Inside JACET: The SA police officers who rescue children from depraved sex predators
Inside the office of SA’s elite team of police officers who rescue children from pedophiles around the world is a board of simple kids’ images. Each one has a special meaning.
Police & Courts
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For once, it wasn’t the perverse images of child exploitation or deceptive messages of grooming that most disturbed Detective Leading Senior Constable Steve Hegarty.
A veteran member of SA’s elite child-rescuing police team, such appalling material never ceased to horrify him, but he’d learned to steel himself against it.
Instead, as he plumbed the torrid depths of a pedophile’s child abuse chat logs, Hegarty was more concerned by the long silences between the victims’ replies.
As he scrolled thousands of pages of data, he worried the vulnerable children targeted by the predator had harmed themselves, or worse, due to their psychological torment.
“That was a traumatic day at work … I said to someone ‘it’s like reading a real-life horror story, but it’s back in time and there’s nothing you can to do change the outcome’,” he said.
“You’re halfway through it, you don’t know how it’s going to end, so you’re flicking quicker and quicker to get to the point of ‘how quickly can I find this child?’.”
Fortunately, the work of Hegarty, his dedicated teammates and their law enforcement allies around the world saved the children and secured the pedophile’s guilty pleas.
It was another win for SA’s Joint Anti Child Exploitation Team, a combined SA Police/AFP group that is changing the face of child protection both here and around the world.
It also epitomised the core ethos that bind the tight-knit, elite team as they investigate some of the worst criminal acts that go before the state’s courts.
“If this job was just about child exploitation, then I couldn’t do it,” Hegarty said.
“I know we can’t save every child, but I don’t think I could mentally put myself through this job unless I thought there was a chance we could.
“When we do remove a child from harm, and we know we’ve stopped evil and given that child freedom from the situation they’re in, that’s the best sensation you can get.
“It’s phenomenal how it can make you feel, and it makes the darkness go away.”
‘OUR FOCUS IS VICTIMS’
To mark National Child Protection Week 2023, The Advertiser is stepping inside JACET to see how victims are saved and pedophiles are busted.
Every Australian capital city has a JACET of their own – SA’s boasts more than a dozen officers, detectives, specialists and investigators.
In the past six years alone, the SA team has brought down an internet sex ring, unmasked the man who started the online abuse trade and caught a predator who marked each day of his life by violating an innocent child.
Most recently, former RAAF spy Jacob Donald Walsh pleaded guilty to a national-record 230 abuse crimes following an SA JACET investigation.
He is officially Australia’s worst-ever convicted child sex offender, serving a 22-year prison term – which a judge said would have been 457 years if not for a ban on “crushing” penalties.
Each of those cases set legal precedents that can now be used by police across the country to pursue offenders, and by courts to impose robust sentences.
Dozens of other alleged offenders are currently before the state’s courts and, at times, it seems the team is making arrests on a weekly basis.
And while JACET’s numbers are impressive, Detective Senior Constable Jordan Dowling said it is not the group’s concern.
“The media, even police officers, can get into the habit of being offender-focused or focused on the number of offences,” he said.
“We have a focus on the victim and on protecting children.
“You can apprehend offenders every single day for the rest of your life, and that’s always going to be there, but if you can rescue a victim that’s the ultimate.”
THE RESCUE WALL
That sentiment is displayed on the wall of their CBD offices, where a child-shaped paper cut-out is posted for every victim rescued from abusive criminals.
Hegarty said the wall was not an official monument, but something that arose from the team’s shared motivation.
“I had a very blunt conversation with an interstate peer that I do not want offender’s faces looking at me while I’m working,” he said.
“We were discussing that in the office and the idea came up, about our focus on removing children from harm, and how that’s what motivates us.
“One of the team said ‘let’s do that, let’s put something up’ … all we would do is a country, a case reference and the age of the child, just to symbolise what we’d done.”
Dowling said he considers himself “lucky” to have the desk directly beneath the wall.
“It’s a good reminder – every single day, when you’re under the pump or stressed and things aren’t that great – of why we do this,” he said.
“It’s also an important way to recognise each of those images of a kid represents a real person, a real child that was really harmed.”
Hegarty agreed.
“The job can be challenging, and it can be difficult, and you can have those dark times,” he said.
“The public asks ‘how can offenders commit these crimes?’, and we have those exact same thoughts too.
“Sometimes you just need to have a moment of clarity, take a deep breath and say that’s why we do this, and that’s what the Wall symbolises
“That’s at the heart and soul of what we do – it’s not about the offenders we arrest, it’s about how many children we can remove from harm.”
‘THINGS I WILL NEVER UN-SEE’
JACET’s dedication to its purpose is tested constantly by dangers both physical and psychological.
Even the simplest investigation spans months and require officers to view hundreds of thousands of abhorrent images, multiple times, to find clues and evidence.
“There are certain things I will never un-see and certain things I will never forget and there are things, plenty of things, I wish I had never seen,” Hegarty said.
“There’s also the language used to discuss abuse, and that’s another difficult thing to deal with … I’ve walked away from my screen plenty of times just from reading it.
“It can be quite confronting, even though they are not exchanging materials, the words they are saying, the content of their conversations, is just as horrific.
“It’s horrifying what you see people write … there are times where I have been really dark, and there are cases that have affected me more than others.”
Some threats are more than mental – in September 2021, a man who had persistently abused his own son violently attacked a JACET detective inside a moving vehicle.
The man, who cannot be named, used his feet and legs to kick and crush the detective’s head into the car’s door as it made its way through heavy Kensington Rd traffic.
Though back-up quickly arrived and the pedophile was subdued, the detective’s injuries have left him with permanent disabilities – but he has returned, undeterred, to duty in JACET.
The offender, meanwhile, began his 17-year prison term with a judge’s praise for the officer and all of JACET ringing in his ears.
In recent years, courts have taken the experiences of JACET and other police into account during sentencing, commending their work while offering condolences for their exposure.
“It’s great that (people) acknowledge investigators and their exposure, and being indirect victims of it,” Dowling said.
“But it really does pale in comparison to the actual victims involved.”
He said that, in addition to supporting one another, JACET members have access to outreach services, psychological counselling and routine check-ups.
Investigators have the freedom to step away from their confronting case loads as needed, or to share the work with peers, until they are ready to take it up once more.
The unit also follows best practice guidelines as to what times of day, and for how long, evidence is analysed in order to reduce vicarious trauma.
“It’s being able to be aware of the potential impact and, if you need help, talking to people,” Hegarty said.
“Our team is an extremely close dysfunctional family, we have a bond because of how we work together and what we see together.
“We reach out to one another, we look after each other.”
And it is through that camaraderie and care that the unit continues to succeed – and weather the next court date.
“My least favourite line is when defence lawyers say ‘there was only this number of offences’,” Hegarty said.
“As soon as they say ‘only’, if I’m in the court, I can tell you right now, my blood pressure goes up.
“Don’t ever use the word ‘only’ when you’re talking about a child victim of abuse.”
JACET’S BIGGEST BUSTS … SO FAR
Ruecha Tokputza, aka “The Child Collector”
Tokputza, of Mile End, generated more than 900,000 images and videos of child exploitation material during his abuse of 13 children in Australia and Thailand.
He was caught by JACET after it and its international partners sought to crack a server in Bulgaria that housed illicit, illegal material.
JACET thought busting Tokputza would give them a password to the server – instead it revealed his litany of abuse and provided evidence to arrest other men overseas.
Tokputza was jailed for a record 40 years, with an SA judge saying his crimes were “without comparison” in legal history.
Read more about Tokputza’s case here.
Jadd William Brooker, aka “The Centre of the Web”
Checking the chat logs of a newly-arrested barista, JACET found a chilling message from another man saying he wanted to infect children with HIV.
They followed the disgusting message’s IP trail to Jadd William Brooker of Glenelg – and by finding him, they exposed an extensive online pedophile network.
Brooker, who has victims around SA, across Australia and overseas, eventually pleaded guilty to a then-record 182 child abuse crimes.
He will next face the Supreme Court in October, where prosecutors will seek to have him jailed indefinitely as an uncontrollable sexual predator.
Read more about Brooker’s case here.
Geoffrey William Moyle, aka “The Author of Misery”
For decades, the most infamous pedophile in the world was the mysterious “Waka” who deviants praised for having “written the Bible on child abuse”.
Waka had all but invented the global online child abuse industry, making him the number one target of the US Department of Homeland Security.
A 20-year manhunt ended when information shared with JACET led to the SA detectives unmasking Waka as Westbourne Park-based foreign aid worker Geoffrey William Moyle.
Details in Moyle’s personal photos matched shoes, watches and items in Waka’s perverse videos, leaving no doubt as to his identity.
Moyle is now serving a 12-year sentence and is $80,000 poorer, having agreed to compensate one of the child sex slaves he routinely abused.
Read more about Moyle’s case here.
Jacob Donald Walsh, aka “The Lying Spy”
Brooker’s status as the pervert record-holder lasted barely months before another JACET arrest overtook him – in spectacular, disquieting fashion.
As in that case, one arrest – that of online impersonator Cameron Robert Bowen – led detectives to the bigger criminal, RAAF intelligence officer Sergeant Jacob Donald Walsh.
He had stolen the identity of his stepdaughter’s boyfriend to pursue girls as young as 10 for sex, preying upon their insecurities and mental health issues in order to satisfy his urges.
Faced with the enormity of JACET’s dossier on his crimes, Walsh capitulated almost instantly pleaded guilty to a record 230 offences and is serving a 22-year sentence.
Read more about Walsh’s case here.
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