“Toronto police have released photos taken at various crime scenes in their hunt for a suspect in the sexual assault of a young girl. The photos are being distributed in hopes that someone will recognize where they were taken and contact investigators. In their original forms, the pictures show the child being sexually assaulted. Police have digitally removed the victim’s image from all of the photographs. They hope that identifying the location of the assaults will help them identify both the victim and the suspect. Toronto police don’t know if the images originated in the city, but said they took up the case after finding the pictures repeatedly in local child-porn cases. ‘I would say, in the last two years, we’ve arrested about 70 or 80 people and I would say at least 50 per cent of them have different pictures from this series,’ said Det. Sgt. Paul Gillespie. ‘This is one of the most popular series on the internet that pedophiles will save and trade with each other. This is like the ‘must have’ if you are a bad guy.’ Forensic examinations suggest the photos were taken between 2001 and 2002 and involved a girl who was about nine years old at the time.” — CBC.com (Canada)

Have a look at the pictures that the police sanitized for public consumption. For example, have a look at this bed. It’s a generic hotel bed, but it’s also the scene of an infamous act of child abuse. When you contemplate the blurry areas of the photo where the victim used to be — and where now there is just an attempt to repeat the pattern of the bedspread — it can send shivers down your spine. It’s like seeing a ghost. Or even creepier, look at the elevator. Is that the reflection of a child in the polished steel wall? Or is that just a mirage, something you see because you know what the photos originally depicted? Either way, the very absence of the victim makes the photos haunting. It evokes the innocence and childhood stolen from her.

As it turns out, members of the public did recognize these photos. One guy even emailed his personal vacation pictures to police, and now law enforcement believes they have identified the location as the Port Orleans hotel at Disney World in Florida. This too is a creepy detail: most kids dream of going to Disney World, but one child somewhere in the world no doubt left there with nightmares.

At any rate, this whole case points to an interesting development in contemporary culture. Traditionally criminals have often sought out desolate, abandoned, or anonymous places to commit their crimes — but in the age of information, will there be any such places left? Police can now enlist a million virtual researchers in their attempts to identify a location. They can draw on high-resolution satellite imagery. They can peruse the incredible new Block View images on Amazon’s search engine a9.com, which is attempting to add photographs of actual locations to its Yellow Pages results. And people themselves are posting their personal photos online — how long will it be before police identify the scene of a crime by comparing it to somebody’s webcam stream?

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