Sifting Clues to an Unsmiling Girl

Other things are not so easy to shake. Gillespie says he has nightmares about the young girls beyond their reach. While shopping at Wal-Mart, he sometimes finds himself staring at children, thinking that he has seen them online. Krawczyk says that after three arrests of Boy Scout leaders in Canada in the last six months, he won't let his son join the local troop. Bulmer says he walks down the street looking at other men, thinking, yep, he looks like a pedophile. Yep, that guy is one for sure.

"You have to shake yourself out of it," Bulmer says. "It would be great if you could just tell by looking. But you can't, and that's what makes it so creepy. It could be your next-door neighbor or your teacher."

Their hard-won successes keep team members on the right side of sanity. One day last year, they discovered pictures of a 6-year-old girl cowering in a dog cage, her gaze perplexed and despairing. In another, her hands are bound, a hunting knife is pressed to her abdomen, and messages are written on her body in a red substance meant to look like blood: "Hurt me." "Kill me." "I'm a slut." Her face is flushed purple. She is crying.

"These were some of the most horrific images we had seen," Gillespie says. "We dropped everything to look for her."

They were lucky to find a few clues in the pictures: an orange wristband from an amusement park, her school uniform, a logo from a T-shirt. They found the amusement park in North Carolina, then contacted uniform manufacturers to narrow down which schools in the area used that particular pattern.

"About 36 hours after we got the pictures, we pinned it down to a certain school," Gillespie recalls. "The FBI showed her pictures of her face to the principal, and bam, they rescued her."

The confessed offender, Brian Tod Schellenberger, has been arraigned and faces up to 30 years in prison. His victims are undergoing intensive counseling, the first step in the long process of recovery. Nearly everyone involved in the case was in tears when they heard news of the arrest, Gillespie says.

They haven't been as fortunate in the case of the Disney World girl, squeezing every possible lead until little was left. Bill McGarry, a detective with expertise in graphics, removed the girl's images from photos and digitally restored the scene. He enhanced tiny background objects to pick up anything that could become a clue. Others on the team sent images of flowers and trees in some pictures to horticultural experts to help pinpoint the geographic area and talked to brick manufacturers all over North America to glean clues from a wall in a photo. Anything. Everything.