SC mother of dead children abandoned decades ago doesn’t admit guilt, but pleads guilty
The decades-long effort to hold someone accountable for dumping a days-old baby known as Julie Valentine in some woods in Greenville has come to an end.
The woman identified through DNA testing as her mother and another child also found dead pleaded guilty Thursday to two counts of unlawful conduct to a child and improperly disposing of remains.
It was an Alford plea, which means Brook Graham maintains her innocence but acknowledges the state has enough evidence to convict her.
Her attorney David Braghirol said the full story has not been told but will come out in a pre-sentencing report conducted by a probation officer. He said there is no doubt Graham is the mother, but both babies were born dead.
She was charged with murder and a number of other charges relating to child neglect in 2019.
An unlawful conduct charge carries a sentence up to 10 years in prison.
Graham was released on bond until sentencing.
The charges involved two babies found dead more than 30 years ago, a boy found in 1989 and a girl in 1990 who was officially identified as Baby Jane Doe but is known in Greenville County as Julie Valentine.
She was named for a victim witness coordinator who worked tirelessly to identify her after her body was found on the day before Valentine’s Day in 1990.
A man picking wildflowers for his wife found a Sears vacuum cleaner box holding a baby with a head full of black hair, who weighed 6 pounds and was 193/4 inches long. It was determined she was 3 days old when she died. An autopsy showed she had breathed.
Among the multiple avenues of investigation Greenville Police officers pursued was tracking who bought the vacuum cleaner. Two names could not be ruled out and Graham’s was one of them.
Yet they could not make a case until former Police Chief Ken Miller ordered DNA testing.
Julie Valentine is a symbol for child abuse prevention in Greenville County. She’s memorialized with a sculpture in Cleveland Park and in the name of the organization that works with abuse survivors.
Julie Valentine is buried in one of three sections identified as Babyland at Woodlawn Memorial Park. The headstone says Baby Jane Doe and under that, Julie Valentine Feb. 1990.
The original detectives on the case paid for the marker on Julie Valentine’s grave, representative of how this case has stayed with everyone involved in finding out who she was and how she died.
Terry Christy, one of the original investigators, said Friday the plea does not bring closure for him. He thinks of the little girl often and sometimes goes by her grave when he goes to the graves of family members.
His wife, Julianna, is the victim witness coordinator for whom Julie Valentine was named.
Christy said Graham refusing to admit guilt was characteristic of a woman “so callous to throw away a baby.”
“She got away with it for all these years,” he said.
This story was originally published May 13, 2022 at 11:40 AM.