Dark web agent spotted bedroom wall clue to rescue girl from abuse
bbc.com460 points by colinprince 11 hours ago
460 points by colinprince 11 hours ago
Am I reading this correctly that the address where they found the child was where her mother’s boyfriend was living?
> "So we narrowed it down to [this] one address… and started the process of confirming who was living there through state records, driver's licence… information on schools," says Squire.
> The team realised that in the household with Lucy was her mother's boyfriend - a convicted sex offender.
There’s a lot of focus on Facebook in the comments here, but unless I’m missing something the strangest part about this story was that the child’s mother was dating a convicted sex offender and they had to go through all of this process to arrive at this? It’s impressive detective work with the brick expert identifying bricks and the sofa sellers gathering their customer list, but how did this connection not register earlier?
EDIT: As others have pointed out, the wording is confusing. They made these connections to the identity only after identifying the house
The registry did come up, as soon as they had enough information for it to be useful. They were looking for a specific child, starting just from the images that her abuser was sharing on the internet (in which he intentionally tried to hide identifying details).
The registry is just a big list of names and addresses.
Sex offender registries are just registries. They only work if someone decides to actually do a query. It might prevent them from getting a childcare job, but it doesn't really prevent them from accessing children at all.
The registers are also massively bloated, some people get put on them for nothing more than public urination.
The only sex offenders who actually get regular checks that might identify this type of thing, are those on parole, or similar court ordered programs.
Other things that could get you on the registry include visiting a nude beach in California or being an 18-year-old high school student with a 17-year-old girlfriend and having your sexual activity discovered by a vindictive parent (that last one will get you the bonus bar of shame of criminal activity involving a minor). The registries are rather blunt tools and also end up doing things like making getting housing difficult (there was a news story I saw in the 90s about an encampment under a freeway in Florida as it was the only place people on the sex offender registry could legally live in a major city (I think Miami but this was 30 years ago). A more recent story in Chicago pointed out that a restriction on sleeping on the CTA would cause homeless people on the registry to end up being unable to meet the terms of their parole). I don’t really have much sympathy for child sex abusers, but if people are such dangers to society that they can only live under a freeway or will be reincarcerated on unavoidable technicalities, something is very wrong.
Right but I'll be honest, I've never thought about looking up the people I've dated in the past. No one really talked about it when I was younger. I don't remember my mother telling me to do criminal background checks on people I'm seeing.
Happened to me. Went out with somebody who turned out to be a serial shop lifter who operated with a small gang of other shop lifters. Everything looked fine up front until they disappeared when we had plans without contact for days. Thought I was ghosted. Turns out they were arrested.
A friend went out with someone who destroyed his car after he broke up because she was violent twords him. He had to get a restraining order. A friend of his dug up a link to a FL police site. Turns out she did a little time down there for assaulting another woman, beating her with a coat rack during a fight. He never thought to look her up either and she seemed nice at first. Shit happens. Don't blame the victim for not being paranoid that everyone they're dating might be a criminal. Especially when there are damn good liars out there.
Back when my wife and I were renting, we only found out our landlord was on the list because his parole officer stopped by and asked if he'd informed us as he was legally required to do.
We moved out rather quickly after that. If we were in a situation where we had to rent again, and went with an individual renting their own house rather than a company, checking out the registry is on the checklist of things to do.
How many of these sex offenders bought this couch and live close to this brick factory in homes built in that time period?
About 0.3% of the adult population is on registries in the US.
With 40,000 couch sales, there would be roughly 120 sex offenders would have bought that couch. You can see what I mean about the registries being bloated.
Doesn't really narrow things down until you add the brick factory, but then they already had it down to 40 houses.
But it's a mistake to even assume the couch was bought by the same house as the offender. The offender could just be visiting, or the couch could have been moved to a different house since purchase (sold second hand, or the owner moved). And you are assuming the offender had been caught before, or was even on the sex offender registry for abusing children.
So ~1m people are registered sex offenders? As in, 1m people who were arrested and found guilty of sex offences?
That’s insane.
It's more like 800,000
But I used number of adults, not total population. Because most children aren't registered sex offenders, or buying expensive furniture.
I think what is confusing is likely that the investigators/detectives were probably trying to make sure that the girl was actually in the house where the sex offender was registered or technically living, and not maybe kept somewhere else. A lot of detective work is building the case, but also confirming what you believe is actually true and you need the evidence to also request the warrant on factual grounds. They could have busted in the door of that house and found that there was no such brick to be found anywhere and the girl was sold off to someone else or something like that.
It’s really rather sick and deranged though that this kind of dynamic of women with children associating with sex offenders is not exactly rare. Frankly, I hope the mother was also charged.
> Frankly, I hope the mother was also charged.
Would you want her charged if she didn't even know?
There is nothing in the article suggesting that the mother conspired with her boyfriend, or that she even knew he was a sex offender. I can imagine a scenario where the mother blames herself for not knowing and is utterly destroyed by misplaced guilt. Who knows what actually happened? The article wasn't about that.
> Would you want her charged if she didn't even know?
Yes. She is responsible for making sure her children is safe and well taken care of. I say this morally, not as a legal fact. She should know what they are up to, and she should notice if any of them are regularly abused over an interval of years.
> Would you want her charged if she didn't even know?
Yes? There are laws against child endangerment for a reason, and giving someone unrestricted accsss to your child without performing a basic background check very much falls into that territory.
> There are laws against child endangerment for a reason
What do you think the reason is? The deterrence value is zero.
I hav heard this many times, but never found a single example - and I’ve looked. Everyone I’ve researched on the registry richly deserved it.
I challenge you and anyone else reading this to find an example of someone who is on the sex offender registry due to public urination.
I had a friend threatened with this by a cop. I was there. We had been drinking and he wanted to change his oil at a Jiffy Lube. Unbeknownst to us there was a park on the other side. He just got a ticket but the cop made the threat. It doesn't disprove your claim but it is an example of why the belief might persist
I'm not sure that's what you meant to link to. The description there is beyond lurid, and that guy only ended up on a registry after a lot of shenanigans.
> he was convicted in 2015 of two counts of open and gross lewdness for displaying his genitals to a neighbor through the window of his home
So he was naked in his own home?
#Land of the free
It's a stupid meme. Public urination, like actually taking a piss in public while no one is around you, is likely going to be a ticket for disorderly conduct if a specific charge for it doesn't exist. You won't get an indecent exposure charge unless you're purposely exposing yourself to others, it requires intent. Sometimes flashers will use the excuse of urinating for their intentional exposure or will lie that their indecent exposure charge was due to public urination and not because they were really masturbating in plain view. There probably have been prosecutors that have tried to slap an indecent exposure charge on an innocent public urinater but like everyone else says, they can't find any proof of it actually sticking.
The salient point was that the person was in a relationship to the child’s mother.
They didn't know who the child was, yet alone the mother. All they had were photos of an unnamed girl being abused.
I didn’t understand that part. The child has a mother, why wasn’t she reported missing?
A child does not need to be missing to be abused. Most abuse happens by people the child knows.
> some people get put on them for nothing more than public urination
When minor offences can get people put on the register, this dilutes the meaning of being on the register.
Every actual sex offender will claim they're on there not because of the serious crimes they committed, but because they went nude on the wrong beach, or something similarly minor.
Have you ever looked at one of the registries?
The ones I've seen have had details about the offense(s).
We don't have public ones here in Australia, so no I've never looked at one.
Having details would make it harder to play down the offenses. But only if someone bothers to check.
Queensland allows residents to see the details of offenders in our local area, but you need to provide extensive ID to do so, and leaking that information is itself a crime. Daniel's Law was introduced in 2025 so this is pretty recent.
The whole thing about people getting put on the sex offender registry for public urination is a myth and there's no verifiable cases of it happening. There are two cases that are relatively close. The first is James Birch, who pled guilty to indecent exposure for peeing on a Taco Bell because he was representing himself and didn't understand that meant he'd have to register as a sex offender. He realized his mistake and the court let him undo the plea and the charges were dropped. The second is Juan Matamoros, a meth dealer from Florida who claimed in the mid-2000s that the reason why he got put on the Massachusetts sex offender registry in the 80s was public urination. Due to the age of the case and Massachusetts privacy laws the court records aren't publicly available and his lawyer from the 80s responded to a request for interview about the case with "no judge I am aware of would allow someone to be put on the sex offender registry for peeing in public".
If anyone tells you that's why they're on the sex offender registry, it's extremely likely they're lying about it and you should really look them up.
It was standard practice by the police and DA in 2000s Massachusetts.
Neighbors were annoyed at loud college parties at the school I went to, so local police waited in bushes to catch people peeing in them, arrested them, and one of the charges was indecent exposure.
Happened to one person I knew personally so it must have happened to several others at just this school.
My friend plead out to some lower charge or probably got a continuance, but it massively increased the leverage they had over him and the fees and fines they could collect, and it massively lowered the chance of him doing any pushback that could have lead to a jury trial, which at least as far as he understood at the time would have put him on the registry, and which is why they abused the law and charged people this way.
Are you entitled to a jury trial for peeing in the bushes in the USA?
That isn’t the case here in Australia.
You can go to trial, but it will be a judge-only trial, and is typically conducted by the magistrate who saw you for your first appearance on the matter, in the magistrates court, which is the lowest court here.
I believe most of the colonies are approximately the same.
You are constitutionally entitled to a jury trial for any criminal charge in the US under the Sixth Amendment.
Thanks.
I’d imagine it would be cost prohibitive to take a peeing in the bushes charge to jury trial though?
Sounds like the sort of thing one would only do if they were aiming to set a precedent for some reason?
95% of cases are settled before reaching jury trial. Usually a plea bargain for criminal cases. Settlement for civil cases. Or dismissal. The other 5% are expensive.
Would peeing in a bush be a criminal charge? I'm not American but I thought there was a difference between misdemeanors and "actual" crimes.