Child abusers exposed.

A Decatur, Georgia, woman named Tracie Dean stopped at a service station in the town of Evergreen, Alabama, in January. While there, she had an uneasy feeling about a man she noticed who was accompanied by a little girl. Something did not feel quite "right" about the way the pair interacted.

"She came over to me and said 'Hi.' I said 'Hi.' She wandered off," Dean said in an interview with WXIA-TV in Atlanta.

When the girl left with the man, Dean was uneasy. "It just didn't feel right," Dean said. "There was tension between the two of them. He wasn't nice to her. Not a warm person at all."

Dean wrote down the license plate number of the man's vehicle and called 911, but the police dispatcher said the vehicle "checked out" (i.e., it had no related warrants), and police took no further action. But Dean still was not satisfied. Back in Georgia, she searched online databases listing information about missing children. She contacted missing children's organizations and various law enforcement agencies, all to no avail.

"I called America's Most Wanted," Dean told WXIA news reporters. "I don't understand why I got no response. I called all the right people. No one would listen to me."

Still, she refused to give up. She drove nearly 300 miles back to the convenience store in Alabama and asked to look at the store's surveillance videotape. While she was viewing the footage, a local sheriff's deputy walked into the store, and Dean told him about her search. He agreed to investigate.

The investigation led to a mobile home inhabited by a man named Jack Wiley, who had recently moved to Alabama with his common-law wife, Glenna Faye Cavender. The little girl was Cavender's three-year-old daughter, and the woman also had a 17-year-old son. The police investigation revealed that Cavender and Wiley were drifters who supported themselves by traveling the stock car racing circuit, selling souvenirs. Furthermore, Wiley was suspected of molesting an estimated 40 children in several states.

Wiley was arrested on multiple counts of raping the three-year-old and of sodomizing her older brother. Cavender was also arrested, and charged with two counts of child molestation.

District Attorney Tommy Chapman, of Conecuh County, Alabama, commented about Dean: "She is a hero. She is truly an American hero for coming back down here and just insisting that law enforcement go back out there and check these children out."