Following up on Friday's Boing Boing post about a Toronto anti-crime group that photoshopped a series of child rape scene photos to remove victim and perpetrator, then released the images online in hopes of public aid — the crime site has been identified. The sexual assault is now believed to have taken place at the Port Orleans French Quarter hotel at Walt Disney World in Florida.
Police in Toronto say they tracked down the hotel after releasing photos from a porn site, showing the locations of sex attacks against a girl who was around 12 years old. (…)[O]ne man who called to identify the hotel e-mailed his own vacation photos, and they matched scenes in photos that police had released. Within hours of releasing the photos, police were "inundated" with tips from people in the Toronto area about where they thought the pictures may have been taken, said Det. Sgt. Paul Gillespie.
Link. See also this Globe and Mail story: Link (Thanks, uberbabe) and a canoe.ca story is here: Link (thanks, Martin Kuplens-Ewart)
And Boing Boing reader Tom Collins says,
"When I saw the original story on ABC News news last night, and then Boing Boing this morning, I couldn't believe it! Back around 2000-2001 I met an artist named Jon Haddock who had done a project called ISPs: p0rnography, with the figures removed. It was a collection of pornographic photos from the Internet that he had digitally removed the people from. The site is still online, and based on the chronology of other projects on his site, I'd say he did ISPs around 1999-2000. Many readers might already be familiar with Jon's Screenshots project that was listed on Slashdot back in 2000: A series of drawings from an isometric perspective, in the style of a computer game. The subject of each drawing is the image, or images, that created a popular cultural event. Historical events (like the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the Lorraine Motel) are used interchangeably with fictionalized events (like the picnic scene from The Sound of Music)."
See also this Toronto Star story:
The man and his victim hit the headlines last week when, in an unprecedented move, Toronto's sex crimes unit released photos showing a hotel room and other spots where the abuse occurred.
"When someone commits offences like this in public, it shows a lot of arrogance," said Det.-Sgt. Paul Gillespie, one of the investigators on the case. "It is like he's not too worried about getting caught." The abuser, Gillespie added, "is fairly bold. "He's committing these acts in some high-risk places."
