MISSING PERSONS: Boy vanishes without a trace

ON APRIL 10, 1988, seven-year-old Glenroy Wickham was taken away from his Connaugh Path, Grazettes, St Michael home by his father Wayne Devonish. Since that day, Wickham has not been seen or heard from by his “heart-broken family members”. While sitting in the living room of her Eden Lodge, St Michael home, Glenroy’s aunt Veronica Wickham-Bryan, who still thinks of her nephew “all the time” and “what has happened to him, up to this God-given day”, told the WEEKEND NATION what she remembered of the incident which “really shook” her family.“I was not home when it happened; I was at work. Glenroy was outside running ’bout with his two cousins. They [two cousins] said that the fella Wayne called him and he went. They said that he [Wayne] told him that he going and buy something for him. The children said that he [Wayne] was walking.“He [Glenroy] was always frighten for Wayne, but that day he went to him . . . and that was the last time he was seen by any of our family members,” said the 51-year-old, as she bent her head, saddened by the painful memories.According to Wickham-Bryan, neighbours, police officers and family members searched many days and nights for her nephew. She said: “We never heard from him and we never saw him. And now, [after] all of these years, we wonder what happened to him.“All of us went searching, then we called the police. The next day, everybody was searching. We went all about looking for him and we couldn’t find him and we couldn’t find Wayne either. Well now, we give up because we feel he gone. The same guy Wayne end up killing his two children. We said that if he did his kids that, he did something to Glenroy. He did this to his kids after Glenroy went missing,” she said.Devonish was convicted of the 1992 disappearance and subsequent double killing of Glenroy’s half-brother and sister Antonio and Kimberley Gilkes.Reminiscing about her nephew, Wickham-Bryan remembered Glenroy as a young lad who was “active, always running ’bout playing, loved to laugh, read and sing, and he was a bit interfering in your things”. She went on to explain why Glenroy’s mother Rhonda Wickham would not do an interview about her son’s disappearance.“She don’t want to go back through that drama. He was the only child she had. All she use to do was cry about it. Sometimes she would buy things for her nieces and nephews and she would remember her son. Once, somebody phone her and told her that Glenroy working in a bank. We went and look on different days to see if the body was Glenroy but it was not him. It was somebody that Glenroy use to sit down next to in school.“Sometimes I wonder that someday I would see him turn up at the door. Actually, before my mother passed on, she would say that he is not dead and someday he will turn up. But knowing that Wayne killed his own children has brought doubts in our minds,” she said, adding that “all of the family loved Glenroy. We miss him very much and we hope that someday, we will see him in resurrection”.Witnesses claimed to have last seen Glenroy on April 15, 2008, heading towards the Grazettes Community Centre with his father.