Aunt Refuses To Reveal Girl’s Whereabouts Woman Adopting Niece Reported Her Missing

The aunt of a missing 3-year-old girl says the child is unharmed but refuses to divulge her whereabouts, police said.

Berlean Williams, 45, told investigators Friday that Lenoria Jones is doing OK, but revealed little else, said Jim Mattheis, police spokesman.

“We thought we were close several times today that she was going to tell us, and she just clams up,” Mattheis said Friday. “We’ve still got a 3-year-old girl out there someplace either alive, or dead or injured.”

Mattheis said Saturday there had been no developments in the case.

Williams, who was in the process of adopting Lenoria, was interviewed for 10 hours on Friday but Mattheis said police weren’t any closer to the truth.

“She gets to a point, she wants to tell us, and then she stops,” he said. “We need something else to go on; we need to find someone who saw her leave the house.”

Williams called police Thursday morning to say the girl, last seen wearing a black “Barney” T-shirt and blue or turquoise pants, had vanished while the two were looking at toys at a department store.

Officers searched the store, then reviewed videotapes from the store’s surveillance cameras which showed the aunt entering the store alone.

“She was confronted with the fact that the video showed she (the girl) wasn’t with her at the store. Her statement was, ‘Well, maybe she wasn’t with me,”’ Mattheis said.

State officials suspended Williams’ day-care license Friday due to her wavering accounts of what happened to the little girl.

Lenoria never lived with her mother or her father and their parental rights had been terminated, officials said.

Williams, the mother’s sister, was in the process of adopting the child through a private agency, they said.

xxxx