Rescuing Tara

by Robin Bowles

  RESCUING TARA

  by

  Robin Bowles

  BLURB

  It took an extraordinary effort by police task forces in Australia and America to take down an international child pornography ring.

  But Rescuing Tara is so much more than bringing some truly reprehensible men - one of whom was "Tara's" own father - to justice.

  Rescuing Tara is the story of how dedicated police officers on opposite sides of the world used the paedophile ring's own playroom - cyberspace itself - along with good old-fashioned investigative work in their search for a young girl whose real name they didn't know; whose location was a mystery; and whose fate was unknown.

  RESCUING TARA

  Sports professional James 'Bart' Huskey, and his wife and two children, once lived normal lives in an inconspicuous house on Highway 193, Lafayette, in Georgia USA. At least they appeared to, until a world of violence and perversion opened up in 2004.

  That was the year one of their children - a daughter, now known to the world as 'Tara' - became the subject of pornographic films produced by her father and distributed world-wide through a secure cyberspace network.

  This network was so impenetrably arranged that members did not know most other members; but all the users were involved in the prolific trade and distribution of child pornography. Deep encryptions ensured highly technical and advanced security. Techniques included: password protection to the group's pre-designated newsgroup chat rooms; PGP encryption of text and binary files; and the swapping of file extensions which subsequently had to be re-swapped in order to successfully download a particular picture or movie file. Members were instructed never to communicate with each other using traditional email, chat, websites, or telephone. These cyber security measures were to protect the safety of the whole group.

  Huskey, now 38-years-old, was one of the leaders of this group; and he made and distributed ever-more violent and degrading videos of his assaults on Tara. He took great care to film his abuse in nondescript surroundings: a home bedroom, a motel room and two different cars. His face was pixilated in these videos, but Tara's pain and agony was graphically captured in detail - for all subscribers to watch.

  She was only five years old.

  A Brisbane team of detectives headed by Detective Superintendent Peter Crawford, from Task Force Argos, the Queensland Child Safety and Sexual Crime Group, were working 'Operation Achilles' part of an international investigation into the activities of child pornography traders, when they first encountered the Tara series. Team members believed that the Tara videos originated somewhere in the USA. By June 2006 the Brisbane officers had been watching the Tara footage for almost two years, watching her as she grew; and, all the while, trying to identify her location and her attacker.

  The detectives viewing these dreadful scenes faced the knowledge that with every new release in the so-called 'Tara Series' the little girl was not only at the mercy of her attacker but, if they could not find her, that the treatment would continue until she simply became 'too old' to titillate the audience.

  Increasingly fearful for her safety, the Australians contacted the Innocent Images Unit of the FBI and told them of the international investigation they'd been conducting. Although several of the 48 subjects under investigation lived in various countries, they told the FBI that they believed the leader of this group, and several other members, probably lived in the United States.

  The police on the Queensland task force had arrived at this likelihood following the arrest of a person for an unrelated child pornography offence. It was a stroke of luck that this individual also belonged to a 'newsgroup' that participated in the distribution of the Tara Series.

  It was soon discovered that members of that group, in order to retain their status, followed strictly-enforced written security measures and standard operating procedures. Membership of the group was limited to personal invitation from an existing member; and new applicants had to pass a written test, timed to prevent them looking up material they should know. They had to demonstrate their knowledge of child pornographic material, such as the names and descriptions of child pornography series or scenes. The test was designed not only as a filter for members, but also to guard against the applicant being a law enforcement officer attempting to infiltrate the group.

  Members were forbidden to reveal their true identities to other members. That way if a member was arrested he'd be unable to provide any specific information about others in the group.

  Any investigation into the distribution of pornography is a slow, painstaking and often heart-breaking process. And, especially since the advent of the internet, just finding the source of the photos or videos is complicated.

  Detective Superintendent Crawford told me that as long as people continued to prey on helpless children, his was an unpleasant job that had to be done. It was the occasional breakthroughs that made the hard slog worthwhile.

  'We see thousands of kids in this type of situation,' he said. 'And mostly we have no hope of identifying them. The perpetrators are clever and careful. An outcome in the Tara case was seen as very difficult to achieve, especially once we suspected the resolution would involve cracking into a network in the USA.'

  Crawford believes most investigations rely on a bit of luck. 'With such a high volume of images, you just need luck, fate, whatever you might call it, to get a breakthrough sometimes,' he said.

  'You can be lucky to get an investigator from a particular area, who has innate knowledge - of say certain vegetation, or types of architecture common to an area - that another investigator may not have. They will say, "It could be this or that location". With a different, equally competent, investigator that lucky bit of "local knowledge" may be missing. And if one bit of information is inaccurately assessed you can break the chain that the investigation is already following, and go along the wrong path.'

  Crawford thinks the luck of the investigators on Operation Achilles took a turn for the better with the arrival of the female FBI agent sent to assist them. She came to Brisbane to view the Tara footage and agreed it was indeed likely that the filming was being done in the USA.

  The assaults on Tara were becoming increasingly violent and included rape, anal rape, forcing her to perform sex acts on her abuser, and the use of huge dildos to violate the terrified child. By November 2007, this big man, clearly over 110 kg, was also holding a large knife to the child's face and neck and using it to threaten her sexually.

  The images became so sickening that in January 2008 the FBI took the unusual step of issuing an all-States bulletin to computer-crime investigators around the country, looking for help. Four months later the Bureau went even further and released around a dozen still photos and video images with an urgent request for assistance.

  On 23 May 2008, Dawn Ego, a computer forensic examiner with the Maine State Police Computer Crimes Unit, began looking for clues. Prior to her transfer to this civilian job with the Maine State Police, only 12-months before, she had worked in computer forensics for the US Customs and Border Protection. As a mother herself, she wanted to catch this man, before it was too late.

  Established in 1999 the hi-tech crime unit, located in Vassalboro, Maine, has assisted in homicide and drug trafficking investigations, stalking, domestic violence and harassment cases, and even a bank robbery. If a computer was involved in the crime their expertise was called on. The Unit's priority, and the majority of their work, however, is in the seemingly-endless cases of Internet Child Exploitation.

  Originally a tri-state partnership - with New Hampshire and Vermont - called the Northern New England Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force - the pilot project was so successful that 20 other units have been funded around the nation.

  So, when the FBI a
sked for help with the Tara Series - even though the perpetrator's location was unknown, and could've been anywhere in the United States (and indeed the world) - Dawn's investigation was supported by her Sergeant, Glenn Lang. He encouraged his team to try some lateral approaches, to seek clues the FBI may have overlooked in their already extensive investigation.

  Dawn scoured the FBI images looking for anything that might identify the monster and his helpless victim. A sadistic bully and a coward, the man was always disguised; either by wearing a mask or by altering or blacking out his face. So Dawn concentrated all her skills on the other things in each image, like the surroundings.

  Working with the most rudimentary information from those images, Dawn and her fellow investigators at the CCU first worked on the photographs taken in the bedroom of what appeared to be a family home.

  Sergeant Lang noticed a blue ribbon, ending in a bow with what appeared to be something written on it, hanging on the Tara bedroom wall. At first they thought it might be an award for horse riding or competing, but further scrutiny showed the words, 'It's a Boy!'

  With sheer hard work, Dawn and her team - Inez Dudley, Chip Howe and Tina Plourde - assisted by the state police intelligence unit, tracked down the manufacturer of the bow. This company supplied the names of their customers, mostly hospital shops and florists, which enabled Dawn to narrow their search for the house from the whole USA to just 17 south-eastern states.

  Then they turned their attention to the hotel room used in the Tara Series, and the bedspread which had quite a distinct pattern. Dawn made random calls to various hotel chains asking where they got their linen, to see if she could find a common supplier. They checked thousands of bedspread patterns and also began looking at the bed linen in the images from the house.

  Then the team got lucky when someone from one of the hotels they'd rung put them onto person who knew fabric types, and who was able to reduce the possibilities to a single mail order company, the Fingerhut Corporation, in St Cloud, Minnesota. Fingerhut had been supplying goods to American homes through its catalogues all around the USA since 1948. They also sold homegoods on-line.

  Dawn Ego invoked all the powers of all the law enforcement agencies she could call upon, especially Assistant US Attorney Gail Malone, for subpoenas to get the company's records quickly. The FBI then asked Fingerhut to check their sales for linen matching the particular pattern found in the home bedroom. The company was able to give investigators a list of everyone who had bought that pattern.

  Amongst the many customers on that list were the names James and Sherri Ann Huskey of Lafayette, Georgia. At that stage of the investigation, though, one name on a list of hundreds was no more significant than any other.

  So Dawn Ego asked the FBI for more images from the Tara Series. The Bureau obliged and Dawn and her team began scrutinising a new batch of about 1800 images and videos.

  Dawn Ego was 'like a pit bull' on this hunt, said her boss, Glenn Lang. 'You combine luck with someone who is incredibly aggressive and diligent and who went after the thing with a vengeance, it just came together like no case I've ever seen.'

  While Dawn concentrated on the motel photos and footage, other investigators started checking the photos of the assaults that had been conducted inside a vehicle. They turned to car manufacturers for help, circulating innocuous versions of the car's interior. A representative from Chevrolet-Buick-Pontiac in Richmond Virginia, said the vehicle appeared to be 'a 2003-2005 Pontiac Aztek; exterior paint colour, Sunburst Orange Metallic'.

  An offline search was conducted for all registered users of 2003-2005 Pontiac Azteks in the 17 most-likely south-eastern states (identified by the blue ribbon); but investigators asked police in all states to start the laborious job of checking car registration lists for an orange Aztec.

  While this was in progress, Dawn again reviewed the 1800 images, looking now at the awful video footage of the interior of the motel room. All the films in the Tara Series had titles, to enable the members of the pornography group to order them easily. This one was called 2007 Tara 8-y-o-gets … [assaulted with a sexual device]-July 21, 2007.

  With nothing but the date - 21 July 2007 - and a bland hotel room to go on, Dawn zoomed in on the room's only decoration: a picture on the wall behind the bed. Closer analysis revealed that it was a print of a picture called 'Inspired Hillsides'.

  A spreadsheet of all copies of that picture sold in the United States was laboriously developed. There were thousands of them; way too many to attempt to follow up individually.

  With the new photo references Dawn and her team started looking at the curtains and the bed linen in the motel room. They called again on the expertise of the fabric specialist who'd helped identify the bedspread in the home bedroom photos.

  Unlike the Australian police in Brisbane, who had been painstakingly investigating the Tara Series for two years, the team from Maine had only been going at it for a couple of weeks. The subject matter made the time irrelevant though. The investigators were all worried about the unspeakable torments 'Tara' must be enduring while they slowly and painstakingly trawled through mounds of possible leads. And the escalation of the abuse.

  One trail even took them miles off course, to a motel in Arizona, well out of their 17-state target area. But it was a possibility that had to be ruled out. Part of the confusion at one stage was caused by the fabric company they were dealing with believing that the search was confined to certain areas.

  Dawn told me, 'When I told them it was a world-wide search, they had another look at their records.'

  Eventually the search results got narrower and narrower. The fabric company identified the Jameson Inn chain of hotels (160 throughout the US) as one of the customers for the linen; the bedspreads narrowed the search to their hotels in South Carolina and to two in the state of Georgia, in Carrollton and LaGrange.

  The field was finally reduced to the Jameson Inn in Carrollton. The fabric manufacturers were certain this was the place, as that hotel-customer had been the only one to order curtains with the line pattern going in exactly the same way as in the photos.

  The investigators then checked their spread-sheet of the thousands of 'Inspired Hillsides' prints that hung on walls all over America found that one of the buyers was the Jameson Inn in Carrollton Georgia.

  'When you take two or three of our initiatives and combine them, we had the crosshairs focusing on South Carolina and Georgia,' Sergeant Lang said. 'And when it resolved, it resolved into a very specific location.'

  The manager of the Carrollton Jameson Inn had confirmed by phone that their hotel still had both the painting and that particular bed linen.

  Suddenly the investigation was moving, but Dawn Ego was anxious. Despite the intensity of the investigation, these leads seemed to take so long to show results. It had been almost three weeks since the FBI had asked for urgent assistance.

  Dawn immediately faxed a redacted copy (one in which the people's images had been blacked out, leaving only the surrounding details) to the hotel manager. When she confirmed that it was indeed one of their rooms, Dawn started to get prickles down her spine.

  Her next question was whether a tall man driving an orange Aztec had registered on 21 July, 2007. The manager actually remembered a big 'kinda creepy' man who'd paid cash for a room on that date.

  'He didn't check out properly, either,' the manager recalled. 'He just left. And he was driving a white Chevy van, not an Aztec.' The woman agreed to see if she could find a photocopy of the man's driver's licence, made when he registered. She agreed to check their archives, which were in the roof space.

  Meanwhile, the FBI, who had noticed that some of the assaults had taken place inside a white van, began doing a separate analysis of all males weighing more than 100 kg who owned white Chevy vans.

  When the hotel manager next spoke to Dawn, she had a name to go with the memory. The man who'd checked in on July 21 the year before was a John Huskey of Highway 193, LaFayette.

  Dawn Ego -
who was in Maine, hundreds of miles away from Georgia - was on tenterhooks to get a look at the man's face. She asked the manager to scan and email a copy of the licence, but was told the hotel didn't have a scanner.

  So Dawn asked her to lighten and enlarge the driver's licence on the photocopier and fax it pronto. Dawn was certain she had found the man; and sure enough, the shape of the heavyset face in the licence photo closely resembled the pixilated shots of the offender in the videos.

  'Once I knew this was the guy, I couldn't hang the phone up quick enough to notify my sarge,' Dawn told me later. 'Everyone in the office just wanted to open up the windows and scream for joy.'

  She wasted no time in passing the information to the FBI. Initially, they were sceptical; mostly because their information was that the suspect was around 5'10" (178 cm); but Huskey's licence said he was 6'4" (193 cm). As she was not in a position to tell the FBI what to do, she repeated her conviction that 'this is your guy' and said firmly that her sergeant 'strongly encouraged them to check this out'.

  It didn't take long for the FBI to discover that John Bartholomew Huskey of Highway 193, LaFayette, was the registered-owner of a white Chevy van. A trawl for that surname through the Georgia vehicle registration records indicated that a Sherri Ann Huskey of the same address owned an orange Aztec.

  These details were cross-checked against the other spreadsheets and databases that investigators had been compiling. Sure enough, the Huskey name and address also turned up on the mail order customer list.

  A separate cyberspace inquiry was then initiated on Sherri Ann Huskey, which resulted in the identification of a MySpace account in her name. Anyone visiting her MySpace page could see photos taken in the Huskey home; the backgrounds of which matched those in some of the Tara videos.

  Bingo!

  Later that evening, Sergeant Lang phoned Dawn at home said the FBI was planning a rescue of Tara that very night.