Girl relishes fresh start after adoptive dad's abuse

"My jerk."

That's what she usually calls him. Or sometimes just "it." Either name seems appropriate, considering the damage he's done to her.

Mea is 12 and living with her adoptive mother in another state, where she makes straight A's, has new friends and a pet hamster, and enjoys the healthy diet that he had denied her because he wanted to keep her skinny.

She's slowly recovering from life in hell with the jerk.

She didn't always call him that. He used to be "Dad."

Matthew A. Mancuso, a balding, single, slightly built engineer from Plum successful enough to retire in his mid-40s, adopted her from a Russian orphanage in 1998 when she was 5 and brought her home to his quiet ranch house on Shearer Road.

The very first night at home, he made her sleep with him naked.

For the next five years, he turned her into his sex slave, taking pictures the whole time at home and on annual trips to Orlando, Fla., and elsewhere.

Mancuso, 46, sentenced last year, is serving 15 years in federal prison on child pornography charges because of those images.

But now different photos of Mea are at the center of a new investigation in Florida that recently created a media storm in the United States and Canada.

For two years, Mea was the subject of a search by Canadian police after she turned up in 200 Internet porn photos, including some taken at a Walt Disney World hotel in Orlando.

Yet for all of that time, it turns out, she was safe in a foster home in Pittsburgh and Mancuso was in jail.

Now police in Orlando are pursuing a rape case against him that could keep him behind bars for life under Florida law.

"I think he should die in prison," Orange County Sheriff's Department Sgt. Matt Irwin told the Orlando Sentinel.

A separate case by the Allegheny County district attorney's office, long delayed by the federal investigation, also is pending.

The Florida and Allegheny County cases are important because federal officials do not have a statute under which they can charge suspects with child sexual assault.

Mancuso was sentenced to the maximum term possible under federal pornography laws because of the pictures he possessed, but state convictions could result in much longer sentences because of the sexual abuse itself.

Faith, 28, and Mea don't care who goes after Mancuso as long as he doesn't get out, and Mea said last week she was willing to testify.

"I want him to stay in jail longer," she said.

Mea is not the girl's real first name. The Post-Gazette does not identify minors who are sexual abuse victims, and her mother's full name and location are also being withheld to help protect the girl's identity.

"I want someone to do something," Faith said. "This child is traumatized for life. She's got a lot of healing to do. She shouldn't be worried about him getting out in 15 years."

It seems unlikely he will. The 200 pictures, which police have seen repeatedly in seized porn collections, show a man believed to be Mancuso sexually assaulting Mea. Investigators have determined that 10 or 15 of those images were taken at the Orlando hotel; the rest were shot in Pennsylvania.

The search for Mea

One curious aspect of this case is why Canadian or Florida police didn't realize Mea was safe, or why authorities here didn't know anyone was looking for her.

"It's pretty obvious that there was kind of a disconnect here," said Detective Sgt. Paul Gillespie, of the Toronto police sex crimes unit. "I'm not blaming anybody on this. The whole Internet porn database system [in law enforcement] has to be rejiggered."

Actually, that's under way. Separate porn databases kept by the FBI and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement are being consolidated with the one at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

That effort is what ultimately solved the Mea mystery.

The Canadian hunt for her began in 2003, when Gillespie received the images from a British colleague at an Interpol conference in France. Because of the type of flowers in the photos and other details, the British detective thought they were taken in North America.

Gillespie and his team tried to narrow the locations by looking at such details as the kind of disease on a particular tree. He said one detective even had a "gut feeling" the location was somewhere near Pittsburgh.

Without any further leads, the team digitally erased the girl from some of the photos in February and asked the public for help in identifying the backgrounds.

Within minutes of airing the images on TV, callers said one of the sites was the Port Orleans Resort at Disney World.

But the resort is a big place, with thousands of guests, and there was no time frame in the pictures to pinpoint when Mea was there.

So police tried another gambit. At a news conference in Orlando in April, detectives and federal authorities released a photo of a different young girl seen lounging on a couch.

The image was one of two taken from the same collection that featured Mea, only this girl was not being abused. The location was the same as the ones in which the Mea images were taken in Pennsylvania.

Police hoped someone might recognize the girl and lead them to the victim. Faith said the girl was a friend of Mea's in Plum who visited her on occasion but did not know the abuse was going on. Mea took the photos of her friend with her digital camera, and Mancuso apparently found them and posted them on the Internet, along with the porn pictures of Mea.

(Federal agents have since interviewed the second girl, and there is no evidence she was sexually abused.)

Distributing that image didn't develop any useful tips, but Gillespie said it was worth a try.

"We're cutting new ground here," he said. "The world of Internet porn is changing so quickly. We have to do business differently."

In the end, it was happenstance that ended the search.

Buchanan said Gillespie had originally sent only a single cropped photo of Mea's head to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

The center sent the picture to the FBI, but agents couldn't match it to anything because the picture showed her face at about age 10. The images in the FBI's database were of Mea at 5 and 6.

Two weeks ago, as part of the effort to consolidate databases, the FBI's Innocent Images team in Baltimore sent its entire porn archive to the national center. By then, police in Florida had sent their pictures of Mea to the center.

An analyst there was finally able to compare all of the images and make a computer-assisted match. Case closed.

'Thank you for loving me'

By any measure, the Mancuso prosecution is one of most egregious child abuse cases ever brought in Western Pennsylvania.

At the sentencing hearing, U.S. District Judge Terrence McVerry told him, "You have scarred the psyche of this young victim for life." He gave him the maximum sentence and ordered him to establish a $200,000 trust for Mea.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Tina Miller looked grim.

"I wish," she said, "I could have charged Mr. Mancuso with crimes that would put him in jail for the rest of his life."

Mancuso said nothing.

The facts of the case are disturbing enough, but what makes it different from many others is that the abuse went on for at least five years without anyone asking any questions. Not at the Russian adoption agency in New Jersey that Mancuso used. Not in the neighborhood. Not at school.

It wasn't until federal agents from the Crimes Against Children Task Force raided Mancuso's house during a routine child pornography investigation in May 2003 that anyone learned what was happening behind the walls.

In April of that year, an undercover police officer in Illinois was corresponding with Mancuso online in child porn chat rooms when Mancuso said he had a collection of kiddie porn. The officer forwarded that information to the FBI, and agents executed a search warrant.

To their surprise, they found Mea living at the home. Until then, they didn't know she existed. During the search, she told FBI Agent Karen Davidson that she had been abused since she was 5.

The details of how the adoption took place aren't public, but Faith said Mancuso had picked Mea out of a video of children at the orphanage "because she was pretty."

Mea had been placed in the orphanage at age 4 after her mother, an alcoholic, stabbed her in the back of the head.

With his money, Faith said, Mancuso essentially bought a child to sexually abuse and no one ever checked up on him.

"He said he loved her," she said in an interview after his sentencing. "The first night, she slept with him in his bed. She never slept in her own bed. She always slept with him. They slept naked. They took showers together. He took pictures from the beginning."

Mancuso plied her with gifts -- a digital camera, Sony Playstation, television set, CDs, money.

"This child had everything," Faith said.

Except love and enough to eat. Mancuso deliberately withheld food, Faith said, to keep her thin and prevent her body from developing as she approached puberty. When Faith met Mea in 2003, after child welfare officials had taken custody of her, she weighed 52 pounds.

"Her hair was brittle. I was afraid to hug her. She was suffering from calcium deficiency because she was not allowed to drink milk. She couldn't have any dairy. She ate plain spaghetti, without butter or salt, and raw vegetables."

After Faith took custody, Mea was emotionally withdrawn. Slowly, she started to open up.

"She had never had a birthday party," Faith said. "She wanted to see 'Spy Kids 3D.' We took her blindfolded to the party room at the theater. It was a surprise. She said it was the best day of her life."

Faith moved her to a different school, where Mea started to blossom. She made new friends, painting her nails with them late into the night and gabbing on the phone. She also started making plans, talking of becoming an artist or a doctor.

In December, Faith decided to move from Pittsburgh to get a fresh start.

These days, Mea has as normal a life as anyone could expect, considering how it began. She relies on her faith, often quoting a passage from Psalm 61: "Lead me to the towering rock of safety, for you are my safe refuge, a fortress, where my enemies can't reach me."

The enemy, she said, is the jerk.

Her family is her other rock.

"My mom, my godmom, my aunt and my friends, they all support me, they talk to me, they encourage me," she said. "I'm doing good."

All it took was love from someone who cared.

At Mancuso's sentencing, Faith read a letter from her new daughter.

"I finally have a mom," Mea wrote. "Thank you for loving me."