By Kathie Durbin, The Columbian (Washington)
On a computer crammed into a small bedroom in his Portland-area apartment, Xavier Von Erck exposes sexual predators who troll the Internet for young victims.
Von Erck, a 25-year-old college dropout, has provided police agencies across the country with evidence that can stand up in court against Internet predators.
“Most police departments jump right on it,” Von Erck said. “We are able to give them phone numbers, encrypted chat room conversations and Web cam shots. We’ve had five convictions in the past six months.”
He helps them do their job, he says, because many police officers lack the computer savvy to do it themselves.
Von Erck and 25 contributors pose as children on Internet chat rooms, waiting for predators to find them. When they receive explicit propositions, they post them on their Web site, www.perverted-justice.com. Von Erck is the Web sleuth who used computer records to lead police to the Pierce County house where an abducted 14-year-old Clark County girl allegedly was held captive and sexually abused for nearly two weeks before her rescue Sept. 12.
“We don’t usually try to track down abducted kids,” he said. “Usually the police are right on top of it. But in this case, (the mother) e-mailed us and said the cops hadn’t done anything. When we first talked to her, she thought her kid was dead.”
The Clark County Sheriff’s Office said it devoted more than 150 hours to investigating the case, but in the end it was a tip from Von Erck that led to the girl’s rescue.
Training lags
In the age of the Internet, computer skills can be critical for police tracking missing teens. But police trainees get virtually no instruction in computer forensics as part of the 720-hour curriculum at the state’s Basic Law Enforcement Academy in Burien.
The sheriff’s office has just one employee with basic training in computer forensics.
However, help from experts is available through the Seattle-based Northwest Regional Crimes Against Children (ICAC) Task Force, one of 45 teams of specialists nationwide funded by the U.S. Department of Justice.
In Clark County, the Vancouver Police Department operates a satellite task force led by Maggi Holbrook, an expert in investigating Internet crimes against juveniles. The sheriff’s office has hired Holbrook to assist with investigations but did not enlist her help in the recent alleged abduction.
Holbrook gets most of her leads from the regional task force. Based in the Seattle Police Department’s Special Investigations Unit, it’s staffed with four detectives and gets 700 referrals a year from a tip line operated by the nonprofit National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
“They try to narrow down the jurisdiction and refer the case to the closest task force,” said task force Detective Malinda Wilson. “They are one of the best partners that any law enforcement agency can have.”
The Seattle task force will investigate any computer crime involving children, including sexual exploitation, child pornography and cyber-stalking, anywhere in Washington or Alaska. It works closely with the FBI and other federal agencies. It also has written agreements with 17 “satellite” local police agencies, including the Vancouver Police Department but not the Clark County Sheriff’s Office.
In 1998, when the Washington task force was established, only police in Seattle, Pierce County and Spokane were actively investigating Internet crimes against children. But in part through the task force’s efforts, awareness of these crimes has increased along with the proliferation of Internet porn sites, Wilson said.
“Our caseload has increased dramatically in the past five years,” she said. “There are thousands of clandestine child pornography Web sites drawing 100,000 or more customers. We don’t know whether the Internet has made it easier or whether the Internet has helped create the crime. Have these people always harbored these deep, dark desires for these children? Has the Internet allowed them to follow through?”
Reporting required
Federal law requires all Internet service providers to report “contraband” material to the national tip line, including child pornography or communication with minors for pornographic purposes. “They are required to do so,” Wilson said, “but they don’t always comply.”
Measuring success isn’t as simple as tallying convictions, Wilson said. “We have cases that result in search warrants which result in getting computers which result in finding contraband and taking it to court. Hardly any of these (defendants) want to go to court. No one wants a jury to see what they have been up to. They usually (enter a guilty) plea.”
The regional task force offers a course in conducting Internet investigations for working detectives at the state police academy. It also offers a short course for police agencies throughout the state. “The course is free and we come to them,” Wilson said. “We tell them how to investigate the case that lands in their lap.” Some employees of the Clark County Sheriff’s Office have taken that training.
At the Vancouver Police Department, computer forensics investigator Holbrook works closely with the regional task force on investigations of Internet crimes against children. She also teaches at a national academy that trains up to 300 law enforcement officers each year in basic computer forensics and strategies for protecting children online.
“I’ve been doing the computer forensics piece since 2001,” she said. “We’ve made a dent in it. It’s a very difficult area; it requires specialized knowledge. We know we need to expand, but money is always an issue. The problem is, the technology keeps changing and we have to keep up with it.”
For example, she said, five years ago no one was storing pornographic material on digital camera hard drives; now it’s common for child pornographers to use cameras to store images because they are more easily hidden than computers.
Success stories
Holbrook worked on the case that resulted in the 2003 conviction of a Brush Prairie man for posting photographs on the Internet of a 17-year-old boy undergoing sexual sadomasochistic abuse. The investigation began when a homeless man led sheriff’s deputies to a torture chamber in the man’s house equipped with operating tables, video cameras, sexual devices, whips and restraints.
The victim, a Seattle transient, said two men contacted him through an Internet chat room and beat and raped him for eight days. His case was later dropped, but an investigation of one suspect’s computer led police to thousands of computer images depicting minors engaged in sex.
Holbrook also helped solve the 2002 case of a Washougal man who posed as a psychiatrist on the Internet and coerced a teenage girl into having sex with him. The crimes came to light after officials at the girl’s school contacted police, who traced hundreds of e-mails from the man’s work computer to the victim’s address.
When a teen goes missing, how aggressively police investigate also depends on the agency’s culture, policies and procedures. The Portland Police Bureau and the Vancouver Police Department make no distinction between reports of missing teens and reports of runaways. Portland police treat both as urgent matters, said bureau spokesman Greg Pashley. Portland police handled 3,400 reports of runaways and 2,000 reports of missing juveniles last year.
If a Portland juvenile is missing under suspicious circumstances, a supervisor reviews the case and decides whether to immediately broadcast a description and initiate a block-by-block search. The detective division is notified promptly.
In the case of the abducted 14-year-old in Clark County, the case was turned over to the Major Crimes Unit two days after the girl disappeared, but the sheriff’s office waited five days to issue a missing person alert.
“If there is a note left behind, or if they took their favorite jacket,” police may conclude a teenager left of her own accord, Pashley said.
Being a runaway is not a crime in Washington or Oregon. But police routinely enter reports of runaways into the National Crime Information Center database. If those juveniles later turn up, police have a responsibility to take them into protective custody, Pashley said.
“Even if they’re 17, you still have to make sure they are safe. They are still legally children. Sometimes it’s taking them home, sometimes it’s taking them to a social service agency.”
That’s what happened in the case of Cynthia Lamb, a 16-year-old who disappeared from the public library in Molalla, Ore., on Oct. 30, 2003. She had no history of running away. She had, however, been corresponding with men by e-mail from a library computer. Detectives who examined library computers tracked down 20 men she had met online; more than half were registered sex offenders.
Molalla Police Chief Nicholas Kelsey enlisted reserve officers and volunteers to staff a tip line, canvass neighborhoods and hand out fliers. He enlisted the help of the Clackamas County Major Crime Team and asked his own patrol officers to take on extra workloads in an all-out effort to find the girl. He wrote a column published in The Oregonian warning parents of the perils of Internet chat rooms.
Nine months after Lamb’s disappearance, police in Missoula, Mont., located her during a traffic stop, entered her name in the NCIC database and found her listed as an endangered runaway. She was living with a man she had met online.
Potential kidnappings have a different feel, Pashley said. “If it’s totally out of character, if they didn’t show up when they were supposed to, if they didn’t take the medication with them that they always carry, those cases would get a different reaction from the officers at the scene. If there is evidence that a child has been taken, we would call detectives, run the facts by them.” If foul play is suspected, homicide detectives would take over.
Some missing child reports trigger the Amber Alert, a system of emergency broadcast alerts adopted by several states, including Washington, after the 1996 kidnapping and murder of 9-year-old Amber Hagerman of Arlington, Texas, who was abducted while riding her bicycle. In April 2003, President Bush signed legislation making the Amber Alert a national program.
But the Amber Alert must be used sparingly to be effective, law enforcement officials say. The U.S. Department of Justice recommends that the alert be activated only when police can confirm that an abduction has occurred, when the child is at risk of serious injury or death, and when they have specific descriptions of the child, the circumstances surrounding her abduction, the suspect and the suspect’s vehicle.
Many parents are left to search on their own, create and distribute posters, and contact friends and relatives. hoping that someone will step forward to help them find their child.