World Of Secrets - The Darkest Web: 3. The hidden child

Episode Date: March 2, 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. You're not at the office. You're solving murders in the Scottish Highlands. You're not in your car. You're in a candlelit carriage on the way to the ball. This winter, see it differently when you streamed the best of British TV with Britbox. Catch a new original series like Riot Women. New seasons of fan favourites like Shetland. A body's been found. And on parallel collections of Jane Austen, Agatha Christie and more. It's time to see it differently with Britbox.

Watch with a free trial now at Britbox.com. Investing is all about the future. So what do you think's going to happen? Bitcoin is sort of inevitable at this point. I think it would come down to precious metals. I hope we don't go cashless. I would say land is a safe investment. Technology companies.

Solar energy. Robotic pollinators might be a thing. A wrestler to face a robot, that will have to happen. So whatever you think is going to happen in the future, you can invest in it at WealthSimple. Start now at WealthSimple.com. Hi, it's Sam. Just a warning before we start, this episode contains references to child sexual abuse and some strong language. It's 2015.

For almost a year, Special Agents Greg Squire and Pete Manning have been trying everything to find a young girl being. sexually abused somewhere in America. They had named her Lucy. Since that first call from Denmark from a colleague who had found Lucy's photos on the hard drive of a notorious paedophile, Pete and Greg have thought of little else. First they tried tech, examining the metadata of the images. So for Pete looking at the XF data, he was just curious if we could find information about what camera was used. You know, then it wasn't as common to find, you know, GPS data. But today, if you take a photo with your phone or a decent camera, you can literally get GPS location sometimes. So given at that point, we had found like

a couple, probably up to almost 100 images, we thought we had a shot at maybe getting some of those details and then comparing those details. But the abuser had to, been careful to remove this information before uploading. No dice. Then there's the actual objects they can see in these pictures, the furniture, plug sockets. I think the first thing he noticed was a wall outlet, and a US wall outlet is pretty unique to the United States.

And then I think that was the number one sort of standout. Greg and Pete had contacted the manufacturers of everything they could identify, requesting the details of every single person who had bought these items. But the list was unwieldy. Thousands of people across multiple states. The breakthrough eventually came from the wall behind Lucy. John Harp, the industry expert, identifying the specific bricks used.

That had narrowed their search to a 100-mile. radius of a single factory in the American Southwest. As soon as we started working and we had just this, actually, this just this huge volume of data. The search area includes tens of thousands of buildings that all need to be ruled out. But they have the list of customers. We started to get like a list together of, you know, names and addresses basically. But it was voluble.

luminous to say the least. There wasn't a lot of items that weren't common. Clothing, bedding, furniture, just, you know, anything we saw, basically, and just trying to see what might stick, you know, and so it wasn't, I mean, everything was on the table at that point. You got a big whiteboard up and you're going, okay, we looked at this and this meant this or this didn't mean that. And, you know, you get a lot of mixed review from, you know, from people when you call them and say, hey, you know, I'm from Homeland Security and we're looking for a red t-shirt and they're going, okay, you know, how can I help you? I mean, when you're in the middle of this, when we were in the middle of this, at home,

you know, get the kids to bed and you're just trying to kind of decompress. I mean, we still found ourselves flipping through the phone and looking, at furniture or looking at clothing and looking at really anything that we had seen in the series that we thought we could find. And so, you know, what goes from a task, you know, if somebody said to you, go find, here's the corner of a bed. Can you find the rest of it? You can just go to the end of the internet almost, you know, looking for that thing, but it's time well spent, you know, it's funny in doing some training and, you know, talking to people through this case and Oh, can we help you out?

Absolutely. Here's a two-inch corner of a piece of furniture. Can you find the whole piece for me? Are you nuts? Well, no, if you want to help. This is what we need done. If Greg and Pete can cross-reference their earlier searches with this new geographical area,

it might narrow things down. The team goes back through every item they can see in the images. And then they realize something. One of the items has been made locally instead of nationally, the sofa. It's manufactured by a regional company with only a limited number sold. Instead of thousands of customers to wade through, it's more like hundreds. Suddenly, the investigation is moving at a new pace. This is World of Secrets, Season 11. The Darkest Web, a BBC World Service investigation. I'm Samparanti, a documentary maker.

For the past seven years, I've been following the extraordinary work of a specialist team who hunt paedophiles on the dark web. Episode three, The Hidden Child. We knew we could really pare down the search that we had been working on there for eight or nine months at that point. So we took the location that John, had given us and, you know, created a map with a 50-mile radius around that point. From there, we went back to all of the sales records that we had worked on over the past eight months. It took us from tens of thousands of records down to under 50. And that was going to be

our focus for however long it took. So the first idea we had was start looking through social media. You know, we knew what Lucy looked like. You know, we knew what clothing she might have been wearing. We had an idea what the house might look like. So we thought we had a fairly good shot if we looked through social media that somebody on that list might have a picture of Lucy on their page. So we divided and conquered. The team took all the addresses that we had at that point and we started just doing a deep dive. Probably two hours. hours into that search, we found our first picture, Lucy, and the team, we just couldn't believe the fact that we had been looking at this girl for so long, and there she was,

like, in a family situation. She was there standing next to an aunt, and, you know, we confirmed the aunt's address with one of the data points that we had. I was so excited. Like, I was I was on cloud nine, and we all were. You know, we were, everyone felt like the big sigh of relief that after nine months of looking at all these photos over and over and over again, we couldn't believe we were staring right at her face. She looked about the same age as we had seen her in the most, what we determined were the most recent photos.

She actually had one sweatshirt on that was an exact match of a sweatshirt she had on in another picture. The net is closing in. But these operations are rarely straightforward. One wrong move and the whole investigation could collapse. Investing is all about the future. So what do you think is going to happen? Bitcoin is sort of inevitable at this point. I think it would come down to precious metals.

I hope we don't go cashless. I would say land is a safe investment. Technology companies, solar energy. Robotic pollinators might be a thing. A wrestler to face a robot? That will have to happen. So whatever you think is going to happen in the future, you can invest in it at WealthSimple.

Start now at WealthSimple.com. America is changing. And so is the world. But what's happening in America isn't just just a cause of global upheaval. It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere. I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C. I'm Tristan Redman in London, and this is the global story. Every weekday will bring you a story from this intersection, where the world and America meet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

When it gets to this point, the fine-tuning, everything has to be perfect. Go to the wrong house. You alert the wrong person and the suspect disappears. US Special Agents Greg Squire and Pete Manning, together with their team, need to operate with caution. They have to get it right. So they go back to John Harp, the brick expert who helped them identify the likely location Lucy is being held in. Every address that we found from relatives of Lucy,

we would basically take a screenshot of that house or residence and shoot it over to John and say, can you offer your opinion at least or a record of, would this house have these bricks inside? Would it be a brick that would be outside? Again, this is a whole new world to us. And he was great. You know, we weren't sharing addresses with him. We were just sending pictures of houses from the internet. So he could look at those and lend his opinion on, yes, this house has a good chance of having that brick inside. versus, yeah, this isn't a house that would have that brick. So it was really interesting to get his feedback and has ended up being extremely helpful as well.

Extremely helpful is an understatement. John looks at the bricks and messages Greg and the team back and forth as they desperately try to identify the right house. And finally, they think they have the right place. A house that John Harp says is likely to have the bricks inside. an address that corresponds with the purchase of that very specific regional sofa. And an address that corresponds with the family relatives of the person photographed with Lucy in the image uploaded to Facebook. So we narrowed it down to one address at that point and started the process of confirming, you know, who was living there.

through, you know, state records, driver's license, things like that, kind of real basic law enforcement checks, looking through information on schools, and at that point, we are already in contact with our local office. Everybody in the world had made a call to that office and saying, whatever you're doing today has just changed, because this is what the main focus is going to be. This is the house where Lucy has been abused for six years. Nobody was going to leave until we had that resolution. You know, we all kind of were sitting there, very anxious, you know, waiting to hear the news and waiting to hear that Lucy was safe and that, and obviously, the suspect was under arrest. And they were great, you know, they understood the gravity of it all.

We had been already working on our reports for them, for what they would need for a warrant. I mean, at that point it's 10 or 11 a.m. and our first thought was, how do we get there before she's home from school and eliminate the chance of him having access to her even one more time? So probably by two or three, we had given the local office everything they needed. They had identified the people living in the house. They had identified who lose. Lucy was, she had a little brother. They had also figured out that living in the house was the mother's boyfriend and that that was a convicted sex offender living there. That was probably our guy.

We felt pretty, pretty confident at that point that this was, this was going to be the abuser. Local officers move in. They had found her. and the man who had been abusing her, her mother's boyfriend. So the abuser was arrested that day. Didn't have much to say for himself during the interview, but when they started looking at his computer, confirmed everything we believed,

they found thousands of images and videos of her abuse. The little brother was also seen in some of the images and videos and videos. Once they got in and started doing the forensics on his machine and, you know, conducting the interview, he had certainly abused her far more times than we knew. I mean, it was certainly a scenario that we had never come across with that much abuse that had occurred over so many years. And clearly being in a household that was tolerant, I guess, in a way. Greg doesn't know exactly how much Lucy's mum knew about what was going on, but he does know her boyfriend sexually abused her daughter in her home.

We don't know what action Lucy's mother may or may not have taken to protect her. Sometimes when people do know, they still don't act, even when it's their own child. I feel like that's when things really started to change. I mean, I remember moving out to that house. and it really was at the time, especially out in the middle of nowhere, there was a gas station. And at that gas station, you still had to drive 10 minutes down a small country road to get to our house. And from there, to get to any city, it was at least 35 minutes away. If you wanted to get to a larger city, it was about an hour.

Elisa and her siblings were growing up fast. And for a family of six, the house was proving small. Not long after, Elisa says her mother discovered her. A son was abusing her daughter, the family moved to a bigger house further into Texas Hill country. Quite isolating, especially when you add in, being homeschooled. There weren't any homeschool families right there by us in that community. The kids that were there, they all went to public school.

And so my mom quickly decided those people weren't good friends to have. But that's when we started going to a homeschool. group and when we started meeting more families that were homeschooling and had believed similar to what my mom started moving towards in a religious way. We reached out to Elise's mother and haven't received a response. You'd have families that believed in wearing skirts to their ankles, their girls had to cover up. Everything, longer shirts, lots of restrictions for the girls. And then you had families that, you know, would let their children dress and act like what our society would consider normal.

And so my mom started, you know, kind of getting some exposure to different levels of homeschooling, different levels of religious control, maybe, is a good way to put it. And as the family moved further away from the world, they grew closer to God. I was being sent to a church summer camp. And at this camp, they believed in speaking in tongues and they would make a really big deal of it if you as a kid would do it and speak in tongues. Since Elisa's dad worked long hours, he wasn't around much.

And her parents' relationship was slowly breaking down. Elisa remembers how her mom changed. She started to kind of believe that she could just pray about things and the problem would be solved at that time. So, you know, whether it was like somebody's sick or, I don't know, later on she said, like, her breaks were squeaking and she needed breaks and she prayed about it and it stopped. So that's kind of the point that it got to. It was reaching a much higher level of belief that anything could be solved through prayer

and worship. Elisa thinks the main reason they moved was so they could live in a bigger house and put space between her and her older brother, Staten. After her mother discovered the abuse, she made an effort to keep the children apart. But Staten still had access to other children. There was like this revolving door of friendships for him.

There would be friends and then suddenly they weren't allowed to be together anymore. And I don't know if that was something between them or doing something together. I don't know what it was, what the behavior was. I've tried to ask, and I don't get an answer. After his friends left, Staten would be sent to counseling, but not with a health professional or specialist.

Always at the church. Whatever church we were at the time. And it was always just kind of, I feel like it was brushed under the rug. It wasn't really talked about. When I think about his demeanor and his personality and behavior now, I think that it didn't happen overnight. I think that he felt like he could get away with things because he had been for most of his life.

As Elisa became a teenager, she did everything she could to stay away from her older brother. She tried not to think about what had happened and didn't tell anyone. There wasn't really anyone to tell anyway. As soon as she was 18, Elisa left home and went out into the world. but Staten did the opposite.

He moved in with their grandmother. It was very much the same as when he was at home. He had his own space. He was just on the computer all the time and didn't really have a whole lot of accountability or drive on his own to do anything or get to that next step or figure out what he wanted to do.

In his grandmother's house, Staten spent increasing amounts of time. on his computer. No one seemed to know what to do with him. So they just left him alone. And for Elisa, life was rapidly changing. She met someone. Eric is everything that I'm not in a lot of ways.

He is outgoing, he's confident. He was like that when we met. I was still figuring myself out and he just knew who he was and what he wanted. I really admired that at the time, you know, especially as I was working through my stuff. He is happy and he shows his emotion very freely. So I think we're kind of different. He's like my balance. They got married and she soon became pregnant.

And after years of barely seeing her mother, the news of her pregnancy changed things. So for a long time, it had just been. you know, my relationship with them had been kind of, I'm not even strained, it just wasn't really there, you know, it was, I see you occasionally, and that's that. So I guess when I found out I was pregnant and I think my mom kind of felt like that was good time to come back around. So she just started doing things like offering help. Like, I can come over and help you do this or that around your house and I could buy you this for the baby. And I think we were just tired and trying to get ready to become new parents. And it felt nice to have somebody offering help. And so we accepted.

But that was kind of like a foot in the door. Allowing her mother back into her life felt like a huge step for Elisa. And becoming a mother was dredging up a lot of uncomfortable feelings from her past. So during my pregnancy, you go to the doctor a lot, you go through appointments that you don't typically have to go. go through, it all felt really extra stressful. I still was struggling with physical touch, and I kind of still do even now, especially from people that I don't know. I was already having anxiety about knowing who would deliver my baby, who would be in the room, all of those things, because it came with touch that just brings up past trauma, I felt like. So after my baby was

born. You know, I remember my mom coming over to meet him at the house, or I guess she met him at the hospital, but she came over again to visit the house, and she brought my grandma with her and my brother. I remember feeling like I didn't want him to hold my baby, but I let him. I just was insistent that he stay, like, right by me. Looking back, I wish I would have given myself the grace to say, no. I don't care what other people think. I'm just not comfortable. Elisa didn't want Staten near her child,

but he had found ways to be near other children. So at this point, he had, I think he quit school at the technical college, and he moved in with my mom. Then he got a job at a resort. in our area and he I think it's important to say that while he was at school he was also doing things like teaching summer camps during the summer to kids teaching them about different computer programs I know he was placing himself around kids at the resort he worked at he'd volunteer to work in like the kids club and you know for big events and

again just place himself there. Elisa thought the warning signs were loud and clear, but no one seemed to see what her brother was capable of. Not yet. So post-arrest and rescue of Lucy, you know, there was some news released about it locally against our wishes, but when the arrest was made public, it was the first time we really saw the offenders on tour, the dark web communities as we were learning them, I want to say the strength of the power of them. Greg, Pete and the team had been so focused on finding Lucy that it was easy to lose sight of the fact that they weren't the only ones who knew about her abuse.

The day after the arrest in the news article came out, we saw that news article pop up on one of the dark web sites. and the criminals on that site, all of the offenders, were piecing together their own part of the investigation, like theorizing on how it was solved, empathizing with the offender, and then the real, you know, scary and kind of just frightening pieces, their comments about the victim.

The dark web seemed to come alive with chatter about the arrest. I mean, I learned that this was life for them. You know, this wasn't like an occasional pop-in. This wasn't like this was their life. They were putting 40, 50, 60 hours a weekend to this community. And for a lot of them, it seemed like this was their escape. This is where they wanted to be. And in that they wanted to invest in the site, the community, each other.

The biggest lesson learned was we needed more of a presence on the dark web. So Greg makes a decision in order to catch these abusers, to infiltrate their networks and become part of their world, he has to pretend to be one of them. America is changing, and so is the world. But what's happening in America isn't just a cause of global upheaval. It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere. I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C. I'm Tristan Redmond in London, and this is the global story.

Every weekday will bring you a story from this intersection, where the world and America meet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.