Mormon Sex Abuse Scandal: How a Kiwi Customs Officer Helped Expose the LDS Church

After initial denials and a six-hour search of the Cambridge home, officers found the devices they were looking for. In court, the 47-year-old pleaded guilty to possessing child sexual abuse material and was added to the child sex offenders register.

After the dawn raid, Peterson began cataloging all the files on the perpetrator’s devices. One of those files – a nine-minute video of extreme sexual abuse of a young girl – was notable because it had not previously been registered in international databases and contained flags for identifying victims.

So he uploaded his findings to the international Interpol system and American investigators recognized this.

Because of the difficulty in locating victims, Peterson and his team typically don’t hear back.

But one morning, a few months after the Cambridge raid, he opened an email.

‘It just had a simple message: ‘Great news. We identified the perpetrator and he was arrested and subsequently we also identified and secured the child.”

“I still remember it. I had to get up and walk out. (I was) quite shaky,” he recalls.

“It was quite powerful. Ultimately, that’s the point of what we do: protect children and get them out of harm’s way. And it doesn’t happen often, so when it does, it’s good,” he says.

The man who saw Peterson abusing the girl in the video was Paul Adams – a US Border Patrol agent living in the small town of Bisbee, Arizona.

The girl was Adams’ daughter. He had been sexually abusing her for years and uploading videos to the internet.

But the astonishing truth, explored in episode four of Heavenly helplineis that Simon Peterson was not the first person outside the Adams household or a dark web chat room to hear about the abuse.

Adams was a member of the LDS Church – and two of its bishops knew about the abuse and never reported it to police. The first bishop became aware of it seven years before Adams was finally arrested.

These bishops did not simply make their own, independent decision not to report Adams to the police; they kept this damning information secret on the advice of the church’s lawyers after calling the LDS Church’s dedicated 24/7 abuse hotline.

We requested comment from the church in response to the abuse allegations discussed in this episode. In a statement, the church said: “If a lay leader from one of our congregations becomes aware of abuse, they are asked to immediately call a hotline to help them protect the victim and ensure perpetrators face the consequences of their actions to see.” The church’s full statement can be read here.

Heavenly helpline is available at iHeartRadio, Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. The series was created with support from NZ On Air. For more information about this series, visit nzherald.co.nz/heavenshelpline.