The Child Protection eNewsletter

INTERPOL wanted pedophile caught in New Jersey… 

An unidentified man who was sought by Interpol because he was allegedly seen in photographs sexually abusing children has been captured in the United States, law enforcement officials told ABC News.  Read More

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested Wayne Nelson Corliss, 59, of Union City, New Jersey, in connection with the case.  Corliss is a U.S. citizen.

Earlier this week, Interpol had issued a global appeal for help in identifying a man seen in a group of images investigators found on the Internet and others taken from the computer of a convicted pedophile.  Interpol investigators said the images numbered at least 800, and were thought to have been taken in Southeast Asia between April 2000 and May 2001.

In the photos, investigators said, the man appeared to be sexually abusing a minimum of three boys between the ages of six and ten.  The images first came to the attention of Norwegian police in March 2006.  Authorities in Norway alerted Interpol, and the agency's child exploitation unit attempted to identify the man using digital comparison techniques to search through its Child Abuse Image Database before reaching out to the public.

Corliss's arrest came as a result of tips which came to Interpol via the Internet.  A law enforcement official told ABC News that Interpol had more than 250,000 hits on its Web site after making a public appeal for help in identifying the man believed to be Corliss.

Corliss is charged with producing child pornography and could face 10 to 20 years in federal prison if convicted, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office in Newark.  Read More

Colleagues know Corliss, who acted under the stage name Casey Wayne, as a witty man who liked to write and eschewed 9-to-5 jobs in favor of acting and entertainment gigs—including painting faces and playing Santa Claus at parties, said Raven Squire, the superintendent of the Union City apartment building where Corliss has lived for more than a decade.

"He's a very amiable man, a great sense of wittiness," Squire said.  "He seemed very stable, always paid his rent."

Corliss' arrest came two days after Interpol took the rare step of asking for the public's help.  vol6_iss35  Two years of investigation had failed to determine the identity, whereabouts or even the nationality of a man shown engaged in sex with children in images associated with a Canadian child pornography investigation in 2005.

Interpol's secretary general, Ronald Noble, said 460 leads flooded in within the first 24 hours after the agency launched its public appeal Tuesday.  Three of those leads, e-mailed to Interpol from people in the United States who thought they recognized the man but who requested anonymity, were particularly strong, and all referred to the suspect by the name Casey Wayne, Noble said.

The leads also came with photographs of the man and other details about him, including a resume for Corliss that described him "an acclaimed portrayer of Santa Claus every winter holiday season," who played at parties for New York banks and others, Noble said.

"That brought him into contact with children on a regular basis," Noble said.

In one of the e-mails, an informant wrote:  "I think I know this man ... He is a good man and I am shocked!" said Noble.

It was only the second time that Interpol had launched such a public manhunt for a suspected pedophile.  The first time, in October, led to the quick arrest by police in Thailand of Christopher Paul Neil, a 32- year-old Canadian.  Neil went on trial in March, accused of sexually abusing a 9-year-old boy.  vol5_iss67

Facebook settles with Attorneys General, adds 40 new safeguards… 

Facebook, the world's second-largest social networking Web site, will add more than 40 new safeguards to protect young users from sexual predators and cyberbullies, attorneys general from several states said.  Read More

The changes include banning convicted sex offenders from the site, limiting older users' ability to search online for subscribers under 18 and building a task force seeking ways to better verify users' ages and identities.

"The agreement marks another watershed step toward social networking safety, protecting kids from online predators and inappropriate content," said Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, who announced the agreement with his counterparts in several other states.

Officials from Washington, D.C., and 49 states have signed on.

"Building a safe and trusted online experience has been part of Facebook from its outset," said Chris Kelly, Facebook's chief privacy officer.  "The attorneys general have shown great leadership in helping to address the critical issue of Internet safety, and we commend them for continuing to set high standards for all players in the online arena."

Texas has not endorsed this agreement or a similar one reached in January among the other states, the District of Columbia and MySpace.  Texas officials have said they want quicker action on verifying users' ages and identities than the pacts guarantee.  vol6_iss4

In other news… 

Josef Fritzl, the Austrian man who fathered seven children with his daughter while keeping her imprisoned in a windowless dungeon in his cellar, has complained about poor media coverage of the case.  Read More  His criticism of the international media's reporting was published in the German tabloid Bild Zeitung.  "I could have killed them all," reads the front page headline.  And Fritzl, dubbed a monster by the Austrian media, told his lawyer, Rudolf Mayer, "I'm not a monster," according to the report.  "I could have killed them all, and no one would ever have known, no one would ever have found out," he reportedly told his lawyer.  Fritzl has confessed to locking up his daughter for almost 24 years, and fathering seven children with her during that time.  Three of those children, Kerstin, 19, Stefan, 18, and Felix, 5, had never seen sunlight until they were released from their captivity by police last month after Kerstin became seriously ill and was taken to hospital for a life-threatening disease.  The young woman has since remained in a medically induced coma and is said to be in critical condition.  "If it wasn't for me, Kerstin would not be alive today," Fritzl is quoted by his lawyer as saying.  "It was me who made sure she was taken to hospital."

A new case of violence in a Baltimore city school was reported after two teenage boys were accused of trying to rape an assistant principal over the weekend.  Read More  VIDEO STORY  Police charged two 13-year-old Calverton Middle School students with attempted rape, robbery, burglary, and trespassing after they allegedly broke into the school Sunday afternoon and tried to assault one the school's assistant principals.  Investigators said the victim fought the teens off and called police.  The boys were arrested the next morning after police identified them from the school's security cameras.

Suicide victims who were abused as children have clear genetic changes in their brains, Canadian researchers reported in a finding they said shows neglect can cause biological effects.  Read More  The findings offer potential ways to find people at high risk of suicide, and perhaps to treat them and prevent future suicides.  And, the researchers said, they also offer insights into how neglect and abuse can perpetuate unhealthy behavior through the generations.  Moshe Szyf of McGill University in Montreal and colleagues studied the brains of 18 men who committed suicide and who were also abused or neglected as children, and compared them to 12 men who also died suddenly but from other causes, and who were not abused, although some had various psychiatric problems such as anxiety disorders.  They found changes in the genetic material of all 18 suicide victims.  The changes were not in the genes themselves, but in the ribosomal RNA, which is the genetic material that makes proteins that in turn make cells function.  These changes involved a chemical process called methylation, a so-called epigenetic change involving the processes of turning genes on and off, they reported in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS ONE, available at Read More.

Guatemala's Attorney General said 2,286 pending foreign adoptions have been placed on hold for at least a month while officials review related paperwork.  Read More  The decision was prompted by a request from lawmakers to review adoptions on a case-by-case basis, top prosecutor Baudilio Portillo said.  Additional DNA testing could be required to ensure that babies are being given up by their birthmothers and not handed over by intermediaries, said adoptions council chief Elizabeth de Larios.  Her council was created in January to overhaul an adoptions system plagued by fraud and corruption.  See vol6_iss6 for the link to the Dateline NBC investigation that led to these reviews.

Meanwhile a study by researchers at the University of Minnesota finds that 14% of adopted US teens face mental health problems, about twice the rate of non-adopted U.S. teens.  Read More  That's in line with what previous adoption research has said for many years.  What this new study challenges are the reasons behind this phenomenon.  In the past, most researchers have dismissed the adoptees' disproportionate number of behavioral or mental health problems as a result of adoptive parents' demographic trends.  That is, since people who adopt tend to be wealthier and more educated, they are likelier to access psychiatric care if their kids exhibit symptoms.  Yet after studying more than a thousand children, both adopted and not, Margaret Keyes warns that assumption may be flawed.  The Minnesota psychologist and her colleagues found that disparity could be due as often to innate factors such as perinatal care or his birth parents' genes.  "The deleterious effects may quite possibly have come before the adoption ever took place," Keyes, the study's lead researcher, says.

The leader of an apocalyptic sect in northeastern New Mexico was arrested and charged with felony sex crimes against children.  Read More  State police arrested Wayne Bent, 66, on three counts of criminal sexual contact of a minor and three counts of contributing to the delinquency of a minor, said Department of Public Safety spokesman Peter Olson.  Bent was being held on $500,000 bond at the Union County Detention Center in Clayton until his arraignment.  According to the affidavit for the arrest warrant, Bent is alleged to have touched three girls in 2006 and 2007.  All of them were under 18 at the time, and one of them was 12.  A judge has since reduced his bond, but she rejected his request to be released on his own recognizance.  Union County Magistrate Ilene Taylor cut Wayne Bent's bond from $500,000 to $55,000.  He was returned to jail, where authorities said he has refused to eat or drink since his arrest.

Bernie Ward, the most prominent liberal voice on San Francisco Bay Area talk radio for more than two decades, admitted to distribution of child pornography by e-mail in a plea deal that will send him to federal prison for at least five years.  Read More  Ward, 57, a former Roman Catholic priest, was a fixture on KGO-AM 810 for three hours every weeknight, known in recent years for his fervent denunciations of President Bush and the war in Iraq during his news talk show.  He also hosted "God Talk," a Sunday morning program on religion, and was a prolific fundraiser for the station's charity drives.  But his career disintegrated December 6 with the unsealing of a federal grand jury indictment, issued three months earlier, that charged him with two counts of distributing and one count of receiving Internet images of child pornography. KGO fired him December 31.  See vol5_iss80.  At a 30-minute hearing in federal court in San Francisco, Ward admitted he was guilty of a single charge of distributing child pornography, saying it involved "exchanging an image of a minor engaged in sexually explicit activity" in December 2004.  The plea agreement he signed, quoted in court, contained an admission that he had sent between 15 and 150 pornographic images via e-mail.

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