Peter Scully: The perverted ‘mastermind’ who built a child porn empire on the dark web

They say monsters lurk in the dark and in the darkest corners of the internet, there has always been Peter Scully. The Australian shocked the world when he was arrested in 2015 on Philippines. His crimes were so heinous that the country’s attorney general requested the reinstatement of the death penalty for Scully.

Until his arrest, the Australian filmed himself torturing and sexually abusing underage girls and babies and sold his videos online to child pornography rings mainly in America and Germany, for tens of thousands of euros.

Scully escaped the death penalty, but will remain for the rest of his life in a sunless prison in the Philippines.

His story has gone down in global consciousness as one of the worst pedophilia cases ever to see the light of day.

Scully didn’t just set up a vast network of material production and distribution sexual abuse of minors, but he also starred in creepy videos. As the police investigation progressed, unimaginable cases of child rape, even of an 18-month-old baby, came to light.

Girls found chained in his home in the Philippines. In his second house, the authorities dug up the body of an 11-year-old girl. The revulsion of world public opinion would unfortunately have no equal…

From a family man, a criminal

Born in January 1963 in Melbourne, Peter Scully lived a seemingly normal life. Nothing hinted at his unparalleled lewdness.

Married with two children, he lived in a quiet suburb of the city. However, something changed along the way. In 2011 he suddenly left his wife and children and moved permanently to Manila.

And of course he had a good reason for that. He managed to leave before the scandal broke, a real estate scam that he managed to eat from 20 big investors more than 2.5 million dollars.

The Australian Securities and Exchange Commission has been targeting him since 2009, investigating him on 117 counts of fraud. When in 2011 he saw the cordon of the law enforcement agencies tighten around him, he escaped in time by moving to Mindanao, the second largest island of the Philippines.

He didn’t go there alone. He also took his underage partner along, a teenage girl from Malaysia whom he had met in Melbourne and he was rumored to be spending time at “sex parties in the suburbs,” former associates told Australian authorities.

“Peter’s motivation was always one thing. The money”, an old colleague of his told a local media outlet. Another, who lost $200,000 on Scully’s scam, said of his even creepier action: “Does it surprise me? Yes and no. The signs have always been there, but it’s gone to darker places now.”.

From his new base in the Philippines, he was ready to set up a pedophile ring of horrific proportions…

The horror network

The house he was renting in Mindanao was transformed into a headquarters of horror. There he made the material of brutality, videos of torture and rape of girls, which the members of an international ring paid gold to see child pornography.

Scully even did live broadcasts for the good customers of the pay-per-click website he had set up on the dark web. His victims were the poor and the vulnerable.

He would find little girls and take them home, promising their parents that he would feed and educate them. He didn’t do this alone, his network also included two Filipina accomplices, Carme Ann Alvarez and Liezyl Margallo, who knew exactly where to look for new victims.

The authorities were easily able to connect them to Scully, since they often took part in the perversion videos, enjoying the sadistic torture of children. Later, other female accomplices of the Australian would come to light. And more victims.

The indecency of the material was such that the prosecuting authorities in the Philippines could not watch the videos without tears in their eyes, we need not go into descriptions.

For any of the members of the international circuit to see the 2012 video, $10,000 was needed. It was so horrific that for years it was considered an urban legend, both in pedophile circles and police services. Unfortunately, it wasn’t.

The video showed the rape and torture of girls by Scully and his Filipina mistresses. The three central victims were 12-year-old Liza, 11-year-old Cindy and Daisy, an 18-month-old baby.

Under Scully’s motivations, the most chilling parts of the material were the physical and sexual abuse of the baby by 19-year-old Liezyl Margallo, a girl who was abandoned by her parents at a very tender age.

But Scully also went to murder, on at least one occasion. He strangled an 11-year-old girl and buried her in the basement of his house. It is known from his videos that he always had two open graves in his yard, where he threatened to bury his victims alive if they did not obey his perverted appetites.

The empire of child abuse

While this was happening, they were sending his website in the skies of the dark interneta second Australian pedophile, the childish Matthew David Graham, was captivated by the violence and blood that Scully lavished.

Graham, known in those corners of the internet as Lux, was no fluke though. He operated one of the most notorious sites on the dark web that hosted the most heinous crimes imaginable.

Here, too, the users were in the thousands (400,000 hits a day, according to the FBI), thousands of people from all over the world sharing or watching material of abuse and crime, often involving young children.

This material is known as “hurtcore”, a form of extreme pornography where the pain and torture are real. “Unsimulated” is the vernacular of those who like to see sexual torture on unsuspecting victims.

Lux took one of Scully’s videos and uploaded it to his platform, growing his audience by thousands. And his profits of course. Except that was to be Scully’s fatal mistake.

Without knowing it, F.B.I, Europol and Victoria Police have been targeting Lux, the so-called “king of hurtcore” for years, constantly playing cat and mouse. The guy had his way of escaping, but at some point his luck ran out.

In Scully’s video someone was saying some Dutch words, which brought the Dutch National Child Exploitation Team (Dutch National Child Exploitation Team) to the international investigation. Despite the fact that it turned out that there were no Dutch people involved in the case, the country’s police had managed to collect enough evidence that it remained in the investigation until Scully’s arrest in 2015.

“The international borders in this investigation have completely disappeared,” commented Farid el Hamouti, the Dutch police officer who worked brilliantly with the Australians, “everyone wanted the same thing: to put the culprits in jail”…

The international cooperation that brought down the pederast

International prosecutors had been hunting Lux since at least 2013, who were finally caught in a raid on his Melbourne home in 2014. The 23-year-old was sentenced in 2016 to 15 years in prison. The judge described his actions as “absolutely vicious”.

Among other things, the young man confessed that he advised a Russian man on how to kidnap, rape and kill a 5-year-old girl for a fee. But also how he convinced a British man to rape the disabled girl he was caring for.

While the investigation against Lux was rescuing 30 girls from their bonds as sex slaves, the Authorities were also on the trail of one of the main suppliers of content for Hurt2theCore: Scully.

But the effort for his own arrest was even more difficult. “It felt like we were looking for a needle in a haystack,” Hamouti said at one point, “digitally, Scully was hiding really well… But we were able to find tiny new pieces of the puzzle that all together led us to the suspect.”

Less than a year after his “king” was arrested dark web, law enforcement tracked down Scully. He was arrested in February 2015, but a suspicious fire nearly blew up the whole effort.

The fire broke out inside his police station Mindanao, where the findings and all the incriminating material for Scully were kept. It was clear that he had “backs” to the local police.

Despite the fact that his computer, a camera, some memory cards and other evidence were destroyed, the international prosecution authorities had “tied” him so firmly to the case that no more documents were needed.

Ruby Malanog, one of the prosecutors pursuing him, said the videos were “the most despicable thing I’ve ever seen. I cried when I was forced to see them. In fact, I want to cry even now talking about it.”

Scully said he was “remorseful”, but his actions did not show that. In court he pleaded not guilty, forcing at least 10 of his victims to testify, reliving the nightmarish torture he had put them through.

As if that wasn’t enough, even from the cell he was incarcerated in he continued to operate his dark empire. It was now run by Margallo’s accomplice, until she too was caught. Authorities found a lengthy exchange of messages and phone calls between them.

Scully was sentenced to life in prison in June 2018 for kidnapping and sexually abusing 75 children. Among the charges, even murder. He had strangled 11-year-old Cindy.

His Filipino accomplices, as well as a German and a Brazilian, were sentenced along with him. His circuit mainly had members in the USA, Germany and Brazil. “If it was my choice, Scully would be put to death, I want it to be”the attorney general of the Philippines said.

Even the president of the country, Rodrigo Duterteinvoked the death penalty as the only appropriate punishment for Scully’s crimes.

We last heard from him on Australian television where he claimed to be writing a book revealing why he raped children. His sister also came out at one point to protest his detention conditions in the Philippines.

Which remain one of the countries where child abuse and exploitation flourishes. As noted by local police inspector and one of Scully’s main pursuers, Paul Hopkins, the pedophile network in the Philippines “remains monstrous.”

Peter Scully was only one of the heads of this hideous Lernaean Hydra…