February 11, 2009 7:24 PM

'Disney World Girl' Found, Safe

By
Kevin Hechtkopf
(CBS)  After a three-year hunt involving investigators across the U.S. and Canada, a young girl who was featured on the Internet in a series of sexually explicit photographs has been found and is safe, police say.

The girl is nearly a teenager now and lives with a foster family, police add.

Her adoptive father, who apparently took the pictures, is in prison for trading pornography online, according to police.

The Early Show correspondent Tracy Smith reports the Orange County, Fla. Sheriff's Department delivered the news the Toronto Police Sex Crimes Unit had been waiting to hear.

Lt. Matt Irwin of the Orange County Sex Crimes Unit told an Orlando news conference, "We have located the victim in our case and the witness in our case."

The girl could be "anybody's child," says Det. Sgt. Paul Gillespie, the lead investigator in the case.

On The Early Show Monday, Gillespie told co-anchor Hannah Storm the case was compelling to him because, "She was simply indicative of, and representative of, anybody's child. There is nothing, truthfully, special or not special about her. ...She's a representative of tens of thousands of victims of horrific abuse that are being traded on the Internet and, in her case, terribly so."

Detective Constable Bill McGarry of the Toronto Police Sex Crimes Unit lived with the horror of seeing pictures of her having forced sex as an eight year old, Smith says.

Copyright 2009 CBS. All rights reserved.
  • Kevin Hechtkopf

    Kevin Hechtkopf is CBSNews.com's politics editor.

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