A sofa and a type of brick were the only clues needed for an elite unit from the United States to save Lucy, a 12-year-old girl who was being abused by her mother’s boyfriend.
Online crime investigator Greg Squire had hit a dead end in his effort to rescue a girl victim of sexual abuse — nicknamed “Lucy” by her team.
Disturbing images of her were being shared on the dark web — an encrypted part of the internet accessible only through special software designed to make its users digitally untraceable.
Even with this level of secrecy, the abuser made a point of trying to cover his tracks, cutting out or altering any characteristics that could lead back to him, says Squire. Was impossible to find out who Lucy was or where she was.
But Squire soon realized that the biggest clue to locating the 12-year-old girl was right there in front of his eyes.
Squire works for the US Department of Homeland Security in an elite unit that tries to identify children appearing in sexual abuse material.
A BBC team spent five years recording the work of Squire and other research units in Brazil, Portugal and Russia.
Journalists filmed investigators solving cases such as that of a 7-year-old girl kidnapped in Russia and presumed dead.
Another case is that of a Brazilian responsible for five of the largest child abuse forums on the dark web. He was captured and sentenced to 266 years in prison.
These stories are narrated in , a BBC News Brasil documentary with BBC Eye, the BBC investigations team. ZAP reported earlier this month how the same documentary showed what Portuguese pedophile Nuno Melo was like.
The BBC’s unprecedented access shows how these cases are often solved not through cutting-edge technology, but through revealing details in images or chat forums.
Squire cites Lucy’s case, which he tackled early in his career, as the inspiration for his multi-year dedication to work. He found it especially disturbing that Lucy was almost the same age as his own daughter. New photos of her being assaulted, apparently in her bedroom, appeared constantly.
Squire and his team could see from the type of switches and electrical outlets visible in the images that Lucy was in North America. But that was all they knew.
They contacted Facebook, which at the time dominated social networks, asking for help to search photos of users on the platform and see if Lucy was in any of them. But the company, despite having facial recognition technology, said that “I didn’t have the tools” to help.
Squire and his colleagues then analyzed everything they could see in Lucy’s room: the bedspread, her clothes, her stuffed animals. Always looking for any element that could help find her.
Until they finally had a small breakthrough. The team discovered that a sofa seen in some of the images was only sold in one region United States rather than nationally and therefore had a more limited customer base. But that still represented about 40,000 people.
“At that point in the investigation, we were still looking at 29 states here in the United States. I mean, we’re talking about tens of thousands of addresses, and that’s a very, very difficult task,” says Squire.
The team was still looking for more clues. And that’s when they realized that an exposed brick wall in Lucy’s room could be a clue.
“I started googling bricks and it didn’t take long to find the Brick Industry Association“, says Squire.
“And the woman on the phone was amazing. She asked, ‘How can the brick industry help?'”
She offered to share photo with brick experts from across the country. The response was almost immediate, says the agent.
One of the people who got in touch was John Harp, who had worked in brick sales since 1981.
“I noticed that the brick was a deep pinkish hue and had a light charcoal-colored coating. It was an 8-inch modular brick and had square edges,” says Squire. “When I saw this, I knew exactly which brick it was.”
It was a “Flaming Alamo”, said the expert: “[A nossa empresa] manufactured this brick from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s, and I sold millions of bricks from that factory.”
Initially, Squire was excited, hoping researchers could access a digitized customer list. But Harp revealed that the sales records were just a “pile of notes” that went back decades.
However, it revealed a crucial detail about the bricks, says Squire. “He said, ‘Bricks are heavy.’ And he added: ‘And heavy bricks don’t go very far.’”
This changed everything. The team went back to the couch’s customer list and restricted it to only those customers who lived within a 100-mile radius of the Harp brick factory in the southwestern United States.
From this list of between 40 and 50 peopleit was easy to find and scour their social media. And that’s when they found a photo of Lucy on Facebook with an adult woman who seemed close to the girl — possibly a relative.
They discovered the woman’s address and then used that information to find every other address linked to that person and everyone else she had ever lived with.
This further narrowed down Lucy’s possible address, but they didn’t want to go door to door asking questions. If they got the address wrong, ran the risk of the suspect being alerted 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 Flaming Alamo bricks were not visible on the outside of any of the homes because the properties were clad with other materials. But the team asked Harp to evaluate — looking at the style and exterior — whether these properties were built during a period when the brick Flaming Alamo was for sale.
“Basically, we would take a screenshot of a house and send it to John, asking, ‘Would this house have these bricks inside?‘” says Squire.
Finally, they made a breakthrough: They found an address that Harp believed likely had a Flaming Alamo brick wall and was on the sofa’s client list.
“So we narrowed the search to that address and started the process of confirming who lived there through state records, driver’s license, school information,” says Squire.
The team realized that Lucy had lived in the same house as her mother’s boyfriend — a previously convicted sex offender in the past.
Within hours, local agents from the United States Homeland Security arrested the criminal, who had raped Lucy for six years. He was later sentenced to more than 70 years in prison.
Harp, the construction expert, was overjoyed to know that Lucy was safe, especially considering his own experience as a foster parent.
“Already We welcomed more than 150 children different in our house. We adopted three. So, over these years, we have had many children at home who have been abused [anteriormente]”, these.
“What [a equipa de Squire] does every day and what they see is something much bigger than I have ever seen or had to face.”
A few years ago, the pressure Squire suffered at work began to seriously affect his mental health. He himself admits that, when he was not working, “the alcohol was a bigger part of my life than it should be.”
“By that time, my kids were a little bit older… And, you know, it almost allows you to be more involved. Like… ‘I bet if I get up at 3 in the morning, I can get [um criminoso] online.’” says the agent.
“But in the meantime, in my personal life… ‘Who is Greg?’ I don’t even know what he likes to do.’”
Shortly afterwards, the your marriage is overand he says he started having suicidal thoughts. It was his colleague Pete Manning who encouraged him to seek help.
“It’s hard when the thing that gives you so much energy and motivation is also the thing that’s slowly destroying you,” says Manning.
Last year, Greg met Lucy, now a woman in her early 20s, for the first time. She said being able to finally talk about what happened is a testament to the support she has around her.
“I have more stability. I can have the energy to talk to people [sobre o abuso]which I couldn’t do… Not even a few years ago.”
She says that, at the time the Department of Homeland Security arrested the criminal, she “prayed for everything to end.” “Not to sound cliché, but It was an answered prayer.”
Squire told him he wished he could let him know he was on his way. “We wanted to have telepathy and be able to reach out and say, ‘Listen, we’re coming.’”
The BBC asked Facebook why it didn’t use its facial recognition technology to help in the search for Lucy. The response was: “To protect user privacy, it is important that we follow appropriate legal process, but we work to support law enforcement authorities as much as possible.”
