared from her foster home.

But in Kansas City, the murder of Precious Doe was a community-wide tragedy. Every year, on the anniversary of the grisly discovery, the Precious Doe case was resurrected with more vigils, more fliers, more advertisements begging for information.

In 2005, an 81-year-old man living in Muskogee, Okla., saw one of those ads and called a community organizer in Kansas City to say he knew the identity of Precious Doe and knew the identity of her killer: his own grandson, Harrell Johnson.

The old man's calls had been ignored by the Kansas City police. (He claimed he tried some 50 times to get through to the homicide investigators.). But Precious Doe, in Kansas City, was a grass-roots cause. Community organizers forced the cops to listen. Within a few days, homicide detectives had a DNA match and two confessions.

`CIRCUMSTANTIAL'

The fate of Rilya Wilson, who would have turned 12 last month, still eludes South Florida. Her foster mother, Geralyn Graham -- a woman with a long history of fraud -- has been charged with Rilya's murder.

Surely, someone out there knows something, but the prosecution has no body, no murder witnesses to buttress the murder charge. ''The case is completely circumstantial,'' her attorney, Michael Matters, told me Monday.

A trial date is set for March, but Matters said he'll ask for a continuance. ``We're just starting to take depositions.''

By the time the case finally goes to trial, Rilya will have been missing nine years. The little girl will have faded from popular memory.

She'll be just another anonymous victim -- Miami's Precious Doe.

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