World Of Secrets - The Darkest Web: 2. Man with the amazing memory

Episode Date: February 23, 2026

US Special Agents Greg and Pete are desperate. Somewhere in America a twelve year old girl, who they have called Lucy, is being sexually abused. Her abuser has been sharing images of his abuse for six years on the dark web. They have to find her - and save her. They were convinced that Facebook would be able to help them using its facial recognition technology, but the tech giant is unable to help. So they go back to the start , examining every single thing they can see in the room she is being abused in: the sofa, the bed and then finally they wonder what they might discover if they look at the room itself, specifically the exposed brick wall. Is there any way someone could identify these bricks? And could that person help them to find Lucy? Season 11 of World of Secrets, The Darkest Web, is a BBC Eye investigation for the BBC World Service. This podcast includes some upsetting scenes, discussions of child sexual abuse, and there’s some strong language. For further information on the issues raised in the programme, contact support organisations in your own country. For a list of organisations in the UK that can provide support go to bbc.co.uk/actionline

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. This is not the future we were promised. Like, how about that for a tagline for the show? From the BBC, this is the interface, the show that explores how tech is rewiring your week and your world. This isn't about quarterly earnings or about tech reviews. It's about what technology is actually doing to your work and your politics, your everyday life.

And all the bizarre ways people are using. the internet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, it's Sam. Just a warning before we start, this episode contains references to child sexual abuse and some strong language. Every stop that we could to try to figure out how do we find the normal people that are seeing this little girl every day? You'd see things, right? Like you've been looking at hundreds of images, at hundreds of things that could be clues. So your eye is naturally drawn towards any item in a room that might help you.

Like, oh, you know what? We never looked at that. Or you hear you on vacation or wherever you might be. And you look at a wall and you go, oh, shit, the texture on that wall is very similar to this. From the moment they wake up, U.S. Homeland Security Special Agents, Greg Squire and Pete Manning are focused. So you don't separate from it. You can't.

You won't allow yourself to, and you have that feeling of responsibility. And yeah, of course, you look at your own kid and you go, this is the life we're protecting. And we've now adopted this. You know, this is a child who is just enduring something we can't even imagine what it feels like and never want to know firsthand. firsthand, you know, we can't.

It's just not possible. There's never a lack of motivation. Boyed by their part in the successful 2010 arrest of a prolific paedophile in the Netherlands who had been creating child sexual abuse material and sharing it around the world on the dark web, they are now focused on trying to find a victim of abuse in the US. The 12-year-old girl, who they're calling Lucy,

has been abused for the part. six years. They're scouring the images for even the tiniest of clues. 90% sure she goes to school every day. She clearly goes to the store. Somebody's, you know, bringing her to school. Like hundreds and hundreds of good people have seen this girl, and they have no idea what she's enduring.

The work is all-consuming. We could communicate all through the morning, all through the night. you know, about little facts and things we'd think of. You know, there was a lot of instant gratification there. You know, I could take a picture of something and say, hey, look, you know, this looks similar to such and such in the case, what do you think? So we had really gotten ourselves like, I mean,

we were probably communicating more with each other than we were anybody else. So we were really in our stride at that point, I think. From a mental wellness perspective and from a work perspective, We were really just plowing ahead. You know, we were really, really functioning at a high level at that point and not really thinking at all, I guess, about mental wellness. Even when they're with their families, Pete and Greg are turning over tiny bits of evidence in their minds,

trying to examine every possible angle which could lead them closer to Lucy. Each day, Pete had his objectives on the forensic side as far as, you know, getting files organized and moving them. We were both like just running on adrenaline. All this pressure will be worth it. All they need is a breakthrough. This is World of Secrets. Season 11.

The Darkest Web. A BBC World Service investigation. I'm Sam Parenty, a documentary maker. Episode 2. The Man with the Amazing Memory. It's 2014, and Facebook is dominating the social media landscape. It feels like everyone you know is feeding all their photos into it. The public doesn't seem worried,

but the amount of data Facebook has on its users is vast. And for an internet investigator, a database of this site presents an opportunity. One of the most difficult things to wrap your head around is that social media collects almost every bit of information on us as individuals, even to the point where they're mathematically doing facial recognition on everybody. It seems to make sense that if you were able to present a social media company with a face of somebody you're looking for,

they could use the reverse technique to find any images of them on Facebook. If Facebook is doing facial recognition on all the photos uploaded to its site, it seems a fair assumption that somewhere and there, there'll be a picture of Lucy. If Pete and Greg could get access to just one picture of Lucy on Facebook, then finding her would be relatively straightforward, because they'd work out who the person was who uploaded the photo, see where they lived, and within a few days, they would be able to find her. They just need one picture

and Facebook could make that happen. We made the request of Facebook to actually do a search for facial recognition of anybody that matches those because we had this hypothesis that we had so many images of this girl and the age of the girl the fact that she seemed well taken care of

outside of the horrible abuse that was happening in secret. There are people out there that were proud as normal, proud parents, caregivers, whatever would do, take pictures and post those on social media for everybody to see. So we were certain that her face was out there somewhere. In their office in Boston, Greg picks up the phone to Facebook. He explains that he's a special agent from Homeland Security,

working as part of an elite team combating child sexual exploitation, and that he's seeking assistance in identifying a 12-year-old girl who they believe has been sexually abused. used for six years, and whose abuser is sharing these images with other abusers. He asks Facebook if they have the tools to help find her. Between the ages of four and six, that's kind of when things started to change for us. And I feel like I can't really put a pin on exactly when it was. I just know that we were sharing a bedroom and the house was small, so we were.

and bunk beds and there's only so much you could do, you know, to keep kids apart in a house that small. While Pete and Greg are in Boston desperately searching for Lucy, nearly 2,000 miles away in Texas, a different story is playing out. Elisa, a real estate agent in her late 20s, is trying to work out a problem of her own. She's trying to figure out if there is any way she can ever be in the same. same room again as her brother. When I was really young, you know, we're all home together.

My mom, my brother went to school, and then by the time I came along, she decided she wanted to homeschool. And so we were all together a lot from the start there. Like, those are the times that I feel like I remember in a better light. We were a little bit closer to my dad's family, and I think that made life better. Everybody knew everybody is still a really small time. town at that point where I grew up. So we lived by the lake, so we'd go there a lot.

Elisa grew up in a beautiful lakeside town, about a 45-minute drive from Austin. Nowadays, that might not seem too far. But back in the early 90s, Texan Hill Country was different. Everything's pretty spread out, and it was even more so when I was younger. It's really grown a lot over the last 20 years or so. You know, where I grew up, there wasn't a lot out there, and now there is. It was originally like a small, you know, lake community at, like, vacation homes that people would come from other cities nearby.

That's how it started out. The word you're looking for is isolated. But for Elisa, this wasn't just due to where she lived, but how she lived. So all of us were homeschooled. My older brother and I were homeschooled all the way through. And because Elisa didn't go to school, there was no one watching over her but her parents. No teachers, no authority figures outside the home, and to make things even harder, she didn't even see her dad that often.

My dad was the sole provider and, you know, he had to do a lot of driving for his job, and so he wasn't home a whole lot. She had her mum and her older brother, Staten. The only people who weren't family who she had regular contact with were her neighbors. So growing up the first house that we lived in, the neighbor right next to us became really good friends of ours. And then there was another family that lived in that neighborhood that we were friends with. And then my family that was closer to us in the area. And we would see those people regularly.

At that time, my family still had relationships. My parents did with people that. they grew up with, friends from their past, so that we were still seeing more people. But it didn't last. Elisa and her family moved further out into Texas Hill Country. I had other friends who had older brothers, and I remember when I started to realize that like they felt like their older brothers would protect them. And that's not how I felt.

Most of my friends had older brothers. I don't think it was until then that I realized that most young girls who have that older brother role. Like, you know, if somebody's giving them a hard time or teasing them, you know, their brother would step in and say, uh-uh, don't do that to my little sister. That's kind of the normal dynamic. And I just didn't have that. From a very young age, Elisa knew that the way Staten, her older brother treated her, wasn't right. She doesn't want to talk about the details of the abuse

Just that it began when she was four And Staten was eight He followed a lot of the typical signs of You know what predators do And I know that's weird to say because he was also a child But he was manipulative and threatened me not to tell And you know I think that at one point I know that there was talk that he

Was told from someone at at church and other kid that he should do things to his sister because this other child was doing things to their sister. So, you know, that's where everything kind of changed. And it took a while for anybody to notice what was happening. But then when he did get caught, that's when we moved pretty quickly to a bigger house. Elisa says her relationship with her mom had always been a bit off.

I can't really tell you exactly when that started. but I don't think at the time I would have felt like she was a safe person to go to. And from a young age, she started trying pretty hard to keep my dad and I apart. She didn't feel like it was appropriate for him to have any conversations with me about any girl things. If that makes sense, I'm not surprised that I didn't feel like I had somebody to go to. The impact of the abuse was immediate. I mean, I think that my demeanor changed for my personality. changed, I remember starting to feel really anxious, which is a weird thing to feel as a kid.

I didn't want to be touched. Like, affection kind of bothered me. I don't really want to get into exactly, you know, what he did. I don't think that that's something I want to talk about, but, you know, I can say that it changed me forever. Just like Lucy, the girl's special agents, Pete Manning and Greg Squire, are trying to find. Elisa was a little bit of a little bit of a small child when her abuse began. She says that at some point her mother became aware of it. They moved House not long after, and while Elisa hopes the move will put an end to her suffering, it's not enough to stop Staten. This is not the future we were promised. Like, how about that for a tagline for the show? From the BBC, this is The Interface, the show that explores how tech is

rewiring your week and your world. This isn't about quarterly earnings or about tech reviews. It's about what technology is actually doing to your work and your politics, your everyday life. And all the bizarre ways people are using the internet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Back in Boston, Pete and Greg are hopeful that Facebook will answer their call for help. I think the response at first was that they couldn't do it. and we went back and said, we're pretty sure you can do it.

And then the response is the privacy concerns wouldn't allow them to do it. I remember we were all pretty taken aback by that. I can get that in theory, but when you're talking about the abuse, the systematic abuse of a child over years, it seems logical to make an exception for an investigation like that. But Facebook holds firm. They tell Greg and Pete they are unable to help. As part of my reporting, I got in touch with them, asking why this was. They chose not to answer that question, but instead told me that in 2024 they received over 9,000 emergency requests from US authorities,

which they say they resolved within an average of 67 minutes, and even more quickly for cases involving child safety and suicide. They also told me that to protect user privacy, it's important they follow the appropriate legal process, but that they work to support law enforcement as much as they can. Facebook users are no longer able to access its facial recognition technology, the system which automatically tags people in photos, but the technology still exists.

and Facebook say they do still use it for things like account recovery. Pete and Greg have never been allowed access to it. Yeah, you could literally analyze pictures to see who else had a Facebook account based on facial recognition. Makes sense. I mean, you could make the argument that it's a lot more difficult to identify of the face of a child than it is adults because they change. Their shapes change.

It's not as solid as it is for adults, but they didn't even try, which was hard. So Pete and Greg go back to basics, re-examining the images again and again and again. We had a few outfits and toys. So, again, this victim, in a very normal setting. Again, like go back to the way these images. and videos are produced, it's not like a staged kind of production.

It's like these are children in their everyday lives. These terrible moments that were surrounded by normal things. And so I remember for Lucy for sure that the biggest thing was this brick wall. And then there was some stuffed animals in a bedspread and some other items that we had to go on that we were looking for to try to put back together. They start to identify everything. they can see. The bed spread. The bed. Working out the company that made it, where it was sold. They're trying to trace all the people who have bought the item and if any of them have been flagged

as child abusers. And then they have an idea. Looking at the room itself. We looked at the bricks. I know Greg and I discussed the bricks early on, like within the first month of looking at all these images. And again, I thought they were fake. Pretty sure he thought they were real. But why we didn't, either way, why we didn't go after the bricks? It's curious.

You could probably look at it as, you know, it's kind of like staring at a white wall. Are you going to really try to figure out who manufactured the drywall? having never thought about bricks before, I guess we didn't realize how unique they could be. My name is John Harp, and I work for Acme Brick Company for 43 years.

Back in 1981, we were primarily a brick company. At that time, we had about 28 brick plants that we were operating, producing back in 1981. So, yeah, we're pretty diverse, not only in product size, but in different colors. Most of us probably have a vague idea that bricks come in different shapes and colors, but Acme Brick salesman John Harp is not most people. You can make what we call through body color.

That means you've got a white body or a red body, or you can put additives in like manganese into the white clay to make it look black. The second way of manufacturing is take your base body color, which usually is red on most clays, and we can put coatings over the top. Since the 1980s, John has sold thousands of different types of bricks, made at plants all over the United States. Some plants would have 20 to 30 colors each, and then multiply the five or six sizes by each color.

The skews would be enormous, how many different options, sizes and color. John is unquestionably a brick expert, but his expertise in identifying bricks hadn't been called for. Until one day he gets an email from his boss, Dennis Knauts. Dennis stated that there was an incident with Homeland Security and a young girl, and they were looking for help identifying a brick that was seen in a photograph, and the photograph was included with the email for us to, review. So at that point, several upper-level managers started dispersing it out throughout the

company to see if anybody could identify what the brick was. Again, it was a silhouette of a young girl, and it was a feature wall, what we call a feature wall, which was a brick wall on one entire wall behind this, this girl. And the lighting was not the best, and it was really hard to tell. So we were getting a lot of guesstimates of here's what we think it is, here's what it is, but no one was actually able to really identify it. So when I saw it that day, I looked at it and called a couple of my colleagues and said, what do you think it is? And we started all calling each other, what do you think it is, what do you think it is?

And nobody was really any ideas that could zero in on what it was. Away from work, John had a hard. whole of the life, caring for others. The foster parenting just became normal. Part of our families, kids would come in and, you know, we didn't dress them different. They didn't eat different. They, you know, slept. They had their own bedroom in most cases.

John's bosses outlined the situation in an email they sent round. Essentially that this was a little girl in extreme danger. And due to his years fostering vulnerable children, John, perhaps more than most, knew what impact trauma like this could have. He was determined to help. So we got an email out, 4 o'clock in the afternoon. I think within just a few hours, we started getting responses.

We started getting emails from people going, hey, my name is so-and-so. I work for this brick company. That brick is called yada, yada. and I was like smiling so bad. I was like, I can't believe we found the experts at this. And the people were so passionate and so knowledgeable. Now, the photos were good.

They were fairly high resolution. Good. But not good enough for John Harp from Acme Brick. I believe I asked Greg, Squire, if they could enhance the photo any. and they've enhanced one lower right corner of it. When I saw that, I knew exactly what the brick was. Standing in the middle of my living room

in my house in Northampton, you know, kids were home, be bopping around and stuff, and my phone rings. It had to be 7 o'clock, 7.30 in the evening. And this guy calls and says, hey, is this agent Squire? I'm like, yeah. goes, hey, I'm, you know, so-and-so from Acme Brick.

I said, oh, amazing. Thanks for, thanks for calling me back. And I said, what, you know, what could you share? And he said, well, you know, I've been working in this plant since, I don't know, like dinosaurs where I think he said something like that, you know, since dinosaurs roamed the planet and, you know, we make the Alamo fire brick. And I said, oh, geez, this is fantastic. I said, now I'm really going to stretch my.

my luck here and what do you think the chances of getting sales records are like of how this brick was sold and he laughed I don't know for maybe two or three minutes at my joke which wasn't a joke once he once he got himself back under control he you know he said that again this brick had been produced since the 70s and the sales records would be you know paper and yada yada yada and I I think he could hear the, he getting a little bit deflated. And then he says, hey, I think he called me son. He says, you know what, son? You know what bricks are?

I was spent at that point in the day. I said, no, sir. No, I don't know what riddle this is, but no, I don't, what are bricks? He says, bricks are heavy. And I said, yes, sir, I would have to agree. And he said, so heavy bricks, don't. go very far. This specific brick had only been made at one plant.

Then my ears started focusing again. He goes, if we sold an Alamo fire brick, that brick didn't travel outside 100 miles of this plant right here. And I was so happy when he said that that I could barely like, contain myself. So we hung up after I thanked him emphatically, and that very next morning, we took all of the data records we had,

and we took a map and drew ourselves a hundred-mile radius and said, she's inside this circle somewhere. Now the race is on. That's next time on World of Secrets. We would like as many people as possible to hear this story. So please leave a rating and a review and do tell others about World of Secrets. It really does help.

This is not the future we were promised. Like, how about that for a tagline for the show? From the BBC, this is the interface, the show that explores how tech is rewiring your week and your world. This isn't about quarterly earnings or about tech reviews. It's about what technology is actually doing to your work and your politics, your everyday life. And all the bizarre ways people are using the internet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.