How cops cracked Swampscott computer sex case

SALEM – It all began with a sharp-eyed cop in Utah who during the course of an investigation came upon 42 pornographic photos of a young girl on the Internet, including one wearing a high school cheerleading outfit stenciled with the words Big Blue. The same girl appeared in another photograph with clothing that revealed the letters s-c-o-t-t, seemingly the tail end of a proper name.A bit of surfing on the popular online socializing site MySpace and a call to the Swampscott police confirmed the investigator’s suspicions.Kyle Fuchs of Saugus, then a teenage football player, soon emerged as the prime suspect. Search warrant in hand, police poked through the files on the teenager’s computer.According to State Trooper Michael P. Murphy, the computer stored more than 7,000 pornographic images or other photographs that might play a role in the investigation.The photo cache held 200-300 images of North Shore girls – some pornographic, others no more than innocent candids downloaded from MySpace and Facebook, depicting people partying or just hanging out.Over the next several months, police from Swampscott, Saugus and Salem joined forces with state troopers assigned to Essex District Attorney Jonathan Blodgett’s Computer Crime Unit to learn who might have taken the illicit photographs.Police printed many of the photos – only as headshots – and inserted them into a thick binder that they carted from one area high school to another. Principals and teachers proved accommodating, offering them yearbooks to peruse in hopes of making a match and confirming the girls’ identities. The school officials also helped identify students in the MySpace and Facebook images so that those individuals might lead them to the girls in the pornographic photos.When finally arrested, Fuchs was already on probation from Lynn District Court for indecent assault and battery. He pleaded guilty in Superior Court to three counts of rape of a child by force, four counts of lasciviously posing a child in the nude, and a single count of possessing child pornography – namely, the pictures of the Swampscott High School girl who was only 14 years old when she met him in 2006.Some of the sexual assaults dated to 2004, when Fuchs was 16.Fuchs, now 20, is serving an 8 to 10-year state prison sentence handed down by Superior Court Judge Howard Whitehead earlier this month. Assistant DistrictAttorney Greg Friedholm, the case prosecutor, said Fuchs was 15 and 16 years old, and the girls 14 and 15 years old, respectively, when the first rapes occurred, as well as the pornographic images created.Murphy and State Trooper Thomas Neff, both from the Computer Crime Unit, along with Saugus Police Detective James Donovan, interviewed the students in the photos and distilled the batch to six crime victims – underage girls from Swampscott, Saugus, Salem and Lynn. In some cases, they interviewed the girls’ parents. Maria Orroyo-Long, a victim-witness advocate, assisted with the interviews when the girls preferred talking to a woman.The case also involved a 15-year-old Boyd, Texas girl who emailed nude photos of herself to Fuchs. Some of the photos examined during the investigation showed the girls engaged in sexual acts. Police also found a photo of Fuchs with one of the victims.Based on an analysis of Fuchs’ personal computer, he continued to view these images up to two weeks before his arrest. Fuchs told the girls the revealing photographs were for his private collection and would not be disseminated in any way.”These girls never thought their pictures would be out there on the Internet,” said Donovan.Friedholm added, “The defendant was never charged with distributing pornography.”In fact, no evidence linked Fuchs to that act but taking or possessing photos of nude underage girls is a crime.”At age 14, they can’t consent to having their pictures taken,” said Murphy.Still, it happens, said Blodgett, noting that girls occasionally get pressured into posing nude for their boyfriends. “If