Police Seize Pitt-Jolie Photos
The ShowBuzz's Judy Faber wrote this story.
When blogger Liza Sabater of CultureKitchen.com received a mysterious e-mail last week from someone offering to sell her over 400 exclusive photos of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, she didn't know quite what to think.
"I thought it was a hoax because the e-mail included the addresses of 15 other people they had contacted. It seemed so sloppy, not professional at all," Sabater told TheShowbuzz.com.
Attached to the e-mail, said Sabater, were three snapshots: Pitt and Jolie playing with balloons, another with feather boas wrapped around their heads, plus an "awesomely gorgeous one" of Jolie holding Zahara, their adopted 18-month-old daughter.
"I really didn't want to publish them at all," she said, "but I had seen a similar photograph on an Asian or Australian online newspaper and that's the one I posted."
A day and a half later, said Sabater, another surprise turned up in her "in" box: a cease-and-desist letter from Yael E. Holtkamp, a lawyer from the Los Angeles law firm of Lavely & Singer. Sabater said she removed the photos from her site after Holtkamp confirmed the photos were stolen.
She then set out to find out exactly who had sent her the allegedly purloined pictures.
Sabater says some cyber detective work and a tip from one of her readers helped her trace the e-mail to Bill Keyes, a "computer expert" and custom van enthusiast in Westfield, Mass.
Next step, she said, was to post on her blog the name of her suspected e-mailer, along with links to his web pages and MySpace page. That information, she believes, may have helped investigators in the case.
A spokesperson for the Westfield police department told TheShowbuzz.com that police raided a home there on Tuesday.
Local police, accompanied by state police and Secret Service officers, went to the Westfield home of William Keyes on Tuesday to recover a digital camera's memory stick after three photos were tracked to Keyes, according to a Westfield Police Department news release on Friday.
Officers then went to Precision Camera and Video Repair in Enfield, Conn., where Keyes works, and recovered the camera. It remains in custody of Westfield police.
No one has been arrested or charged in the case.
The Los Angeles D.A.'s office did not return calls for comment.
Brad Pitt's publicist, Cindy Guagenti, told the New York Daily News Wednesday that an arrest was made in the case the day before, but did not release any details.
Sabater can't say for sure if investigators were tipped off by the information posted on her web site, but she'd like to think so.
"I feel," she said, "that I was aiding a good cause in this particular case."
By Judy Faber By Judy Faber