For years, she thought her father had adopted a boy, who she thought would be safe from harm. "And I feel partly responsible for what happened to her, and I beat myself up about it all the time because I feel that it was my fault that I did not say anything."īecause she had lost contact with her father, Rachelle says she didn't know the details of the adoption. "It goes through my mind every day and I feel so much guilt," says Rachelle. She now feels that if she had told someone, Masha might have been spared. Rachelle never revealed the terrible secret about her father to anyone, until the FBI contacted her during their investigation. No longer interested in Rachelle, the two lost nearly all contact. After six years of torment, Rachelle claims Mancuso stopped when she reached puberty. But she says the sexual abuse intensified during weekend visitations with her father. She says she painfully remembers how her father began molesting her when she, too, was just 5 years old.Īfter years of abuse, Rachelle's parents divorced when she was 10 years old. She grew up in the same house with the same secret shame. Rachelle, Mancuso's biological daughter, says she shares a painful bond with Masha. The house where he and Masha lived has since been sold to a new family. He also pleaded guilty to the horrible sex crimes he committed against Masha and was sentenced to serve 35 to 70 years in prison. Two years ago, Matthew Mancuso was sentenced to 15 years on federal pornography charges. Sergeant Zaglifa says that to gain proper perspective on the severity of child pornography, it's important to call them "child sex abuse images." "When those images are being made," says Sergeant Zaglifa, "that's sex abuse in progress." He offers his expert advice for how parents can protect their children: "The number one thing is: No chat rooms." Her rescue, says Sergeant Zaglifa, was an unexpected reward for what he calls the "physically and emotionally draining" work of capturing child predators. Working with other agents, he traced Mancuso's Internet address to a location near Pittsburgh, where he was later arrested.ĭuring their investigation, police officials had no way of knowing that the little girl in the photographs was Mancuso's adopted daughter. Sergeant Zaglifa says his instinct told him this man was an absolute danger to children. Posing as a pedophile, Chicago area police officer Mike Zaglifa discovered Mancuso in an online chat room. Back in the states, Masha expected a nice American home with a bedroom all her own. No phone calls were made to his ex-wife or to his biological daughter. What she didn't know was the adoption agency failed to properly check her new father's background.
But nothing could have been farther from the truth. Mancuso seemed like her knight in shining armor. He visited Masha several times at the orphanage, took her to nice dinners, and bought her candy. After months of waiting, Mancuso traveled to Russia to meet his new daughter. He contacted a New Jersey adoption agency requesting information on 5-year-old Caucasian girls, and chose Masha from a videotape.
Meanwhile, 41-year-old Matthew Mancuso, a divorced father in Pennsylvania, was looking for a little girl to adopt. Soon after recovering from her traumatic ordeal, Masha was sent to an orphanage where she prayed that a good family would come to rescue her. Her own mother tried to kill her when she was only 4 years old by stabbing her in the back of the neck with a kitchen knife. She was born in southern Russia to an alcoholic mother and a father she never knew. At 13 years old, Masha has already survived the unthinkable.
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