All Blog Posts from Crimesider

SANFORD, N.C. - Police still hope 5-year-old Shaniya Davis will be found alive, but that hope is dwindling.

About 200 searchers fanned out across several miles southeast of Sanford, N.C. on Monday based on "reliable information" that the missing girl's body may have been discarded, said Fayetteville Police spokeswoman Theresa Chance.

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FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. - Police have released horrifying still frames from a hotel surveillance video that shows a man carrying missing 5-year-old Shaniya Davis through a hotel hallway and towards an elevator.

Officials say a hotel worker called police to report seeing a child matching Shaniya's description, but by the time police got there, the man and child had left.

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FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. - North Carolina police now say that the mother of 5-year-old Shaniya Nicole Davis, who has been missing since Tuesday, forced her child into sexual servitude and prostitution.

Fayetteville police charged Antoinette Nicole Davis on Saturday with charges including human trafficking, child abuse involving prostitution, filing a false police report and resisting, delaying or obstructing an officer.

According to arrest documents cited by The Fayetteville Observer, Davis "knowingly provide(d) Shaniya Davis with the intent that she be held in sexual servitude" and she "permit(ted) an act of prostitution."

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BERLIN - It's not just the Earth that's heating up in Germany, where a legal brothel has decided to offer discounts for patrons who want to save the planet.

The "House of Desire" brothel is giving customers $7.50 off their tab for riding a bike or taking public transit on their way to the steamy establishment.

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SAN JOSE, Calif. - Stanford University law school graduate Cristina Warthen will have to serve a year of home detention for failing to pay taxes on money she earned while working as a prostitute.

As part of a new plea deal with prosecutors, she'll also have to pay the government about $243,000, instead of the $313,000 established in a previous plea arrangement.

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EVERETT, Washington - Could I get a little sex with that coffee?

That seems to be what Washington state law enforcement officials are saying happens when five baristas allegedly charged customers to touch their breasts and buttocks at an espresso stand where servers wear bikinis to draw business.

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LAS VEGAS - She was once the infamous "Hollywood Madam" who provided models-turned-prostitutes to the rich and famous. Now, Heidi Fleiss, who lives a decidedly less exciting existence in rural Nevada, has been sentenced Tuesday to three years probation on felony drug charges stemming from an arrest in the "Silver State," but the convictions will be erased from her record if she can stay out of trouble until 2012.

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New York They went undercover and posed as a pimp and a prostitute, and now 25-year-old conservative activist James O'Keefe, and his partner, a scantily clad 20-year-old college student dubbed "Kenya," have raised serious questions about ACORN, who they claim, offered the two unfettered, and perhaps illegal, advice.

ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, which advocates for poor people, has since fired the two employees captured in O'Keefe's video.

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ROME - Thirty women. Eighteen parties. Guests willing to supply sex "if the need arises."

Two Italian newspapers published what they described Wednesday as excerpts from prosecutors' interrogation of a businessman who said he paid dozens of women to attend parties at Premier Silvio Berlusconi's Sardinia villa and his Rome residence.

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PITTSBURG, Calif. - Police in the Northern California city of Pittsburg say they have found no evidence to connect kidnapping suspect Phillip Garrido or his wife to several unsolved murders.

Following Jaycee Lee Dugard's reappearance last week after 18 years missing, Pittsburg police focused on Garrido in connection to the slayings of prostitutes in the 1990s.

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