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World of Secrets
The Darkest Web: 5. Buried hard drives
00:28:10
A Portuguese paedophile goes to extreme lengths to keep his abuse hidden
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- [00:00]
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- [01:15]
Sam Paranti
Hi, it's Sam. Just a warning before we start. In this episode of World of Secrets, we'll be talking about child sexual abuse right from the start. There are also some particularly upsetting scenes. We'll warn you before they come up. It's June 2017, and US Special Agent Greg Squire is leaving his home in Boston to fly to Portugal. He's going to, for one reason, to assist in the arrest of a man whose actions on the dark web have shocked even him. Not an easy feat for a seasoned investigator like Greg, because this man they are hoping to arrest, who calls himself Twinkle, runs a website specifically dedicated to the sexual abuse of very young children.
- [02:17]
Greg Squire
Children. And so we had this horrifying collection of babies being sexually abused all in one space. Every member, of course, had this interest.
- [02:30]
Pete
And as opposed to years past where
- [02:32]
Greg Squire
you'd see a random member or a random group of members that had this interest in babies, for the most part, a lot of sites simply wouldn't allow it. You know, there's kind of like a no toddlers rule amongst this band of evil.
- [02:51]
Sam Paranti
But that rule doesn't exist anymore. And Twinkle isn't just sharing this material, he's producing it too. Which is why there is such urgency for Greg to get to Portugal, arrest him, and shut this website down. This is world of secrets season 11. The darkest web a BBC world service investigation I'm sam paranti, a documentary maker. Episode 5 buried hard drives. Greg has flown out to meet Ricardo Vieira, a Portuguese agent who does the exact same job as himself.
- [03:42]
Pete
The Portuguese police are awesome. We met for the first time, you know, when I went over there, and it was instantly just a great match.
- [03:54]
Sam Paranti
Greg and Ricardo both work undercover, speaking to pedophiles on the dark web. Very few people can truly understand the impact that has on a person, but they understand each other.
- [04:09]
Ricardo Vieira
Greg is a guy like me and the rest of the team. The sense of humor, the way that he works, the commitment that he have, cannot explain you why, but we established this connection since the first day. I don't know why, but I have it with him and I feel the same from him. So it was easy to share everything that we had, and he was giving the right support and friendship. Apart from this, apart from the work, it was the friendship. So we had a group when we talked about the investigation, and of course, Greg was part of that, an important part.
- [04:55]
Sam Paranti
Like Greg, Ricardo has a partner. He works with Joao. And just like the two American agents, they help each other stay sane.
- [05:04]
Pete
They had like a very Pete and Greg vibe going to over there. You know, you could feel their energy. They're really brilliant guys, extremely passionate, and, you know, they were ready to pull off an operation with a police force a fraction of the size of even say, nypd. And they were just extremely squared away, just very professional, highly skilled, and I was just blown away and honored to be there with them.
- [05:39]
Sam Paranti
Just like Greg, Ricardo is shocked by Twinkle's actions. And by the way, we're not giving you Twinkle's real name. To protect the identity of others involved
- [05:48]
Ricardo Vieira
in the case, we had several investigations related with Darknet and different boards, but this one was particularly terrible because the contents were really strong.
- [06:02]
Sam Paranti
Having successfully located Twinkle's house using the information from the Brazilian's black book, the team has to wait to get the arrest warrant from the court. Ricardo makes sure everything is in place.
- [06:16]
Ricardo Vieira
Thinking about the small details. We are talking about more than 30 persons working on this on field on the day of the action. So everything, the cars, the place where we can stay for the day of the action, the technical support that would need on the field, all the small details we were thinking about in the previous week before the action day.
- [06:53]
Sam Paranti
Finally, the day arrives. They leave early, before sunrise. U.S. special Agent Greg Squire is tagging along with his Portuguese counterpart, Ricardo Vieira, and a team of officers to make the arrest. They're driving deep into rural farmland, the
- [07:15]
Ricardo Vieira
place where he lived. It was perfect. It was perfect for him for all the abuses that he committed. It's really difficult for us to make the surveillance. It's one road, it's a dead end in the, in the end of the road. So it was perfect for him to control everyone that entered that road. So it was easy for him, easier for him than it was for us.
- [07:42]
Pete
I had never been to that part of the country before. It was very, very rural. We saw farms and farms and farms and small villages sort of pop up in the middle, you know, your gas station and then it would be farms again. It looked like probably a lower income area where he lived. A lot of the houses had the metal roofing, kind of odd construction, you know, people putting together stuff as they could afford it, probably, you know, a few goats here and there, but a lot of farm country and a lot of just not quite poverty, but certainly not upper echelon of the country for sure.
- [08:26]
Sam Paranti
When they get near Twinkle's home, Greg takes a step back. He's there both for his expertise, but also his memory of things. Twinkle has said online he might notice an item during the search, like a pillow from an image. That helps the local team, but since they're in Portugal, he has no jurisdiction. Ricardo's team will be making the arrest.
- [08:54]
Pete
My team, the four of us, we parked a few blocks away. The team that was going to execute the actual warrant had gone right up to the house. Of course, our online team was aware of what was going on as far as monitoring things on Baby Heart, as this was going to take place.
- [09:12]
Sam Paranti
During major arrests like this, the international team worked closely together to do everything they can to catch the perpetrators. They're in touch with agents in Australia, the usa, Brazil and elsewhere, piecing together the last bits of evidence. Everyone is laser focused. The police convoy pulls up outside the house. It's a large, ramshackle structure and just another warning. Some of what you're about to hear contains upsetting details.
- [09:58]
Ricardo Vieira
So we stopped the car. We stayed in silence inside the car. And when it was the perfect moment, when we say it's time to go, everybody jump out of the car like eight police officers. And we are just watching the door.
- [10:20]
Sam Paranti
The doors are open. Silently, the team enters the house. Inside it's filthy, there's rubbish everywhere. It's eerie and unsettling. The house is like a labyrinth. There are corridors in every direction. Extra makeshift rooms have been added on, covered with corrugated iron roofs. There's no obvious structure or Format, So they just have to keep looking. Peering around one bedroom door, they see two people they believe are Twinkle's parents. They're fast asleep. Quietly, the team shuts the door and keeps moving. They try another door. Asleep in bed is a man lying with two children. It's Twinkle.
- [11:23]
Ricardo Vieira
I remember his face. I remember the kid's face, but I remembered Twinkle's face. It was in the first moment. He was surprised. What the hell is going on?
- [11:36]
Sam Paranti
In the flesh, Twinkle looks like a scrawny teenager and he's absolutely terrified.
- [11:43]
Ricardo Vieira
He didn't realize that we are from the police. And we caught him. And after a while he started to be scared because he realized that that his wall was ruining. So everything was falling apart and the police was there to catch him. We grabbed Twinkle. He was taken away from the kids to a different room. So we went away from his room.
- [12:16]
Sam Paranti
The house is in chaos.
- [12:19]
Pete
It looked like multiple families were probably living there. Again, not poverty, but certainly very low income. Pretty Spartan living quarters, despite the size of it all. Upstairs was one of the strangest, strangest things I've ever seen. There was this, I think it was supposed to be like a children's playroom, but it looked like something out of like a Stephen King movie. It was really, really dark. There was cat feces all over the floor. There was two swings, like hanging from the ceiling. It was almost like nightmare inducing the way it looked. And I couldn't believe that there would be children up there playing. Not to mention all the feces everywhere. I think there was three adult females there at the time of the warrant that were gonna have to be interviewed and kind of sorted out. But it was a big place. It was gonna take a while to search.
- [13:14]
Sam Paranti
Despite overwhelming evidence against him, Twinkle tries to deny who he is.
- [13:19]
Ricardo Vieira
We were calling him by his name and he was claiming, it's not me. This is a mistake. You are in the wrong place. I'm not the right person. You should take a look in another place. At the same time I was talking with him, I was starting his laptop. And when I entered his laptop, without asking him for the password, I asked him, should I call you Twinkle? And that made a click on his head. He realized that we knew a lot about him. He was quiet for a moment, thinking. I believe he was processing everything, like having 20 persons inside this place searching everything. He was with two kids in his bed. So it was full of evidence everywhere. But we were searching for the digital evidence for those pictures that he took during years of abuses that he committed to the victims in the laptop the only thing that was inside the hard disk was was the operating system and some incent files without any evidence.
- [14:40]
Sam Paranti
As Ricardo searches for the digital evidence of Twinkle's crimes, Greg walks through the house looking for physical evidence. And it's not long before he finds something.
- [14:56]
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- [16:51]
Pete
Myself and the two other experts on the victim ID side, you know, quickly started noticing clothing that they had seen from Twinkle series.
- [17:05]
Sam Paranti
The team is looking for evidence, proof that the man whose home they have raided is the same man who has been sharing child sexual abuse materials on the dark web. The evidence is everywhere.
- [17:21]
Pete
There is a really sad and like kind of scary mural on one of the girls walls that I think said like love and hate or hate and sadness like painted on the wall. That really took us back, you know, kind of was thinking like what little girl has this painted on their wall? It Wasn't a warm place. You know, there was nothing home about it, you know, nothing comfortable about it. The girl's bedroom just, you know, it's a crime scene. That's what it is. And, you know, and this one, one girl, one of these, you know, 12 or 15 kids, you know, had been. Was living in that room. So as we started collecting evidence inside the room, you know, saying, okay, this is. They had created a binder with a checkbox of different clothing pieces that they would look for and say, yes, this victim was wearing that. This was that victim. We started finding some of the notes that Twinkle had been putting on the kids and putting in the photos. And that was obviously really damning evidence,
- [18:44]
Greg Squire
but also a little bit surreal to
- [18:46]
Pete
see, having looked at those images a bunch of times and then finding the notes themselves.
- [18:54]
Sam Paranti
The notes are something that Twinkle did to his victims, a type of branding. He would write his username on the body of his victims or sometimes on a note next to them. This was purely for the benefit of his online community, so they knew he alone was producing these images. They're also essential evidence of the monstrous crimes he's committed. But they're not enough. They need the main computer hard drive, the place where Twinkle has everything stored, every image, every video of every child he has abused. They cannot leave without finding it.
- [19:47]
Pete
The problem was the hard drive was gone. So here's this big desktop and, you know, a hard drive the size, you know, of a sandwich is not in the computer. And so naturally, they go directly to Twinkle and say, you know, where's this hard drive?
- [20:04]
Sam Paranti
For hours, the team questions Twinkle going round and round before eventually he gives in and tells them where the hard drive is hidden.
- [20:16]
Pete
Every night, he would take the hard drive out of the computer, put it in a zip bag, Ziploc bag, and bury it in the woods across the street. So across the street we went with the team, and he had given a description of approximately where it was, the little tree that sort of served as a marker for him. And we went out there with a shovel that was, you know, at the house, and sure enough, we dug up a hard drive and definitely never seen anything like that before.
- [20:48]
Sam Paranti
Remember that Greg has to deal with this kind of material every day and has to cope with what he's seeing. But what he finds next shocks him to the core. And just a warning, there are some upsetting details coming up over the next few minutes.
- [21:05]
Pete
So as the search continued and, you know, questions were being asked of Twinkle and he was being fairly cooperative at that point, we Went out to look at his car. Cuz I think during the interview he had said he was, you know, set to be leaving somewhere that day. So three of us volunteered to go take a peek in the car. And when we, when we opened the trunk of the car, we found looked like Twinkles leaving for the weekend. There was some kids toys, like some pool toys in the car, a backpack and some other like swim things for kids. So we opened the backpack and. He was definitely going to be abusing some kids that weekend. He ended up admitting he had a weekend planned and that he was leaving that morning to go meet another offender at an Airbnb. So as the team sort of got a plan together, I think it was about an hour away where we were going to need to be because at that point we had the address of where this meeting was going to take place and we had like an approximate time of when the other guy was going to arrive. So that's a scramble to say the least. So I think we took maybe four cars into that direction. Again, it was like another super rural, very hilly area. So here we are maybe three hours away from being at Twinkle's house at a whole other residence. The guy showed up pretty much on time. He pulled into the driveway in his little Volkswagen and we pulled in pretty much right behind him. The primary police officers went and removed him from the vehicle and when they looked in the back, his two kids were in the back. There was a little girl, she was maybe four, maybe three or four. And then there was an infant in the back. The little girl was certainly drugged. She was completely out of it, like, couldn't keep her eyes open when the officers were trying to check on her. Was really just having this hard time, like kind of staying conscious. The baby was asleep. I don't remember if they said he had had something as well, but he was groggy for sure. They asked him, you know, what are you doing here? You know. And at first he had himself a little bit of an excuse, meeting a friend. But when they opened his trunk, he had almost the same sort of kit in the back of back of his car. He decided to start confessing shortly thereafter that he had met Twinkle online and that they had organized this weekend to bring each other's children to this Airbnb to have a weekend of, of abusing all the kids together. Really, really surreal, you know, really surreal that, you know, these notes that we had found months ago was an actual event and the fact that we were there on the right day now, this was completely, completely New to me and everybody that was there, you know, there weren't. There was a pretty experienced group there, and this was certainly the first time for all of us to go. You know, they had a planned weekend to, you know, sexually abuse babies, you know, in the little girl, of course, you know, being the eldest, at three or four, the wife had flown to France, and so he had the kids for the weekend. And that's why he was able to kind of arrange this, arrange this to happen. You know, on his camera, there was already pictures of abuse. You know, we knew we would find his children, his victims, inside baby heart. Yeah, it was. It was completely crazy. Like. Yeah, I just couldn't believe that we were there for that and that that was gonna happen, you know, in front of everybody's face. You know,
- [26:03]
Sam Paranti
if you're listening to this and struggling to cope with what you're hearing, that's normal. What isn't normal is having to process this kind of information day after day, year after year. But that's exactly what Greg and Pete had to do.
- [26:20]
Pete
I think we now describe my brain as mush, just a pile of mush.
- [26:24]
Sam Paranti
Pete and Greg have now been working together for almost a decade.
- [26:27]
Greg Squire
I think you're kind of just in the moment and wanting to do as much as you can for the operation, for the children, and, you know, while still trying to keep a clear head about the impact it's gonna have on the site, the impact it's gonna have on the, you know, the other bad guys, what sort of ripple effect to look for. You know, when these two people are all of a sudden missing. Typically, a guy like Twinko goes missing for just a few hours, there's instant concern, instant paranoia about what happened, what's going on, where they are.
- [27:03]
Sam Paranti
And these thoughts are ever present in Greg's mind. If the abusers aren't online, then where are they and what are they doing?
- [27:11]
Greg Squire
It is isolating work. It is a lonely occupation at times, and it's also not a very palatable topic. You know, you don't get asked a lot of second questions sometimes when you talk to people.
- [27:27]
Pete
And I get that, you know, we don't. We don't.
- [27:29]
Greg Squire
I don't do the work because I need anything more than we're doing the best we can for the children. We're not machines. We do a job that's. That's different. And somebody said to me in the. In the course of the conversation, well, what.
- [27:43]
Pete
What could we do? Like, what could we do? And it was a genuine.
- [27:46]
Greg Squire
A genuine question. And I appreciated it.
- [27:49]
Pete
The first thing that came out of my mouth without. Without really thinking. I was like, hey, if you see
- [27:54]
Greg Squire
me in the grocery store, just give me a hug.
- [27:59]
Pete
I don't think that they were expecting that, but I was like, you know, I don't know.
- [28:03]
Greg Squire
I don't know what to ask for. I don't. Most of us don't want to ask for anything. This is a calling in a way,
- [28:09]
Pete
just like a soldier has a calling
- [28:11]
Greg Squire
and many professionals do. You know, when I hug my kids, that's your fuel, right? That's your why. Because most times we're not going to see these kids that we help to get out of these situations and we, you know, we make these arrests to hopefully have them not live in fear and hopefully have them set on a journey of healing. So for us to feel love. It's a difficult journey. It's very difficult. I can't say that for everybody. I can say it for myself. It's hard to expose your whole self because your brain just doesn't operate the way everybody else's does. So there's a fear in saying, this is who I am and this is what I do.
- [29:06]
Sam Paranti
One of the hardest things is that there is no pattern, there's no type. There's no way to even try and predict who these people might be. And once you start thinking about this, you start looking at everyone you know, wondering, do they look at this type of content? Perhaps the only people who can identify paedophiles or people who will go on to become paedophiles are those who know them best. Twinkl is sentenced to 21 years in prison. After his arrest, Greg flies back home to the States where he gets a call. An investigator in Sweden has just arrested a man who was abusing his three year old niece. But that isn't the only crime he'd committed. He had been showing the footage of this abuse to someone else. A man in America living in Texas whose wife is pregnant. The investigator has identified the man as Staton Grubert.
- [30:24]
Narrator or Expert
Satan has always placed himself around children, his friends, siblings, family members, children, childcare environments in churches and work summer camps. I could go on. His personality and social skills allowed him a pass.
- [30:44]
Sam Paranti
That's next time on World of Secrets. We would like as many people as possible to hear this story, so please do leave a rating and a review. It really does help. Also, do subscribe or follow World of Secrets so you get our next investigation automatically. And if you haven't already, check out our previous seasons.
- [31:22]
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