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World of Secrets
The Darkest Web: 3. The hidden child
00:25:37
The remarkable investigation which leads to the rescue of the girl abused for six years
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- [00:00]
A
This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. The best B2B marketing gets wasted on the wrong people. So when you want to reach the right professionals, use LinkedIn ads. LinkedIn has grown to a network of over 1 billion professionals, including 130 million decision makers. And that's where it stands apart from other ad buyers. You can target your buyers by job title, industry, company role, seniority skills, company revenue. So you can stop wasting budget on the wrong audience. It's why LinkedIn Ads generates the highest B2B return on ad spend of major ad networks. Spend $250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn Ads and get $250 credit for the next one. Just go to LinkedIn.com Broadcast. That's LinkedIn.com Broadcast. Terms and conditions apply. This message comes from Schwab at Schwab. How you invest is your choice, not theirs. That's why when it comes to managing your wealth, Schwab gives you more choices. You can invest and trade on your own. Plus get advice and more comprehensive wealth solutions to help meet your unique needs. With award winning service, low costs and transparent advice, you can manage your wealth your way at Schwab. Visit schwab.com to learn more.
- [01:15]
B
Hi, it's Sam. Just a warning before we start. This episode contains references to child sexual abuse and some strong language. It's 2015. For almost a year, special agents Greg Squire and Pete Manning have been trying everything to find a young girl being sexually abused somewhere in America. They had named her Lucy. Since that first call from Denmark from a colleague who had found Lucy's photos on the hard drive of a notorious pedophile. Pete and Greg have thought of little else. First they tried tech examining the metadata of the images.
- [02:02]
C
So for Pete, looking at the XF data, he was just curious if we could find information about what camera was used. You know, then it wasn't as common to find, you know, GPS data. But today if you take a photo with your phone or a decent camera, you can literally get GPS location sometimes. So given at that point we had found like a couple, probably up to almost 100 images. We thought we had a shot at maybe getting some of those details and then comparing those details.
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B
But the abuser had been careful to remove this information before uploading. No dice. Then there's the actual objects they can see in these pictures. The furniture, plug sockets.
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C
I think the first thing he noticed was a wall outlet and you know, a US wall outlet is pretty unique to the United States. And then I think that was the number One sort of standout, Greg and
- [03:00]
B
Pete had contacted the manufacturers of everything they could identify, requesting the details of every single person who had bought these items. But the list was unwieldy. Thousands of people across multiple states. The breakthrough eventually came from the wall behind Lucy. John Harpe, the industry expert, identifying the specific bricks used that had narrowed their search to a 100 mile radius of a single factory in the American Southwest.
- [03:40]
C
As soon as we started working and we had just this, actually this, just this huge volume of data.
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B
The search area includes tens of thousands of buildings that all need to be ruled out, but they have the list of customers.
- [03:57]
C
We started to get like a list together of, you know, names and addresses basically. But it was voluminous to say the least. There wasn't a lot of items that weren't common. Clothing, bedding, furniture, just, you know, anything we saw basically, and just trying to see what, what might stick, you know, and it, so it wasn't, I mean, everything was on the table at that point. You know, you got a big whiteboard up and you're going, okay, we looked at this and this meant this or this didn't mean that. And you know, you get a lot of mixed review from, you know, from people when you call them and say, hey, you know, I'm from Homeland Security and we're looking for a red T shirt and they're going, okay, you know, how can, how can I help you? I mean, when you're in the middle of this, when we were in the middle of this at home, you know, get the kids to bed and you're just trying to kind of decompress, I mean, we still found ourselves flipping through the phone and looking at furniture or looking at clothing and looking at really anything that we had seen in the series that we thought we could find. And so, you know, what goes from a task, you know, if somebody said to you go find, here's the corner of a bed, can you find the rest of it? You can just go to the end of the Internet almost, you know, looking for that thing. But it's time well spent. You know, it's funny in doing some training and you know, talking to people through this case and oh, can we help you out? Absolutely. Here's a 2 inch corner of a piece of furniture. Can you find the whole piece for me? Are you nuts? Well, no, if you want to help, this is what we need done.
- [05:46]
B
If Greg and Pete can cross reference their earlier searches with this new geographical area, it might narrow things down. The team goes back through every item they can see in the images. And then they realise something. One of the items has been made locally instead of nationally. The sofa. It's manufactured by a regional company with only a limited number sold. Instead of thousands of customers to wade through more like hundreds, suddenly the investigation is moving at a new pace. This is world of secrets, season 11 the darkest web, a BBC world service investigation. I'm Sam Paranti, a documentary maker. For the past seven years, I've been following the extraordinary work of a specialist team who hunt paedophiles on the dark. We Episode 3 the Hidden Child we
- [06:59]
C
knew we could really pare down the search that we had been working on there for, you know, eight or nine months at that point. So we took the location that John had given us and, you know, created a map with a 50 mile radius around that point. From there we went back to all of the sales records that we had worked on over the past eight months. It took us from tens of thousands of records down to under 50. And that was gonna be our focus for however long it took. So the first idea we had was start looking through social media. You know, we knew what Lucy looked like, you know, we knew what clothing she might have been wearing. We had an idea what the house might look like. So we thought we had a fairly good shot if we look through social media that somebody on that list might have a picture of Lucy on their page. So we divided and conquered. The team, took all the addresses that we had at that point and we started just doing a deep dive. Probably two hours into that search, we found our first picture of Lucy and the team, we just couldn't believe the fact that we had been looking at this girl for so long and there she was, like in a family situation. She was there standing next to an aunt and, you know, we confirmed the aunt's address with one of the data points that we had. I was so excited. Like I was. I was on cloud nine. And we all were, you know, we were. Everyone felt like a big sigh of relief that after nine months of looking at all these photos over and over and over again, we couldn't believe we were staring right at her face. She looked about the same age as we had seen her in the most. What we determined were the most recent photos. She actually had one sweatshirt on that was an exact match of a sweatshirt she had on in another picture.
- [09:13]
B
The net is closing in. But these operations are rarely straightforward. One wrong move and the whole investigation could collapse.
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D
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E
The sun's shining, birds are singing, and all feels right in the world.
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C
Until the season changes and suddenly you lo your motivation to get out of bed.
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D
In fact, one in five people experience some form of depression no matter the
- [10:19]
C
season or time of year.
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E
At the American Psychiatric association foundation, our vision is to build a mentally healthy nation for all because we want you to live your best life and be your best you all year round.
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D
Please visit mentallyhealthynation.org to learn more.
- [10:35]
E
Matthew Perry's tragic death led prosecutors to Jasveen Senger, dubbed the ketamine queen of LA. Now a BBC investigation asks who is the woman facing 65 years in prison and what was the dark timeline that led to the death of the Friends star? Watch Matthew Perry and the Ketamine Queen with a subscription to BBC.com and the BBC app and unlock unlimited articles, live news, audio and documentaries. Visit BBC.com docs to learn more.
- [11:07]
B
When it gets to this point, the fine tuning everything has to be perfect. Go to the wrong house, you alert the wrong person and the suspect disappears. US Special agents Greg Squire and Pete Manning, together with their team, need to operate with caution. They have to get it right. So they go back to John Harp, the brick expert who helped them identify the likely location Lucy from is being held.
- [11:35]
C
In every address that we found from relatives of Lucy, we would basically take a screenshot of that house or residence and shoot it over to John and say, can you offer your opinion at least or a record of Would this house have these bricks inside? Would it be a brick that would be outside? Again, this is a whole new world to us. And he was great. You know, we weren't sharing addresses with him, we were just sending pictures of houses from the Internet so he could look at those and lend his opinion on yes, this house has a good chance of having that brick inside versus yeah, this isn't a house that would have that brick. So it was really interesting to get his feedback and it ended up being extremely helpful as well.
- [12:23]
B
Extremely helpful is an understatement. John looks at the bricks and messages. Greg and the team back and forth as they Desperately try to identify the right house. And finally, they think they have the right place. A house that John Harp says is likely to have the bricks inside, an address that corresponds with the purchase of that very specific regional sofa, and an address that corresponds with the family, relatives of. Of the person photographed with Lucy in the image uploaded to Facebook.
- [13:05]
C
So we narrowed it down to one address at that point and started the process of confirming, you know, who was living there through, you know, state records, driver's license, things like that, kind of real basic law enforcement checks, looking through information on schools. And at that point, we were already in contact with our local office. Everybody in the world had made a call to that office and saying, whatever you're doing today has just changed. Because this is what the main focus is gonna be.
- [13:37]
B
This is the house where Lucy has been abused for six years.
- [13:46]
C
Nobody was gonna leave until we had that resolution. You know, we all kind of were sitting there very anxious, you know, waiting to hear the news and waiting to hear that Lucy was safe and that obviously the suspect was under arrest. And they were great. You know, they. They understood the gravity of it all. We had been already working on our reports for. For them, for what they would need for. For a warrant. I mean, at that point, it's 10 or 11am and our first thought was, how do we get there before she's home from school and eliminate the chance of him having access to her even one more time? So by probably by two or three, we had given the local office everything they needed. They had identified the people living in the house. They had identified who Lucy was. She had a little brother. They had also figured out that living in the house was the mother's boyfriend and that that was a convicted sex offender living there. That was probably our guy. We felt pretty. Pretty confident at that point that this was. This was going to be the abuser.
- [15:04]
B
Local officers move in. They had found her and the man who had been abusing her, her mother's boyfriend.
- [15:19]
C
So the abuser was arrested that day. Didn't have much to say for himself during the interview, but when they started looking at his computer, confirmed everything we believed, they found thousands of images and videos of her abuse. The little brother was also seen in some of the images and videos. Once they got in and started doing the forensics on his machine and, you know, conducting the interview, he had certainly abused her far more times than we knew. I mean, it was certainly a scenario that we had never come across with that much abuse that had occurred over so many years. And clearly being in a household that was tolerant, I guess, in a way.
- [16:10]
B
Greg doesn't know exactly how much Lucy's mum knew about what was going on, but he does know her boyfriend sexually abused her daughter in her home. We don't know what action Lucy's mother may or may not have taken to protect her. Sometimes when people do know, they still don't act, even when it's their own child.
- [16:40]
F
I feel like that's when things really started to change. I mean, I remember moving out to that house and it really was at the time, especially out in the middle of nowhere, there was a gas station and at that gas station you still had to drive 10 minutes down a small country road to get to our house and from there to get to any city. It was at least 35 minutes away. If you wanted to get to a larger city, it was about an hour.
- [17:05]
B
Elisa and her siblings were growing up fast. And for a family of six, the house was proving small. Not long after Elisa says her mother discovered her son was abusing her daughter, the family moved to a bigger house further into Texas Hill country.
- [17:24]
F
Quite isolating, especially then when you add in being homeschooled and there weren't any homeschool families right there by us in that community. The kids that were there, they all went to public school. And so my mom quickly decided those people weren't good friends to have. But that's when we started going to a homeschool group and when we started meeting more families that were homeschooling and had beliefs similar to what my mom started moving towards in a religious way.
- [17:59]
B
We reached out to Elise's mother and haven't received a response.
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F
You'd have families that believed in wearing skirts to their ankles. Their girls had to cover up everything. Longer shirts, lots of restrictions for the girls. And then you had families that, you know, would let their children dress and act like what our society would consider normal. And so my mom started, you know, kind of getting some exposure to different levels of homeschooling, different levels of religious control maybe is is a good way to put it.
- [18:42]
B
And as the family moved further away from the world, they grew closer to God.
- [18:46]
F
I was being sent to a church summer camp and at this camp they believed in speaking in tongues and they would like make a really big deal of it if you as a kid would do it and speak in tongues.
- [19:03]
B
Since Elisa's dad worked long hours, he wasn't around much and her parents relationship was slowly breaking down. Elisa remembers how her mum changed.
- [19:14]
F
She started to kind of believe that she could just Pray about things, and the problem would be solved at that time. So, you know, whether it was like somebody's sick or, I don't know. Later on, she said, like, her brakes were squeaking and she needed brakes, and she prayed about it and it stopped. So that's kind of the point that it. It got to. It was reaching a much higher level of belief that anything could be solved through prayer and worship.
- [19:46]
B
Elisa thinks the main reason they moved was so they could live in a bigger house and put space between her and her older brother, Staton. After her mother discovered the abuse, she made an effort to keep the children apart. But Staton still had access to other children.
- [20:05]
F
There was, like this revolving door of friendships for him. There would be friends, and then suddenly they weren't allowed to be together anymore. And I don't know if that was something between them or doing something together. I don't know what it was, what the behavior was. I've tried to ask, and I don't get an answer.
- [20:25]
B
After his friends left, Staton would be sent to counseling, but not with a health professional or specialist.
- [20:32]
F
Always at the church, whatever church we were at at the time. And it was always just kind of. I felt like it was brushed under the rug. It wasn't really talked about. When I think about his demeanor and his personality, behavior now, I think that it didn't happen overnight. I think that he felt like he could get away with things because he had been for most of his life.
- [20:54]
B
As Elisa became a teenager, she did everything she could to stay away from her older brother. She tried not to think about what had happened and didn't tell anyone. There wasn't really anyone to tell anyway. As soon as she was 18, Elisa left home and went out into the world. But Staton did the opposite. He moved in with their grandmother.
- [21:23]
F
It's very much the same as when he was at home. He had his own space. He was just on the computer all the time and didn't really have a whole lot of accountability or drive on his own to do anything or get to that next step or figure out
- [21:38]
B
what he wanted to do in his grandmother's house. Staton spent increasing amounts of time on his computer. No one seemed to know what to do with him, so they just left him alone. And for Elisa, life was rapidly changing. She met someone.
- [21:59]
F
Eric is everything that I'm not in a lot of ways. He is outgoing. He's confident. He was like that when we met. I was still figuring myself out, and he just knew who he was and what he wanted. And I really admired that at the time, you know, especially as I was working through my stuff. He is happy, and he shows his emotion very freely. So I think we're kind of different. He's like my balance.
- [22:31]
B
They got married, and she soon became pregnant. And after years of barely seeing her mother, the news of her pregnancy changed things.
- [22:41]
F
So for a long time, it just been. You know, my relationship with them had been kind of not even strained. It just wasn't really there. You know, I see you occasionally, and that's that. So I guess when I found out I was pregnant, and I think my mom kind of felt like that was a good time to come back around. So she just started doing things like offering help, like, I can come over and help you do this or that around your house, and I could buy you this for the baby. And I think we were just tired and trying to get ready to become new parents, and it felt nice to have somebody offering help, and so we accepted, but that was kind of like a foot in the door.
- [23:27]
B
Allowing her mother back into her life felt like a huge step for Elisa, and becoming a mother was dredging up a lot of uncomfortable feelings from her past.
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F
So during my pregnancy, you go to the doctor a lot. You go through appointments that you don't typically have to go through. It all felt really extra stressful. I still was struggling with physical touch, and I kind of still do, even now, especially from people that I don't know. I was already having anxiety about knowing who would deliver my baby, who would be in the room, all of those things, because it came with touch that just brings up past trauma. I felt like. So after my baby was born, you know, I remember my mom coming over to meet him at the house, or I guess she met him at the hospital, but she came over again to visit at the house, and she brought my grandma with her and my brother. I remember feeling like I didn't want him to hold my baby, but I let him. I just was insistent that he stay right by me. Looking back, I wish I would have given myself the grace to say no. I don't care what other people think. I'm just not comfortable.
- [24:52]
B
Elisa didn't want Staton near her child, but he had found ways to be near other children.
- [25:01]
F
So at this point, he had. I think he quit school at the technical college, and he moved in with my mom. Then he got a job at a resort in our area. And he. I think it's important to say that while he was at school, he was also doing things like teaching Summer camps during the summer to kids teaching them about different computer programs. I know he was placing himself around kids at the resort he worked at. He'd volunteered to work in the kids club and, you know, for Big Vince and again, just place himself there.
- [25:47]
B
Elisa thought the warning signs were loud and clear, but no one seemed to see what her brother was capable of. Not yet.
- [26:03]
C
So post arrest and rescue of Lucy, you know, there was. There was some news released about it locally against our wishes. But when the arrest was made public, it was the first time we really saw the offenders on tour. The dark web communities as we were learning them, I want to say, the strength of the power of them.
- [26:27]
B
Greg, Pete, and the team had been so focused on finding Lucy that it was easy to lose sight of the fact that they weren't the only ones who knew about her abuse.
- [26:37]
C
The day after the arrest and the news article came out, we saw that news article pop up on one of the dark websites. And the criminals on that site, all the offenders were piecing together their own part of the investigation, like theorizing on how it was solved, empathizing with the offender. And then the real, you know, scary and kind of just frightening piece is their comments about. About the victim.
- [27:11]
B
The dark web seemed to come alive with chatter about the arrest.
- [27:15]
C
I mean, I learned that this was life for them. You know, this wasn't like an occasional pop in. This wasn't like this was their life. They were putting 40, 50, 60 hours a weekend to this community. And for a lot of them, it seemed like this was their escape. This is where they wanted to be. And in that, they wanted to invest in the site, the community, each other. The biggest lesson learned was we needed more of a presence on the dark web.
- [27:53]
B
So Greg makes a decision. In order to catch these abusers, to infiltrate their networks and become part of their world, he has to pretend to be one of them. That's the next time on World of Secrets.