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TORONTO She is perhaps 12 now, her hair still light blond, but she doesn't smile anymore. Over the last three years, she has appeared in 200 explicit photos that have become highly coveted collectibles for pedophiles trolling the Internet. They have watched her grow up online the hair getting longer, the look in her eyes growing more distant.
"She's a collector's item," says Det. Sgt. Paul Gillespie of the Toronto Sex Crimes Unit. "I know somebody out there could lead us to her. But right now, the only ones who can see her face are the wrong ones."
To his shame and frustration, all he could do was watch as the photos kept appearing and the usual tricks to trace her failed. So he decided to try something different. A computer expert digitally erased the girl from the photos, and in February, Gillespie asked the public to help identify the locations: a hotel room, a fountain, an elevator and a video arcade.
Moments after the pictures appeared on a Toronto television station, the tips began to come, and caller after caller identified a Disney World hotel in Florida. A scan of hotel records gave the police a few clues. They believe some of the pictures were taken by a relative on a family vacation and the rest were taken at a residence.
It was a rare breakthrough for Gillespie and his team at the Child Exploitation Section of the Sex Crimes Unit. A 25-year veteran of the Toronto Police Service, Gillespie is a tall, mustached man with intense energy, blue language and a willingness to push boundaries including teaming up with Microsoft's Bill Gates to pioneer a tracking system that became available this month to any police unit investigating child pornography.
But in the case of the Disney World girl, it hasn't been enough. Now Gillespie wants to do something radical: release a photo of her face. But aside from worrying that it would violate her privacy, he must weigh whether it would put her more at risk than letting the abuse continue while they search for other leads.
In another case, an abuser confessed to police that he'd been so convinced that his victim's mother had figured out what was going on, he hired a fellow pedophile to kill her and the girl in exchange for more pictures and sex toys. What would happen if the offender saw the police broadcasting the Disney World girl's picture and expected that he was going to be caught?
"Could harm be caused? Absolutely," says the 45-year-old Gillespie. "Would it be more harm than would be caused for the rest of her life if we didn't do anything? We don't know. We're trying to determine the best thing to do."
...
One night in 2003, a frustrated Gillespie e-mailed Gates asking for help creating a database that could combine data from around the country and the world to help track down offenders and their victims.
To his surprise, Gates responded. After a year and a half of collaboration, Microsoft Canada and the Toronto police unveiled the Child Exploitation Tracking System this month to help investigators share information.
The system is designed to enable police in any country to plug into the system and cross-check data, including names, Internet aliases and the digital signature of every captured photograph. The software is free to any police team working to stop child pornography.
...
"Sometimes you just want to take a shower after doing this," Krawczyk says. "Sometimes you want to throw the computer across the room. But when we do get a bad guy, it gives you great satisfaction. He wouldn't have been caught any other way."
Of the unit's 37 arrests last year, 26 resulted from their undercover work.
The banter is tough in the room, with graphic discussions of what they would like to do to the "bad guys" if they could get their hands on them. But it masks an emotional investment in the search and rescue of children who often remind them of their own.
Bulmer, a goateed 16-year veteran with bleached spiky hair, speaks longingly of finding an 11-year-old girl he has tracked since 2002. After extensive analysis of online videos of her, the team has pinpointed her location to a city in the American Northwest and handed the case to the local police.
"Why can't they find her?" he asks. "Give me a plane ticket and I'll go there and find her myself."
Almost every investigator in the office has a talisman to ward off the ghosts that haunt the workday. For Gillespie, it's a Christmas card from the mother of a 3-month-old boy who had been raped by his uncle, thanking Gillespie and encouraging him to keep going even when he wants to give up. Gillespie tells a bit of the child's story, then swivels his chair to face the window when his eyes begin to well up. He turns back, recomposed.
"I look at that sometimes," he says simply. "It makes me feel good."
Krawczyk sometimes sneaks a look at a framed quote from Nietzsche above his computer: "He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster." But nothing purges the taint of the day like the way his son runs to hug him when he walks through the door at night, he says.
...
May 13, 2005
ORLANDO, Fla. -- A young girl who appeared in a series of sexually explicit pictures taken at a Walt Disney World hotel and other locations for the past three years has been found and is now safe, authorities said Friday.
The girl was located in a foster home in the Pittsburgh area after officials found a match Thursday in one of several law enforcement databases of child pornography, state and federal officials said. The officials variously gave her age as 11 or 12.
In April, police publicized a photo of a girl believed to be a witness in hopes that someone could identify her and the victim.
That girl was the victim's neighbour and friend, said Matt Irwin, a detective for the Orange County Sheriff's Office.
''She has been determined not to be the victim of any sexual abuse,'' Irwin said of the neighbour.
The unusual move came after police determined some of the assaults took place at a Disney resort in Orlando, Fla.
[...]
one more for the good guys!!Kathianne said:They found the 'blond girl' mentioned at the beginning of the above article:
http://www.canada.com/national/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=04b37c54-7b64-41d9-a89b-2adb2e8a50fe
i can vouche! i remember back when i was in as an MP. i mean, drunks, assults, thefts were easy to deal with. but when i came to family abuse (physical or sexual), deaths and the like it hard to deal with it. with the sexual abuse and deaths, CID took the cases, but you got jsut enough of the information from the initial contact to get the jist of it, and its sickening.Kathianne said:Read this and then remember, most police are doing a job none of us would want to. There are some bad ones, but not most:
