She has also been hired by Masha's lawyer to find out how a pedophile could have adopted a young child. "It doesn't appear that they talked to anybody about Mancuso, that they simply took what Mancuso said to them at face value and placed this child with him," said Maureen Flatley, a lobbyist who specializes in adoption and child welfare. Mancuso is very capable, willing and well-prepared to provide a stable and loving home." Instead, Mancuso's agency relied on a home study prepared by a Pittsburgh social worker. I feel somehow responsible," Rachelle said.īut McDade and her daughter both say they were never contacted by adoption authorities. When I first found out that he adopted a little girl I should have spoke up, I should have said something. He had molested Rachelle as a child, they said. His ex-wife, Doreen McDade, and his 28-year-old daughter, Rachelle, told ABC News he had done this before. It turns out Masha was not Mancuso's first victim. "I guess I'd still be waiting, like I did for five years," she said. She says she doesn't know what she would have done if they didn't come. Masha was finally rescued at the age of 10. So once I said something - I said everything else. "It was like, I finally had someone to talk to.
Holtz remembers her asking: "Is this about my secret?" An agent had taken Mancuso inside his house, but even there, he tried to keep Masha from talking by yelling out to her.īut Masha spoke anyway. The agents found computer disks with child pornography - but the biggest discovery was to come from Masha herself. "He wasn't happy that we were there and it was obvious to us," he said. They immediately separated them, and Clinton says he could tell Mancuso was concerned. When they pulled up, they saw Mancuso and Masha outside. On May 27, 2003, federal agents Denise Holtz and Tom Clinton visited Mancuso's home, looking for the photos advertised on the Internet. Zaglifa pretended to want them too, and struck up a conversation with someone using the handle "NkdSister." After chatting with him for a bit, he had a gut feeling - and traced NkdSister's Internet address to Pittsburgh. There is a limited supply of child porn, and so pedophiles are always looking for arousing new images - so when Masha's fresh pictures appeared, this caused a feeding frenzy. Mike Zaglifa had been posing as a pedophile on the Internet, where obscene pictures of children are often traded like baseball cards. The road to Masha's rescue began hundreds of miles away in the Chicago suburb of Palos Heights. So I just didn't tell anybody, 'cause I was afraid." A Desperate Search by Police "He wouldn't tell me what it would be, but he'd just say something bad would happen. "He'd tell me not to tell anyone, or else something bad would happen," Masha said. To keep her silent he used rewards - as well as threats. "But it always came back to me - couldn't stop it." "I'd make myself think of other things when it was happening," she said. And then, a few days later, he started raping her repeatedly - and taking sexually explicit photographs. Then he started touching her private parts. The first couple of nights, he touched her leg or chest. When it was time for bed that first night, he didn't send her to her room - he told her to get in bed with him. The nightmare began when Masha flew home with Mancuso to his modest, middle-class house on the outskirts of Pittsburgh.
"I remember asking him if I was gonna get a mother, and he'd say that he wasn't married, and that he didn't think I would," she said. But there was also something strange about him. Masha said Mancuso was friendly and brought her gifts. He said he wanted to adopt a 5- or 6-year-old Caucasian girl, and Mancuso picked Masha out from a videotape sent to him by the adoption agency.
Matthew Mancuso had found Masha through an adoption agency in Cherry Hill, N.J. Then one day, a divorced 41-year-old American showed up saying he wanted to adopt her. It was a sad and desperate existence, but because adoption is rare in Russia, Masha expected to live there until she turned 18.
0 kommentar(er)
