Piracy itselfBBC Eye Surveys
BBC
Warning: This article contains details of sexual abuse
Online specialist investigator Greg Squire found himself at a dead end in his efforts to save an abused girl his team had named Lucy.
Disturbing images of her were being shared on the dark web – an encrypted corner of the internet accessible only using special software designed to make the owners digitally untraceable.
But even with this level of subterfuge, the attacker was conscious of “covering his tracks,” by cropping or altering any identifying features, Squire says. It was impossible to know who or where Lucy was.
What he would soon discover was that the clue to the 12-year-old’s whereabouts was hidden in plain sight.
Squire works for the US Department of Homeland Security Investigations in an elite unit that attempts to identify children appearing in sexual abuse materials.
A BBC World Service team spent five years filming with Squire and other investigative units in Portugal, Brazil and Russia – showing them solving cases such as that of a seven-year-old kidnapped and presumed dead in Russia, and the arrest of a Brazilian man responsible for five of the biggest child abuse forums on the dark web.
This unprecedented access shows how these cases are often solved, not through cutting-edge technology, but by spotting tiny, telling details in images or chat rooms.
Squire cites Lucy’s case, which he tackled early in his career, as inspiration for his long-term dedication.
He found it particularly disturbing that Lucy was around the same age as his own daughter and that new photos of her being attacked, apparently in her bedroom, were constantly appearing.
Squire and his team could see from the type of light sockets and electrical outlets visible in the images that Lucy was in North America. But that was about it.
They contacted Facebook, which dominated the social media landscape at the time, to ask for help sifting through uploaded family photos – to see if Lucy was featured in any of them. But Facebook, despite having facial recognition technology, said it “didn’t have the tools” to help.
Squire and his colleagues analyzed everything they could see in Lucy’s room: the bedspread, her outfits, her stuffed animals. I’m looking for anything that might help.
And then they had a little breakthrough. The team discovered that a sofa seen in some images was only sold regionally, not nationally, and therefore had a more limited customer base.
But that still represented around 40,000 people.
“At this stage of the investigation, we are [still] looking at 29 states here in the United States. I mean, you’re talking about tens of thousands of addresses, and that’s a very, very daunting task,” Squire says.
The team searched for other clues. And that’s when they realized that something as mundane as the exposed brick wall in Lucy’s bedroom could give them a clue.
“So I started Googling bricks and there weren’t too many searches [before] I discovered the Brick Industry Association,” Squire says.
“And the woman on the phone was great. She asked me, ‘How can the brick industry help?'”
She offered to share the photo with brick experts across the country. The response was almost immediate, he said.
One of the people who contacted us was John Harp, who had been in the brick sales business since 1981.
“I noticed that the brick was a very pink brick and it had a little layer of charcoal on it. It was an eight-inch modular brick and it had square edges,” he says. “When I saw that, I knew exactly what it was,” he adds.
It was, he told Squire, a “Flaming Alamo.”
“[Our company] I made this brick between the late 60’s and mid 80’s, and had sold millions of bricks from this factory. »
At first, Squire was excited, expecting to be able to access a digitized customer list. But Harp announced that the sales records were just a “pile of notes” going back decades.
It did, however, reveal a key detail about the bricks, Squire says.
“He said, ‘Bricks are heavy.’ And he said, ‘So heavy bricks don’t go very far.'”
It changed everything. The team went back to the sofa customer list and narrowed it down to only customers who lived within a 100-mile radius of the Harp brick factory in the southwest United States.
From this list of 40 or 50 people, it was easy to find and browse their social networks. And that’s when they found a photo of Lucy on Facebook with an adult who seemed close to the girl – perhaps a relative.
They calculated the woman’s address, then used it to discover all the other addresses linked to that person and everyone they had lived with.
This narrowed Lucy’s possible address even further – but they didn’t want to go door to door to inquire. If you get the address wrong, they could risk the suspect being tipped off that he was on the authorities’ radar.
So Squire and his colleagues began sending photos of these houses to John Harp, the brick expert.
The burning Alamos were not visible on the exterior of any of the houses, as they were clad in other materials. But the team asked Harp to evaluate — by examining their style and exterior — whether these properties were likely to have been built at a time when Flaming Alamos was for sale.
“Basically, we would take a screenshot of this house or residence and pass it to John and ask ‘would this house have these bricks in it?'” Squire says.
Finally, they achieved a breakthrough. They found an address that Harp thought was likely to feature a Flaming Alamo brick wall and was on the couch’s customer list.
“So we reduced it to [this] an address…and began the process of confirming who lived there through state records, driver’s license…school information,” Squire says.
The team realized that in Lucy’s house was her mother’s boyfriend, a convicted sex offender.
Within hours, local Homeland Security agents had arrested the offender, who had been raping Lucy for six years. He was later sentenced to more than 70 years in prison.
Harp, a brick expert, was thrilled to hear that Lucy was safe, especially given his own experience as a long-term foster parent.
“We’ve had over 150 different children in our home. We’ve adopted three of them. So over the years we have a lot of children in our home who have been [previously] abused,” he said.
“What [Squire’s team] I do it day after day, and what they see is a magnification hundreds of times of what I saw or had to face.”
A few years ago, this pressure on Squire began to take a toll on his mental health, and he admits that when he wasn’t working, “alcohol was a bigger part of my life than it should have been.”
“At that point, my kids were a little older…and, you know, that almost makes you push harder. Like…’I bet if I get up at three this morning I can surprise [a perpetrator] online.’
“But in the meantime, personally… ‘Who is Greg? I don’t even know what he likes to do.’ All your friends… during the day, you know, they’re criminals… All they do is talk about the most horrible things all day long. »
Shortly afterward, his marriage broke down and he says he began having suicidal thoughts.
It was his colleague Pete Manning who encouraged him to seek help after noticing his friend seemed to be struggling.
“It’s hard when the thing that gives you so much energy and motivation is also the thing that’s slowly destroying you,” Manning says.
Squire says exposing his vulnerabilities to the light was the first step to improving himself and continuing to do work he’s proud of.
“I feel honored to be part of the team that can make a difference instead of watching it on TV or hearing about it…I’d rather be there in the fight to try to stop it.”
Last summer, Greg met Lucy, now in her twenties, for the first time.
She told him that her ability to now discuss what she had experienced was a testament to the support she had around her.
“I have more stability. I can have the energy to talk to people [about the abuse]which I couldn’t have done… even a few years ago.”
She said that when Homeland Security stopped its abuse, she “actively prayed for it to stop.”
“Not to sound cliché, but it was an answered prayer.”
Squire told her he wished he could let her know help was on the way.
“You wish there was a little bit of telepathy and you could reach out and say, ‘listen, we’re coming’.”
The BBC asked Facebook why it couldn’t use its facial recognition technology to help find Lucy. He responded: “To protect user privacy, it is important that we follow the proper legal process, but we work to support law enforcement as much as possible.”
If you have been a victim of child sexual abuse, a victim of crime, or feel a sense of hopelessness e t you’re in the UK, you’ll find details of help and support at bbc.co.uk/actionline.
