EP. 240 - FLORIDA: ABUSED AND KILLED BY HER OWN FATHER: THE SYSTEM FAILED 12-YEAR-OLD LORI PAIGE

There were signs that things were not right at home for 12-year-old Lori Paige. Not just tiny ones: blazing red flags that followed her all her life. She came to school without shoes. She was hit with a belt in front of her classmates. She cried to friends and teachers, saying she couldn’t take the abuse any longer. And then… she vanished. What followed was an investigation that came far too late—one that revealed sexual abuse, violence, and cruelty at the hands of the person who was supposed to care for her most: her father. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Colin Brown?

  Warning: The following podcast is not suitable for all audiences. We go into great detail with every case that we cover and do our best to bring viewers even deeper into the stories by utilizing disturbing audio and sound effects.

• 0:12Courtney Brown?

  Trigger warnings from the stories we cover may include violence, rape, murder, and offenses against children.

• 0:18Colin Brown?

  This podcast is not for everyone. You have been warned.

• 0:23Courtney Brown?

  It was April 5th, 2025. A cadaver dog moved through a remote stretch of woods in Thomas County, Georgia. The brush that had covered this ground for years had recently been burned away, leaving nothing but flat, blackened earth. The dog's owner followed quietly behind, watching. The investigators watched too. And then, the dog stopped, completely still, right there in the dirt. One of the investigators stepped forward, and beneath what had been nearly two years of thick Georgia brush were bones. Small bones, belonging to a child. They had all been waiting for this moment for a long time, and they knew exactly whose bones they were.

• 1:07Courtney Brown?

  But finally, they found her. She had been right here the whole time. This is the story of 12-year-old Lori Paige. I'm Courtney Brown.

• 1:17Colin Brown?

  And I'm Colin Brown.

• 1:19Courtney Brown?

  And you're listening to Murder in America.

• 2:23Colin Brown?

  Miranda Page grew up in a house that looked like a home from the outside. Her mother was Brooklyn Page. But according to Miranda, what happened inside that house was something she spent years trying to forget. When Miranda was around four or five years old, Brooklyn brought a woman and her four children into their home. According to Miranda, three of those children, a girl and two boys, sexually abused her. She said that both mothers witnessed it happening. She said that men would come to the house, and the children would be made to perform sexual acts in front of them. At some point, DCF came to check on Miranda, and Brooklyn hid her under the bed. "Don't say anything," she told her. "They're going to take you. Stay quiet."

• 3:07Colin Brown?

  Miranda did as she was told, and the officers left. But the abuse didn't stop there. Miranda said that when she was very young, her mother told her to go to the bathroom with a mirror and touch herself, saying, "You have to get to know your body." From a young age, Miranda said that Brooklyn would make her lie on her back on the bed, spread her legs, and she would touch her, examine her, look at her, presenting it as something normal, something a mother just does. Miranda said this continued until she was 12 to 14 years old. She didn't have the language for what it was at the time. She had been taught, from the very beginning, not to question it.

• 3:45Courtney Brown?

  But from there, even though the sexual abuse at home came to an end, it continued outside of the home. Miranda was just 16 years old when 23-year-old Andrew Wiley got her pregnant. The two had never been in a real relationship. They just kind of crossed paths. Miranda said that the first time they had sex, it felt consensual to her. But there was a second time. That time, she said no. But he didn't stop. Shortly after this, Miranda found out she was pregnant. And Andrew, her baby's father, then enlisted in the military. They ended up going their separate ways. Here is Andrew Wiley himself talking about their relationship.

• 4:27Speaker 02

  Me and Miranda relationship, we was never together. She was just a girl I was sleeping with.

• 4:36Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 4:36Speaker 02

  She got pregnant, so it's not like I was there.

• 4:41Speaker 03

  How did y'all meet?

• 4:43Speaker 02

  I don't, I don't even know. I know we met and we were talking, but we wasn't never together. She was just somebody I was sleeping with. She got pregnant.

• 4:57Speaker 03

  I mean, this would have been...

• 4:59Speaker 02

  A while ago.

• 5:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:05Speaker 03

  2000ish?

• 5:06Speaker 02

  Not 2000.

• 5:07Speaker 03

  2010. 2010. Around 2010, 2011. Okay, 2010. Right before you went in the army.

• 5:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:11Speaker 03

  Okay. And I mean, did y'all, did you first meet her at a bar or meet her...

• 5:15Speaker 02

  Nah, she was young. I really don't know, because she was 17 and I think I was like 20.

• 5:21Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 5:22Speaker 02

  And I was telling her, like, even then, I was like, I don't think we should be doing it. But Miranda was smart. She was like, oh, we can do this under the law, some crap.

• 5:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, 16 to 24 is legal.

• 5:34Speaker 02

  Yeah. And, um, yeah. And then she got pregnant and I went to the military.

• 5:39Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 5:40Courtney Brown?

  While he was away, Miranda considered getting an abortion as late as six months in, but she didn't go through with it. And on April 14th, 2011, Lori Annalee's page was born. Sadly, from that point forward, life for this little girl became anything but stable. Miranda was living with her mother, Brooklyn, when Lori was born. But it was never a peaceful house. The two of them argued constantly. Miranda was young and irresponsible, and Brooklyn had no patience for it. Things were tense from the start. And when Lori was just eight or nine months old, a fight between them came to a head. Brooklyn kicked them both out. A teenage mother and her baby with nowhere to go.

• 6:25Courtney Brown?

  Eventually, the state stepped in. Child Protective Services removed Lori from Miranda's care. Miranda was ordered to undergo a mandatory mental health evaluation. After that, she got a place of her own. And once a few weeks passed, she claimed she had changed. She wanted to do better. And Lori was given back to her.

• 6:46Colin Brown?

  With Lori back in her arms, Miranda convinced her mother, Brooklyn, to move in to help. At first, it seemed like a solution. But it quickly became clear that Miranda had no intention of being the one doing the parenting. While Brooklyn was there, Miranda would sleep until 2:30 in the afternoon. She would leave snacks on the low shelves for Lori to reach on her own and go out with friends until the early hours of the morning, leaving Brooklyn to take care of her daughter. When Miranda was home, she complained that Lori talked too much, that she didn't have the patience for it. Brooklyn would confront her. Then more arguments would come. Now, Child Protective Services didn't just walk away after returning Lori to Miranda. They continued to monitor the situation, the way they do when a child has already been removed once.

• 7:31Colin Brown?

  And when Lori was three years old, something prompted another investigation into Miranda. We don't know exactly what triggered it, but during that investigation, authorities told Miranda she couldn't have Lori spend the night with her. Not wanting to uproot her daughter, Miranda went to stay with the mother of a boyfriend named Maurice Jones, while Grandma Brooklyn stayed with Lori. But sadly, behind closed doors, it was alleged that Brooklyn was doing to Lori what she had done to her own daughter. Brooklyn allegedly told her to go to the bathroom with a mirror and touch herself, saying, "You have to get to know your own body." And so it continued.

• 8:06Speaker 04

  She would get like, for example, she would give Lori a mirror and like send her to the bathroom and masturbate. And I'm like, "What?" "Right."

• 8:16Speaker 05

  At what age?

• 8:17Speaker 04

  Um, like, four. And, and this, this is not sounding crazy to me, because she did the same thing with me. It's like you have to get to know your body, like, blah, blah, blah, blah.

• 8:29Speaker 05

  No, no.

• 8:30Speaker 04

  You're right, you don't encourage it. Like, they're gonna do it, but you don't, you don't encourage it.

• 8:34Speaker 05

  Well, you know, yeah, when you're older and close to being in a, I would imagine, but not at four?

• 8:43Speaker 04

  And, I mean, ki- kids do it, but it's, it's more of, it's not like a sexual, they're just exploring.

• 8:49Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, it's a curiosity.

• 8:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 8:52Courtney Brown?

  But Brooklyn didn't wanna be a full-time caregiver. Eventually, she moved to North Carolina. And with no one left to care for her, three-year-old Lori ended up in foster care. But Miranda's grandfather, Lori's great-grandfather, came down and took custody of Lori to get her out of foster care. It seemed like a good situation. Lori was living with a family member. But sadly, during this time in 2016, four-year-old Lori told someone at school that her great-grandfather had touched her inappropriately. When Miranda spoke to Lori directly, Lori told her something even worse, that her great-grandpa had sex with her. Those were the words of a four-year-old little girl.

• 9:37Courtney Brown?

  Following this, a forensic interview was conducted. A child psychologist worked with Lori through play therapy. But some of what Lori said was inconsistent. The investigation was inconclusive. The records were sealed. And no charges were ever filed. Because of that, her mother Miranda never believed it. She had grown up around this man. She couldn't imagine him doing that. But she also acknowledged she wasn't there. She didn't know what happened when Lori was alone with him.

• 10:11Speaker 04

  When she was four.

• 10:16Speaker 05

  Are you talking about the allegation?

• 10:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 10:19Speaker 05

  I've heard about that.

• 10:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, and so I don't know if something happened to her in that time.

• 10:25Speaker 05

  How do you feel about that?

• 10:28Speaker 04

  I, my granddad, he didn't do that. He didn't. Not at all. I grew up with him. He, he didn't do that.

• 10:34Speaker 05

  Never had anything with you or any other kid? It'd be kinda strange if, you know, it happened to one kid and not others, you know, it, it's.

• 10:45Speaker 04

  But I don't know that nothing hap- like, when she, you know, all that time that I wasn't there, I can't. Like, something could have happened to her and it, those things get so deep that they can't.

• 10:56Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 10:57Speaker 04

  Then it comes out, you know, when they're thirty.

• 10:59Courtney Brown?

  But after this, Lori ended up back in foster care. And this time, DCFS contacted Lori's father, Andrew Wiley. Andrew offered to take her in, a man she had never met. He was standing in a doorway in Miami when she arrived. She looked up at him. He looked down at her. A little girl, five years old, with brown eyes and a bag of belongings. She had no idea what came next. Neither did he.

• 11:28Colin Brown?

  Andrew Wiley grew up in Miami, Florida. His father was violent and abusive, and he had a brother, Antoine, and also a son. A boy believed to be named Keyshawn, about a year older than Lori, from another relationship. According to his brother Antoine, Andrew had no part in raising him either. Now, as we mentioned, Andrew enlisted in the army right around the time his son was born and when Miranda found out she was pregnant with Lori. According to his family, this seemed like a good excuse to get out of being a present father. But during his time in the army, Andrew was stationed in Colorado. It was there that he met a woman named Jeannie Abney. Jeannie had grown up in a dysfunctional, alcoholic household. She was trying to get out of it any way she could.

• 12:12Colin Brown?

  And then Andrew showed up. He was charming, sweet. He listened to her. For the first time, she felt like someone was paying attention. And one day, he came to her with an idea. "Hey," he said, "do you wanna get married? If we get married, I'll get housing money and I can pay the bills. You won't have to worry about paying rent. I'll take care of you. Everything will be okay." Jeannie looked at him. They barely knew each other. But she also knew exactly what she was going back to if she said no. The toxic house, the drinking, the chaos. And here was a way out. She said yes. They went down to the courthouse and got married that day, just like that. The military housing money came through and they got an apartment for Jeannie and her kids.

• 12:56Colin Brown?

  He would stay on base. That was the arrangement. But she wasn't comfortable bringing a stranger into her children's lives, not yet. They barely knew each other. He understood, or said he did, but within weeks, everything changed. The warmth was gone. The listening was gone. Andrew had a drinking problem, and when he drank, the man Jeannie thought she had married disappeared completely. He moved himself into the apartment and didn't leave. Jeannie had three kids, a twelve-year-old daughter, a ten-year-old son, and a three-year-old. And he wasn't going anywhere.

• 13:29Courtney Brown?

  One night, her ten-year-old son was at the apartment when Andrew came home drunk. He went after Jeannie. He reportedly hit her. He got his hands around her throat and started strangling her. It was her ten-year-old boy who stopped it. He grabbed a frying pan and stood over them. "Get off of her," he said. "Leave her alone." Andrew let go. Jeannie called the military police. When things settled down, Andrew turned to her. He said he was sorry. He said he had grown up watching his father do the same thing. He was going to get help. He promised her he was going to stop drinking. So, she let him back in. But a month later, he was drinking again.

• 14:12Courtney Brown?

  And this time, he was also using drugs. Soon enough, Andrew was throwing rocks at the windows, shattering the glass. Jeannie had had enough. She reported him to the army. Their marriage was annulled. And from there, she was gone. Andrew left the Army not long after. He went back to Miami. And it was around that time when he learned that his daughter Lori needed a temporary guardian. So for several months, he took her in. Lori moved to Miami with her father. Now, we don't know what those months in Miami were like. But we do know that it didn't last long. Eventually, custody was returned to Miranda.

• 14:53Courtney Brown?

  But from that point forward, Andrew wanted to have a role in his daughter's life. During winter and summer school breaks, Lori would travel to Florida to spend time with her dad. First in Miami, and later in Tallahassee after he moved there. It was the arrangement that had held for years. Things seemed to be as stable as they ever would be for Lori. She finally had a relationship with her dad. And her mom Miranda seemed to be doing better as well. Eventually, Miranda even met a woman named Latonya White. She lived in Nashville, Tennessee. It was there that Miranda and Latonya fell in love. They built a life together in Nashville. They got married with Miranda taking Latonya's last name.

• 15:37Courtney Brown?

  Now, Latonya had a son of her own. So the four of them, Miranda, Latonya, Latonya's son, and Lori, became a family.

• 15:46Colin Brown?

  But Lori was struggling in ways that were hard to ignore. She'd been wetting the bed, acting out. She'd been in counseling. But one afternoon at Chadwell Elementary, Lori did something that got her in trouble at the after-school program. And instead of waiting to face it, she ran. She bolted straight for the door and headed toward traffic. A school counselor tackled Lori to stop her. Miranda knew her daughter needed serious help. She took her to Vanderbilt Children's Hospital in Nashville. Lori stayed there for three to four weeks. She was prescribed the blood pressure medication that can also be used for anxiety. But the hospitalization itself left a mark. Lori felt abandoned, like everyone in her life kept leaving her in places and walking away.

• 16:30Colin Brown?

  And now she was in a hospital alone again. But eventually, she came home. And for a while, things seemed more settled. But there were things Lori had already seen that a child should never have to see. At some point while in Nashville, she had allegedly watched her mother attempt suicide with pills. She never talked about it, just carried it. But it did affect her. During this time, her grandma Brooklyn was granted temporary guardianship of Lori for a few weeks. It was then that she noticed something was wrong with her granddaughter. Lori had been put on medication after her incident at school. And Brooklyn felt that it was only making things worse for her. She said that one day, something triggered Lori and she ran out of the house screaming. Brooklyn had to chase her down the street.

• 17:13Colin Brown?

  Neighbors came outside to watch, and soon enough, Brooklyn got her back inside and calmed her down. But then she made a decision to wean Lori off the medication over a period of three days. According to Brooklyn, Lori was perfectly fine after that. Brooklyn never believed Lori needed any medication anyway. She believed Miranda was medicating her daughter to make her easier to deal with.

• 17:37Courtney Brown?

  But there was something else that happened during that time. When Lori was around nine years old, she noticed a small spot in her underwear. Her period just barely starting. According to Miranda, her mother Brooklyn's response was to have Lori lie on her back and examine her private parts. She even called Miranda in to look at it too. Presenting it as she always had, as something routine. A grandmother helping a little girl understand her body. Miranda, who had spent her whole life being taught that this was normal, didn't question it. Not then, at least. Now from there, Lori went to school. And school, as it turns out, was where Lori came alive.

• 18:20Courtney Brown?

  She rarely missed a day. She made the A B honor roll consistently. If she ever did make a low grade, it would upset her. She was known to challenge the boys to foot races at recess. She usually won. She loved to play Roblox and she loved art. She was obsessed with anime. She wanted to watch all the anime in the world. But more than anything, Lori loved to learn. And she loved to help others learn as well. When a classmate was struggling in math, Lori was the first one to offer help.

• 18:52Speaker 04

  Lori is probably undiagnosed dyslexic.

• 18:54Speaker 05

  Okay, that makes sense.

• 18:56Speaker 04

  She's really, really smart. But she's all, she's had a tutor, even in Tampa, she had a tutor. To help her with her reading and her writing. And she, she understands, she has a comprehension, she just can't spell.

• 19:07Speaker 05

  That's a tough thing to get over and, and typically mislabeled. Um, so I, I, uh.

• 19:14Speaker 04

  She didn't wanna be, she didn't wanna be like. Because she's smart, so she didn't want to feel dumb.

• 19:19Colin Brown?

  But Lori was also holding things that had no business being inside a child. A school social worker named Lisa Britt, who worked with Lori during those years, kept detailed notes from their sessions. In exercises meant to identify how Lori saw herself, she consistently applied the negative descriptors to herself and the positive ones to everyone else. She described herself as evil, disrespectful, lazy, hateful. Some of those words, Britt noted, were words Miranda had used about Lori. There was also a note that noted that Lori had been pondering what would happen if she died. By the summer of 2022, Lori was 11 years old. And like she'd done every summer before, she packed her bags and headed to Florida to spend time with her father.

• 20:03Colin Brown?

  Andrew was living in Tallahassee now, in a small quadruplex apartment on Continental Court. It was the routine she had always known. So when she arrived that June, she had no reason to think this time would be any different. She was just visiting. Miranda would come get her before school started, like she always did.

• 20:22Courtney Brown?

  Back in Nashville, Miranda was trying to turn her life around. She was even working towards her master's degree. But as the summer was coming to an end, things weren't going well. The financial aid that Miranda was supposed to get had been withheld. There was a problem with her account, some paperwork issue. She was trying to get it resolved, but weeks went by and it wasn't resolving. Her rent wasn't getting paid. Soon enough, eviction notices were starting to appear on her door. And Lori was still in Tallahassee waiting to come home. Miranda said that, given their situation, she had to make a decision. She didn't want her daughter to come home to a world where they were in jeopardy of losing their home.

• 21:06Courtney Brown?

  So she called Andrew on a Thursday night. She told him what was happening. And she asked if he could keep Lori for a while while she figured things out. Andrew said he didn't mind. But he didn't want to be the one to tell Lori the news. So Miranda agreed to call her daughter the following day. Eventually, that day came around. Miranda was in class when her phone buzzed in her pocket. It was Andrew. He was calling her over and over. Miranda gathered herself, pushed back her chair quietly, and stepped out into the hallway. She found a spot away from the classroom door and answered. It was Lori. "Hey, baby," Miranda said, keeping her voice steady. "I love you so much, you know that?"

• 21:51Courtney Brown?

  "Yeah," Lori said. Miranda took a breath. She told her about the financial aid, about the apartment, about the notice on the door. She said she didn't want Lori to come home to that, to watch her lose another place, to go through all of it again. "It's not going to be forever," she said. "Just a little longer, just until I get things sorted out." But the line was quiet, and then it wasn't quiet. Lori just kept repeating the word "no" over and over again. She couldn't help it, it just came out. This was not what she wanted. Miranda stayed on the line, trying to convince her daughter that this is what was best for her. "We're about to be homeless," she said.

• 22:36Courtney Brown?

  "I don't want you to see that. You are right where you're supposed to be right now. I need you to understand." Lori didn't say anything. And at some point, the call was over. Miranda walked back to class. And hundreds of miles away in Tallahassee, Lori put down the phone and went back to whatever she had been doing, carrying it the way she had always carried things, quietly and completely alone. Lori went to bed that night knowing that her mother wasn't coming back to get her. Not soon at least, and maybe not ever. Nobody asked her. Nobody said, "Do you want to go back to Nashville first? Say goodbye to your friends, get your things?"

• 23:18Courtney Brown?

  It had just been decided, the way most things in her life had just been decided, without her. Her friends from Goodletsville Middle Prep were probably at home right now, doing homework, texting each other, living their normal lives, with no idea that Lori wasn't coming back. Tallahassee was her home now, whether she wanted it to be or not.

• 23:42Colin Brown?

  Tallahassee, Florida, sits in the northern panhandle of the state, just a stone's throw away from the Georgia border. It's the state capital, but don't let that fool you. Despite having nearly 200,000 residents, people who live there will tell you it doesn't feel like a big city. It feels like a town. There are over 700 miles of trails winding through some of the most beautiful natural scenery in the South. On Fall Saturdays, when Florida State and Florida A&M have home games, the whole city transforms, fans pouring into the streets, school colors everywhere. It's a college town through and through. And for a lot of people, once they get there, they never want to leave. But the zip code where Lori now lived, 32304, hooking the west side of Florida State University,

• 24:27Colin Brown?

  tells a different story. There were more than 160 registered sex offenders living in that zip code alone. And every night, while her father worked the overnight shift, Lori was alone in that apartment. A 12-year-old girl in a city she hadn't chosen. Now, at the time, Andrew worked as a corrections officer at Jefferson Correctional Facility in Monticello. He had a girlfriend, a woman named Simone Robinson. They had met at work. She was around when she could be, but she wasn't living there. This was the neighborhood where Lori Page was going to grow up now. Andrew certainly wasn't ready for it. He was a man who had become a full-time parent, essentially overnight, and it showed.

• 25:09Courtney Brown?

  Not long after Lori arrived, Andrew picked up the phone and called his ex-wife, Jeannie, the one he was married to while in the Army. They hadn't spoken in a while, but every once in a while, they would catch up. How are you? What are you up to? The usual. But this time, Andrew mentioned something. He said that his daughter was living with him now. "Well, that's good," Jeannie said. "Your daughter's with you?"

• 25:35Colin Brown?

  "Yeah, her mom ain't shit. We don't get along. She just sent her to me."

• 25:39Courtney Brown?

  Jeannie paused. She thought about the little girl. Twelve years old, dropped off with a father she barely knew. She chose her words carefully. "Well, every little girl needs her dad in her life. Just be there for her."

• 25:53Colin Brown?

  "Yeah, whatever."

• 25:54Courtney Brown?

  Jeannie tried again. "Is she bad? Does she give you any problems?"

• 25:59Colin Brown?

  "She's just fast."

• 26:01Courtney Brown?

  Jeannie took that to mean "boys." Like Lori was boy crazy, flirtatious. "So, she's into boys, or whatever the case may be?" Andrew's response shocked her.

• 26:13Colin Brown?

  "I don't really know what the fuck she's into. I just know she's bad and she's here."

• 26:18Courtney Brown?

  Jeannie didn't know what to say to that. So she changed the subject. She asked about Andrew's drinking. Whether he still drank the way he used to.

• 26:27Colin Brown?

  "No, but I mean, you know, every now and again, it is what it is."

• 26:31Courtney Brown?

  The call wound down, and they said their goodbyes. Jeannie sat with that conversation for a moment longer. She decided to let it go. It wasn't her place.

• 26:42Colin Brown?

  Miranda had made sure Andrew had someone nearby to call if he ever needed help with Lori. Daisy Garcia, Miranda's godmother, lived close by. Someone Miranda loved like a mother and trusted completely. "Call her if you need anything," Miranda had told him. "She's right there." But Andrew never called her, not once. There was also Brooklyn, Miranda's mother, Lori's grandmother. She had since moved back to Tallahassee and lived just a few streets away. At this point, Miranda and Brooklyn had fallen out badly. Miranda said it took her years to fully remember what Brooklyn had done to her as a child. The abuse, the men, the things she had been taught were normal. When it finally came back, her PTSD got significantly worse. And then a realization came that shook her to her core.

• 27:28Colin Brown?

  She had left her own daughter in that same woman's orbit. The person who was supposed to protect Miranda had been the one hurting her. She was adamant that Lori have no contact with her whatsoever. Andrew knew this, but Lori knew where her grandmother lived. And she would visit from time to time.

• 27:45Courtney Brown?

  In the fall of 2022, getting Lori enrolled in a new school in a new state took some time. Her records were back in Nashville, and getting them transferred wasn't simple. By the time it was all sorted out, Lori Paige walked through the doors of Griffin Middle School, three weeks behind her classmates. She didn't know anyone, she didn't have any friends. She had a backpack, a quiet determination, and nothing else. Throughout those first few weeks, she kept to herself. She rarely socialized with her classmates. Her neighbor Terry Smith noticed it right away. She wore baggy clothing, she hardly ever hung out with the neighborhood kids.

• 28:27Courtney Brown?

  She seemed, as Terry put it, "lost," like she wasn't comfortable in her own skin. But after a few months at school, Lori found her footing. Slowly, quietly, the way she did everything. It didn't take long for her teachers to notice her. Lori ran between classes so she wouldn't be late. If she made a low score on something, she was upset about it. If she misspelled a word on a writing assignment, she wanted to learn her mistake. At some point that school year, a large number of students failed a civics test. Lori made an A. Her teacher gave the class a chance to make it up with an extra credit report on the Bill of Rights.

• 29:09Courtney Brown?

  Lori had already passed, she didn't need to do the extra credit, but she did it anyway. The following morning, she walked into class with a trifold cardboard, covered in tiny soldiers, and little American flags lined across the top. Every inch of it deliberate and precise. Her teacher looked at her, then at the board, then back at Lori. "You know you can actually improve an A," the teacher said. Lori already knew that, she just wanted to do the assignment.

• 29:40Colin Brown?

  She loved art most of all. She had joined the Griffin Middle School Art Club, and her art teacher was one of the only adults at school she fully trusted, according to Andrew, the only one. Outside of class, she played basketball and soccer. She challenged the boys to foot races. She usually won. At home, she watched anime and YouTube videos and played Roblox. She maintained excellent grades and earned honor roll. She took detailed notes in science and civics while many of her classmates laughed and goofed off. But Lori was also starved for attention. She had grown up in households where the adults were largely absent, and the hunger showed up at Griffin in ways that concerned her teachers. She sought out adults. She lingered.

• 30:24Colin Brown?

  She had a much closer relationship with the teachers than with her peers. And at some point during her sixth grade year, that need for connection crossed a line. Lori developed what appeared to be a crush on one of her teachers, a man named Nathan George. She was openly flirtatious with him. She tried to hug him. Mr. George reported the behavior to the guidance counselor immediately, and Lori was called in, but she denied everything. But afterwards, she wrote Mr. George a note. It said, "Do you like me? Yes or no?" The school thought it would be best to remove her from Mr. George's class. The guidance counselor, Mr. Woods, spoke with her. He would later say that Lori was typically quiet,

• 31:06Colin Brown?

  but in the last months of sixth grade, she started to, in his words, "spaz out" on other students, especially as rumors spread about her behavior with the male teachers. She had been carrying so much for so long, and it was starting to show.

• 31:22Courtney Brown?

  In April of 2023, Andrew said that he had to take Lori's phone away from her. According to him, he caught her watching pornography. When he called and told Miranda about it, she said she wasn't surprised. "It wasn't the first time," she said. But without her phone, Lori had even less connection to the outside world. She had no way to reach her friends back in Nashville, no way to reach her mom, or anyone, really. And then one morning, something happened at the bus stop that several of the neighborhood kids would never forget. Lori was already there, waiting for the bus with the other kids. When Andrew appeared, he had a belt in his hand.

• 32:04Courtney Brown?

  He walked straight to her, pulled her off to the side, and in front of everyone, while still standing there, he whooped her with it. A boy named Aniston Kears was standing right there. He watched the whole thing. He didn't hear exactly what was said, but he didn't need to. And he wasn't the only one who noticed things weren't right. At some point during the middle of the school year, while a group of kids were standing at that same bus stop, Lori said something that caught everyone's attention. "I can't take this abuse," she said. Nobody said anything. Instead, the subject was changed. Lori had been trying to tell someone, but no one was listening.

• 32:46Colin Brown?

  Around the same time, Lori got into trouble for attempting to light a fire on the grass at the bus stop. Andrew would later tell investigators it was nothing serious, just a minor thing. She was a good kid. But the situation at home kept deteriorating. On May 8, 2023, on the bus ride after school, Lori told Donaldson Pierre that she wasn't going back home. He was a classmate. They rode the same bus. He had noticed things weren't right for a while. At the beginning of the school year, for example, he had seen a bruise on her lip. He never asked about it directly, though, but he still noticed. And over the months, Lori had said things, small things, that she wasn't happy at home, that things were bad, that she didn't know how much longer she could take it.

• 33:30Colin Brown?

  He didn't try to talk her out of it. "I live on Okala Road," he told her. "There's a pool behind my apartment building. Nobody goes back there at night. I can bring you food." It wasn't much, but it was something. And right now, something was everything. When the bus stopped, Lori got off with him, and she didn't go home. That night, Lori sat on a lounge chair by the pool at the complex on Okala Road, barely a five-minute walk from the home she was supposed to be in. The night was warm and still, just the sound of bugs and the distant hum of traffic on West Tennessee Street. Donaldson brought her food. They talked. She told him about the abuse, that she wanted to go live with her grandmother in Georgia, that she just needed to get out.

• 34:13Colin Brown?

  He listened to her, and he didn't tell anyone. Meanwhile, Andrew Wiley had come home from work and found the apartment empty. He reported Lori missing. Officers went to the school, to nearby parks, to the places she was known to frequent, but they couldn't find her.

• 34:28Courtney Brown?

  The next morning, May 9th, 2023. Lori walked through the doors of Griffin Middle School. She had no shoes on. She was in yesterday's clothing. And she felt for the first time in a long time, like she had done something. She'd actually done it. She had gotten out, spent the night somewhere else, somewhere safe. And on top of that, she even made it to school the next day, all on her own. Now, she just had to get through the day. At the time, Lori was determined to make it back to her mom in Tennessee. She wanted to find a way. But as Lori walked into middle school that morning, the other kids noticed her bare feet immediately. Of course they did.

• 35:12Courtney Brown?

  Comments were made, eyes went wide. Someone in her class laughed at her, but Lori brushed it off. She had bigger things on her mind. She found her seat, she took out her notebook, and she paid attention to the lesson. For a few hours that morning, sitting in her classroom with her bare feet on the floor, Lori Paige felt brave, because she was. And then, her name came over the intercom. She figured it was about the shoes. Maybe they'd send her to the lost and found, give her a pair of sneakers someone had left behind. No big deal. She gathered herself and walked out into the hallway, past the lockers, past the other kids who didn't look up.

• 35:54Courtney Brown?

  She pushed through the doors in the front office, and there was Andrew, her father. Lori stopped in her tracks. Her hand was still on the door. Her eyes went straight to him, and then to the ground. That feeling came over her, the one that told her to go still, go small, don't react. She stood there in the doorway for a moment, barefoot on the floor, in yesterday's clothes. The plan she had been building all morning dissolved in real time. She wasn't going back to her mom's, and she knew what was waiting for her back at that apartment. Now, she was going to go back home with her father, and there was nothing she could do about it. The staff member at the front desk smiled at her like it was any other morning.

• 36:40Courtney Brown?

  Andrew signed whatever he needed to sign. He then looked at her. "Let's go," he said coldly. Lori let go of the door, and she walked out of her school with her dad.

• 36:51Colin Brown?

  Police had called Miranda the night Lori went missing. They wanted to know if Lori was with her, but she wasn't. And then Lori turned up at school the next morning. Andrew picked her up and that was that, but Miranda was hundreds of miles away with no way to reach her directly. Andrew wasn't picking up the phone, Lori's phone was gone, and Miranda had no way to hear her voice. No way to know how she was really doing. A few days went by like that. And then Miranda decided to call the school herself. Once again, Lori's name came over the intercom. She looked up, the teacher looked at her, she got up from her desk and walked out into the hallway and down to the front office. The woman at the desk pointed to the phone. She picked it up.

• 37:32Courtney Brown?

  "Hey, baby, just wanted to check on you, make sure you were okay."

• 37:36Colin Brown?

  Lori didn't say anything.

• 37:37Courtney Brown?

  "Lori, you there?"

• 37:39Colin Brown?

  "Yeah," she told her mom.

• 37:41Courtney Brown?

  "I've been trying to reach you. I've been trying to get through to your dad and..."

• 37:45Colin Brown?

  "You never call," Lori said. Her voice came out smaller than she had intended. Miranda kept talking, she just wanted to hear her voice, make sure she was okay. But Lori wasn't really listening anymore. She was standing there with the phone pressed against her ear and her eyes on the floor. And something that had been sitting in her chest for months was pressing hard against her ribs and she couldn't make it stop. She said as little as she could. And when it was over, she handed the phone back and walked down the hallway and back to class and sat down. She didn't tell anyone what had happened. She just picked up her pencil and kept going.

• 38:20Courtney Brown?

  Andrew was home when she got back from school. He looked at her when she walked in. He could see it on her face. Something was off. Something happened. You okay? He asked. Lori set her bag down. She didn't look at him right away. And then she told him about the call from her mom. According to Andrew, Lori then said, quote, "I want to kill myself," end quote. The apartment went quiet, just the two of them standing there in that small space on Continental Court. Andrew said he didn't know what to say. He worked night shifts and left her alone in his apartment because he had no other choice. And now she was standing in front of him, telling him she wanted to die.

• 39:04Courtney Brown?

  Not knowing what else to do, he picked up the phone and called Miranda.

• 39:09Colin Brown?

  What did you say to her?

• 39:11Courtney Brown?

  Andrew's voice was tight, controlled, but not for long. What are you talking about? Miranda said.

• 39:18Colin Brown?

  She just told me she wants to kill herself. What did you say to her on that phone?

• 39:22Courtney Brown?

  I just called her to check on her. I just wanted to hear her voice.

• 39:26Colin Brown?

  You called the school, you pulled her out of class in front of everyone. She doesn't need that. She's already going through enough.

• 39:32Courtney Brown?

  I had no other way to reach her. You never pick up. And her phone is gone now. What was I supposed to do?

• 39:38Colin Brown?

  Andrew didn't have an answer for that. The weeks after that phone call were quiet. Lori went to school. She came home. She did what she always did. Kept her head down, kept to herself, kept going. No incidents, no runaways, just the ordinary rhythm of a child trying to get through her days. But Miranda still couldn't reach her. Andrew wasn't answering her calls. Lori still didn't have her phone back. Days turned into weeks, and the silence on the other end of the line was getting louder. She didn't know what was happening inside that apartment. She didn't know how Lori was doing. She didn't know if she was okay. The worry was turning into something else. Anger, frustration. She'd been shut out long enough.

• 40:22Colin Brown?

  At one point, she got a text from Andrew, in all caps. "Stop ruining your daughter's life. She does not want to go back and live with you. This convo is over. Do what you gotta do." Miranda's response was quiet and direct.

• 40:36Courtney Brown?

  You talk in capital letters, like you didn't rape a 16-year-old. But you're not ready to have that conversation.

• 40:43Colin Brown?

  Of course, Miranda was talking about how Andrew raped her when she was 16. The very rape that led her to get pregnant with Lori.

• 40:51Courtney Brown?

  Miranda knew deep down that something was going on with her daughter. She was so convinced of it, she decided to call the Tallahassee Police Department. It was May 25th, 2023. She asked them to do a welfare check on Lori. That day, officers arrived at 1229 Continental Court. They spoke to Andrew. They checked on Lori. Everything appeared to be fine. And so, they left. But Miranda was already on her way.

• 41:25Colin Brown?

  And now for a brief ad break.

• 41:42Colin Brown?

  Are you ready to have your mind blown? I want you now to imagine that in front of you was a locked door, symbolizing all that you know. Everything you've been taught in your time on Earth. The lies your government has fed you. With my podcast, The Conspiracy Files, I now give you the door's key. And, once you've listened to the show, you finally unlock this door and step inside. Beyond the door is another dimension. A dimension of false narratives. A dimension of hidden evidence. A dimension of truth, lies, and murders. You're moving into a land of both shadow and substance of deadly secrets and explosive ideas. You've just crossed over into the conspiracy zone. I'm your host, Colin Brown. Join me now on this journey into the world of secret pedophile rings,

• 42:25Colin Brown?

  government cover-ups, and suspicious suicides on my new show, The Conspiracy Files. Available now on all streaming platforms.

• 42:36Colin Brown?

  Anyways, y'all, let's get back to the show.

• 42:44Courtney Brown?

  She pulled up the Continental Court not long after the officers left. Andrew was there. Miranda had her iPad. And she was recording everything. When Lori saw her mother, she didn't move towards her. She didn't smile. She just looked at her. And what was on her face wasn't sadness. It was anger. The quiet, controlled kind that a child develops when they've been hurt too many times to cry anymore. "I just wanted to see you," Miranda said. "I just wanted to..." Lori cut her off. "You never call. You never come see me," she said. Miranda tried explaining that she had been trying to reach her, but Lori wasn't buying it.

• 43:27Courtney Brown?

  "You don't love me," she said to her mom. The words hit hard. Nobody moved. Miranda tried to explain herself again. She talked about the financial aid, the apartment, everything she had been dealing with. But Lori wasn't interested in her excuses. "That was almost a year ago," she told her mom. "You sent me here in August. It's May, and this is the first I'm seeing you." Miranda couldn't find the words. But Lori wasn't finished yet. "I don't feel loved," she said. "You're never going to bring me home. You don't care about me. You don't even want me." Things were said that couldn't be unsaid. Voices rose.

• 44:10Courtney Brown?

  Miranda felt that Andrew was trying to put a wedge between her and her daughter. At some point, during all the arguments, the police were called again. And this time, they removed Miranda from the property. From there, she got in her car and she left. Back inside the apartment, Lori went quiet. A different kind of quiet than usual, heavier. She started pacing back and forth around that small place. Andrew watched her. He would later tell investigators that after Miranda's visit, Lori was completely off. Like something in her had shut down. She told him her mother didn't love her, that she felt unloved and unwanted.

• 44:53Courtney Brown?

  Now, in the days surrounding this incident, Andrew actually took off from work. It was summertime now. Lori didn't have school to distract her. And after such a traumatizing event, perhaps he wanted to be home with her. But on June 2nd, 2023, a Friday, Andrew had an overnight shift. Before he left for work that night, he said that Lori had been sitting on the couch watching television. She seemed to be doing a lot better. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. So from there, he went to work. The following morning, June 3rd, he came home from work just after 10 a.m. School was out for the summer, so Lori should have been home.

• 45:37Courtney Brown?

  But as he walked around the house, he couldn't find her. Andrew would later say that he wasn't concerned right away. It was a Saturday morning. Maybe she just stepped out to play with the neighborhood kids. But something he did notice is that her rainbow backpack was gone. That's when Andrew decided to call the police. His voice was steady, a father worried about his little girl. He told them his 12-year-old daughter was missing. She was in the apartment when he left for work the night before, but when he came back, she was gone. He didn't know what she was wearing. He didn't know when she left because he was at work. But he did tell the officers that she had run away before, just a few weeks ago, in fact.

• 46:22Courtney Brown?

  However, that time, she had turned up at school the next day. Within minutes, officers arrived at 1229 Continental Court. It was 11:15 in the morning. Andrew let them in. He answered their questions. He allowed them to search the apartment for any signs of foul play. There were none. Everything looked normal, undisturbed. But inside, they found Lori's diary. And her own handwriting were the words, "It would be better off if I wasn't here." Seeing that, the officers started wondering if she was a runaway. But that afternoon, Lori Paige was entered into the National Missing Persons Database.

• 47:04Colin Brown?

  Immediately, investigators also set out trying to locate any family members who might have had contact with Lori or perhaps had her at their house. First, they went to Lori's grandmother's house, Brooklyn Page, who lived at 1332 Arkansas Street. But Brooklyn had not seen or heard from her granddaughter. They also looked into her mother, Miranda, since she had come to Tallahassee about a week earlier to see Lori. But she didn't have her either. And the news of Lori's disappearance completely broke her. The last interaction she had with Lori wasn't a good one. And now they're telling her that her daughter is missing. But in those early days, everyone was hoping that Lori was just at a friend's house, that she would turn up the next day like she had before.

• 47:47Colin Brown?

  But that next day came, and she was still gone. Then the next day, and the next. But still, investigators didn't think that there was any foul play. Lori was a 12-year-old with a history of running away. But she had no phone, no social media, no digital footprint to help track her down. They had tracked down her school-issued Chromebook, hoping for search history, messages, anything at all to help find where she could be, but over summer break, it had been reassigned to another student. Wiped clean and reset. Another dead end. Detective Anna Drake of the Tallahassee Police Department's Special Victims Unit was assigned to the case. A missing persons flyer went out almost immediately.

• 48:30Colin Brown?

  Lori Annalise Page, 12 years old, 5 feet tall, 120 pounds, shoulder-length black dreadlocks, brown eyes. She had taken her rainbow tie-dye JanSport backpack with her. If anyone had seen her, they were asked to call Tallahassee Police. Detective Drake was straightforward about where things stood. She told reporters, "Everything is pointing to that she ran away voluntarily, but voluntary or not, we're going to exhaust all options to locate her. Harboring a juvenile is a serious crime and can result in an arrest," Drake warned, but nobody came forward. Flyers went up. Officers canvassed the neighborhood. They checked the abandoned apartment on Okala Road where she had hidden before.

• 49:15Colin Brown?

  They checked Griffin Middle School. They checked the parks. They spoke to neighbors, classmates, anyone who might have seen her. Nothing. Investigators interviewed sex offenders in the area and looked at surveillance footage from nearby businesses, but it was hard to locate footage because they had no idea when Lori might have left Andrew's apartment. But people who knew Lori said she was afraid of the dark. She wouldn't walk outside alone at night. That detail sat with people who knew her. But day after day, Lori didn't come home. Soon enough, it had been two weeks since anyone had seen her. Margaret Summers, a paraprofessional at Griffin Middle School, had watched this girl run between classes so she wouldn't be late. She had told her she couldn't improve an A.

• 50:00Colin Brown?

  And now, it had been 14 days and she couldn't stay quiet anymore. She told reporters,

• 50:06Courtney Brown?

  I feel like after 14 days, there has to be at least one adult who has seen her or has an idea of where she may have gone. I'm hoping that if nothing else, Lori will come to the school. She knows she's safe there. She knows that people care about her there. And we're in summer school, so she can come there any day, Monday through Thursday.

• 50:26Colin Brown?

  Margaret was already thinking about what came next, about what Lori would need when she came home. She said,

• 50:32Courtney Brown?

  If we can find Lori, hopefully we can find her a mentor. So next time she faces struggles, she can talk to her mentor and not feel that she has to run away.

• 50:42Colin Brown?

  Margaret then looked into the camera and spoke directly to Lori herself.

• 50:47Courtney Brown?

  Lori, you're a great student and a great kid. And there's nothing you haven't done well enough. Just come back.

• 50:54Colin Brown?

  Around the same time, Summers reached out to Rudy Ferguson, a pastor and neighborhood advocate who helped organize community searches. Volunteers fanning out through the streets around Continental Court, through the parks, through the neighborhoods Lori had walked every day. Summers also went on Nancy Grace, sitting in front of a camera and telling the country about this little girl. The honor roll, the art club, the trifold cardboard board with the tiny soldiers. She wanted the world to know who Lori Paige was. She wanted someone, somewhere to recognize her, to find her and bring her home.

• 51:29Courtney Brown?

  Meanwhile, Lori's father Andrew was calling his ex-wife Jeannie just to talk, the way they did sometimes. He mentioned it, almost in passing.

• 51:40Colin Brown?

  My daughter ran away. I don't know where she's at.

• 51:42Courtney Brown?

  Jeannie asked how long she had been gone.

• 51:45Colin Brown?

  Oh, I don't know. Probably a couple of weeks now.

• 51:48Courtney Brown?

  A couple of weeks. Jeannie pressed him. Are you looking for her? Do you have any idea where she might be?

• 51:55Colin Brown?

  I know where she's at. She's on the wrong side of town. That's where she's at, where all her little friends hang out at.

• 52:01Courtney Brown?

  Jeannie waited for more, but there wasn't any.

• 52:04Colin Brown?

  I'm just tired. Her mom ain't shit. She just dumped her on me. I'm trying to get another job and I don't have time to be dealing with this.

• 52:12Courtney Brown?

  His 12-year-old daughter had been missing for two weeks, and he didn't have time to be dealing with it. Sadly, the weeks kept passing. Tallahassee police canvassed neighborhoods over and over. They checked the parks, the community centers, the bus stops. They put up flyers at hotels and motels and extended stay facilities across the city. They followed up on every tip that came in, but it never led anywhere. In Nashville, Miranda was not taking it nearly as calmly as Andrew. She was posting on social media every day. She was sharing Lori's flyer, reaching out to anyone who would listen. She wasn't convinced Lori had run away, not this time.

• 52:56Courtney Brown?

  This time, she feared something far worse, that Lori had been lured by a predator. Tallahassee had one of the highest rates of sex trafficking in Florida. That thought never left her. By July 11th, 2023, more than five weeks in, Margaret Summers, the employee at Griffin Middle School, still hadn't given up. She was still pushing, still talking to anyone with a camera. She wanted to keep Lori's name alive. She told reporters, quote, "I don't feel she's getting the attention she deserves. She's polite, studious, and has zero disciplinary issues," end quote. But sadly, there was still no movement in the case.

• 53:39Courtney Brown?

  Weeks turned into months with no sign of Lori. Soon enough, the summer ended. Schools started back up. Lori's seat at Griffin Middle School was empty. And it's during these months when Lori's classmates started to hear rumors. One student named Paris said that she overheard a group of kids discussing Lori being kidnapped, murdered, and placed into the back of a van. Back in sixth grade, Paris and Lori had second and sixth period together. Paris admitted that they were never close, but during the last few weeks of school, Paris said that Lori's personality changed. She would frequently put her head down on her desk. She stopped doing her schoolwork.

• 54:22Courtney Brown?

  Paris said it was unlike her. After this many months into her disappearance, the entire town of Tallahassee was talking about her. Many of them had the same questions. If Lori was a runaway, then where was she? And why hadn't she been seen after this many months?

• 54:42Colin Brown?

  In August, Andrew allowed detectives to come to the apartment and run a luminol test, the chemical that reacts to the presence of blood. They went through every inch of that apartment and found nothing. Months passed, fall became winter. And then in November 2023, five months after his daughter disappeared, Andrew Wiley quietly moved out of the apartment on Continental Court. He packed up his things and relocated to Thomasville, Georgia, a small town just thirty-five miles north of Tallahassee. He got a new phone number. He didn't tell investigators he was moving. He didn't ask anyone to forward his mail. He just left. His daughter was still missing. And he left.

• 55:26Colin Brown?

  On January 8th, 2024, seven months after Lori disappeared, Miranda posted a status on her Facebook page. "My baby is gone." A broken heart emoji. That was it. She deleted it almost immediately. But investigators had already seen it. They reached out to her. She told them she hadn't meant it the way it sounded. She meant Lori wasn't with her. She meant she missed her. But then she said something else. She told investigators that she knew in her soul that Lori was dead.

• 55:59Courtney Brown?

  On January 31st, 2024, investigators drove to Thomasville, Georgia. They knocked on Andrew Wiley's door. He let them in. They told him where things stood. With no sightings, no contact, no leads. The chances of Lori being found safe were not great. They watched his face as they said it. Andrew showed no emotion. And he was adamant that he had nothing to do with her disappearance. But he also offered no insight into where she might be.

• 56:33Speaker 05

  So here's, here's why we're here. Um, it's been six months. This fool walked out of your house with a bag and nothing else. Um, she's twelve years old and she hasn't heard from him in six months. Me and him were part of the homicide. You, I'm not telling you anything's happened to her, but it's gotten to the point now where probabilities are, are not in our favor. Yeah. And that's why we're here. So, um...

• 57:01Speaker 05

  You know, we kinda wanted to get our own perspective of everything. That's why we're asking you these questions again. Me and him don't believe the other thing is gonna do with you. You did not kill her, right? No. You would not, you would not want to. That's your daughter, right? Yeah. Okay.

• 57:15Courtney Brown?

  Andrew even told them that at his new apartment in Thomasville, he had even set up a bedroom for Lori for when she came back. He walked the officers down the hall, but what they saw was no bedroom at all. It was an office. There was a desk, a computer, but no bed, no dresser, none of Lori's belongings. Nothing at all that said a child had lived here or was expected to. When investigators asked Andrew why he moved away, he told them that he had already been planning to move to Georgia before Lori disappeared. This had always been the plan. The officers continued looking around the apartment. Are any of Lori's things here? Her hairbrush? A toothbrush?

• 58:00Courtney Brown?

  Anything with Lori's DNA on it? He didn't have either. I guess it all got thrown away in the move. Instead, he opened a bag and dumped some of her clothing on the floor. Shirts, pants, socks, underwear, all in a pile at their feet. Investigators crouched down and sorted through it. They took what hadn't been washed. Socks and underwear. It was all they had to work with. They drove back to Tallahassee with a bag of dirty laundry and nothing else.

• 58:32Speaker 05

  Do you have, do you have any of Lori's stuff still? Yeah, Lori's stuff's still in there.

• 58:39Speaker 05

  Anything like a toothbrush or anything? Not, nothing like that.

• 58:44Speaker 02

  Well, clothes are here.

• 58:46Speaker 05

  For clothes?

• 58:47Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, I mean, it's supposed to be her room, because she didn't have her room last time. So, we was trying to move into a bigger space.

• 58:55Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 58:56Speaker 04

  So, you were, you were already planning to move here?

• 58:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was already planning to move, because like I said, when I got Lori, I was just by myself. So.

• 59:05Speaker 05

  Where, uh, where's her clothes?

• 59:07Speaker 02

  My clothes is there. Yeah, so he used to use this in, in, in the old house. He had her own handkerchief. Yeah. So we used to put her clothes in the handkerchief and this. But once it moved, it was up there.

• 59:18Speaker 05

  Right.

• 59:20Colin Brown?

  On February 8th, over 50 officers fanned out over a five-square-mile radius from the apartment on Continental Court. Businesses, wooded areas, bodies of water, cadaver dogs moved through San Luis Park. One dog paused near the lake bridge. Not a full alert, just a flicker of interest. Investigators waded in and checked. There was nothing there. Five days later, on February 13th, the Leon County Sheriff's dive team searched the lake at San Luis Park. There was nothing there either. Detectives had been looking at everyone in Lori's life. Friends, neighbors, classmates, family members across three states. They traveled to Nashville to interview Miranda.

• 1:00:05Colin Brown?

  Three times over the course of the investigation, they had asked her for a DNA sample. Three times, she refused. But on the fourth ask, on February 15th, she finally agreed. They spoke to Latonya, too, Miranda's wife. She told them that as far as she could see, Lori had seemed happy in Tallahassee. She was a daddy's girl, that she had no issues there. But by this point, police were zeroing in. They had canvassed the neighborhood around Continental Court over and over. They had followed hundreds of leads. And through all of it, every lead, every interview, every dead end, one person kept landing at the center of it. The person who had last seen Lori, the person who had reported her missing, the person

• 1:00:50Colin Brown?

  who had allowed them to search his apartment, answered their questions calmly, and then quietly moved to another state while his daughter was still missing. Andrew Wiley.

• 1:01:00Courtney Brown?

  They pulled up his work records. His supervisor told detectives, she didn't even know Andrew had a daughter. He had never mentioned Lori once. Not her name, not her disappearance, not a single word. She did say that Andrew was a reliable employee. He showed up. But interestingly enough, there were a few days when he didn't come into work. One was the 27th of May, and the other was the 29th. Days before Lori disappeared. Andrew gave his boss no explanation, no reason on why he didn't show up for work. So on February 19th, Detective Megna contacted Andrew by phone.

• 1:01:42Courtney Brown?

  He asked him to come into the police station the following morning at 9:00 a.m. for an interview. Andrew agreed. He seemed cooperative, agreeable, no problem at all. But the next morning at 9:00 a.m., Andrew didn't show up. By 10:00 a.m., investigators learned he had driven from Thomasville to Tallahassee. But instead of coming to the police department, he went straight to Brooklyn Page's house, Lori's grandmother. Then from there, he went straight to his attorney's office.

• 1:02:14Colin Brown?

  While investigators waited for him, over 100 officers from the Tallahassee Police Department and Fire Department were fanning out across San Luis Park. The park sat just a mile from the apartment on Continental Court. Trails, woods, a lake, the kind of place you could lose something and never find it again. Investigators had already been back to that park again and again. This time, they did a full grid search. Each inch covered systematically. They found nothing. That same day, the Tallahassee Police Department and the FBI announced a $15,000 reward for any information leading to Lori's whereabouts. Billboards went up across Florida, Georgia, and Tennessee.

• 1:02:56Colin Brown?

  FBI Jacksonville Acting Special Agent in Charge Mark Dargis addressed the public directly. "The FBI will stop at nothing to protect kids," Dargis said. "We encourage everyone to keep an eye out for this young lady and help us bring her home." Nancy Grace had covered Lori's case once already during the summer search. That February, she brought it back to a national audience on Crime Stories.

• 1:03:20Courtney Brown?

  By 2:30 that afternoon, Andrew Wiley arrived at the station with his attorney by his side. The detectives had questions, a lot of them. Andrew sat down. He was calm. But this interview would be far more intense than any questioning he faced before. Andrew told detectives that he was still convinced Lori ran away. But as for why she ran away, he wasn't sure. He claimed things had been good at home. There were no disputes, no arguments. Any problems that Lori faced came from her mother, he told them. Andrew said that Miranda had been neglecting Lori her whole life. He said throughout Lori's entire childhood,

• 1:04:03Courtney Brown?

  Miranda would just drop her off with anyone and not take care of her. To Andrew, Lori likely ran away because she was still upset over seeing her mother.

• 1:04:14Speaker 03

  When it comes down to it, it's about a missing 12-year-old girl who hasn't been home in seven months. And making sure that we've done everything we can to find her.

• 1:04:33Speaker 03

  So, I mean, this is, this is a tough thing to do, especially with, with you. But did something happen to cause Lori to run away?

• 1:04:46Speaker 02

  In what sense?

• 1:04:47Speaker 03

  Any sense. An argument, a fight, discipline, anything that you haven't told us?

• 1:04:56Speaker 02

  No, I mean, from what I think, it was that argument with Miranda that kind of set it all off. On top of that, I mean, obviously she ran away because I can see her got in trouble again. And that's why she ran away the other time, so.

• 1:05:15Speaker 03

  And don't, don't think, don't think anyway about this at all. All right? I have to ask these questions. I would, I've asked everybody these questions. Do you know where Lori is now?

• 1:05:29Speaker 02

  No, I do not.

• 1:05:30Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:05:31Speaker 02

  No, I do not, and if I did tell. I know.

• 1:05:35Courtney Brown?

  But again, he was adamant that he had nothing to do with her disappearance. Now it's here, where investigators brought up his work records. "We noticed you didn't go to work on these two days," they said. "It's around the time Lori went missing. Do you remember calling out?" Andrew had no recollection. They continued pressing him. "By looking at your records, you hardly ever call out of work. Was there something that happened at home that would have caused that?" But again, Andrew said no. So they moved on. They asked him about the day before Lori was reported missing. "Did you leave town at all?" they asked him.

• 1:06:14Colin Brown?

  I don't know. I can't remember.

• 1:06:16Courtney Brown?

  But investigators already knew the answer to this question. Andrew's car was spotted at the Jacksonville airport the day before Lori was reported missing. So they asked him. "Was there any reason you would go to Jacksonville?" Andrew paused.

• 1:06:32Colin Brown?

  Jacksonville? Not that I can recall.

• 1:06:35Courtney Brown?

  Well, it looks like you went to Jacksonville that day, just before you went to work. Do you remember that?

• 1:06:41Colin Brown?

  Oh, yeah. I do remember that.

• 1:06:44Courtney Brown?

  What was that for?

• 1:06:46Colin Brown?

  I was dropping off a friend at the airport.

• 1:06:48Courtney Brown?

  Who's your friend?

• 1:06:50Colin Brown?

  Tim Brown.

• 1:06:51Courtney Brown?

  Do you have his phone number?

• 1:06:53Colin Brown?

  Not on this phone.

• 1:06:54Courtney Brown?

  Next, investigators asked if Lori had any access to any other cellphones or computers that were in his house prior to her disappearance. Andrew admitted that he did have multiple phones and computers that Lori sometimes used. He even agreed to hand the computer over at the request of his attorney. However, he would later change his mind, citing an invasion of privacy. As for his friend, Tim Brown, the one he said he took to the airport, it turns out there was no one by that name listed in Andrew's cellphone. To investigators, it appeared as if Tim Brown was made up.

• 1:07:33Courtney Brown?

  But from here, Andrew walked out of the police station with his attorney and drove back to Thomasville. However, the detectives weren't done just yet. Not even close.

• 1:07:44Colin Brown?

  On February 23rd, detectives met up with Andrew's brother Antoine to drop off additional missing persons flyers. During that conversation, Antoine told them something that hadn't come up before. He said that in the months before Lori disappeared, Andrew had been talking about how he wanted to send Lori back to her mother. He was done with it, but Antoine had talked him out of it. A couple days after their conversation with Antoine, investigators moved in. Two teams, two locations simultaneously. The first team drove to Jefferson Correctional Facility in Monticello, Florida, where Andrew was working his overnight shift. They had a search warrant for his vehicle. His white Dodge Charger was sitting in the parking lot.

• 1:08:27Colin Brown?

  Detective Magna walked up to Andrew and explained why they were there. Andrew looked at the warrant, he looked at his car. "Do your thing," he said. He laughed even. "Okey dokey," he told them. After that, he called his brother. Then he climbed into a coworker's car and left.

• 1:08:45Courtney Brown?

  The second team was already at Andrew's apartment in Thomasville, Georgia. They were executing a search warrant with the help of local police. Inside, they found three shopping bags containing the pieces of a single dismantled cellphone. They found two iPhones that had been factory reset, completely wiped clean. They also found a Dell laptop and some notebooks, torn papers pulled from a trash can, and a hard drive. Andrew had spent a considerable amount of time trying to make sure there was nothing left to find. He arrived back at his house while the search was underway. Detectives stood outside with him while his apartment was processed. He looked around at what was happening.

• 1:09:29Courtney Brown?

  They'd untucked my baby, he said laughing. He was talking about his car. This is great, he said. I love it.

• 1:09:37Colin Brown?

  Meanwhile, the Dodge Charger was being towed to a forensics facility for processing. When the team got inside, they found more. A loaded Ruger SR45 firearm with a round already chambered. A Ziploc bag containing ammunition, with Andrew's correctional officer name tag sitting right inside of it. They also found three paper maps of San Luis Park, the same park investigators had just searched inch by inch the week before. They found twenty of Lori's missing persons flyers stuffed under the passenger seat. A bottle of cleaning fluid, almost full, with a label that specifically advertised its ability to remove blood. They also found a receipt, small, folded up and easy to miss. One of the investigators picked it up and smoothed it out.

• 1:10:23Colin Brown?

  It was a receipt from Goodwill, 2734 Capital Circle. The purchase: a laptop computer. He had just purchased the computer the day before. When they showed up at his house to take it in, Andrew had handed it over without protest. "Okey dokey, do your thing," he said, laughing. Detectives went to Goodwill and pulled up the security footage. In it, Andrew walks into the store empty-handed. He walks out with the laptop he bought off the shelf. The original computer, the one that had actually been sitting in that apartment, the one Lori had used, the one that contained two years of whatever Andrew had been doing, was gone. Whatever he had done with it, it was never found.

• 1:11:05Colin Brown?

  And the one sitting in the evidence bag right now was a forty-dollar decoy from a thrift store. Investigators theorized that he had known they were coming with a warrant. He'd gotten rid of everything he needed to get rid of. But the computer wasn't the only thing that could tell the story.

• 1:11:21Courtney Brown?

  During the surge of Andrew's car, they noticed that his floor mats were missing. Upon seeing it, the investigators looked at each other. Then, they reached for the luminol. The canister hissed softly as the luminol misted across the front passenger carpet. It was quiet, the kind of quiet where you can hear your own breathing. The technician moved slowly, methodically, covering every inch of the carpet. The lower interior door, the door jamb. And then the glow appeared, blue-white, unmistakable, spreading across the front passenger carpet, like something that had been waiting a long time to be seen. Luminol doesn't lie.

• 1:12:06Courtney Brown?

  It reacts to the presence of blood, blood that the naked eye can no longer detect. Someone had tried very hard to clean that carpet. The missing floor mats, the bottle of blood-removing cleaning fluid, sitting right there in the car. Someone had worked on this, but it wasn't enough. The carpet was cut out and sent to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement Crime Lab. By this point, they already knew that Andrew Wiley murdered his daughter. But now, there was no doubt in their mind. However, they couldn't make an arrest just yet. They didn't even have confirmation that the blood was Lori's. So in the meantime, as they waited for the results, investigators went wider.

• 1:12:50Courtney Brown?

  They got warrants for Andrew's bank records, his credit cards, every financial transaction attached to his name, going back through the spring of 2023. And eventually, the story of what happened started to become clear. Throughout most of their investigation, they knew that Andrew was likely responsible. But one thing they couldn't figure out was why. What motive did he have to murder his daughter? Well, they were about to find out. With any investigation, you look at the victim's whereabouts on the day they disappeared. In Lori's case, Andrew reported her missing on June 3rd. But as detectives started looking into things,

• 1:13:33Courtney Brown?

  they actually found that Lori hadn't been seen for several days before that. In fact, June 1st was the last time anyone had seen her alive. So detectives started following Andrew's whereabouts during that time. As they did, they saw something that made their stomachs drop. On May 31st, 2023, the day before Lori was last seen, Andrew drove to an urgent care on North Monroe Street. He paid $30 for a visit. Now, what was Andrew being treated for, you ask? Investigators would later learn that he was being treated for a sexually transmitted disease.

• 1:14:13Courtney Brown?

  However, when the doctor tried to examine him, Andrew refused. According to state attorney Jack Campbell, he believed that Andrew wasn't there to treat himself. He was there to get medication to bring home to someone else. Someone who couldn't come in herself. Someone whose symptoms would raise questions no doctor would leave unanswered.

• 1:14:37Colin Brown?

  Now, STDs like chlamydia and gonorrhea can sometimes be completely asymptomatic. Some people who have them never develop any symptoms and have no idea they're infected. But the person they pass it to may not be so lucky. They may develop symptoms while the person who gave it to them never did. Following his trail that day, investigators said he went from an urgent care to a Publix pharmacy. He paid $42.95. He had also purchased a generic form of Plan B, a morning-after pill taken to prevent pregnancy after unprotected sex. No prescription required. You walk in, you pick it up off the shelf, you pay for it, and you leave. Now, at the time, Andrew's girlfriend Simone Robinson

• 1:15:21Colin Brown?

  was at Fort Polk in Louisiana for National Guard training. She'd been there for weeks. She hadn't been anywhere near Tallahassee.

• 1:15:30Courtney Brown?

  The only other person in that apartment was Lori. From what we could find, Andrew didn't have any other sexual partners, which led investigators to the unthinkable. After finding all of this, they believed that 12-year-old Lori was being sexually abused by her father, which would explain the change in her personality shortly before her disappearance. It would explain why Andrew was trying to distance Lori from her mother. Investigators theorized that while Andrew was abusing Lori, he might have given her an STD. In the days before her disappearance, he was trying to get rid of it, which is why he went to the doctor.

• 1:16:11Courtney Brown?

  He was also likely trying to give her a plan B to stop her from getting pregnant with his baby. But what happened? Did Lori threaten to tell someone about the abuse? Is that why Andrew killed her? Investigators had another theory. What if Lori was already pregnant? That plan B wouldn't have worked. And once someone is pregnant, that's it. You really only have two options. Have the baby, or get an abortion. But both of those options wouldn't have worked out well for Andrew Wiley. When a pregnant 12-year-old comes into any clinic, the doctors are required to ask questions. Soon after that, they'll figure out who the father is.

• 1:16:55Courtney Brown?

  And it would only be a matter of time until they found out it was him. Lori's own father. Investigators believe that it's likely, after Andrew found out his daughter was pregnant, he decided to kill her to avoid prison time. Now, how he killed her, they didn't know. But they did figure it was violent, considering all the blood found in Andrew's car.

• 1:17:19Colin Brown?

  Investigators believe that Andrew Wiley killed Lori on June 1st, 2023. Then the following day, he got rid of her body. But where did he take her? They figured that looking through Andrew's electronics might hold more answers. But Andrew had done what he could to make sure the phones would tell no story at all. One, he had taken apart completely. He disassembled it into pieces and stuffed it into shopping bags. Two others, he had factory reset, the standard method most people use when they want to wipe a device clean. To the average person, a factory reset means the data is gone. What Andrew didn't account for is that to a forensic examiner, it isn't.

• 1:18:00Colin Brown?

  Law enforcement forensic tools can reach into a reset device and pull back data that the reset process left behind. Fragments, traces, things that were supposed to be gone, but aren't. Through their search, they discovered some internet searches on one of Andrew's phones. One search was made June 1st, 2023, the day police believed Lori had been killed. Andrew had searched for remote areas in Alabama and Georgia, bodies of water in those areas, driving directions to these locations. He had searched for bad neighborhoods in Tallahassee. He had searched Appalachian National Forest dead body, and he had searched where do police

• 1:18:40Colin Brown?

  look to find missing kids? He was looking for somewhere to put her, and he was making sure he'd know where not to put her as well. Following Andrew's movements, they saw that on June 2nd, 2023, the day before he reported her missing, Andrew was very busy that morning. At 4:34 a.m., while it was still dark, his phone left the residence. It traveled through Frenchtown, through East Tallahassee, through Monticello. It crossed into Jefferson County. It kept going north into Georgia, and eventually it turned down a rural road. And then at 7:01 a.m.,

• 1:19:18Colin Brown?

  the phone went silent. No ping, no location, nothing. And when it reappeared, it was in a field, 800 feet off the roadway, near Mitchell Road in Thomas County, Georgia. The phone stayed dark for a stretch of time. Investigators theorized that Lori's body at that point was sitting in his car bleeding out as he frantically searched for a place to dump her. Once he found a good spot, he tossed her body out in the wilderness and then took off again. It's here where his phone came back to life and headed south, back through Georgia, back into Florida, back to

• 1:19:57Colin Brown?

  A license plate reader captured Andrew's white Dodge Charger heading back to Georgia at 8:28 a.m. Then, just before 9:30 a.m., his phone began moving again. He drove all over, east, then south, back toward the residence, then east again, then north. Finally, he was back home by 10:14 a.m. The phone was restless, moving in patterns that didn't make sense for a man who was supposed to be at home.

• 1:20:23Courtney Brown?

  About an hour later, Andrew left the residence and headed east towards Jacksonville. His phone records show that he stopped by the Jacksonville Airport. Now, if you remember, Andrew told investigators that he went to the airport that day to drop off his friend, Tim Brown. But there was no Tim Brown. As it turns out, Andrew wasn't dropping anyone off at the airport. Instead, he was booking himself a one-way flight out of the country. He paid $150.70. It was a Delta flight from Jacksonville to San Juan, Puerto Rico. It was scheduled for the next day, June 3rd. But when it was time to leave for that flight, Andrew didn't go.

• 1:21:06Courtney Brown?

  Perhaps he knew that leaving the country wouldn't look very good once people realized his daughter was missing. So instead, he stayed home. He cleaned out his car. He destroyed his electronic devices. On June 2nd, he even clocked in to his overnight shift at work. Then, on the morning of June 3rd, as that flight took off for San Juan, Andrew Wiley came home and called the police to report his daughter missing. Interestingly enough, after reporting Lori missing, Andrew tried to get a refund on that one-way ticket he bought to Puerto Rico. He was denied. Now, as investigators are figuring all of this out, they get a call from the crime lab.

• 1:21:49Courtney Brown?

  It's here where they learn that the blood found in Andrew's car was indeed a match to Lori Paige. Andrew had been driving around for eight months with his daughter's blood soaked into the floor of his car. He had cleaned it. He had removed the mats. He had bought a special cleaning fluid, designed to eliminate exactly this kind of evidence. And from then on, he kept driving, to work, to the grocery store, through the streets of Thomasville, Georgia, for eight whole months. Now, one would think that finding all of Lori's blood in his car would lead to an arrest, but it didn't. They still needed to find Lori's body.

• 1:22:31Colin Brown?

  Following Andrew's movements on the morning of June 2nd, they found a remote, heavily brush-covered area, a plantation. Locals knew it as Merrily Plantation, and they went there. Believe it or not, they had searched this area before. The first time, the brush was years deep, dense and low and tangled. You could walk within feet of something and never see it. They searched what they could reach, and searched it again. They came back with dogs. The dogs moved through the undergrowth and found nothing they could confirm. One area drew a flicker of interest, not an alert, just attention, and then that too went quiet. They marked it. They kept coming back. And every time,

• 1:23:14Colin Brown?

  the plantation gave them nothing. Months passed. The searches continued. And then, in the spring of 2025, land managers conducted a prescribed burn at Merrily Plantation. When investigators heard about the burn, they reached out to the Thomas County Sheriff's Office. They were going back out to the plantation. It's April 5th, 2025, in South Georgia. The air is still. The prescribed burn has done its work. The thick brush that had covered Merrily Plantation for years is gone, burned away, leaving nothing but flat, blackened earth stretching out in every direction. The ground is open in a way it

• 1:23:55Colin Brown?

  hasn't been in a long time. You can see it now, all of it. A small team moves across the clearing.

• 1:24:02Courtney Brown?

  Some of them had been here before. They knew these coordinates. They knew what the phone data said. They know that somewhere in this field, somewhere within a few hundred feet of where they are standing, a phone went dark on the morning of June 2nd, 2023. It was right here, 800 feet off the roadway. The cadaver dog's name is Kairos. He belonged to the North Florida search team. That day, he moved through the field the way dogs like him always do. Methodically, nose low to the ground, working in careful overlapping passes. His owner follows a few steps behind, watching him, reading the small shifts in

• 1:24:45Courtney Brown?

  his body language that most people would never notice. The investigators are there too. Nobody's talking. There's nothing much to say. They've all been here before. They all know how these days usually end. However, they're hopeful that today will be different. The field is quiet. Kairos keeps working. He's sniffing all along the burned field. And then he stops, completely still, nose down, right there in the dirt. His owner watches him for a moment. Kairos signals that he's found something. One of the investigators steps forward. They crouch down and look at what the dog has found. And there, just

• 1:25:28Courtney Brown?

  beneath the surface of the cleared and blackened ground, in a field 800 feet off Mitchell Road, are bones. Small bones. A child's bones. Nobody speaks. They already knew whose bones they were. They just needed her to be found. On April 8th, 2025, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement positively identified the remains as those of Lori Annalise Page. Only two bones were returned to Tallahassee, but that was all it took. They finally had what they needed. Several days later, on April 11th, 2025, three days before Lori's 14th birthday, Andrew Lamal Wiley was arrested and charged with second-degree murder.

• 1:26:14Colin Brown?

  Under Florida law, second-degree murder means killing someone without premeditation. Not planned, not calculated, a killing that happens in the heat of something. The charge reflected what prosecutors believed at that moment. That whatever happened inside that apartment on June 1st, 2023, had not been planned in advance, that it had been triggered by something. State Attorney Jack Campbell would later say it was possible Lori's death was a crime of passion, that Andrew may have realized he could not cover up what he had done to her, that she was a 12-year-old girl who was sick, who might be pregnant, and who could tell someone.

• 1:26:52Speaker 05

  Um, do you have any weapons on you? No. Mind if I touch it down? You think you're my mother? Oh, shit.

• 1:27:04Speaker 05

  Put your hand on your back.

• 1:27:21Speaker 05

  You know why we're here, right?

• 1:27:33Speaker 05

  We're gonna head up to the station, we're gonna have a chat. Okay.

• 1:27:39Speaker 05

  You ready? Come on, yeah.

• 1:27:54Speaker 05

  Falls, wallet falling in here. That falls, that's it. Where are you working?

• 1:28:06Speaker 05

  Uh, we're walking, just have a sit in crime. Yeah, right, come on.

• 1:28:22Speaker 05

  We need to make a big show of this. Alright.

• 1:28:56Colin Brown?

  Margaret Summers, Lori's teacher, found out that morning when a friend called her. Andrew Wiley had been arrested. Lori had been found. "I just couldn't believe it," she said. "It was a shock to me." She thought about all the times she had met with Andrew over these 22 months, offering support, telling him that they were going to speak up for Lori, that they would never give up. She had hugged him. She had meant every word. "I thought I was giving him comforting words," she said, "and now I'm only imagining what he was thinking." Later that day, the Tallahassee Police Department held a press conference. The rotunda was packed: law enforcement, community members, Pastor Rudy Ferguson,

• 1:29:39Colin Brown?

  who had organized search after search, who had stood in front of cameras month after month refusing to let people forget her name, people who had spent nearly two years looking for this little girl. Chief Lawrence Revelle stepped to the podium. "I told you two years ago we would find Lori and we would bring her home," he said. "I told you two years ago that we would find who did this and we would arrest them and bring them to justice. And today, I stand before you to tell you we have done just that." He paused. "This case has deeply impacted our community for nearly two years. Lori deserved a safe home and a full life. While today's arrest will never bring her back, it does bring us one step closer to justice."

• 1:30:23Colin Brown?

  Pastor Rudy Ferguson spoke outside when it was over. While this was the grim news we were hoping we didn't get, on the other side of that, we're grateful that we do have this information. It brings some sense of closure, but it also reminds us that there's work to be done in the community to safeguard our children, to protect them, to love on them.

• 1:30:45Courtney Brown?

  On Sunday, April 13th, a candlelight vigil was held at a park in town for Lori Paige. The community that had searched for her, posted flyers for her, and driven her face across three state lines on billboards, came out one more time. Not to look for her now, just to remember her. Nine days later, they did it again. On April 22nd, the community filled Bethel AME Church to remember Lori. About 100 people showed up: community members, local leaders, teachers and staff from Griffin Middle School, people who had never met Lori but felt like they knew her through the flyers, the billboards, the searches, the 22 months of refusing to let her name disappear.

• 1:31:30Courtney Brown?

  No members of her family were in attendance, but her mother Miranda sent a message. Ashley Leland, one of the service organizers, read it aloud. It said, quote, "Lori's life was a testament to love, a resilience to ripple through the hearts of those who knew her. In the face of tragedy, our community stands united, not only in our grief, but in hope. We honor Lori by carrying forward her light, choosing compassion over despair, and holding each other with the same warmth that she gave to us so freely," end quote. Stephanie Tolbert, a teacher at Griffin, also stood up and spoke.

• 1:32:10Courtney Brown?

  She said, quote, "It's devastating to Griffin to know that we've lost such a sweet soul, but I'm not here to mourn her death. I'm here to celebrate her life and what we remember. She's smiling to be celebrated, to know so many people loved her," end quote.

• 1:32:27Colin Brown?

  Margaret Summers said she hoped Lori's story would become a turning point. "I would like to see that be the legacy," she said, "that we all spend more time focused on the kids in our community." Rudy Ferguson spoke about what Lori's case had become for him personally. "We must do better," he said. "We want the community to know that one child matters, no matter their color, what side of town they live on, or even financial status." "Getting back to that sense of 'your child is my child,' 'you live in my community,' 'you live next door to me,' 'so we are a community, we are neighbors, and we need to operate as a neighborhood." A community member named Patty Wilson, who had been involved in the searches from the beginning, put it simply:

• 1:33:12Colin Brown?

  "I have pierced sadness for that child," she said. She said everyone has abandoned me, and she was right.

• 1:33:20Speaker 06

  Tallahassee remembered Lori Paige Tuesday evening.

• 1:33:23Speaker 07

  She ran from class to class just to be sure she was never tardy. She was attentive and tried to get every answer correct.

• 1:33:31Speaker 06

  As the community filled Bethel AME Church to celebrate the dedicated, passionate, and caring former middle school student.

• 1:33:39Speaker 05

  We are proud to say she was indeed a tiger.

• 1:33:45Speaker 06

  Those who knew Lori personally, and even those who didn't, but feel like they did, through the 22-month-long search effort for Page, including Stephanie Tolbert, a teacher at Griffin.

• 1:33:56Speaker 08

  It's devastating to Griffin to know that we've lost such a sweet soul. So I'm not here merely to mourn her death, but to celebrate her life.

• 1:34:07Speaker 06

  And those memories were shared in abundance Tuesday, especially by Margie Summers, who spearheaded the search efforts for Lori.

• 1:34:15Speaker 07

  That's the best feeling that I've had maybe since she went missing. And for all the people that came out and said that she mattered, that was really satisfying.

• 1:34:27Speaker 06

  One of the key takeaways from the memorial was how the community wants Lori's story to live on, and to also be the foundation of the next efforts to protect Tallahassee's children. I think if I see another kid like that...

• 1:34:41Speaker 07

  I'll realize that if this kid needs me to be proud of her that much, maybe she needs me to have a conversation with her too.

• 1:34:48Speaker 06

  But these teachers telling me they know Lori is looking down on this community with love.

• 1:34:53Speaker 08

  She's smiling. She's smiling to be celebrated, to know that so many people loved her.

• 1:34:59Speaker 06

  Definitely not many dry eyes at Bethel AME. Our hearts are with those grieving a life over far too soon.

• 1:35:07Courtney Brown?

  For the first time in 22 months, they had some answers. Throughout everything they found, investigators were confident that Andrew Wiley was her killer. And soon enough, he was going to have to sit in a courtroom and answer for what he had done. The community that had searched for her, the teachers who had loved her, her mother, they were all going to watch that happen. And then they weren't. On June 19th, 2025, at 5:36 PM, Andrew Lamal Wiley died at the Leon County Detention Center. He was 36 years old. The cause of death was a pulmonary embolism, a blood clot in his lungs.

• 1:35:51Courtney Brown?

  Andrew's death was sudden, without warning, and natural. He died just 69 days after his arrest.

• 1:35:58Speaker 09

  Thank you for joining us here at 6 o'clock tonight. I'm Jacob Murphy. Julie is off this evening. Tonight, an investigation underway after a man accused of killing his daughter dies while in the Leon County Jail. Andrew Wiley died after a medical emergency last night, according to LCSO. Just two months ago, the sheriff's office announced his arrest, sharing the shocking news they had discovered the remains of his daughter Lori Paige in South Georgia. Page had been presumed missing for almost two years, with billboards, signs, and search parties working to find her. Wiley was at the Leon County Jail, charged in Lori Paige's murder, awaiting trial when he died. Our capital city correspondent Matt Hoffman joins us now from the jail. And Matt, you were there yesterday when you noticed something was off.

• 1:36:42Speaker 10

  Yes, we were here for an unrelated story when we saw literally just past those gates, multiple fire trucks. That was a bit unusual, but there are some 1,000 detainees at any given time. When we asked, though, we learned of a surprising end to a long-running case. Police say Andrew Wiley killed his daughter Lori Paige and dumped her remains at a plantation in rural Georgia. He'll never face those allegations in court, though, after he died from a pulmonary embolism while at the Leon County Detention Facility, according to a preliminary autopsy report provided by the Leon County Sheriff's Office.

• 1:37:25Speaker 10

  Here's Margie Summers, a longtime paraprofessional and advocate for Lori Paige.

• 1:37:31Speaker 07

  And there should be people crying in front of the media and begging for her return, and nothing's happening.

• 1:37:37Speaker 10

  Authorities say Wiley's death was natural. His brother, Antoine Wiley, said he maintained his innocence until his death. Summers isn't buying it. For a long time, she didn't believe Paige's father was the one who killed her, but she does now.

• 1:37:56Speaker 07

  I've tried to think of how else his pain could be in the exact place of her bones, and I have not been able to come up with one.

• 1:38:06Speaker 10

  Summers said she met with Andrew Wiley on multiple occasions. While police say Paige was already dead, she didn't know that at the time, and she encouraged Andrew Wiley to speak out. Looking back, she believes his behavior was suspicious.

• 1:38:23Speaker 07

  One of the times I met him was like months after she'd been missing, and I said, "We're still looking, we're never gonna give up." And he met us at one of the searches, and I was like, "We're still looking." And I thought I was comforting him. He was probably thinking, "Lady, please stop." But I never... I... I didn't think it was him.

• 1:38:45Speaker 10

  Summer says justice has been served, but she also says Wiley's death leaves many unanswered questions.

• 1:38:53Colin Brown?

  He never went to trial. His brother Antoine had told the media that Andrew intended to represent himself, that he believed he could stand up in that courtroom and talk his way out of it. The same way he talked his way through every interview, every search warrant, every knock on his door. He would never answer for what he did to Lori. Not in a courtroom, not under oath, not in front of her mother or her grandmother, or the community that had spent two years searching for her. He was gone before any of that could happen. State attorney Jack Campbell spoke publicly after Andrew's death. He said the evidence against Wiley had been strong.

• 1:39:34Colin Brown?

  He said, "The biggest evidence in the case was his phone leading us to this plantation where her body was eventually found, which doesn't really make sense that he would be there at that time in that area, other than him disposing of her body."

• 1:39:48Courtney Brown?

  And then Campbell said something else, something that had been in the probable cause affidavit, in a carefully chosen language. Evidence suggesting abuse of a sexual nature. Up until this point, they had never talked about that, but there it was. State attorney Campbell told the public that Andrew Wiley had likely murdered his daughter after sexually assaulting her, and possibly impregnating her. Campbell said, quote, "We know that we unfortunately deal every year with sexual abuse, where people do impregnate children, and even their own children. If he had gotten her pregnant, if he had given her a venereal disease, those would be hard things to explain," end quote.

• 1:40:33Courtney Brown?

  But the evidence was all right there. The urgent care visit, the plan B, the two sick days Andrew took with no explanation, the refusal to let the doctor examine him. When the community heard all of this, they were even more devastated than before. But they still didn't have all the answers. After all, only two of Lori's bones were found. Without the rest of her body, investigators couldn't definitively determine exactly what happened to Lori. They couldn't prove how she was murdered, or why. For the last few months, they'd been putting together a theory that Andrew impregnated his 12-year-old daughter. But without finding the rest of her, they couldn't prove that.

• 1:41:14Colin Brown?

  Campbell said there was no way to know for certain what Lori's final hours looked like. That uncertainty, not knowing exactly what happened inside that apartment on June 1st, 2023, was part of why Andrew's arrest hadn't come sooner. That, and the possibility that Lori had been taken by a trafficker rather than killed by her father. They hadn't been able to rule it out completely, not until the bones were found. But Campbell said he was not closing the case entirely. If new information develops, the door remains open. The community of Tallahassee is still hopeful that they'll find the rest of Lori's remains. It's unclear exactly what happened to them. It's possible that they were scavenged by animals. It's also possible that Andrew Wiley moved them.

• 1:41:59Colin Brown?

  But with his death, any answers of what happened to Lori, or the rest of her remains, went to the grave with him.

• 1:42:08Courtney Brown?

  This case is heartbreaking in every sense. Lori Annalise Page was born on April 14th, 2011. And from the very beginning, she didn't have an easy life. For most of her childhood, she moved from home to home. There was a lot of change, a lot of abuse, and a lot of instability. More than anything, Lori just wanted to feel like she belonged. She wanted to stay in one place, and be surrounded by people who loved and supported her. But she didn't get that. Instead, she found herself in a new town, at a new school, where she didn't know anyone. The one person she did know, the one person that was supposed to protect her, did anything but.

• 1:42:51Courtney Brown?

  In the months before her death, she tried to speak out. She stood at a bus stop in the middle of everything that was happening to her, and she said out loud, "I can't take this abuse." But nothing happened. Her father, Andrew Wiley, continued abusing her. And not only did he likely get her pregnant, but as a result of his own sick actions, he killed her. Then he dumped her body in the wilderness like she was nothing. I wish there was justice in this case. I wish Andrew Wiley would face the consequences for the monstrous acts he committed against his daughter. But he didn't. And that's where this story comes to a tragic end. But Lori Paige was far more than what happened to her.

• 1:43:35Courtney Brown?

  She was a girl who taught herself to read before she was four. When she made an A, she did the extra credit anyway. She challenged boys to races at recess and usually won. She loved anime and Roblox and YouTube and art. She helped kids she barely knew with their math. She made honor roll in a city she hadn't chosen, in a school she started three weeks late, in a life that had given her almost nothing to work with.

• 1:44:05Colin Brown?

  Today, we will be making a donation to the RAIN, the Rape Abuse and Incest National Network, the largest anti-sexual violence organization in the United States. They work to support, prevent, and advocate for survivors of sexual assault.

• 1:44:21Colin Brown?

  Hey, everybody, it's Colin here. Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of Murder in America. Courtney and I have a great series planned that we are starting next week that we can't wait to dive into with you guys. And yeah, we just can't thank everybody enough for all of the support over the years. It's been an absolutely incredible journey here on the show, and we just can't thank each and every one of you who listen every week enough. If you want to help to support the show, please consider joining us on Patreon. On Patreon, you can get early, ad-free access to every single episode of the show. And you can also get access to an entire library of bonus episodes of the show. These are episodes that will never- Be posted on the main feed that feature Courtney and I, they sound exactly like the

• 1:45:05Colin Brown?

  episodes that you hear here on the main feed of the show, but they are exclusively on Patreon, or they will always be exclusively for Patreon members. In addition, don't forget to leave us a five star review wherever you listen to the show. We love reading those reviews from you guys. And follow us on Instagram at Murder in America to see photos from every case that we cover here on the show. Anyways, y'all, thank you for listening. Thanks for tuning in this week. I hope each and every one of you has an incredible weekend or week. Thanks again from Courtney and I both, and I'll catch y'all in the next one.