PORT ST. LUCIE — Police searched today the grounds of three homes owned by convicted child abuser Judith Leekin, using cadaver dogs to sniff for the remains of one of her 11 adopted children, Shane “Moo” Graham, who went missing a decade ago.

Judith Leekin

The search proved fruitless, but police officers will keep looking until the boy’s body is found, Detective Stuart Klearman said today at a press conference at the Port St. Lucie Police Department.

“We need to find this child and do right by him,” he said.

Leekin, a 63-year-old Port St. Lucie woman, forced her adopted children and young adults to sleep on a storage room floor, binding them with plastic ties and handcuffs, beating them and keeping them away from school and medical care.

She is serving a 20-year term in Florida on multiple charges of aggravated child abuse and aggravated abuse of disabled adults concurrent with a 10-year, 10-month term she received in New York last year for defrauding that state’s adoption system out of $1.68 million that was supposed to go toward the children’s care.

Leekin has so far refused to speak about Graham, the only one of her 11 adopted children to remain missing.

Police officers, with the assistance of cadaver dogs from the Miami-Dade and Miramar police departments, spent about 20 minutes at each of three properties, including Leekin’s main residence in the 100-block of Hawthorne Circle, and houses in the 100-block of Southwest Lion Lane and the 1400-block of Southwest Herder Road, all in Port St. Lucie.

They also hope to use ground-penetrating radar, Klearman said.

Klearman the search is made difficult by the length of time Graham has been missing, but he hopes that Leekin will one day say where he is.

“Only she knows,” he said.

Tags: Judith Leekin, Port St. Lucie police, Shane "Moo" Graham, Stuart Klearman

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 19th, 2009 at 6:50 pm and is filed under Courts, Crime, Port St. Lucie, St. Lucie County. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.