The parents of a 10-year-old girl who died in a nightmarish house fire and were arrested after two months on the run were “recluses” who never let anyone into the squalid home where their other four children were found living in their own filth, according to family.
William Linn McCue, 47, and Carina Wisniewski McCue, 38, of Loganville, Georgia, were found on the Appalachian Trail by the fugitive unit of the Gwinnett County Sheriff’s Office. They were taken into custody on Wednesday and have been charged with first-and second-degree cruelty to children and false imprisonment, court records state.
Authorities have been hunting the couple ever since they vanished in May after their 10-year-old daughter, Zoe, died in a fire at their home in April. When the blaze died down, investigators found the little girl’s remains in a makeshift bed in a bathtub in a windowless room.
The appalling circumstances of Zoe’s death were uncovered alongside what authorities described as “unsanitary and dangerous” living conditions to which the other four McCue children are also believed to have been subjected.
But Carina McCue’s father told The Daily Beast on Friday that his daughter and son-in-law worked hard to keep him away from the secrets they were allegedly hiding behind closed doors.
Police found that the toilets in the house didn’t work, and the septic tank was either full or inoperable. Instead, “improvised camping-style toilets” were found at the property. None of the showers or bathtubs appeared to work either, cops said, adding that some of the children didn’t know how to use toilet paper.
“There was evidence that the children were to not leave the home for years. There was evidence that the children were not given adequate food,” a social worker told a judge in court.
Timothy Wisniewski, a retiree who lives in Western New York, said in a telephone interview that his daughter and son-in-law never invited him inside their house when he came to visit them and his grandchildren. And although he and Carina kept in touch and spoke regularly before she was arrested, Wisniewski said he rarely got to see her—the last time being at Zoe’s funeral shortly after the deadly Easter Sunday blaze.
“They had five kids, obviously, and when I would go down to the Loganville area, I would be visiting old friends and stuff and I’d stay at their houses,” Wisniewski told The Daily Beast. “And I’d visit with my daughter, but I was never invited into the house. The last time I was… inside their house, prior to the fire—because I went there after the fire—was 2014 or 2015.”
After the fire on Easter Sunday, Zoe’s 15-year-old brother was found by authorities at a church in Rockdale County. They say he confessed to deliberately starting the blaze, and he was arrested on a range of charges, including murder. It’s unclear if those charges still stand. The three other siblings were taken into protective custody by the state.
“They were reclusive,” Wisniewski said on Friday, describing William and Carina. “There’s no doubt about that.”
Yet, Wisniewski claimed he never saw any obvious red flags or signs of trouble when it came to the children.
“Whenever I saw the kids and took them for ice cream and whatnot, they were always well-presented, clean,” he said. “Sometimes I didn’t see them for two years, but they were never unkempt and they were sociable in the way they acted with people… I had no reason to suspect they were being neglected at all. Otherwise, I would have said something [to authorities].”
When Gwinnett police issued warrants for William and Carina McCue’s arrest in early May, the pair went on the lam. Investigators tracked the couple to Cleveland, Georgia, before they were spotted at a motel in Lawrenceville. They were ultimately found on the Appalachian Trail near the picturesque alpine town of Helen, Gwinnett Sheriff’s Office spokesman Ashley Castiblanco said.
Wisniewski told The Daily Beast that he was “really surprised” when he heard his daughter was on the run with her husband. He said he had been down in Loganville to “support them burying my grandchild,” then couldn’t reach them again once he returned home.
“I told them I’d stick around as long as they needed me to,” he said, noting that the other four children had been placed in foster care after the fire.
Shortly before he was set to leave, Wisniewski said Carina told him that she and William had scheduled a supervised visitation with two of their kids. Eager to see them, Wisniewski said he asked Carina to speak to the case worker to see if he could come along.
That Friday, Carina told Wisniewski that the appointment had been postponed until the following week. But Wisniewski, whose father had recently died and had named him executor of his estate, had to get back to his life in New York, and said he’d return soon.
“I said, ‘Just give me a call,’ and I headed back home,” he said. “And that was the last time I talked to them.”
Wisniewski said he never much liked his son-in-law, who he described as “quick to upset” and having an “everybody’s-out-to-get-me-type attitude.”
There had been previous allegations of child abuse, a spokesman for the Gwinnett County Police Department told The Daily Beast.
According to state child protection records obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the first came in 2015, when a teacher reported a suspicious red mark on one of the McCue children’s faces. However, the case was later closed without any charges being filed.
The second allegation took place in 2019, when a concerned citizen called a child abuse hotline after spotting William McCue and four of his children walking through the woods in Tennessee. Police eventually took McCue into custody, but no further details were immediately available on Friday. Wisniewski said he drove from Chattanooga, Tennessee, where he was living at the time, to meet Carina in a different part of the state and picked up the kids, taking them back home to Georgia.
The couple filed for divorce twice, once in 2010 and once in 2019, according to court records. They later reconciled, with the judge ordering them to attend parenting seminars. Wisniewski said he’s “pissed” now that his daughter never went through with the split.
When he last saw them, Wisniewski advised the couple to get a lawyer immediately and start working on their defense, he said, offering any financial support they might need.
There was never any indication that the two were about to become fugitives when he saw them last, according to Wisniewski. When he found out, Wisniewski said he called the Gwinnett County Police Department right away but had no clue as to where they might have gone.
Wisniewski said he’s worried about his grandkids and has no way of contacting them while they’re in foster care, he said. There’s not much he can do right now for his daughter, and he still can’t fathom what led her to this point.
“I always thought Carina was a good person,” said Wisniewski. “She would always tell me how good she was doing. They were driving a Chevy Tahoe, fairly new, nice-looking vehicles, so I never thought they were having problems. And when I found out they didn’t have working plumbing, that just baffled the hell out of me because they could’ve always asked me for help. And she knew that.”