Its finest hours came during a few summer days in the June of 1944 when a polio epidemic hit North Carolina, crippling hundreds of small children and terrifying parents. Overwhelmed, the hospital in Charlotte, the state's largest city, barred its doors and anguished parents trudged onward with sick children. They were halted at Hickory, where the people had, within three days, created a hospital in old stone buildings on the town's edge. Doctors from across the United States flooded into Hickory to treat the polio victims. The saving of the children is still celebrated here as "The Miracle of Hickory".

Another sickly child came to Hickory in late 2008. Zahra Baker was then a smiley, freckly eight-year-old. In her brief life she had already lost her left leg to bone cancer. The disease had entered her lungs and she had beaten it back. The cancer left her with severe hearing problems and an artificial leg. With her Australian father, Adam Baker, now 33, she had come from the sugar hamlet of Giru, 50 kilometres south of Townsville, Queensland. Adam had met a Hickory woman, Elisa Fairchild, nine years older, on the internet. Elisa had travelled to Giru, married Adam in his parents' front yard and, a few months later, returned to Hickory with her new husband and his daughter, who was ready for a better future.

But Elisa was not the wife Adam had imagined, nor the close mother Zahra never had. Then 40, Elisa was hiding six previous marriages, mostly to vulnerable men, and was still married to at least one. Her three children, all by different fathers, had grown up wanderers and, according to some who knew Elisa, neglected. She'd been evicted from many of the 42 addresses she'd had over the previous seven years and amassed a string of debts as well as seven convictions for passing worthless cheques. Once dark and attractive, her looks had been degraded by years of hard living and obesity. She liked seedy bars and long nights and drew needy men. She was also a goth who dwelt in the internet's shadier regions. It's where she met Adam Baker before she first set eyes on him in the arrivals terminal at Brisbane airport.

Now Zahra Baker is dead, her small body dismembered and scattered over the woodlands and in the creeks of eastern Appalachia. Elisa, having led police to only some of her remains, is in prison awaiting trial for Zahra's murder. Adam Baker is holed up with his mother, Karen, in a grimy block of flats down a dank gully outside town, venturing out infrequently in his ageing two-door Mazda, which has the words "Zoom Zoom Racing" on the sides.

When Good Weekend calls in at the apartment, Adam is wary and withdrawn. He has thick, muscled arms and a broad chest that were built with work or weights but seem to have sagged in idleness. He carries a saggy paunch. There are dark rings beneath his eyes and he frequently looks away when talking. He seems tired, dishevelled and acquiescent. His bed is a small mattress on the floor of the flat's congested living room. Karen is kindly but fiercely protective of the son who mostly defers to her. She came to Hickory from Giru shortly after Zahra's death.

Adam declines an offer of dinner to talk about co-operating with me, but he does accept a beer, saying,"Christ, it's a while since I had one of these." He variously claims that he has been too busy to talk, despite being unemployed, or that he has been in discussions with his lawyer about Good Weekend's request. His lawyer is, how­ever, overseas and said by his office to be out of contact. Finally, Adam tells me, "I've been burned too many times. No matter what I say, it gets twisted around."

Three weeks later, in mid-April, Hickory police shackle Adam at the wrists and ankles and dress him in green prison scrubs. They bring him into court and he stands sighing as a prosecutor reads out new charges against him of false pretences and identity theft, ruses he used to get the power company to connect his flat. Adam had already been charged with issuing six dud cheques around Hickory (later dropped), failing to return rented machinery and attempting to run one of Elisa's relatives off the road in a dispute over money.

Adam is flat broke. His lawyer says his parents' support has run out. He can't work because he is now an illegal immigrant – his tourist visa has expired and his marriage status is being investigated. His movements are heavily restricted and constantly monitored through a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement electronic signalling device bolted around his leg, while the Hickory police have his passport. He faces a jail term of two years or more if convicted on the various charges. His lawyer says Adam has been blindsided by the new charges and his sudden electronic confinement. Others suspect a classic squeeze by police who want Adam to talk about Zahra's death.

Even when Zahra was alive, those who came across Adam in Hickory noticed his unwillingness to engage with strangers. Eddie Mitchell, 69, is a gregarious former Londoner who lives opposite the neglected little brick house in an otherwise neat street in Hickory where Adam and Elisa lived and where police say Zahra died. He recalls his unsuccessful attempts to converse with Adam: "I tried to talk to him two or three times. But every time I did, he put his head down, totally ignored me. I had no idea he was Australian. Did not want to talk. That's unusual around here. To be honest, I thought he was retarded."

Adam Baker was in his early 20s and living in Wagga Wagga, NSW, when he met a local teenager, Emily Dietrich. She became pregnant to him and gave birth to Zahra on November 16, 1999. Weeks later, suffering from depression, she gave the baby up to Adam, who took Zahra to stay with his parents, then living in Newcastle. According to Emily's aunt Diane Ross, Emily had not seen Zahra since she was eight months old. Adam shut her out of her daughter's life.

In 2004, Adam, Zahra, his parents and at least one of his brothers moved to Giru, so the family could take jobs at CSR's Invicta sugar mill, the main employer in the town of 375 people. Zahra was being looked after by her father and grandmother, Karen, and appeared to be a loved and cared-for child. "Zahra seemed very happy," remembers Jane Fenton, a staff member at the Giru daycare centre. "She always came in with a smile on her face and she was clean and everything.

"She was at preschool then and had just been diagnosed with the cancer. Then she went away for treatment. Afterwards, she came back for a visit with her grandmother. I gathered that her father really did care for her. He brought her through the chemo and everything. She was a very happy, determined little girl. She was willing to give anything a go."

The child's struggle with bone cancer was fought far away from her birth mother, Emily. "We weren't allowed to ring [the Bakers], and every time we tried they'd moved, changed phone numbers, the whole works," Diane Ross tells Good Weekend. By the time Emily and her family discovered Zahra's whereabouts, after Zahra was pictured in the Townsville Bulletin newspaper in September 2008 on top of an army vehicle while attending a day out for child cancer sufferers at the city's Lavarack army barracks, it was too late. Zahra, her cancer in remission and wearing a prosthetic leg, was about to depart for the US.

In the previous 18 months, while Zahra had been in and out of hospital, Adam had taken to spending his nights in Giru on the internet. He had joined the IMVU (Instant Messaging Virtual Universe) website, where users create three-dimensional characters to exchange instant messages with others, similarly disguised. Adam could be anybody – least of all himself. Soon he met and struck up a virtual relationship with a woman in North Carolina who called herself Gothic Fairy. She had selected a fairy avatar and added red angel wings and a stylish gown. Adam's avatar was a black figure with bat wings.

Gothic Fairy was Elisa Fairchild and she let her friends know that the younger man far off in the north Queensland cane fields was the one she wanted to spend her life with. "Who says long-distance relationships don't work?" she asked on her MySpace page, which she'd dressed up with a skull and crossbones and a soundtrack of a song called Living Dead Girl.

Elisa and Adam married in Giru in July 2008. Not surprisingly, the older, and more worldly, American's arrival aroused suspicion. Elisa would recount preposterous details of her past to Giru locals. Kim Wright, a friend of the Baker family, told North Carolina media earlier this year that while in Giru, Elisa had claimed to have been a police officer shot in the line of duty and that she had also been a bounty hunter. "She had a lot of stories that never quite rang true," said Wright.

It seems Karen Baker may have been disapproving of her son's new relationship, too. Nikki Hay, of Mackay in Queensland, had a daughter who also suffered from cancer and who became friends with Zahra. In an email to Hickory's police chief, Hay told of calling Karen because she wanted to pass on photos she'd taken of Zahra. "She was so upset," Hay wrote. "She explained to me that her son had remarried and they had taken off overseas quite abruptly and she didn't have any idea of exactly where they were."

Granite Falls is a hardscrabble old steel town just north-west of Hickory in the folds of the Brushy Mountains – densely wooded hills known to hide the huts of the moonshiners who still operate in rural North Carolina. After living for six months with Elisa's father in Hickory, Elisa, Adam and Zahra moved to Granite Falls in the middle of 2009.

Things between Elisa and Adam had rapidly gone downhill. Elisa's dad had thrown them out and later suggested Elisa's drug use was the reason. For Zahra, there was misery in the back-lane flat that was her new home. Within six months, their landlady, Shirley Mims, a woman scarred by her own tragedy, had also kicked them out.

"They were violent; it was physical, physical," Mims tells me of the couple who rented the flat next to hers. "You could hear them fighting and everything. They were fighting one night and then they came out into the parking lot fighting. He came storming out the door – I was sitting outside smoking – and she came out after him. So we asked them to move. They went. They didn't give us no hard time about it."

They were two months behind on the rent. "I never seen him go to work," she says of Adam. "They came and went but it wasn't like they were going to work or nothing."

For Mims, the most troubling side of Elisa and Adam surfaced in the Granite Falls flat only after they'd gone. Mims and her husband had assumed that the young girl they'd seen with Elisa and Adam on the day they moved in must have been a visiting grandchild; they saw her just the once. As Mims tells me, "We never saw her after that, so we never thought no more about it. We never heard, we never saw her or anything. She didn't come out to go to school.

"They would come and go, all day, all night, everything. But the little girl was never with them. We kept hearing all these noises in the attic. I truly believe that's where she was at. In my heart that's where she was at because, when they moved, we didn't hear the noises no more. And then my husband went up to the attic later on and some boards had been moved and there was a sheet up there."

Mims begins to cry. Her only child, a son, drowned, she says.

Zahra's life would worsen with the move away; some people would decide her stepmother was a monster and her father a weakling. Those least able to help her tried. And those who should have stepped in to protect a little girl failed to.

Hudson is another ramshackle Appalachian town, a few kilometres north-west of Granite Falls, shrivelled by recession and irrelevance. The town's decline can be seen in the creeping reach of the trailer parks up the back roads of the surrounding hills. It was here that Adam, Elisa and Zahra came next. They could live in a box in a field for $US350 a month. Adam Baker and his daughter were sliding into an underclass that Elisa had been in, and lived among, before. (Unbeknown to Adam, a man who lived in the park, whom Elisa said was a friend, was one of her former husbands.)

Tanya Hefner is raising four children on faith, hope and food stamps in a spotless trailer in that park. She has a tough exterior, but when she realised the plight of Zahra Baker, she acted. The Bakers' trailer was up a steep, narrow road in the park. Hefner and her neighbours saw that Zahra walked with a limp – they didn't immediately know she had a prosthetic leg – and that Elisa frequently marched her up and down the hill while hitting and cursing her.

Says Hefner, "The whole neighbourhood had seen her hit Zahra. We heard Elisa cuss her up and down the hill and make fun of her about her leg. 'Oh, you think you're so good. I think you should get that limp out of your leg. You need to get up that hill.' Smack. 'Walk faster.' It was awful."

Eventually, Hefner says, she made a sworn statement to police that Elisa had threatened her after Hefner, enraged by Zahra's treatment, had confronted Elisa. Hefner says she also informed authorities that Zahra was being abused and contacted the local school Zahra was attending to inform them. The school, she says, told her they had concerns that Zahra was being abused and about her poor attendance.

Two teachers visited Zahra's home after the child turned up at her fourth-grade class at Hudson Elementary School with a black eye. And, according to some in the trailer park, one teacher gave Zahra her mobile phone number because she was concerned for her. The school will not talk publicly about what was known or done.

Tanya Hefner has made up her own mind: "Nobody did anything," she says.

Bobby Green, 29, a tattooed, muscled, part-time landscaper, and his partner, Kayla Rotenberry, lived next door to Adam Baker. Their children knew Zahra. Bobby Green and Adam became friendly – for a time – until Bobby and Kayla could no longer stomach Elisa's lies and fury. They heard and saw Elisa's abuse of Zahra. Kayla recalls that during one beating, Elisa injured her hand on Zahra's prosthetic limb.

Later, on a night they looked after Zahra when her parents went out, Zahra would not leave Green's side as he made dinner for the children. "She stayed right by my side, like on my hip the whole time," he recalls. When he saw Adam's car return later that night, Green called to Zahra: "I said, 'Well, here's your mommy and daddy, they will be over to get you in a minute.' Zahra ran and hid in the bedroom. She wouldn't go home and that was maybe a month before they moved out and that's when I started ... that's when you know something was goin' on."

The autopsy conducted on Zahra Baker's partial skeleton concluded that two different cutting instruments were used to dismember her. Her skull has not been found. The report's words don't disclose how Zahra died but suggest something of how she lived: two of her right ribs were broken earlier in her childhood – possibly during cancer treatment. And, despite her history of grave illness, only one medical record was generated during her two years in the US under Adam and Elisa's care.

For now, the cause of Zahra's death is given in the report as undetermined homicidal violence. Police are not revealing their evidence on exactly how she died until Elisa's trial on a date yet to be set. The autopsy's words suggest a sudden ending, but Zahra's short life was in free fall once her father moved to the US. Elisa had a history of abuse, neglect and use of her own children to obtain money. By the time she was 25, Elisa had three children by three men and, according to her ex-husbands, frequently beat and neglected them. Alone again in 1993, she struck up a relationship with another vulnerable man, Darrell Putnam, who was profoundly deaf and lived with his mother in the same street as Elisa in the village of Cherryville, North Carolina.

His mother, Margie, had deep reservations about her son's involvement with Elisa, who was known in the street to be neglectful and using of her two young daughters. "She would have one of her little girls come up the road in a wheelchair and tell people she had cancer, but there was nothing wrong with the little girl," Margie Putnam recalls.

Darrell became Elisa's fourth husband. Soon after the marriage, however, she began disappearing for days on end with the money he made from his job in a dye factory. The marriage ended when Darrell found his wife at home with another lover. He walked the 12 kilometres home to his mother's house and still lives alone next door to her in a little yellow house covered with toy butterflies.

"I know she wasn't taking care of the kids," says Margie. "Darrell said she wasn't feeding the kids. He loved those girls. He stayed with her because of them. But in the end she broke his heart."

Most of Elisa's former husbands – such as her fifth, Jeffery Allred – walked out. Allred is 1.9 metres tall and barrel-chested, but he fled Elisa after she took to beating him with a baseball bat and throwing rocks at him. Too scared to face her in court, he never divorced her, withdrew higher into Appalachia's hills and never remarried.

Adam Baker was the seventh in a line of apparently lonely, vulnerable men whom Elisa married. He stayed despite ongoing physical violence between himself and Elisa and growing concern among outsiders for Zahra's safety because of Elisa's treatment of her.

In February, the North Carolina Department of Social Services released a log of call-outs to Zahra's home in the Granite Falls trailer park and, from August, back in Hickory. On four occasions last year between January 29 and August 6, social services officers went to Zahra's home following reports from outsiders of improper discipline of the child and reports that she was in what the officers call an injurious environment. Each time, after interviews with Zahra and her parents, no action was taken. The department closed the case on August 6, having found no evidence of maltreatment or child-safety issues. Zahra, obviously, had said nothing to confirm the suspicions. Forty-nine days later she was dead.

A backwoods farmer, who never knew Zahra but was anguished that some of her remains were found on his land, has built a permanent roadside memorial to the child; covered with weathered teddy bears, flowers and messages, a placard says, "Safe at home with Jesus."

Elisa Baker was charged with Zahra's murder in February after she led police to Zahra's remains and after her mobile phone records placed her in those same remote forest locations on September 25. Police believe that Zahra died in the Hickory home she shared with Elisa and Adam on Friday, September 24, 2010. Her body was dismembered, police say, and dumped by Elisa the following day.

Incredibly, it would be another 15 days before Adam Baker, as he tells it, noticed that his 10-year-old daughter, who slept in the room next to his, was no longer in his home. He did not report her missing until he made a strange call to the police emergency line at 2pm on Saturday, October 9.

Adam has had great difficulty explaining the 15-day delay. The reasons he has offered have met with open derision in Hickory; he is often abused when he ventures out. His first words in the call to the emergency number were said in a matter-of-fact tone: "Ah, yeah, my daughter is missing."

He went on to claim that he'd found a ransom note written on a power bill on the windscreen of his work car, a silver Chevy Tahoe SUV, addressed to his boss, Mark Coffey, the principal of a small tree-lopping business. Coffey was also the owner of the house Adam and Elisa rented and where police believe Zahra died. The note said Mark Coffey's daughter had been kidnapped and that $US1 million was the ransom. The words "No cops" were scrawled on the top and bottom.

Adam told the police emergency line that the kidnappers must have confused Zahra with Coffey's daughter – their intended target. Then came the oddest part of Baker's call: he laughed. He told the police emergency operator, "And my daughter is, I think, coming into puberty ... 'cause she is hitting that brooding stage [chuckles], so we only see her when she comes out when she wants something. And that's about it."

The kidnapping, of course, was a fiction. Elisa Baker was to admit to writing the ransom note. She then led police to Zahra's remains – an act of co-operation with authorities that, controversially in Hickory, has seen her murder charge reduced to second degree, thus avoiding the threat of North Carolina's penalty of execution by lethal injection.

Adam Baker's most coherent public explanation for not noticing for 15 days that his 10-year-old daughter was no longer living with him tumbled out in an interview he gave to a local TV reporter, Steve Ohnesorge, on February 22:

Reporter: "People say how could you not know what was going on?"

Baker: "Elisa's, ah, very manipulative, abusive and controlling. With the pressure of work I was gone first thing in the morning, didn't get home until late. I was told that Zahra was in bed because Zahra normally went to bed early. I checked every night. From what I could tell, she was in bed. There was something in bed."

Reporter: "What did you see when you looked in the room?"

Baker: "It looked like Zahra was in bed."

Reporter: "When was the last time you know for sure you saw Zahra?"

Baker: "Well, Steve, I really can't answer that at the moment because the police are still doing their investigation. I'd love to answer that but, as I said, I don't want to do anything to hinder their investigation at this time."

Meanwhile, from her jail cell, Elisa Baker has written a series of letters to a crime website, Serial Killers Ink, well known in the US for publishing and selling the correspondence and art work of notorious prisoners. The site's owner received the letters after he contacted Elisa in jail.

Whether Zahra died of an illness, as her stepmother has implied, or whether the child was murdered will come under intense scrutiny at Elisa's trial. Adam Baker has repeatedly denied any involvement in his daughter's death or later dismemberment.

The small, now-abandoned house where Zahra died on 21st Avenue NW, Hickory, stands out from the other smart bungalows on blocks studded with tall trees. It is boarded up and has been vandalised, and locals want it razed. The old willow oak tree that for decades stood out front has been felled by Mark Coffey, who took all the flowers, soft toys and messages that were hanging from the tree to the police station. The insides of the house have been ripped apart by the waves of police who have been through hunting for evidence of what happened to Zahra. The floor of the small pink room where she slept has been split open to the earth.

It is a dead house with but one ode to life. The pink room's shredded wallpaper still bears the words that Zahra Baker could read each night before she went to sleep: "Love, Laugh, Live."

Bernie Lagan’s story having first appeared in Good Weekend.