One Child at a Time: Inside the Police Hunt to Rescue Children From Online Predators by Julian Sher

Author:Julian Sher
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Non-Fiction, Kidnappings, Social Science, True Crime, Sexual Assault, Abductions, Pornography
ISBN: 9780679313939
Publisher: Vintage Canada
Published: 2008-04-07T23:00:00+00:00

Slowly they were able to piece the story together.

Masha was her name, though she had been born Maria Yashenkova Nickolayevna in a dreary southern Russian industrial town. Stabbed in the neck at age three by her alcoholic mother during a drinking binge, she was parked in a state-run orphanage so “scary and dangerous,” she later recounted, that she had to hide her few toys and belongings “under my pillow because I was afraid they would be stolen.” So in 1998, when an American man arrived to take her to the United States, she thought she had been saved. “He seemed nice,” she said. “He gave me presents.”

Matthew Mancuso was a divorced engineer and millionaire in his early forties who tried to offset his baldness with a dark mustache and long sideburns. He had paid a New Jersey agency thousands of dollars to arrange the adoption, specifically requesting a Caucasian girl under six. He picked the girl out from a videotape sent to him by the agency. From the day she arrived in her new home in America, Masha, by then five, realized that her hoped-for paradise had turned into prison. She asked if she was going to have a mommy, but the man told her there would be no mother for her. On her first night in her new home in America, she discovered there was also no bedroom for her. Mancuso made her sleep—unclothed—in his bed.

“The abuse started the night I got there,” Masha said. “He molested me all the time. Sometimes he kept me chained in the basement. Because he didn’t want me to grow up, he only let me eat a little bit of food—plain pasta, raw vegetables, no meat.”

In the isolated ranch house in Plum Borough, outside of Pittsburgh, the sexual abuse continued for the next five years. Her adoptive father used a combination of rewards—like visits to Disney World—and punishment to force her to keep silent about his molestation.

“I knew it was wrong. I tried to tell him to stop, but he wouldn’t listen,” Masha later told a TV reporter. “I just waited until it was over. I made myself think of other things when it was happening.

“It’s like he stole my childhood.”

The end of her ordeal began in 2003. When Mike Zaglifa, the undercover Chicago cop, tracked the Internet address of “NkdSister,” it led to Mancuso’s home. (The Toronto cops could take some solace in the fact that their geographic instincts had been right: the abuse had occurred in the northeastern United States; they had even picked Pennsylvania as the likely state.)

After Zaglifa notified the FBI, two agents approached Mancuso’s home on May 27, 2003. They expected to find a prolific online trader. They were shocked to find a girl, pale and starved, sitting outside the house with the suspect.

“This is not good,” one of them said to the other, according to a later account they gave to the media.

The FBI agents quickly separated the man and the child.

“It’s about my secret?” ventured the timid girl, by then ten years old, hinting she had a dark tale to reveal.

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