RedHanded - Episode 259 - Richard Huckle: Britain's Worst Paedophile

Episode Date: August 18, 2022

In October of 2019, prison officers at HMP Full Sutton in West Yorkshire discovered the body of a prisoner who'd been subjected to 89 minutes of torture before being strangled to death by ano...ther inmate. The victim was 33-year-old Richard Huckle. Dubbed by the media as "The Gap Year Paedophile", Huckle was serving a life sentence for carrying out a 9-year-long, systematic campaign of abuse against some of the world's poorest children. Huckle documented his atrocities on the dark web, authored a how-to-guide for paedophiles, and contributed to one of the largest nonce-networks ever discovered. This is the story of Richard Huckle and the incredible officers who brought him down. Become a patron: Patreon Order a copy of the book here (US & Canada): Order on Wellesley Books Order on Amazon.com Order a copy of the book here (UK, Ireland, Europe, NZ, Aus): Order on Amazon.co.uk Order on Foyles Follow us on social media: Instagram Twitter Visit our website: Website Sources: https://www.ecpat.org.uk/news/wake-up-call-needed-over-abuse-of-children-abroad-ecpat-uk-warns https://www.malaymail.com/malaysia/article/pmo-sets-up-task-force-to-review-child-protection-laws https://thethunderbird.ca/2008/01/22/pedophiles-destroying-views-about-teaching-overseas/ https://www.nationalcrimeagency.gov.uk/news/british-teacher-jailed-for-sexually-abusing-children-in-the-uae https://edition.cnn.com/2021/06/04/china/david-mcmahon-us-china-shanghai-prisoner-intl-hnk/index.html https://www.ecpat.org.uk/news/wake-up-call-needed-over-abuse-of-children-abroad-ecpat-uk-warns https://www.the-sun.com/news/2763075/sex-attack-convict-teacher-changed-name/ https://www.theguardian.com/social-care-network/2014/dec/19/simon-harris-british-citizens-child-abuse https://www.thestar.com.my/news/nation/2016/06/08/najib-heed-lessons-from-richard-huckle-case/ https://www.thestar.com.my/news/nation/2016/06/03/he-wasnt-a-teacher-says-british-council https://www.thestar.com.my/news/nation/2016/06/03/have-laws-on-child-pornography-or-another-richard-huckle/ https://www.theweek.co.uk/73210/richard-huckle-britains-worst-paedophile-handed-22-life-sentences https://www.nspirement.com/2021/09/13/child-sex-tourism-the-scale.html http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/34/child-sex-tourism-us-and-them-in-a-globalized-world  https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/jun/02/richard-huckle-parents-threw-him-out-court-told https://www.nst.com.my/news/nation/2017/09/284002/paedophiles-diary-richard-huckle-kept-account-his-grotesque-acts https://www.hulldailymail.co.uk/news/hull-east-yorkshire-news/paul-fitzgerald-paedophile-richard-huckle-4717343 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nBgCCLGiw8 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-humber-54991643 https://www.hulldailymail.co.uk/news/hull-east-yorkshire-news/paul-fitzgerald-murder-richard-huckle-4729347 https://news.sky.com/story/richard-huckle-prisoner-found-guilty-of-murdering-britains-worst-paedophile-12140521 https://metro.co.uk/2020/11/24/man-who-murdered-britains-worst-paedophile-laughs-as-hes-jailed-for-34-years-13650057/ https://peoplepill.com/people/richard-huckle https://allthatsinteresting.com/richard-huckle-death https://www.hulldailymail.co.uk/news/hull-east-yorkshire-news/richard-huckle-murder-paul-fitzgerald-4732115 https://www.hulldailymail.co.uk/news/hull-east-yorkshire-news/paul-fitzgerald-jailed-richard-huckle-4731528 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-humber-55061443 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-humber-55061443 https://www.sundayworld.com/crime/cannibal-killer-who-raped-and-murdered-paedophile-richard-huckle-committed-first-sex-offence-at-12/39813976.html https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRSpa_6jDrU&t=1202s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47Q-N252ZNE https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/06/01/britains-worst-paedophile-who-targeted-poverty-stricken-children/ https://news.sky.com/story/1705161/huckle-tried-to-cash-in-on-child-abuse-pics https://www.kentlive.news/news/kent-news/gruesome-details-revealed-over-death-3436632 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWgruUf1NNk https://dailyuknews.com/uk-news/prisoner-found-guilty-of-murdering-britains-worst-paedophile/ https://www.kentlive.news/news/kent-news/psychopath-who-raped-murdered-richard-4733739 https://www.kentlive.news/news/kent-news/prisoner-who-killed-kents-most-4715058 https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/10141515/richard-huckle-murder-making-of-britains-worst-paedophile/ https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/innocentlooking-schoolboy-turned-britains-worst-paedophile/news-story/e7ef359a22d22f5afb5125adf9f0b87e https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zVGsKIM2_Y https://www.malaymail.com/news/malaysia/2016/06/03/british-paedophile-met-victims-at-community-of-praise-church-source-says/1133555 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-abuse-malaysia-idUSKCN0YV061 https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/se-asia/uk-paedophile-who-wrote-child-lover-guide-admits-to-sex-attacks-on-malaysian-children https://www.malaymail.com/news/malaysia/2016/06/04/report-troublemaker-uk-paedophile-wanted-to-marry-indian-girl-at-kl-welfare/1133897 https://www.buzzfeed.com/patricksmith/paedophile-given-23-life-sentences https://www.sundayworld.com/crime/cannibal-killer-who-raped-and-murdered-paedophile-richard-huckle-committed-first-sex-offence-at-12/39813976.html https://www.nst.com.my/news/2016/06/149621/huckle-never-drew-suspicion https://www.kentlive.news/news/kent-news/sickening-crimes-richard-huckle-how-3426139 https://malaysia.news.yahoo.com/report-convicted-paedophile-richard-huckle-030505307.html?guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAIcsqBAR1k-zKCW69HKZIbqBYFPkJe6z0fKtqH99QqEv_p1WBCfHVZAroIy2uc337Gx3kQ0-Ctwl9yaxbBVRBp1UxeuTFbgOaTV29kHspTS5e-nOE8l9dJjURgPIGcJlDi1GtvICpav29qwCV3GZKFOk3Q0YgkXGlE0o6CZ35Bnl&guccounter=2 https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/jul/13/shining-a-light-on-the-dark-web-how-the-police-ended-up-running-a-paedophile-site https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-36435349 https://vpnoverview.com/privacy/anonymous-browsing/the-dark-web/ https://www.nst.com.my/news/2016/06/149621/huckle-never-drew-suspicion https://abcnews.go.com/International/inside-world-cambodias-child-sex-trade-told-eyes/story?id=45990734 https://subsaga.com/bbc/documentaries/crime/2018/the-gap-year-paedophile.html https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/4537502/britains-worst-paedo-richard-huckle-who-raped-kids-as-young-as-3-boasted-of-kissing-little-girl-at-sunday-school-in-sick-diaries/ https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/10141515/richard-huckle-murder-making-of-britains-worst-paedophile/ https://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcthree/article/7b60672a-c67f-4ed8-8bd6-28efd0506733 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-36437856 https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/britains-worst-paedophile-richard-huckle-8102681 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to Red Handed early and ad-free. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. So, get this. The Ontario Liberals elected Bonnie Crombie as their new leader. Bonnie who? I just sent you her profile. Her first act as leader, asking donors for a million bucks for her salary. That's excessive. She's a big carbon tax supporter. Oh yeah. Check out her record as mayor. Oh, get out of here. She even increased taxes carbon tax supporter. Oh yeah, check out her record as mayor. Oh, get out of here.
Starting point is 00:00:25 She even increased taxes in this economy. Yeah, higher taxes, carbon taxes. She sounds expensive. Bonnie Crombie and the Ontario Liberals. They just don't get it. That'll cost you. A message from the Ontario PC Party. They say Hollywood is where dreams are made.
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Starting point is 00:00:57 or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Saruti. And I'm still Hannah, allegedly. And welcome to Red Handed. What have we got for you today? Well, we haven't done a Patreon little notice in quite a while, so if you're not a patron and you're like sitting on the fence thinking about it well here are some reasons you should get off that fence because over there you can go take a look at it you can go take a look at the various tiers we've got and pick the one
Starting point is 00:01:35 that you think is right for you and if you sign up you can get access to under the duvet which is our official after show party every single week where hannah and i talk about all sorts of things from doing the citizenship tests of various countries and failing. I saw that the most popular comment for the next one we should do is Australia. Okay. We'll give it a shot. So far we are not British and we are not French and we also do deep dives into all manner of political things going on around the world as well as i don't know babies that have been born into our friendship groups yeah and sometimes i chat shit about m night shabbalan there you go so come check it out and if you would like some more structure
Starting point is 00:02:13 to your patreon content we'll never fear because we also do a full length bonus episode every single month and this month it is on the just absolutely horrific and shocking case of Christopher Newsome and Shannon Christian. I'm guessing most of you spooky bitches already know that case. So if you want to hear it, come on over to patreon.com slash red handed and sign up there. Exactly. But don't worry, we haven't kept all of the horror for Patreon. We do have some horror for you right now. Oh, yes. And that is not an over-exaggeration. On the morning of the 13th of October 2019,
Starting point is 00:02:52 prison officers at HMP Full Sutton in West Yorkshire rushed to cell 43, where an assault was taking place. There they found an inmate lying face down in a pool of blood, being straddled by another inmate, 29-year-old Paul Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald was a diagnosed psychopath who was already serving an indefinite sentence for a string of crimes, including sexually assaulting a dog walker, in 2009. The prisoner being attacked was gagged, had his hands and feet bound by electrical wire, and his trousers pulled down around his ankles. Fitzgerald was whispering something in his victim's ear while strangling him with a guitar string.
Starting point is 00:03:30 The officers managed to restrain Fitzgerald before trying to resuscitate the other prisoner, but it was too late. The post-mortem of the other prisoner revealed the grisly details of the 89-minute-long torture that Fitzgerald had subjected this man to. He'd been stabbed in the neck with a shiv made from a screw and a toothbrush. I know that contraband in jail is a thing that exists. I am also confused. Where are these electrical cables, guitar string, condoms, all of these things, where are they coming from? I mean, offence, presumably, but it's the condoms that that i'm like why would you need condoms in a male prison safe sex safe sex and i i guess smuggling drugs in people swallow condoms full
Starting point is 00:04:15 of drugs i guess anyway moving on a pen had been forced up the prisoner's nose and into his brain a spoon had been forced into his lower bowel through his anus. His head had been smashed against the floor multiple times and he had been raped anally and that all happened long before he finally died from strangulation. Fitzgerald later told officers that he was also planning on cooking and eating pieces of his victim and that he had intended to go on to kill two or three more other victims. But in his own words, quote, I got carried away by how much fun I was having doing what I was doing to him. For this murder, Fitzgerald was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum
Starting point is 00:04:56 term of 34 years. Fitzgerald claimed that he had tortured and murdered the 33-year-old as a form of poetic justice. What did he mean by this? Well, the man that he killed was Richard William Huckle, a freelance photographer, English teacher and Christian missionary, dubbed by the press as Britain's worst paedophile. Huckle was born on the 14th of May 1986 into a loving, church-going, middle-class family in Ashford, Kent. He attended Harvey Grammar School, a selective grammar school with only 900 pupils.
Starting point is 00:05:30 I believe that Kent and Buckinghamshire are, I think, one more county of the only ones that still have grammar schools. Yeah, they're very few and far between. International listeners, to get into grammar school you have to do a very antiquated test called the 11+, which has been around for nearly 100 years and is a very specific form of verbal reasoning and if you fail that you are not getting into grammar school which is what happened to me. A few friends that Richard Huckle had at school described him as quote a bit of a loner but nothing out of the ordinary. In fact there was only one slightly remarkable incident that took place during his time at school.
Starting point is 00:06:06 When Huckle was disciplined for selling fake Pokemon cards. I definitely nicked Pokemon cards. I definitely went in people's coat pockets and took the shiny ones. I know. I think I was the reason they got banned in my school. Wow. I've never told anyone that. Wow, confessions.
Starting point is 00:06:22 Fucking Anna. I'll just tell thousands of people. Hundreds of thousands of people. My entire opinion of you has completely changed. I know, wronging from the start. But apart from the Pokemon card incident, he went on to be a successful podcaster. No, I'm kidding. There really weren't any other red flags or signs of delinquency in Huckle's early life. Certainly nothing that would have warned anyone about what he would go on to do. Huckle's quiet and sometimes odd demeanour did catch the attention of local bullies who would taunt him for looking rat-like
Starting point is 00:06:51 and all this did was cause the already sheepish young man to retreat further into himself. After Huckle finished his GCSEs, in which he did quite well, he struggled with his AS levels and decided to take up a course in IT and photography at college instead. When he was 16, Huckle took the opportunity to get away from life in Kent by going on a month-long trip to work at a school in Namibia, southern Africa. It was in Namibia that Richard got his first glimpse of what life was like for children in poorer countries, something that you'll later see got the twisted
Starting point is 00:07:25 cogs turning in his mind. It was also around this time that Huckle became a regular worshipper at Ashford Baptist Church. He'd often volunteer to photograph events there, like baptisms and Sunday school classes, using a camera that he'd been given for his 17th birthday. This pastor never really thought much of it, but the pastor at another church that Huckle attended in London did note that it seemed as though Huckle was only interested in the big JC's house when he knew that he'd have the opportunity to work with children. The trip he took to Namibia sparked a taste for travel in Huckle, and so in early 2005, Huckle decided to take a gap year before going to university. But before he set off, he got himself
Starting point is 00:08:06 baptised and then headed to a year-long teaching placement in Malaysia. And he, of course, took his camera with him. He got the placement through the World Challenge Organisation, which on its website describes itself as a non-denominational Christian organisation committed to communicating the truths of scripture and the person of Jesus Christ in an accurate, clear, and practical manner, leading people to an understanding of God's love and plan for their lives. I don't understand any of that. I understand all of it. And I mean, it's a mission statement, sort of this. It's like, you silly heathens with your other gods
Starting point is 00:08:46 with all of their different flavor arms got it you can't have those anymore because you're wrong I see but don't worry I'm a non-denominational so that means anything goes like but except your gods they're not fine got it and I'm gonna tell you through God's love got it and my penis initially Huckle was sent to work on an animal conservation programme, but it turned out that washing elephants and saving baby turtles wasn't really his idea of a good time. So he went to the World Challenge head office in Malaysia and requested that he be transferred to work at a school or an orphanage,
Starting point is 00:09:19 claiming that helping kids was his true passion. And so Huckle was sent to teach English at a local school. We are going to talk about this later, but I feel like it would be remiss not to even mention it now. What is the vetting process at this point where he's just like, nah, I don't like these turtles. I want to work with the kids. And they're just like, sure. Imagine if like somebody just turned up at school here and was like, oh, to volunteer they would get vetted at least like dbs checks and things like that yeah the problem with the dbs is it just proves you haven't been caught oh of course yes there is a dbs system in this country and it's better than the crb system that used to exist
Starting point is 00:10:00 and it's better than nothing which is what seems to be happening here. So it was here, at this local school, that Huckle met a woman named Sammy, who he also ended up sharing an apartment with. Sammy has since said that Huckle never really socialised with her, and that when they were at school, he was incredibly quiet and nervous. She said that it was weird that Huckle wouldn't really speak to anyone, including the children, but that he made sure to have his camera hanging around his neck at all times. For all of his quietness in the real world, Huckle was extremely vocal on his blog. Here Huckle wrote incredibly offensive things about his fellow World Challenge missionaries and the organisation itself, something that they weren't too pleased about when they found out he's really just like the worst of the worst weird quiet awkward guy at school just taking
Starting point is 00:10:51 pictures of everybody but then he goes and he writes a blog where he just slags everyone off i've said it before and i will say it again never trust a blogger though all of my friends parents are like how's the blog going and i'm like great yeah and you're like oh the dino blog great guns nailing it I'm full time now I went back to my old job for a press night and the I think you were there actually this was years ago and the box office manager he's Australian he's like how's your website going and I was like so good yeah it's all right actually yeah it's uh yeah just just running a website that. That's what I'm doing. Love it. So after they found out about his blog,
Starting point is 00:11:32 the organisation decided that it would be best to move Huckle to another placement because that is what the church and any religious organisation just loves doing. They're like, we're not going to out you because that's going to be embarrassing for everybody. And so we're just going to move you somewhere else and make you their problem how's that sound great off you go and so huckle was sent to work as a children's sunday school teacher at an independent church called the community of praise tamam wayu which is a tamil protestant community in kuala lumpur careful i know you didn't see that coming, did you? I did not.
Starting point is 00:12:06 Well, there you go. It's here. The Tamils. The Tamils are here. So although Huckle avoided socialising as much as he could, he did post relentlessly online about the experiences that he was having. In one post he wrote, After my second week of teaching here, became passionately fond of tamil culture and became very involved with the church and its members oh great i love i'm so glad i'm so glad
Starting point is 00:12:31 that richard huckle loves tamil culture fuck you he loved it so much that he quote learned to read tamil characters within a few months something i don't believe for a fucking second also i can't do that i can't even write my name in Tamil. I do not believe that Richard Huckle learnt Tamil. I think one of the first things I ever remember asking you about Tamil was like what does the alphabet look like and you were like no fucking idea. It's mental. In a word it's fucking mental. There are like a bazillion characters and it is like it's recognised as one of the hardest languages to learn you just i cannot believe it fuck you richard huckle you lying piece of shit he also claimed that he slowly
Starting point is 00:13:12 began to learn some of the language but he learned to read and write it first and then he learned to speak that's how that works read and write it there are loads of kids in tamil nadu who can't read or write tamil because they just get sent to english schools because it's just easier obviously they can speak it but he's lying lying. Yeah, I don't believe it. He also took trips to Brunei and Cambodia within his first eight months of being stationed in Kuala Lumpur. You could argue if those things were true, which we don't think that they are, they are reasonably normal, good things for someone to move to a new country and attempt to integrate into the culture, learn the language, etc. But what Richard Huckle was writing in his diary whilst at Praise Church
Starting point is 00:13:48 was quite a bit more troubling than lying about being able to speak Tamil. You get absolutely zero points for guessing what we're about to say next. One of these diary entries read, I had some of the children sit down with me for a cuddle. We got out the mattress and had a relaxation session I think one of the most jarring things about teaching abroad having I never see I never taught in this country but I would work with kids with disabilities and blah blah and there's so many rules about touching them and how much is too much and like etc etc and you I was taught that
Starting point is 00:14:26 if they hug you you just have to say thank you put their arms down and put them away from you the other countries in which I taught those rules do not exist so I found it very difficult because obviously if a child has hurt themselves or they're crying your first instinct as a human is to touch them and I had not been able to do that previously. And then I was suddenly in an arena where that was sort of expected, especially with the babies, you know, with the really tiny kids, like there are no rules about how much you can touch them. Absolutely. And I would say also, I haven't done as long stints as you have done, but I did do a couple of weeks volunteering in an orphanage many, many years ago in Peru.
Starting point is 00:15:10 And absolutely, now that I think about it, reflecting after we've done the research for this particular case, it's really troubling because I volunteered in a girl's orphanage. And men my age at the time, so I would have been like 23, were allowed to stay in the accommodation that was above the orphanage and interact with the girls I don't want to sound like a cynical bitch because like all the guys that I met there were really great I made loads of friends etc but now I think about it I'm like there were loads of times we were completely unsupervised with those kids oh totally I think like in Korea Costa Rica is a different situation because I was working illegally but like in Korea, it's a very strenuous process to get the visa. You have to do the equivalent level of not a DBS check, but an FBI level check on you.
Starting point is 00:15:51 But again, that only proves you haven't been caught. It's probably different now. But at the time, you didn't need an English teaching qualification to get a job in a state school. All you needed was to have a degree, English being your first language, and to be white. And actually, if you are white South African, it didn't matter whether your first language was Afrikaans because you were white. They assumed it was English, so you're allowed to teach. So I watched a lot of Afrikaners teach terrible fucking English.
Starting point is 00:16:13 So there was some definite safeguarding issues, even in the country with all of the infrastructure. Yeah, because I would say that when I went to Peru, I went through a private organisation and we were just paying the orphanage. So we were just making donations to the orphanage every single week in order to use the accommodation upstairs. We would hang out with the kids, but we were also allowed to go do whatever we wanted. So it was essentially staying in a... Like a homestay.
Starting point is 00:16:37 It was like a homestay. Slightly more expensive, hostel, homestay vibe. But if you were traveling solo, which I was, it was just a good place to meet people who maybe weren't just there to like take loads of drugs or whatever but now that I think about it yeah nothing no check whatsoever yeah literally nothing so what we're saying is that we are in no way surprised that this got as far as it did as quickly as it did shortly after he began working at praise church World Challenge received a complaint from some of the parents. They accused him of having smacked their children for misbehaving in class. And so, World Challenge decided to let Huckle go and told him to return to the UK. But somehow,
Starting point is 00:17:16 the following week, Huckle convinced the pastor at Praise Church to hire him independently, something World Challenge were extremely troubled by, but had no power to stop. Despite the few complaints that had been made against Richard by some of the parents, the fact that he showed so much willing, like allegedly learning some Tamil and constantly talking about God,
Starting point is 00:17:38 people were quick to give him the benefit of the doubt that he just really did want to teach the children. Local families invited him into their homes, even allowing him to sleep over and take their children out for day trips without any supervision. There is no doubt in my mind whatsoever the fact that he is white also made a lot of this possible for him. No doubt whatsoever.
Starting point is 00:17:59 So nobody knows for certain when exactly Huckle began to sexually abuse the children of these poor communities, but the earliest confirmed case took place in 2006 during one of Huckle's visits to a church in Cambodia. There he was allowed completely unsupervised access to two young sisters, aged four and six. Huckle raped these girls systematically for years, and he filmed what he did to them. Cambodia is sometimes referred to as the Kingdom of Wonder, but for some of the nation's children, it is a living hell. The country's been through a lot, years of civil war, genocide and the fall of the Khmer Rouge, and in the wake of the lawlessness of that time, child sex trafficking was and is still rampant today. It's a well-known
Starting point is 00:18:47 fact that Western paedophiles and sex tourists flock to the country every year to take advantage of some of the world's most vulnerable children. And they do so because they know that they will get away with it there. According to former pastor Don Brewster, who founded the organisation Agape International Mission, or AIM, which is dedicated to fighting child sex trafficking in Cambodia, he says it's commonplace for Westerners to come into a little community, stop in front of a school and ask the first person they see, I want to have sex with a young girl.
Starting point is 00:19:20 And a lot of the time, it's the children's parents who sell them to foreigners for as little as 100 American dollars. The fact that these sex tourists can just go there and it's not even like they're having to sneak into these environments in order to abuse these children. The fact that they are able to just go and speak to people on the street and be like where can I find a child to rape yes we've seen so much of this in recent years as well the kind of rise of like even virtual grooming rooms where these men will set up internet accessibility for poor families in countries like the Philippines and then often it is the mother or the father themselves that are sexually abusing the children in front of a webcam for these men to watch. I mean, the level of like poverty and the inability for people to escape from it and crossing the line to where it feels OK or it feels excusable to allow the abuse of your own children in order to get money. It is just so harrowing and so dark. And again, the fact that these men are just able to go there
Starting point is 00:20:25 and abuse with impunity is horrific. And if you want an example, a real life example, we've got one for you. In 2008, a former US Marine, Michael Joseph Pepe, was living in Cambodia when he was charged with seven counts of illegal sex acts with a child. He was extradited back to the US. And it was there he was sentenced to 210 years in prison in 2014. But in reality, he is just one sick fuck who got caught out of hundreds, probably thousands just like him, who fly under the radar every single day. That's what I was going to say. It's good. I'm glad they got him. I'm glad he's in prison. But the other thing to understand is that not only are sometimes these families complicit in the abuse, often that's not the case. And these families have
Starting point is 00:21:09 no idea what's happening, like many of the victims in the Richard Huckle case that we're going to go through. But also the police in these countries, I would argue that in countries like India, the idea of a paedophile is only even now just becoming something that people talk about. I'm not saying people didn't know that they exist, but it's just not something that is like a part of the lexicon. It's not something that is seen as like a crime that occurs. And if we think that historical child sex abuse cases were happening in this country like 40, 50 years ago, of course, it's still happening now. But all of those cases that were ignored, like Jimmy Savile, etc. Think even 50 years before that, And that's where you might be
Starting point is 00:21:47 approaching where these developing countries police forces are in terms of tackling these issues. Yeah, we even spoke about it in the Jimmy Savile episodes, like in the, you know, late 40s, early 50s, when he was DJing, people who were around were like, well, we just didn't have a word for it then. There were girls who wore socks, and there were girls who wore tights, and that was it. Yeah, exactly. But coming back to Huckle, as we said, he abused these little girls in Cambodia for years as he bounced back and forth between the UK and Malaysia after he finished his gap year. In 2010, after getting a certificate in English language teaching for adults, or CELTA,
Starting point is 00:22:21 he decided to move to Malaysia permanently. Getting a CELTA is your golden ticket. CELTA is seen as like the most prestigious English teaching qualification. I have a TEFL, which is basically bullshit. You can do it in a month, right? People who have CELTAs, it's a lot of work. It's very expensive. So like people who have CELTAs think they can shit on everyone. And they do because like the international school jobs are where the money is. You are not getting an international school job without years of experience and a CELTA. So a CELTA is quite a big deal in the English teaching community.
Starting point is 00:22:49 And he got himself one. And then he got himself a student visa to study IT in Kuala Lumpur's Metropolitan University and began freelancing as a photographer. His professional Facebook page for his photography business said that he worked birthdays, weddings, sports events and religious festivals. And it also said that he'd captured the true feeling and emotions of his subjects to produce the most natural looking pictures. I fucking hate this guy. Once again, proof that no one is a photographer. They're all paedophiles and on the site trek world which is apparently a popular british tourist like photo
Starting point is 00:23:27 posting website but i've never used it ever apparently it's like where people go to post like pictures of their travels oh maybe like flicker do you remember that i do remember flicker i think it's like that okay but i've not ever seen it. And on this website, Trekworld, Huckle, under the username Huckle, which is spelled H-U-C-K-O-O-L. The cool way. Yeah, the cool way, with a K, would regularly comment on photos of children saying how beautiful they were.
Starting point is 00:23:59 But this guy, like, because with the diaries he keeps, right, we're going to look at a few more entries throughout this episode of the things that he writes in these diaries. He's very careful. He uses a lot of like a very careful language. He says like a relax session or like we just had a cuddle. But like, oh, and then he's just on here like posting things like so beautiful, like all of this.
Starting point is 00:24:21 But as you're going to find out, he saves his worst for where he thinks no one else can see it. So like we said, Trekworld is a very normal website. It's accessible by anybody. I don't know if it still exists, you can probably still get on it. And it's on what we'd call the clear web. But at the same time, Huckle was also very busy posting on the dark web. Something we'll come back to in a little bit. Since he gained that all-important shelter, Huckle began to advertise his services in Kuala Lumpur not only as a photographer but as a qualified English teacher. Pretty soon he began working in schools, orphanages and was even hired by families for private tuition. Again, shelter is something that not everyone has and everyone wants. But still this wasn't enough for Richard Huckle. He began to frequent the beaches in Port Dixon, a coastal town just south of Kuala Lumpur.
Starting point is 00:25:09 Families would often visit these beaches on day trips from the capital, and Huckle would wander around with his camera and take pictures of the children, like the Balinese woman who just took a picture of me on the beach. That was very funny. Hannah and I were in Bali, and we were just like hanging out on the beach that was very funny Hannah and I were in Bali and we were just like hanging out on the beach and this Balinese woman was just like I'm just gonna take pictures of that girl that white girl over there with the long red hair and then she did yeah and then I foolishly thought that she was asking me to take a picture of her and her friend and then they took
Starting point is 00:25:41 it in turns to sit next to me and take pictures with me. And I knew exactly what was going on. Because these two Balinese women came over to me and Hannah on the beach and they were like, oh, a camera? And they were like handing the camera, but they were like pointing the camera at you. And you were like, oh, she'll take it because she's better at taking photos than me. And I was like, I was thinking that's not what they're asking. And then they were like, no, no. And then one of them sat down and the other one took a picture of her friend sat next to Hannah.
Starting point is 00:26:06 And then they swapped. It was so funny. I am not for a moment suggesting that that is as sinister as what Richard Huckle was doing. It just made me think of it. So what he would do is he would approach the parents and offer them a print of their picture that he had just taken uninvited of their children. And he would spark up a conversation about how he'd love to teach their children English free of charge. This is the thing and I do think again I just want to reiterate that the parents that this is happening to not all of them are just like yeah let my child be abused because I'll get some money because that's not that's not Richard Huckle's operation and the thing is they're also not stupid the thing is, they're also not stupid. The problem is that they just don't live
Starting point is 00:26:45 in a world in which stranger danger, men attacking your children and snatching them away, etc, are top of mind. They're not like part of society's fears for parents. That's not what they're thinking about. So when this man comes over and shares a picture and wants to like hang out with your kids, these people will think that it's a good thing for their child, that their child's going to learn English, that it's going to open their eyes up and their knowledge up to like the western world and it's going to get them a better job because that's what these parents are preoccupied with for their children I do just want to make that point because I don't want people to feel like they're either complicit or they're all stupid because that's not the case
Starting point is 00:27:19 and Richard Huckle fully knows that he is working these parents for all they are worth because usually they were thrilled and almost always accepted his seemingly kind, educated white man's offer to help better their child's future prospects. Little did these parents know how dangerous this man really was and how they were unwittingly playing into his extremely calculated grooming strategy. In exchange for the free English tuition, these poor families would often give Huckle meals and even a bed for the night in their home.
Starting point is 00:27:52 Based on diary entries that Huckle made during this time, we know that he managed to convince at least 12 families to allow him into their homes using this tactic, one of which had a six-month-old baby living there. And in his diary entries, he talks about trying to put the baby to sleep in the hammock. So he is alone with the baby at definite points during that time. So, so far, we've mentioned Huckle committing abuse in Malaysia and Cambodia. But over the nine-year period between 2005 and 2014, He also made four trips to India. Here, Huckle once again posed as a
Starting point is 00:28:27 Christian missionary in order to gain access to church-run orphanages across the country. Huckle would even wander around the poorest areas of big cities trying to ingratiate himself with impoverished families. So this thing, he doesn't even just go through the church, he has this disgustingly insatiable need to just find any routes he can to get towards children to the point that he's just talking to people on the street it's so calculated imagine waking up in the morning and being like you know i'm gonna do today i'm gonna spend all day down at the beach trying to groom some children and their families so i can fuck their child and And I think that this is also because Huckle, when he was in the UK,
Starting point is 00:29:07 he didn't have any of this confidence. He wasn't a charismatic man. He wasn't a man that people would have responded to positively on the street. When he goes to developing countries like India, Cambodia, etc., where he commits these atrocities, he's probably finding for the first time in his life, he's having positive reactions from people that he speaks to. Because he's white, because he speaks English english and because he's with a church and i think that he is
Starting point is 00:29:29 fucking living the life that he's always wanted so a number of huckle's diary entries from this time refer to one particular 10 year old girl who he'd met like this so he'd met by talking to her parents on the street and And in the BBC documentary, The Gap Year Pedophile, which is also another nickname for Richard Huckle, the host actually managed to track this girl down. And she told the host how Huckle kept asking her to go to Malaysia with him so that he could, quote, bring her up. There were also a number of occasions where he tried to lift up her skirt and even once locked her in a room with him. But thankfully, somehow this child managed to escape. Nothing in
Starting point is 00:30:12 Huckle's diary suggests outright that he committed abuses in India on the scale that he did in Malaysia. But the problem is, no police investigation has ever been carried out there, so it's absolutely impossible to say. However, knowing what we do know about him, there is no way in four trips that he didn't. Now researching this case was definitely pretty difficult. Anything to do with child victims always is. But this part definitely got to me in particular because Hukul spent quite a lot of time in my home state of Tamil Nadu. And just hearing some of the locals in the documentaries that we've been watching giving their accounts of meeting Hukul speaking in Tamil was so surreal. Like it felt like such a weird clash of worlds. Because again, it's just a
Starting point is 00:30:56 topic that isn't spoken about. I felt like when I was listening to them, I was like, what even is the word for paedophile in Tamil? I don't know. I literally don't even know how I would translate that or say it, apart from saying, like, a man who rapes children. It was very bizarre. Harvard is the oldest and richest university in America. But when a social media-fuelled fight over Harvard and its new president broke out last fall, that was no protection. Claudine Gay is now gone. We've exposed the DEI regime, and there's much more to come.
Starting point is 00:31:32 This is The Harvard Plan, a special series from the Boston Globe and WNYC's On the Media. To listen, subscribe to On the Media wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of Wondery Show American Scandal. We bring to light some of the biggest controversies in U.S. history, presidential lies, environmental disasters, corporate fraud. In our latest series, NASA embarks on an ambitious program to reinvent space exploration with the launch of its first reusable vehicle, the Space Shuttle. And in 1985, they announced they're sending teacher Krista McAuliffe into space aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger, along with six other astronauts.
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Starting point is 00:32:33 Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Start your free trial today. And in the BBC documentary that you can go and watch with your own two eyes, the host visited one orphanage led by a pastor who'd actually hosted Huckle on two separate occasions. And in what might be one of the most bizarre things
Starting point is 00:32:50 we've ever heard on this show, the pastor told the host that whilst Huckle was staying with him, he had a dream whilst napping on the bed that Huckle slept in. And in this dream, according to the pastor, he saw Huckle sexually abusing children and confronted him about it. He says that Huckle denied that there was anything to it, to which the pastor responded,
Starting point is 00:33:11 If you are lying, then you must renounce your sins and come to God. Troublingly, Huckle did make a diary entry during this stay in India, saying that he actually confessed to the pastor what he'd been doing. And the pastor told him if he wanted to be absolved from the sins he'd committed, he simply needed to repent, which is, of course, Christianity's golden fucking ticket. And because that's how Christians do, that was the end of it right there and then. The pastor demoted the incident to a dream. No police were ever involved. And everyone just insisted that
Starting point is 00:33:46 Huckle was never left alone with a child at the orphanage even for a second. But I think we can quite quite safely call bullshit on that one. This whole thing is so bizarre because Huckle admits in his diary that he's told the pastor and this is the pastor's response and the pastor's like oh no he never told me but I did have a dream about that and I told him in the dream that he must repent and it's like what it just feels like people minimizing their role in allowing this to continue 100% I think that's what I was going to say it's the pastor being like I know I should have done something about this and I didn't so I'm just going to tell you that I dreamt it instead exactly but I'm still going to be the hero because in my dream I told him yeah no no no but it was just a dream go forth and repent
Starting point is 00:34:29 quite commune with god atone maybe this is just a catholic thing and they're called pastors and stuff so i guess they're not what they're non-denominational christians right does penance not exist in this version of christianity i don't know i don't know why i'm looking at you i'm confused i'm like you'll die and come back as a dung beetle i don't know which would make more sense than richard huckle just having no penance for this but i would think that in india especially in christian communities in india where there's still missionaries and stuff I would think people would build staircases in the sides of mountains as their penance for stuff you know and like pretty recently so I I would expect some sort of like tasks of Hercules to be rained down upon a paedophile in this kind
Starting point is 00:35:16 of community you would think so but again I think it comes back to him being white and him being there as this foreigner because I think a there's two there's two reasons a lot of what we see you know with the with all of the catholic church abuse and every single religion like oh my god India is going through an absolute like or at least my state is going through a bit of a me too movement now with child abuse and where people are coming out a lot of teachers religious leaders are being outed as being sexual predators. And this is a very recent, very recent thing. And I think we've seen this so many times is that when leaders are caught, they always want to obfuscate. They always want to be like, well, you know, we'll just cover it up.
Starting point is 00:35:54 We'll cover it up. And I think that's what you're seeing here. Like we said earlier, it's believed that Richard Huckle first abused children in 2005 when he went on his gap year. What we know now is that over the span of nine years following that trip, Huckle abused at least 191 children, both boys and girls aged between six months and 13 years old. And how do we know that? Well, the diary that Huckle carried around with him wasn't the only place he documented what he was getting up to. Over that nine-year period, Richard Huckle avidly used the dark web
Starting point is 00:36:31 to upload thousands and thousands of photos and videos of himself carrying out these abuses on children. Now, most of you will already know this, but for those of you who don't, the dark web is a hidden area of the worldwide web that can only be accessed using a specialised web browser such as a Tor browser. And many people seem to think that the dark web exists exclusively for illegal activity. You know there are websites where you can potentially hire a hitman, buy illegal drugs
Starting point is 00:37:03 and of course child sex abuse images and some of the worst things you can imagine exist on those encrypted sites. But the dark web is more than just a series of illegal marketplaces. It can also be a safe place for journalists and whistleblowers to speak freely and for citizens of countries with strict internet regulations to talk openly. It isn't just full of wrong-ins, but they are there. They are there, obviously. And most typically what happens when people try to hire a hitman is that they just get all their money stolen. So what's the benefit of using the
Starting point is 00:37:36 dark web? Well, for wrong-ins as well as right-ins, it's because it's incredibly difficult to trace and locate dark web users. So if you are, say, a journalist who needs anonymity, it's because it's incredibly difficult to trace and locate dark web users so if you are say a journalist who needs anonymity it's the perfect place to talk about things. However as you will soon see it is not completely impossible to find dark web users. A site that Richard Huckle used daily that has since been closed down was called the Love Zone. Whilst this site was running, it was one of the biggest and most secure nonce networks out there. Tens of thousands of paedophiles and child sex offenders were on there, regularly exchanging the most evil and depraved videos and images you could ever imagine, and many things far worse than anything our imaginations could nightmare up.
Starting point is 00:38:22 There were around 45,000 daily users and to be allowed to keep your account on the site you were required to regularly upload child sexual exploitation content. I guess it's sort of like a collateral damage syndicate. Yeah and also it's because if you've listened to Hunting Moorhead which will come up later in this episode also you will know that many of these users think that it is illegal for the police to share images of child sexual abuse, which varies from state to state, from country to country, etc. and from team to team even. So they think, well, this person can't be a cop because if they're sharing these images, they wouldn't be doing that if they were a police officer. User accounts that didn't contribute would be deemed suspicious and would be terminated naturally
Starting point is 00:39:06 there was a hierarchy amongst the users of the site as well those who uploaded the most frequently would be elevated to the top which was known as producer status and obviously richard huckle had producer status it's also coming back to my favorite ever podcast of all time hunting warhead it's also they explain in there that there's the difference between just the consumers and the producers. So you have the consumers who are sharing images of child sexual abuse, but they aren't images that they have created. They're just recycling, repurposing, reusing stuff that already exists. The producers are the ones who are carrying out the abuse and sharing new images into the ecosystem. And Richard Huckle wasn't just a producer.
Starting point is 00:39:47 He also brought his teaching onto the dark web. He quite openly and even boasted about how he would teach other paedophiles to be better paedophiles. And what we mean, well, what he means by better is more successful, not by any means more virtuous. On the site's forum, Huckle spoke about how he was authoring a 60-page guide for the other users that he handily titled, Pedophiles and Poverty, A Child Lover Guide. He also wrote things like,
Starting point is 00:40:18 If you really want to embrace child love, then poverty is the way. Impoverished kids are definitely much, much easier to seduce than middle-class Western kids. My freedom relies on the hush mentality of the locals on this kind of thing. If I were to transfer my skills to the West, I wouldn't last a month before I found myself in a cell. And then in another post on the forum, he boasted, I'm not a pro at anything except being a paedophile. By no means am I claiming to be a king or a top dog, but the experiences I've had and the regularity of them put me way up in what people aspire to be.
Starting point is 00:40:58 He's like a disgusting paedophile pick-up artist. He's like, let me show you how I do it. Yeah. In one of Huckle's posts, he wrote about how he'd been abusing one girl from the age of five until she was 12 and said, quote, I hope from the images that you've seen
Starting point is 00:41:15 that you've enjoyed watching her grow. He even gamified the abuse and wrote about what he called paedo points, creating a set of rules for himself and others if they wanted to play along. For example, Huckle would award himself 15 pedo points for rape, but the rule was that he couldn't abuse the same child more than once in the same week in the same manner. This is where you see that Huckle is genuinely just reveling in the depravity of the things that he's doing. And he's reveling in not only being accepted, but being the best.
Starting point is 00:41:52 Absolutely. I think that statement where he's talking about his experiences and how he is sort of like, I know he says I'm not the king or the top dog, but he's kind of saying that he is. Yeah, yeah. And again, it comes back to the fact that here is a man who has never succeeded or excelled at anything and he is like this is my niche this is my raison d'etre and i'm a massive disgusting horrible piece of shit but i'm going to lean into it as hard as i possibly can so between the months of january and november 2014 huckle proudly posted that it accumulated 1300 points and recorded it in what he called his pedo ledger. In this pedo ledger, Huckle documented the names and places of the 191 children that he'd abused
Starting point is 00:42:35 with vivid details of everything that he'd done to them. But Huckle was not only uploading child sexual exploitation content to the site, he was also selling it and turning a profit. In fact, he also had an account on a crowdfunding site called Pedofunding. On this site, he exchanged these videos and images in exchange for Bitcoin and paid a 20% commission to the owner of the site. It's reported that Huckle made 105% of his profit from a series of videos and images of him abusing a three-year-old girl. On the forum, Huckle detailed his plans for the future and how he was going to continue his abuse of children. He spoke about how marriage to a
Starting point is 00:43:19 Western woman wasn't a good option for a pedo and that living in South Asia and marrying a South Asian girl would be far preferential. He said that he had his eye on one girl he'd been abusing since the age of seven and had hopes of moulding her into the perfect passive wife with whom he could begin fostering children which would lead to him having a quote endless cycle of kids. Huckle went on to say that her family were aware and disapproving of him abusing her but turned a blind eye because they knew he could benefit them in the future. He also said he wanted to have one or two children with this girl eventually but stated that he wasn't a big fan of incest. Yeah it's nice to know he's got he's got lines that he doesn't like to cross.
Starting point is 00:44:01 He draws the lines at incest and it just gets worse and worse, I'm afraid, guys. So to save this show from just becoming a child rapist in a monologue, we are going to leave it there. We'll just say, if you want to know more, the information is all out there. You can read the list of sources in the description, but we are going to leave it there. Huckle and the 45,000 or so other users of the love zone felt untouchable going about their business in the murky depths of the dark web. But what they did not know
Starting point is 00:44:32 was that in 2014, the site had been taken over by an elite squad of detectives who had been analysing images, monitoring conversations, and linking the users with the crimes they were committing. These real-life superheroes were based in an office block in Brisbane, Australia, and they were known as Task Force Argos. I really wish we had the soundboard. That's my, that's my, like, I don't don't know yeah metal metal sound cat noise task force argos are my favorite they're my faves they're fucking sick so sick hannah's classics corner what is the argos well i remember artemis was the other because they have
Starting point is 00:45:23 two there's like argos and artemis and artemis was the the the because they have two, there's like Argos and Artemis, and Artemis was the goddess of the hunt. But I don't know what Argos was. The catalogue, the goddess of the catalogue. I don't think that this particular definition is correct, but. Well, actually. Well, actually. Argos is Odysseus' dog.
Starting point is 00:45:42 Okay. Obviously, the Argo is Jason Jason's To be an Argonaut You're on the Argo Ah okay But Argos is Odysseus' dog Ah In Greek mythology it says here in my script It says Argos Panoptes was a giant beast
Starting point is 00:45:56 Who guarded Hera the queen of the gods And had a hundred eyes that never closed once So essentially Argos never stops watching I think that's Argus with a U. But you know, who's here to pick holes in this? Obviously me. What you need to know is that Task Force Argos do not stop watching. Task Force Argos seized control of the love zone in 2014. And they began following the trail that led them there to their office block in Brisbane, Australia, five years before, and they started in Toronto, Canada. And if you want to know more about Task
Starting point is 00:46:32 Force Argos, we've said it before and I'll say it again, go listen to Hunting Warhead because that is where I first became aware of the work that they were doing. So Canadian police raided the warehouse owned by a businessman named Brian Way. The 42-year-old was running the biggest child abuse film distribution network ever discovered, and it was worth $4 million. Of his 370 customers, around 40 of them were found to be residing in Queensland.
Starting point is 00:47:02 He was getting $4 million out of 370 people. The fuck? Jesus Christ. Okay, yeah, so they were all, like, 40 of them were residing in Queensland, Australia. That's a big percentage. Yeah, man, that's a lot. And their details were passed to the commander of task force,
Starting point is 00:47:21 Argos Inspector John Roos. So if you listen to Hunting Warhead, Argos were based in Australia. That's, like, where they were doing their Argos Inspector John Roos. So if you listen to Hunting Warhead, Argos were based in Australia. That's like where they were doing their Argos thing. And Roos is absolutely the fucking Michael Jordan of catching paedophiles. After Brian Way's arrest, Task Force Argos arrested all of his customers in Queensland
Starting point is 00:47:39 and one of them was a contributor to the Love Zone. And so Roos and his team took over his account and did what they needed to do to keep it from being terminated, which was to contribute content at least once every 30 days. Now, this is something that they do talk about in Hunting Warhead, whether this is ethically OK for the police to be sharing this kind of content. And in there, they interview the parents of children who have been victims. And they said those images are already out there. And if the police can use them in order to stop this happening to any other children, then we're okay with that. This is very important to note, the police aren't producing content. They're sharing content that's already on these websites. I'm not saying, you know, it feels great. I'm sure they don't feel great about it, but this is one of those areas of crime, particularly, that is incredibly grey.
Starting point is 00:48:29 So all the while, the team scanned through as many horrific images and videos as possible, looking for any clues that could help them rescue the children or apprehend the paedophiles. They'd look out for anything and everything, from food brands, grains of wood, accents, literally any clues as to the location of where the images and videos had been captured. In their office, the whiteboard had a list of names of their most wanted paedophiles, and amongst them was Huckle's username. But Huckle was incredibly careful with what he uploaded. He'd blur faces, backgrounds, and delete metadata.
Starting point is 00:49:04 One thing that did stand out to the team, however, was the way in which the site's owner would begin each of his regular posts with the greeting, Hi-as. I hate it. I hate him. Fucking hate this guy. Hi-as. Hi-as.
Starting point is 00:49:22 Stop it. Admittedly, it is not much to go on, but when you are the michael jordan of catching pedophiles that's all you need a team of investigators in denmark had already informed task force argos that they believed the site's owner was based in australia probably in adelaide because some of his abuse footage featured indigenous children and uh i personally don't know anyone who says hiya's but if you google it there are about half a million hits so what task force Argos needed was for the site's
Starting point is 00:49:52 owner to fuck up and fortunately he did three times. The squad discovered a post on a forum about four-wheel drive cars opening with the greeting Hiya's and the username was eerily similar to the owner of the love zone. Next the task force spotted another group of posts on a basketball forum opening with Hiya's and again using an eerily similar username. So now they knew that they had to be onto something. On the car forum, the user was asking for advice on raising his vehicle's suspension, and other users had advised him on the specific parts that he needed. Then, the squad found someone on Facebook posting that they were looking for those exact specific parts, and the timelines all matched. Just like that,
Starting point is 00:50:43 they had their guy. And that guy was a 32-year-old man called Shannon McCool, who as it turned out, worked in childcare. Police kicked down his door and arrested him in June 2014. As a result, they took control of the world's largest known paedophile network. They now had access to everything on the site, including every single private message ever sent by every single one of its 45,000 users. And yes, that included Richard William Huckle. Still though, it wasn't easy to identify him. Huckle never once specified what countries he was in. However, one message exchange with another user based in the Philippines provided a clue.
Starting point is 00:51:25 The man said to Huckle, It's a shame you're so far away, to which Huckle replied, I'm probably closer than you think. This paired with what the squad were able to discover by going through the abuse content that Huckle had uploaded, led them right to him. Interestingly though, it wasn't what was in the videos or the photographs that gave them this breakthrough, like looking for brands or looking for TVs or looking for things that might point to which country he was in. It was actually what Huckle used to photograph with, meaning the camera that he'd used. Huckle had slipped up and left some metadata and a number of images,
Starting point is 00:52:06 which allowed the detectives to figure out the brand and model of his Olympus camera. Using this, they tirelessly combed through clear net photography websites like Flickr and TrackEarth for photos taken using the same camera in Southeast Asia. And voila, they found numerous legal images of children taken by the same photographer in Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos using the same exact make and model of camera. It's fucking genius. And once the task force had the email address associated with those accounts on Flickr and Trek Earth, etc, etc, that email led them to all the other accounts on the internet linked to that same email address. I bet you use the same password.
Starting point is 00:52:46 Some of which had eerily similar usernames to Huckle's username on the love zone. Eventually, the task force discovered a studio named Huckle Photography Productions based in Malaysia with a link to Richard Huckle's Facebook profile. And on that Facebook profile, Huckle had posted countless photos of him posing with the very same children he had posted abuse images of on the love zone.
Starting point is 00:53:08 So Task Force Argos had him. Immediately, they contacted Britain's National Crime Agency and gave them everything that they knew. The only problem was, Huckle was still in Malaysia and the Malaysian police bizarrely didn't feel like they had enough evidence to arrest him. The Malaysian police now claim that they weren't actually notified about Huckle until 2016, which is almost 100% likely to be total bullshit. Yeah, I find it hard to believe that Task Force Argos would have gone through all of this trouble, found this man painstakingly, and then just been like, should we tell the Malaysian police? Oh no, don't worry about it. Yeah, I don't believe that.
Starting point is 00:53:45 But in any case. Four months later, Task Force Argos let out a sigh of release when Huckle posted on Facebook that he'd booked a flight home for Christmas and even hashtagged the airline that was going to fly him there. Fuck you, you stupid twat. Get him. And on the 19th of December 2014, Richardard huckle was arrested at gatwick airport during the arrest officers found a myriad of computers and hard drives that he had on him which of course contained over 20 000 images of child abuse however his laptop contained some heavily encrypted files
Starting point is 00:54:20 which huckle never revealed the passwords to so we we don't know what they are, but I think you can probably guess. Yeah. During questioning, Huckle refused to answer any questions and was let out on bail on the condition that he returned to his parents' house. The following day, his mother confronted him about the accusations and Huckle admitted to her that he'd had sex with children aged from three to 13 years old. Imagine telling your mum. Oh my god, I know. And again, it just reminds me of Hunting Moorhead where that guy's parents are just like fucking making excuses for him. I'm like, shut the fuck up, mum and dad. Stop, stop letting him live in your fucking house. And thankfully, in this case, his parents then
Starting point is 00:55:02 phoned the police and begged them to take him away, saying that they didn't want him in their house. The both of them made witness statements in support of their son's prosecution and have since moved away from the area. After running the love zone for six months, prosecuting hundreds of its users and saving the lives of 85 children, Task Force Argos pulled the plug on the site. Shannon McCool was sentenced to 35 years in
Starting point is 00:55:27 jail with a non-parole period of 28. Huckle was charged with 91 counts, including creation and possession of indecent images of children, rape of a child under the age of 13, digital penetration, sexual assault and facilitating the commission of child sexual offences by creating a paedophile manual. Huckle pleaded guilty to 71 of the charges and was sentenced to life imprisonment on 22 counts with a minimum term of 25 years before being eligible to apply for parole. Prosecutors were only able to identify 29 of Huckle's victims and uncover 20,000 images and videos because the vast majority of his abuse content is believed to be in heavily encrypted files on his computers. So despite having Huckle's
Starting point is 00:56:10 posts about his pedo ledger, which puts his abuse count at at least 191, the true number of his victims could easily be far greater. He was hip-hop's biggest mogul, the man who redefined fame, fortune, and the music industry. The first male rapper to be honored on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Sean Diddy Cone. Diddy built an empire and lived a life most people only dream about. Everybody know ain't no party like a Diddy party, so. Yeah, that's what's up. But just as quickly as his empire rose, it came crashing down. Today I'm announcing the unsealing of a three-count indictment,
Starting point is 00:56:52 charging Sean Combs with racketeering conspiracy, sex trafficking, interstate transportation for prostitution. I was f***ed up. I hit rock bottom, but I made no excuses. I'm disgusted. I'm so sorry. Until you're wearing an orange jumpsuit, it's not real. Now it's real. From his meteoric rise to his shocking fall from grace, from law and crime, this is The Rise and Fall of Diddy. Listen to The Rise and Fall of Diddy exclusively with Wondery+. I'm Jake Warren, and in our first season of Finding,
Starting point is 00:57:24 I set out on a very personal quest to find the woman who saved my mom's life. You can listen to Finding Natasha right now exclusively on Wondery Plus. In season two, I found myself caught up in a new journey to help someone I've never even met. But a couple of years ago, I came across a social media post by a person named Loti.
Starting point is 00:57:44 It read in part, Three years ago today, that I a social media post by a person named Loti. It read in part, Three years ago today that I attempted to jump off this bridge, but this wasn't my time to go. A gentleman named Andy saved my life. I still haven't found him. This is a story that I came across purely by chance, but it instantly moved me and it's taken me to a place where I've had to consider some deeper issues around mental health. This is season two of Finding and this time, if all goes to plan, we'll be finding Andy. You can listen to Finding Andy and Finding Natasha exclusively and ad-free on Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
Starting point is 00:58:25 And many officers involved in this case find it unfathomable that Huckle only began the campaign of abuse on his gap year and that he never committed any sexual crimes in the UK during his time in the church. We have no way of knowing that unless the victims come forward, which is completely up to them. The question we have to ask ourselves is how this was allowed to happen and go on for so long. Huckle himself wrote on the Love Zones forum that something big this was allowed to happen and go on for so long. Huckle himself wrote on
Starting point is 00:58:45 the Love Zones forum that something big would have had to happen in order to stop him from doing what he was doing. But how and why did that big thing take nine years? To begin with, we have to acknowledge that the odds were absolutely stacked against Task Force Argos from day one. I don't feel as though the blame can be put on them for not bringing down the Love Zone earlier. Some would argue that if Huckle had not been rehired by the Praise Church after World Challenge let him go, that he wouldn't have been able to continue abusing, but I think he would have found a way anyway.
Starting point is 00:59:13 One reason for sure that fell in Huckle's favour were the lax laws surrounding child abuse in some of the countries where he committed his abuse, especially Malaysia. In fact, it was only in 2017 that the then Prime Minister of Malaysia, Najib Razak, introduced the Sexual Offences Against Children Act, which, shockingly, is the nation's first ever legislation to address child grooming, child pornography and child rape. Harkal may be one of the worst paedophiles we've ever read about
Starting point is 00:59:43 who's travelled from the West to developing countries in order to abuse children, but he certainly isn't the first, and he won't be the last to do so. The organisation Every Child Protected Against Trafficking, or ECPAT, has spent two decades campaigning against transnational child sex abuse, and have been vocal that the case of Huckle is not an isolated one. Following Huckle's conviction, Bharati Patel, the CEO of ECPAT UK, said the following. The sad truth is that there are many hundreds of British nationals, some of whom are convicted sex offenders,
Starting point is 01:00:15 who continue to travel to countries and use their Western status to get jobs and groom vulnerable children and families. ECPAT UK has documented over 300 cases of British nationals alone abusing children in countries like Kenya, India, Cambodia and the Philippines. And in 2015, a Freedom of Information request to the Foreign Commonwealth Office revealed that 154 British nationals were detained overseas for child sex offences. So yeah, that's all very horrifying. Yeah, absolutely terrifying.
Starting point is 01:00:47 Yeah. And these predators have absolutely understood the benefits that they can reap from just going to a country that is not equipped or ready to or able to understand what they're doing and capture them. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:01:00 So yeah, the dark web combined with free movement for these people to go to developing countries just creates an absolute minefield for anybody trying to stop them. So yeah, really bad times. Yeah, I mean, if you can stomach it, go listen to Hunting Warhead. I would implore you not to go through the links that are in the sources. But if you must, then don't say we didn't warn you. Yeah, we can't stop you, but really don't.
Starting point is 01:01:26 Yeah. What are you going to gain? Nothing. So yeah, that's that, guys. So yes, go check out our Patreon if you want a bit of a palate cleanser, where we'll be doing Under the Duvet immediately after this. And here are some wonderful people. Rachel van de Heide.
Starting point is 01:01:41 Heide, sorry. Swift Hun Jefferson Jr. Swithun. Guys, it's so small. Sw Swift Hun Jefferson Jr. Swithen. Guys, it's so small. Swithen Jefferson Jr., Georgia Picken, Bahani Wolfman, Cecilia Schroeder, Angel Petit, Jasmine Sadler-Ladell, Regan Forbes, Janice Smith, Heather Cotchen, Samantha Fern Hopkins, Abigail Cabalona, sorry, my eyes are going,
Starting point is 01:02:08 Tara Devlin, Sarah Verdin, Emma Remington, Leah Eccleston, ETH. You know, if you press Command Plus, you can zoom in. Well, all right. Anna Brown, Emily Reichli, Tara Matthews, Vicky Bryant, Tiffany Shin, Megan Russell, Missy Lawler, Stacey Solario. Feel free to jump in at any time. Okay, tag. Jeffrey May, Major Havoc, Tara Smigowski, Megan Davidson, Rachel Simon, John Adams,
Starting point is 01:02:37 the President of the United States of America, Shannon Bunting, Carolyn Hagen, Hagen possibly, Caitlin Patterson, Hungry Hounds, Sonali Gandhi-Keeler, Stephanie Schneider, Lucas Krawstrick. I'm not very good at the Polish ones. Thank you ever so much for supporting the show on Patreon. We quite literally couldn't do this without you. If you would like to be a Patreon person, you can go over to red... No, you can't. Patreon.com forward slash redhanded. I was going to say redhanded.com forward slash Patreon. That'll be the day.
Starting point is 01:03:16 And we will see you another day for something else. Hopefully less child abuse heavy. Bye! Bye. I get it. Lots of people don't. I didn't either, until I came face to face with them. Ever since that moment, hauntings, spirits, and the unexplained have consumed my entire life. I'm Nadine Bailey. I've been a ghost tour guide for the past 20 years. I've taken people along with me into the shadows, uncovering the macabre tales that linger in the darkness, and inside some of the most
Starting point is 01:04:13 haunted houses, hospitals, prisons, and more. Join me every week on my podcast, Haunted Canada, as we journey through terrifying and bone-chilling stories of the unexplained. Search for Haunted Canada on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you find your favorite podcasts. They say Hollywood is where dreams are made. A seductive city where many flock to get rich, be adored, and capture America's heart. But when the spotlight turns off, fame, fortune, and lives can disappear in an instant. When TV producer Roy Radin was found dead in a canyon near L.A. in 1983, there were many
Starting point is 01:05:00 questions surrounding his death. The last person seen with him was Lainey Jacobs, a seductive cocaine dealer who desperately wanted to be part of the Hollywood elite. Together, they were trying to break into the movie industry. But things took a dark turn when a million dollars worth of cocaine and cash went missing. From Wondery comes a new season of the hit show Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder. Follow Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of The Cotton Club Murder early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus.

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