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During a brutal bond hearing in May, a Homeland Security Investigations agent described some of the horrific material allegedly found on the computer of former reality TV star and conservative activist Josh Duggar, who is currently awaiting trial for allegedly possessing and receiving child pornography.
The agent testified that one video titled “Daisy’s Destruction,” showing the rape of an 18-month old girl, ranked among the “Top five worst of the worst” that he ever had to examine.
Law&Crime’s podcast “Objections” explores the crime case behind that video, which was created by an Australian man described by international tabloids as the “world’s worst pedophile.”
Peter Scully, who is currently serving a life sentence in the Philippines for human trafficking and rape, created videos of his child abuse for an international audience and disseminated them on the dark web.
When he was arrested in 2015, Filipino and Australian authorities invited journalists to tour the crime scene where the video was made. That experience still disturbs Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s correspondent Matthew Carney, who has covered wars and atrocities around the globe and still remembers that assignment as particularly grueling.
“I’ve covered 25 years upon six and seeing the most horrendous things, but what this man did to this 18-month-old child just beggars—it’s inexpressible,” Carney recounts on the podcast. “I’m not a person to subscribe to simple notions of good and evil, but if there is evil in this world, it is Peter Scully and what he did to that 18-month-old baby in his video.”
On June 2, 2015, Australian broadcaster ABC published Carney’s report on Scully’s arrest, which ran with a warning that the segment contained “distressing material.”
“So we were taken to this location,” Carney recounts on the podcast. “It was a very rural location. The house was in a very—I wouldn’t say isolated area, but it was very rural. You wouldn’t know what’s going on. […] That’s obviously why the location was chosen. The neighbors were far off. It was a big house. They converted the attic upstairs to their sort of dungeon basically, where they would take their victims and there was a lot of them.”
As a Filipino federal agent described in the segment, the toddler was hanged upside down from a hook on the ceiling during her abuse. Carney said that authorities told him Scully had planned to execute her in a follow-up video, but the toddler was rescued before he could carry out his plan.
Reflecting upon the assignment six years later, Carney says even recalling the name “Daisy” in connection to the case provokes memories that still send a “chill down my spine.”
“I just have never seen such an abhorrent disturbing thing that happened,” Carney added. “It was really horrendous.”
Filipino police claimed that Scully buried an 11-year-old girl he allegedly killed under the floor board of a house after raping and strangling her.
Scully peddled his videos on the so-called “dark web,” accessible through the encrypted TOR browser, which is how prosecutors claim that Duggar accessed the video.
According to prosecutors, a Linux partition was installed on Duggar’s work computer, and the user accessed the TOR browser from here and downloaded dozens of child pornography images and videos—including “Daisy’s Destruction”—through the file-sharing program BitTorrent.
In a Zoom interview for the podcast, Homeland Securities Investigations (HSI) Special Agent in Charge Jack Staton spoke generally combating international child exploitation, though he declined to comment on Duggar’s pending case in particular.
“As civilization becomes more technologically savvy, there is more encryption and gets harder to identify people,” Staton noted. “You talk about the darknet. It was designed to hide identities; that’s what it’s there for. And individuals can go in, and they can do a variety of different things. So, we utilize different investigative tools and techniques to go in and try to identify this. And we’re constantly working with our Cybercrime Center located in the Washington, D.C. area.”
One thing that journalists and law enforcement officials who track these perpetrators agree upon: The work is emotionally distressing.
“There is a lot of difficulty that goes along with that, not only for our special agents, but our computer forensics analysts that are going through these files and these images, and seeing these most vulnerable in our whole society, our children, and children being hurt and being treated in ways that are unspeakable,” he said.
Duggar, who has pleaded not guilty, has sought to postpone a trial originally slated for July until February 2022. His lawyer did not respond to an email requesting comment.
Staton encouraged listeners to educate themselves about and report signs of child exploitation.
Suspicious activity or instances of child sexual exploitation can be submitted to HSI online at https://www.ice.gov/tipline, by phone at 866-DHS-2-ICE or by contacting your local HSI office. Reports can also be filed with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) at 1-800-THE-LOST or online at https://report.cybertip.org/.
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(Image: Duggar’s mugshot)