Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Man guilty in murder of girl, 4
Cold case from 1999 solved; Pilar’s body was never found
PUNTA GORDA – Even today, no one knows what happened to the body of little Pilar Rodriguez.
The talkative 4-year-old from Hollywood went to Punta Gorda in 1999 with her babysitter for a 2-week stay with the woman’s boyfriend. They never came back.
Melissa HardingJones told police her boyfriend, Keith Wilson, beat Pilar to death and got rid of the body. But there was no proof and no body, and the case went cold for years — until new evidence emerged and Wilson was charged.
Now, after an eight-day jury trial, Wilson, 46, faces the death penalty. A jury in Charlotte County convicted him Oct. 18 of second-degree murder. He is scheduled to be sentenced Dec. 4.
Jurors deliberated two hours in a case that took 18 years to bring to trial — including a decade when the case sat cold.
The saga began when Pilar’s father, Marco Rodri-
guez, gave Harding-Jones permission to take Pilar to Punta Gorda in February 1999. When they never returned, Rodriguez reported his child missing.
Harding-Jones apparently flew to Wisconsin instead of returning to South Florida. She told detectives she was at a medical appointment when Pilar disappeared from her boyfriend’s apartment. Then she changed her story.
Harding-Jones told authorities that Wilson had beaten the child severely. She died within days, she said, and Wilson took her body away in a trash bag, saying he would bury her.
More than 100 officers from 15 law enforcement agencies joined the hunt for the girl’s body, scouring hundreds of acres of woods and scrubland and a pond behind the apartments.
They found nothing. But soon after, tips led investigators to new evidence discovered at a man-made lake half a mile down the road from the sheriff’s headquarters. Mucky waters prevented divers from exploring the lake’s contents and Sheriff Richard Worch ordered the lake drained in November 1999.
As pumps sucked out an estimated 50 million gallons of lake water, three alligators were caught and split open, their insides scoured for human remains. Next, divers waded through the pools on the lake’s bottom, bagging clothing and blankets and any finds they believed might provide a link to Pilar.
At the end of the search, Worch called the evidence recovered at the lake “extremely promising” and for the first time named Wilson as the primary suspect. Yet, no one had found Pilar’s body, and the case remained unsolved for years.
In 2009, 10 years after Pilar disappeared, a relative of Wilson’s came forward with information that helped lead to Wilson’s arrest, according to the arrest report released in 2013. His stepfather told investigators that he saw a rolled-up pink blanket in the trunk of Wilson’s car with a child’s foot, the skin turned purple, sticking out.
Harding-Jones told investigators that Wilson did not want Pilar in his home, according to the report. Wilson made Pilar wear a dog collar and tied the leash to the bed frame, the report said. He would make her take cold showers and dry in the air, and he cut her hair short to make her look more like a boy, Harding-Jones told investigators.
On Feb. 12 or 13, 1999, an angry Wilson hit Pilar, causing her to fall and hit her head on the floor, the report said.
Wilson was arrested July 16, 2013, after Melissa Harding-Jones pleaded guilty to being an accessory after the fact. She faces up to 30 years in prison.