The specialist investigator had run out of options. For months, Greg Squire had been trying to trace a young girl his team called Lucy, whose abuse was being shared across the dark web. Every lead collapsed into nothing.
The images were circulating in heavily encrypted online spaces, accessible only through specialist software designed to hide users completely. Whoever was abusing Lucy clearly knew how to stay hidden. Faces were cropped out, backgrounds altered, and anything that could point to a location was carefully obscured. There was no clear way to tell who Lucy was, or where she was being held.
What Squire didn’t yet realise was that the key to finding her had been visible all along.
Squire works for US Department of Homeland Security Investigations, in a highly specialised unit tasked with identifying children featured in sexual abuse material. Over five years, a BBC World Service team followed Squire and other investigative units in Portugal, Brazil, and Russia, documenting how some of the world’s most disturbing cases are solved.
Their access revealed something surprising: these investigations are rarely cracked by cutting-edge technology. Instead, they often hinge on small, easily overlooked details — a background object, a texture, a fragment of conversation.
Lucy’s case was one Squire handled early in his career, and it stayed with him. She was around the same age as his own daughter. New images kept appearing — Lucy, being assaulted, seemingly inside her bedroom.
By studying the electrical outlets and light fittings visible in the photos, Squire’s team worked out that Lucy was somewhere in North America. Beyond that, nothing stood out.
They turned to Facebook, which at the time dominated social media, asking whether uploaded family photos could be scanned to see if Lucy appeared in any of them. Despite having facial recognition technology, the company told investigators it didn’t have the tools to help.
So the team looked harder. They analysed everything in Lucy’s room — her bedding, her clothes, her soft toys — anything that might hint at a location.
Eventually, a small break came. A sofa visible in some images turned out to be a regional product, sold only in certain areas rather than nationwide. That narrowed things down, but not nearly enough. The list of possible buyers still ran into the tens of thousands.
“At that stage, we were still looking at 29 states,” Squire said. “That’s tens of thousands of addresses. It’s overwhelming.”
They needed something else.
That was when the brick wall behind Lucy’s bed caught Squire’s attention. Plain. Ordinary. Easy to ignore.
He started researching bricks and soon came across the Brick Industry Association. When he called, the woman who answered didn’t hesitate.
“She asked how the brick industry could help,” Squire recalled.
She shared the image with brick experts across the country. One of them responded almost immediately.
John Harp had been selling bricks since 1981. He knew the material instantly.
The brick had a pink tone, a charcoal overlay, a square edge. It was a modular eight-inch brick. To Harp, there was no doubt.
It was called a Flaming Alamo.
His company had produced it from the late 1960s through the mid-1980s, selling millions from a single plant.
At first, Squire thought this would lead to a neat customer database. It didn’t. The records were handwritten notes stacked up over decades.
But Harp gave him something far more useful.
Bricks are heavy. They don’t travel far.
That changed the investigation completely.
The team went back to the sofa buyer list and filtered it again — this time keeping only customers who lived within 100 miles of the brick factory in the US southwest.
From tens of thousands, the list dropped to around 40 or 50 people.
Investigators searched their social media profiles. That’s when they found a photo of Lucy on Facebook, standing with an adult woman who appeared close to her — possibly a relative.
They traced the woman’s address, then followed every address linked to her name, and every person she had lived with.
The list shrank again.
Still, the team avoided knocking on doors. If they got the wrong house, the abuser could disappear.
Instead, they sent images of the remaining houses to Harp.
Flaming Alamo bricks weren’t visible on the outside of any of them — the buildings were clad in other materials. But Harp assessed the style and age of each property, judging whether it was likely to contain those bricks inside.
Finally, one address stood out.
Records confirmed who lived there. Among them was Lucy’s mother’s boyfriend — a convicted sex offender.
Within hours, local Homeland Security agents arrested him. Lucy had been raped repeatedly over six years.
He was later sentenced to more than 70 years in prison.
Harp was deeply moved when he heard Lucy was safe. As a long-term foster parent who had cared for more than 150 children, many of them abused, the case hit close to home.
What Squire and his team see every day, Harp said, is suffering multiplied many times over.
The work took its toll on Squire.
Over time, the emotional weight began to seep into every part of his life. Alcohol became a coping mechanism. Work consumed him. His sense of self faded.
His marriage collapsed. Suicidal thoughts followed.
It was his colleague Pete Manning who noticed something was wrong and urged him to get help.
“It’s hard when the thing that gives you purpose is also the thing that’s destroying you,” Manning said.
Opening up was the turning point. Squire began to recover, determined to keep doing a job he believed in.
“I’d rather be in the fight,” he said, “than watching it on TV.”
Last summer, Squire finally met Lucy — now in her twenties.
She told him she had been praying for the abuse to stop.
When it did, it felt like an answer.
Squire told her he wished he could have reached her sooner, somehow letting her know help was coming.
“You wish you could say, ‘Hold on. We’re on the way.’”
