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No one knows the extent of paedophilia. There are 30,000 registered sex offenders in the UK alone - but the fact that most arrested paedophiles have no prior record suggests a more profound problem. What is clear, according to the latest psychological profiling, is paedophiles do not consider themselves criminals. Upon being told he might never leave prison, Timothy Cox simply giggled.
They caught the Son of God red-handed, in his pyjamas, presiding over the most heinous online paedophile ring British police have yet uncovered. In his final moments of freedom, Timothy David Martyn Cox would have felt untouchable. Obsessed with being caught, Cox, 27, had only to press a button and his chatroom of child abusers would vanish.
One morning last September, armed police burst through his bedroom window. As Cox spun round, officers forced him to the floor of his parents' Suffolk farmhouse in eastern England. The largest international investigation of its kind had snared its ringleader.
Those examining evidence inside his computer would soon require counselling. Tired of trading in pictures of abuse, Cox had created a worldwide nexus of actual abusers. Babies as young as 2 months were raped live via webcam before a global audience.
In the three months that officers monitored his network, hundreds of new members joined Cox's site. With the internet forever evolving, keeping abreast of the mutating tactics of online paedophiles presents a daunting challenge. Demand for images is growing so fast investigators are embroiled in a continual, desperate hunt to track down victims.
The chatroom of the Son of God, Cox's online alias (a homage to a US paedophile), revealed how abusers modify their sites to avoid detection.
Ian Robertson, from Britain's Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, brought Cox to justice. "Somehow, we have to keep up with the internet,' he says.
Yet police are unsure how exactly Cox and his followers met, or even how they peddled their wares so widely.
Cox was a presentable, polite young man who lived with his middle-class parents. To those who met him offline, he seemed a meek, law-abiding person. From their vantage point in a tree outside his bedroom window, police would watch Cox all night. A pattern began to emerge. His typed messages appeared to match those materialising on a website they were monitoring called "Kids the Light of Our Lives".
For a month in 2006, detectives dug themselves into the garden of his parents' farmhouse. Such surveillance techniques had been reserved for fighting terrorism and organised crime.
Some days he would spend 19 hours at his screen. At 9pm exactly, he would troop downstairs to collect dinner from his parents before retiring upstairs. Occasionally he would see his 26-year-old girlfriend. Sometimes he helped run the family's micro-brewery business, but he had dedicated his young life to the virtual pursuit of paedophilia.
Convinced he would never be caught, it is almost certain Cox would still be facilitating live abuse shows online had it not been for a phone call from Toronto.
Robertson received a tip-off from Canadian counterparts who had recently closed a secret US-based chatroom called Kiddypics. Its host was an online presence who had christened himself GOD, but who was in fact the less celestial Royal Raymond Waller, 49, of Tennessee. In June 2006, Toronto detectives discovered Waller's site had been reactivated.
They were bemused by the colloquialisms used by its new ringleader. He described summer when winter was setting in. He logged on at unusual hours. It suggested he was British.
Days later, Operation Chandler traced a computer to a farm in the English countryside.
Cox had spied a gap in the online market for child abuse. He set up business as the jailed Waller's "son". In August 2006, officers attempted to crack Cox's encryption code. It was impossible.
Across the Atlantic, undercover officers, posing as paedophiles, logged on to Kids the Light of Our Lives. No one got in to the site without Cox's say-so, and his confident online patter suggested an adjusted, intelligent author.
Police know paedophiles are generally of above-average intelligence and tend to appear normal, respectable. Clean-shaven and with a neat haircut, Cox looked both.
Confronted by police, partners often refuse to believe they are involved with a paedophile. In one recent case, London's police found a bridal gown hanging in the living room of a suspected child abuser. He was due to be married the following Saturday. When his fiancee left on business, he arranged to meet a "child", who turned out to be an undercover officer.
It is unclear what Cox's girlfriend thought of her suitor, but neighbours described him as a quiet, well-mannered man. He was canny and technologically literate. For a month, officers tried without success to hack into his online lair. Their failure left them with a dilemma: to secure a conviction they had to enter his site "naked", catching him while he was logged on and disseminating child abuse. Unable to disable his encryption, they would have to acquire his password, or seize him as he hosted Kids the Light of Our Lives. But you only have a few moments, before he can physically pull the plug from the socket.
Cox had good reason to hide his site. Although it offered an semi-illiterate warning: "Adult Chat Topic. Do Not Come In If Your Are Offended", only the depraved could not have been revolted. In all, 31 children and babies, 20 from Britain, had to be rescued by officers following the raid on Cox's parents' home.
He arranged the live abuse of youngsters at pre-designated times. Why, some asked amid the outrage that followed his arrest, had we not heard of these missing souls? The truth is these children were never missing. The babies and children abused via web-cam were rescued from their own homes.
Like most children, Jane just wants to be popular. Her interests are dancing and boys with blue eyes. She loves Brad Pitt. Her favourite thing in the whole world is chocolate icecream. Jane is not your typical teenager. She is a middle-aged male detective from Scotland Yard. Here in Vauxhall, south London, "Jane" spends her office hours in online chatrooms. She hopes to lure paedophiles into the open. It requires a dextrous mind - one moment chatting about Arsenal, the next her fictitious sister's new pony.
Paedophiles are not shy in coming forward. Within minutes of entering a chatroom there can be an approach. "Do you like sex?" men will ask children. The detective's response is deliberately vague to avoid asking leading questions. "What do you mean?" he will often answer. Some predators ask for sex straightaway. Others prefer to groom victims for months. Often, paedophiles do not even pretend to be a teenager. "They are generally very honest about who they are," according to detective chief inspector Nick Stevens of the Met's paedophile unit. "The grooming process can be very, very quick. The first time the paedophile talks to an undercover officer he can start referring to sexually explicit material and child abuse images."
Such meetings are arranged in public parks. Paedophiles always turn up, invariably with condoms, vibrators or pornographic DVDs. If caught, they are arrested and charged immediately. Ninety per cent plead guilty straightaway. The wealth of computerised evidence offers little opportunity to escape justice - every keystroke has already been recorded as proof.
Eighteen months have passed since Scotland Yard officials started posing online as innocent teenagers. So far, 50 men have been arrested, but police know they are only scratching the surface.
Nick Stevens appreciates that they are unlikely to catch men making their first foray into actual abuse. How many times they have struck before can be difficult to pin down. The mobile phone of a recently convicted paedophile contained images of six previous victims. Usually, though, police can only guess at their history of abuse.
That the internet offers paedophiles unprecedented access to vulnerable, young victims is beyond dispute. Yet many parents remain oblivious to its obvious threat. Mothers who tell children never to accept sweets from strangers happily grant them unsupervised access to the web.
Detectives constantly find children handing over their most intimate details to strangers on the internet almost instantly - mobile phone details, where they hang out, where they go to school, who their friends are.
Although psychologists maintain the internet cannot turn someone who has no sexual interest in children into an offender, the consensus suggests the internet has given potential abusers anonymity, access and acceptance.
But the internet that has emboldened predators is also beginning to entrap them. Bank robbers resist videoing their heists and then posting them online, but paedophiles usually trade images, a process that creates a trail of electronic footprints that police are adept at tracking.
Cox thought moving away from pay-per-view sites into chatrooms would make him immune to the law. His hard drive contained 75,960 images of child abuse. In addition, he had disseminated 11,491 images to other site users.
On September 28 last year, as Cox was led from his parents' home in handcuffs, fellow site users received a strange message from their leader. The Son of God explained that he had to leave in a hurry, but would be back. The message, though, was not from Cox. It was from the police. With access to his site, officers were now in total control of his domain. For 10 days they chatted with paedophiles across the world. More than 700 men were sought.
The trial involved 35 countries. Eventually police shut down the site. All went quiet. Then, around last Christmas, Robertson's team noticed Cox's site was back up and running.
Gordon Mackintosh could not help himself. Like Cox, he had become fixated with images of child abuse. Every few months, the 33-year-old would be consumed with guilt and delete all his files. It was futile. Mackintosh was hopelessly addicted and shortly after a clearout he would start downloading a fresh library. Also, like Cox, Mackintosh appeared a presentable, law-abiding figure and worked as the manager of a video streaming company owned by Italian internet company Tiscali.
By the end of December 2006, Mackintosh had used his technological know-how to resurrect Cox's dormant chat-room. On August 8 when Mackintosh logged into the site, his ground-floor bay window in Welwyn Garden City - smothered with a blanket to prevent passers-by peering inside - shattered. Armed police stormed inside. Mackintosh pleaded guilty to 27 charges of making, possessing and distributing indecent images and videos. Police found 5167 indecent and explicit images and 392 indecent films in his computer.
Immediately, the images were transferred to a video suite 50km away in central London. Here, inside the visual identification unit of CEOP (Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre), officers began trying to decipher the whereabouts and identity of the victims in Mackintosh's images. Facial recognition software cross-referenced the unit's database of one million images to the fresh images. As always, it was the soundtrack to the films of abuse that was most traumatic.
"The sound affects them [the officers] most; the screams and crying are difficult to take," says Miriam Rich, spokesperson for CEOP.
Visually, the tiniest clues can prove crucial. Tiled floors suggest the abuse may have taken place abroad. The type of sunlight may indicate where the abuse was filmed. McDonald's carrier bags vary between countries.
What is clear, according to CEOP's latest psychological profiling, is that paedophiles do not consider themselves criminals. Mackintosh may have been tormented by the nature of his lust, but Cox is more in keeping with the average paedophile. He laughed when sentenced in court last June.
Meanwhile, the search continues for the next son of God. One thing is certain; another Timothy Cox is already out there.
- Observer
