Raquel Rutledge is an investigative reporter assigned to the Public Investigator team focusing on consumer issues, but has spent the past year uncovering widespread fraud in Wisconsin’s child-care subsidy program. She also has written about doctors failing to test children for lead poisoning, risky levels of mercury in sushi, and a furniture store owner who swindled customers out of thousands of dollars while avoiding state scrutiny. Before joining the Public Investigator team, she wrote about a variety of topics, from ethanol to Iraq, as a general assignment reporter. She exposed dishonest mechanics and dirty gasoline during a 2005 investigation that saved car owners in Milwaukee untold thousands of dollars. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Rutledge joined the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel staff in 2004 from the Colorado Springs Gazette, where she spent nearly seven years covering education, the military and city hall.