The Man Who Made the Videos Josh Duggar Downloaded
Peter Scully was called “the world’s worst pedophile”
When former reality-TV star and “family values” lobbyist Josh Duggar was arraigned on April 30, he was charged with one count of receiving child sexual abuse materials (AKA “child pornography”) and one count of possessing it. Department of Homeland Security investigators testified that Duggar had dozens of these images on his work computer, downloaded from the dark web and carefully hidden inside a second, password-protected operating system.
At his pre-trial hearing, the investigators described the images as “in the top five, worst of the worst” that they had ever had to watch. One video was mentioned by name: Daisy’s Destruction, a video so shocking, its very existence was thought to be an urban legend.
But it was — and is — very much real. And despite its horrific content, it was the key piece of evidence in bringing down an international child sex trafficking ring, as well as the man responsible for the kidnapping, assault, torture, and murder of at least 75 children.
At first glance, there was nothing particularly noteworthy about Peter Scully. He lived a quiet, normal life with his wife and two children in a suburb of Melbourne, Australia.
It was in the early 2000s that the facade of a middle-class family man began to slip. First, he launched a real-estate scam targeting low-income homebuyers; though the scam was technically legal, it was so sketchy a judge reprimanded him for it.
Around that time, he also left his wife and kids, traveled to Malaysia, and returned with a teenaged “girlfriend” named Ling. He began running an “unlicensed escort service,” pimping Ling out to clients and parties.
He also got back into the real-estate scam business, where he and a co-conspirator swindled almost $3 million from investors. Unlike his earlier scam, this one didn’t just skirt the line into illegality; it crossed that line. Scully was now facing 117 charges of fraud and deception.
So he fled Australia for the Philippines. Using various aliases, he settled in the city of Cagayan de Oro on the island of Mindanao. There, he began building his next, most lucrative enterprise: a video production company he called “No Limits Fun.”
He recruited a couple of “girlfriends,” Carme Alvarez and Liezyl Margallo, themselves teenaged sex workers. Alvarez and Margallo would lure young street children to one of Scully’s rural homes with the promise of food, shelter, or jobs. Sometimes they would even convince children’s parents to allow Scully to “adopt” them, so they would have access to a more comfortable life.
But what the children were subjected to was far worse than the grinding poverty they hoped to escape. Scully would hold the children captive while he and his accomplices would torture and sexually assault them. Scully would livestream the assaults over the dark web, charging customers $10,000 each to watch and record them.
One of his many videos was the infamous Daisy’s Destruction, wherein several girls, including one as young as 18 months old, are brutally tortured and sexually assaulted. It was uploaded to the dark web in 2012, and from there, was copied and shared, eventually ending up — allegedly — on Josh Duggar’s hard drive seven years later.
It was this video that, when it was first discovered on the dark web, drew the attention of police around the world. Even among seasoned investigators, however, it was particularly difficult for them to watch. Some reported having nightmares and PTSD after viewing it.
But if they wanted to stop the man who made it, they had to set their feelings aside and view it, over and over, looking for clues.
Because it sounded like the man in the video (Scully, his face pixelated) spoke Dutch, the Dutch authorities assembled an international task force to try and find the perpetrator.
On further inspection, it became clear that the man had not spoken Dutch, but rather, English with an Australian accent.
Another clue: one of the victims yelled “agay,” which is the Visayan equivalent of “ouch.” Visayan is a language spoken in the Philippines — which was only somewhat helpful, since that country has a “booming cottage industry” of homemade child sexual abuse materials, and is one of the top 10 producers of it in the world. Digital forensics confirmed the original video had been uploaded from the Philippines.
So the investigators took careful note of the backgrounds of the videos. Using that information, investigators in the Philippines began going house to house, looking to match things like floor tiles, walls, windows, and other landmarks to find the crime scenes.
They finally caught a break when cousins Queenie, 9, and Daisy, 12, went to the police with a tale almost too horrific to believe. The two had been lured in by a young woman with the promise of food and shelter. But instead, they were held captive in dog collars, raped and tortured repeatedly on camera. They were even forced to dig their own graves.
But at some point, the woman who had lured them into this nightmare — Carme Alvarez — found her conscience and freed them. The two brave girls went to the police.
Using the girls’ descriptions, along with evidence found in the videos, the Philippines police, assisted by the Australian Federal Police, were able to track down and arrest Scully, Margallo, and Alvarez in February 2015. But since the police didn’t have warrants specifically for Margallo, she was allowed to go free.
At the time of his arrest, Scully had been negotiating with clients to sell footage of himself murdering the 18-month-old he was still holding captive. Luckily, she and nine other victims were freed before he could carry out his plan.
When he was arrested, Scully was calm and smiling. He pled not guilty to the 75 charges of child rape and human trafficking — one count for each of his victims. While awaiting trial, he complained about the conditions of the jail he was being held in and demanded a cell phone, electric fan, and fresh meat.
Alvarez, however, seemed to show remorse and worked with the police to uncover evidence of her — and Scully’s — crimes. She led them to the apartment where one of his victims was buried beneath the floorboards. There, investigators found the skeletal remains of 11-year-old Cindy, who had appeared in Daisy’s Destruction and who Scully later filmed himself choking to death.
Scully was now the center of an international media spotlight. Filipinos were so disgusted and angered by his crimes, they seriously considered bringing back the death penalty for him.
Yet one of his accomplices was still free: Liezyl Margallo. Apparently Scully was still able to keep in contact with her from prison, and she continued running his criminal empire while using the name Shannon Carpio. She had been living a life of luxury in a palatial condo in the wealthy enclave of Cebu City, claiming that she was the wife of a French software millionaire. It took about a year and a half before she was finally arrested at an upscale seaside resort.
However, things took a turn for the worst when the police station housing the evidence against Scully — including hard drives, microchips, a camera, and a chain used in his crimes — burned down in a mysterious fire. Though no cause was ever determined, many believed that Scully bribed someone to commit that arson.
Without the physical evidence, many were worried the man dubbed “the world’s worst pedophile” would walk free. But, thankfully, that was not the case. In 2018 he, along with Alvarez and several other co-conspirators, was found guilty of one count of human trafficking and five counts of rape by sexual assault of underage girls. They were sentenced to life in prison, where they remain.
Despite Scully and his accomplices being behind bars, the images of abuse they created are still out there, being shared around the dark web with people like — allegedly — Josh Duggar.
As of this writing, Duggar is scheduled to stand trial on July 6; however, the trial may be delayed, at the request of his defense attorney. He is presumed innocent until proven guilty.
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