Vincent Uher can still remember seeing little boys' underwear hanging above the suspect's bed.
Then there were the cutouts from children's underwear advertisements, the soap carvings of male genitalia strewn about the Linden Street home.
"He had all that kind of stuff, and it was a creepy, creepy thing," Detective Uher said. "He had hundreds and hundreds of images in his house."
By the time Michael M. Baranow's case landed on his desk in early 2003, it had only been about a year since Detective Uher had been promoted from the patrol division.
Mr. Baranow, then 61 years old, had been downloading and printing images of child pornography at the Albright Memorial Library.
The fledgling detective went to the library, took a seat and watched as Mr. Baranow printed out a new batch of images.
After an arrest team tailed Mr. Baranow home to take him in, it was time to get a search warrant and take a look inside.
"It was just very disturbing," Detective Uher said.
The case was solid, though, and within a few months Mr. Baranow was sentenced to five to 40 years in state prison.
Soon after, Detective Uher was told the Lackawanna County district attorney's office was putting together a special victims task force and wanted him to investigate child abuse exclusively.
"I figured I'd take it for about a year or so," he said. "Here I am eight years later, nine years later still doing it."
Today, that team is made up of Detective Uher and his partner, Detective Jennifer Gerrity, and the prosecutors and detectives who make up the special victims unit of the county district attorney's office.
Every job in law enforcement comes with the understanding that on any given day one may face the most depraved, indefensible human behavior.
They face it every day.
"It's a shock to the system," Detective Uher said. "One minute you're working on an identity theft or a robbery. Next thing you're looking at a 5-year-old little boy being forced to have sex with somebody. ⦠It's like the sun - you've got to look, but you don't want to."
'Get the ball rolling'
The investigations can start any number of ways: a family member may raise concerns to Children and Youth Services, a tipster may phone in a report to Child Line - Pennsylvania's statewide hotline for reporting child abuse - or, on occasion, a victim will simply walk into the district attorney's office.
No matter how authorities become aware of abuse, the reaction is generally the same, said Deputy District Attorney Jennifer McCambridge, head of the office's special victims unit.
"There's a team in place, there's a plan in place. We try to treat every case the same," she said
More often than not, a victim's report comes long after the alleged abuse - a "delayed disclosure."
"It's different if they come in saying something happened yesterday or 10 minutes ago or ... 10 years ago," Ms. McCambridge said. "That really dictates how we then proceed and what the next step is."
At that point, an investigator will begin a police report "and get the ball rolling," Detective Uher said.
The interview
As far as the victim is concerned, the first step in a child abuse investigation is a forensic interview at the Children's Advocacy Center of Northeast Pennsylvania.
"A lot of times, (the victim) and the perpetrator are the only people that know what happened, so it's huge," Ms. McCambridge said.
Lackawanna County protocol mandates that any victims under 18 years old are interviewed by forensic interviewers rather than police officers, Detective Uher said.
"There's all kinds of issues: Was the child led there? Was she tainted? Did someone put it in her mind that that's what happened? ⦠You have to watch how you ask those questions," he said.
Forensic interviewers at the CAC are trained to ask questions differently from police officers, allowing the child to make a disclosure independently, without any possible leading.
"The interview process, it starts out wide and then it kind of funnels down, and then you hit the piece where the disclosure is, and then you kind of let it flow back out," said Kristen Cashuric Fetcho, one of the forensic interviewers at the center.
While Ms. Fetcho sits with a victim in one room, a team of prosecutors, investigators, counselors and CAC employees will observe via closed circuit television from another room.
Toward the end of the interview, Ms. Fetcho will excuse herself, check with the team to make sure nothing is left uncovered, then go back to the child and ask an important question: "Do you think there's anything else that's important for me to know?"
"A lot of times kids will throw extra stuff out," Ms. Fetcho said.
Details
When a child discloses abuse, every last detail has value.
A child may say the abuse took place in a bedroom and there was a certain poster on one wall or a strange piece of furniture.
"So we'll be getting search warrants to go in that house and if this is exactly what the room looks like, does it prove what happened? No. But it goes toward credibility. ⦠That's a little chip," Detective Uher said.
Or maybe just before the abuse occurred the offender took the victim out to McDonald's.
"And we'll go to McDonald's and get the tape," Detective Uher said. "We'll see them going through the drive-through."
Tattoos, the smell of cologne, even what was playing on television while the abuse occurred - anything that can be backed up is worth backing up.
"All those little things just start adding up and adding up and adding up to prove credibility of a child's statement," Detective Uher said. "Of course it's always great when we have trace evidence and DNA evidence - unfortunately that hardly ever happens."
DNA
It's a common refrain among investigators and prosecutors in Detective Uher's line of work. As much as any number of police procedural dramas would lead viewers to believe, cases are very rarely closed in a laboratory.
"It's extraordinarily rare that you're even within the realm of possibilities," First Assistant District Attorney Gene Talerico said of physical evidence.
Even physical injuries rarely come into play as evidence.
"It doesn't take very long for, even if there were injuries, for them to start repairing," Ms. McCambridge said. "It used to strike me as odd ⦠but the body by nature fixes itself."
Generally speaking, investigators have a 72-hour window after abuse occurs to recover DNA evidence or document the existence of physical injuries before they heal, Mr. Talerico said.
But with so many cases beginning with delayed disclosures, sometimes years after the abuse occurred, that is hardly ever a possibility, he said.
Confessions
Rather than finding a sample for the lab, investigators' top priority in these cases is confessions.
Not only does it bolster the case significantly, Detective Uher said, but if it leads to a plea agreement, it could save the victim from having to tell his or her story in court, which can be traumatic.
"And it's not going to be in that cozy room up at the CAC (Children's Advocacy Center) anymore. It's going to be in front of a judge, the bad guy's going to be there, you're going to have a jury there, a defense lawyer coming down hard on a child, so we work hard to get confessions," he said.
That's where those details from the forensic interview come in.
"We get so much corroborating evidence that we go in there and show them that and tell them, 'By you lying it's just making everything worse,'â" Detective Uher said. "I hardly even raise my voice, and I get a lot of confessions."
In their experience, Detective Uher and Detective Gerrity have found that leveling with suspects and almost consoling them is most effective.
"I get a lot more (confessions) by holding hands, patting backs and saying, 'This sucks. I'm sorry,'â" Detective Gerrity said.
Child pornography
Investigators working on child molestation cases have the benefit of a victim - a living, breathing child with a story that can be backed up and brought to bear on a suspect.
County Detective Justin Leri has computers.
Detective Leri's primary task is investigating Internet crimes against children, most often child pornography.
His investigations often begin with his performing an undercover file-sharing session, during which he browses peer-to-peer file-sharing networks looking for child pornography.
"They're horrible pictures to look at, but send me those pictures because I'm going to get you," he said. "That's the biggest part - to take these people who have sexual interests in children off of the streets."
Once he downloads images and determines that they are either child pornography or child erotica - non-nude but sexually suggestive images of children - he identifies the source computer's IP address, which will give him a general idea of its location.
"It could be within 50 miles, 100 miles of that area. ⦠But it gives a general idea - this one is in Northeast Pennsylvania," he said.
The other number he checks into is called a hash value. Every file on a computer has one, and each is unique, like a fingerprint - "except it's much more specific than a human's fingerprint," Detective Leri said.
He then searches that number in the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children database to see if the file has been investigated in the past, if the victim has been identified or any other information gathered on the file.
The next step is to subpoena the Internet service provider for the IP address sending the file to determine who was sitting behind that computer.
From there, Detective Leri can obtain a search warrant for the home and seize any and all electronic storage devices - everything from external hard drives to thumb drives to cellphones.
"It's not just the big black computer," Ms. McCambridge said.
Those items are carried straight into a mobile computer forensic van outfitted with computer equipment investigators use at the scene to find child pornography on a certain hard drive or other storage device.
"That's very, very valuable," Detective Leri said. "If we can preview and establish whose computer this was we can focus our interviews to that individual."
If the suspect does not come clean, Detective Leri can simply go back to his or her computer and perform a more in-depth forensic investigation to prove that the suspect was using the machine in question at the time the pornography was downloaded.
"The forensics tell a whole big story because the use of someone's computer records everything," he said. "I always say I can learn so much about someone by going through their computer."
Whether it's an Internet search history of the suspect's known interests or visits to their personal email account around the time the files were downloaded, there is always something left behind.
Court
While Detective Leri has a specialized knowledge of computers and the Internet, most jurors do not, which presents a certain challenge for prosecutors.
"To say 'hash value' to someone in the jury means nothing so you really have to instruct them in terms of what it is and what it means," Ms. McCambridge said.
When it comes to bringing cases to court, all of the evidence, interviews, digital files must be there, but there's something else.
"There is a very big human element to prosecuting sex crimes," said Assistant District Attorney Mariclare Hayes, one of the prosecutors in the special victims unit.
That part is always more complicated than the nuts and bolts of an investigation.
Children are often testifying against people they love, despite the harm they have caused them.
"It's nice to think that every victim came to court with their mom and dad by their side rooting them on, but the reality ... because of coming forward those children are out of their home. They've lost their families," she said.
Contact the writer: domalley@timesshamrock.com, @domalleyTT on Twitter