Don't Mess With Maine

Honestly, it must be great to be Glenn Lang.Not because his life is particularly easy;  I had the pleasure of teaching with him at a training sponsored by my former unit, the National Center for Prosecution of Child Abuse, earlier this year.  He’s not a professional athlete, a recording star or an actor.  He doesn’t live in a Monaco hotel or a Malibu villa.  He’s actually a beefy, classic “Dad” looking, state police sergeant from the great but often punishingly frigid state of Maine.  He drives a normal car and deals with the normal stressors we all endure, if not more.  He and his wife share normal worries about paying the bills and getting the kids through school.But Sergeant Lang leads a team- the Maine State Police Computer Crimes Team- that in 2008 was largely responsible for saving the life of a nine year-old girl who had become the subject of an unspeakably hideous series of images and videos to child pornographers worldwide.  The name given to the child was “Tara” and the videos and images of her (the so-called "Tara Series") were uploaded to a shadowy and highly secretive group of child porn consumers around the globe.  She was molested, raped, and then ruthlessly exploited by a northwest Georgia man named Bart Huskey, a 38 year-old tennis instructor now thankfully serving 70 years in a US Federal penitentiary.The investigation started in Australia where local authorities busted the high-tech ring where “Tara” had become a commodity.  One of the arrested men provided law enforcement with video and images of her that had been taken over the three or so years she’d been a slave of Huskey’s.  Frighteningly, the recorded attacks on her were getting more dangerous.  In one of the later images Huskey was seen using weapons against the girl.  Investigators feared it was a matter of time before he maimed or killed her, particularly as it became clearer that an international effort to find her was underway.  Australian authorities reached out to the FBI, and that agency took a bold step: They reached out to every ICAC (Internet Crimes Against Children) team in the United States for help in narrowing down the whereabouts of the girl.ICAC teams are a phenomenal idea.  Sponsored by a program under the US Department of Justice, the teams have sprouted in almost all states and several large cities, and focus on computer-facilitated child sexual exploitation and abuse.  Sgt Lang's Maine is one of them.  His team heard the call for anything that might assist the FBI on the “Tara” case, and they went to work.  Dawn Ego, one of his computer investigators and a mother herself, must have felt something stir when this case came across her desk.  She latched onto the case, in Lang’s words, like a “pit bull,” relentlessly combing the images and video for anything that might lend a clue as to where “Tara” was and where the images were being generated from.  Swatches of bedclothes, a ribbon hung on a wall in a motel, and the interior of a car were the things Ms. Ego and the team honed in on.  It was painstaking, shoe-leather detective work, all of it done by necessity with the sickening backdrop of “Tara” being abused repeatedly.   But it paid off.  The Maine ICAC team asked the FBI for all of the usable videos and images.   Through a meticulous examination of the backgrounds and environments of where they were being made, Ego, Lang, and the rest the unit began to narrow things down.  Ego identified the ribbon and bow on the motel wall and eventually discerned its manufacturer.  The manufacturer had a distribution pattern that got them down to roughly the southeastern US.  The bedclothes took them to a hotel chain in the same region, and a redacted photo was sent eventually to the right hotel; the management confirmed that the room was one of theirs.  At the same time, the interior of a vehicle Huskey used in a video was narrowed to a particular make and model.  When investigators found the hotel, they were able to get a copy of Huskey’s driver’s license from the management after pin-pointing a date where he’d been there with “Tara.”  The burnt orange Pontiac Aztek that Lang’s team identified in one of the videos was discovered to be owned by Huskey’s wife.It was go-time.When investigators knocked on Huskey’s door, they hit pay dirt.  He confessed, and later pleaded guilty.  The child “Tara” was rescued and taken into protective custody.  Lang was able to call Dawn Ego late on the night of Huskey’s arrest and personally deliver the good news.The path to Bart Huskey was much more complicated than I can describe here, and there were a few dead ends.  But even some of the dead ends yielded some valuable child pornography arrests in other cases.  And in the end, because of the tenacity of Lang’s team and the entire investigatory force stretching back to Australia, the man was located among 300 million people sprawled across a continent.  From that universe, a glorious thumbtack was stuck between the eyes of James Bartholmew Huskey, plucking him from the obscurity of a quiet town to the judgment of a United States Federal District Court.It’s perhaps obvious but important to note that Huskey’s arrest doesn’t make things all better.  “Tara” was rescued, but she is deeply scarred and her road to recovery is just beginning. And thousands upon thousands of consumers of the material Mr. Huskey produced will still obtain it, view it, trade it and enjoy it for God knows how long to come. But “Tara” is alive, and Bart Huskey will likely never attack, use, exploit or rape another child again.  It’s far from perfect, but in the crapshoot, tumbling-dice reality of the globe we navigate, it’s a blessed seven.So still, the players who made it happen, including Glenn Lang, Dawn Ego and the rest of the MCCT, will find themselves underpaid, overworked, pelted by sleet, stuck in traffic, on interminable bank lines and 1000 other minor insults of daily life.  But my hope is that they’ll still smile in these moments from somewhere very deep down.  They’ll smile because at least once in their already noble careers, they faced down the darkest evil imaginable.  They meticulously stalked it, tracked it down and then cornered it within four walls.They triumphed.  And so did we.