Seven years of silence: How a NZ child abuse investigator exposed the US Mormon church

In episode four of the podcast, the true purpose of the Mormon church’s abuse victim helpline becomes clear. Illustration / Paul Slater
Podcast series Heaven’s Helpline reveals how credible reports of child sexual abuse and domestic violence vanish into a system of church leaders, lawyers and secret courts within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In episode four, Murray Jones reports on a global chain of events, from rural Waikato to Utah via Arizona, that would reveal shocking new details of the Mormon church’s abuse helpline system.
It’s dawn in Cambridge, New Zealand, November 2016. Simon Peterson is about to execute a search warrant on a rural farmhouse.
Inside the home is a suspect Peterson and his team have been monitoring for two months.
Peterson is the chief customs officer in the child exploitation operations team at New Zealand Customs. The team predominantly deal with the movement across the border of child sexual exploitation material or objectionable publications.
After initial denials and a six-hour search of the Cambridge home, the officers found the devices they were looking for. In court, the 47-year-old pleaded guilty to possession of child sexual abuse material and was added to the child sex offenders’ register.
After the dawn raid, Peterson began cataloguing all the files on the offender’s devices. One of those files – a nine-minute video of extreme sexual abuse of a young girl – stood out because it hadn’t been registered on international databases before and had markers for victim identification.
So he uploaded his findings to the international Interpol system and US investigators acknowledged it.
Due to the difficulty in locating victims, Peterson and his team typically don’t hear anything more.
But, one morning, a few months after the Cambridge raid, he opened an email.
“It just had a simple message in there saying, ‘Great news. We’ve identified the offender and he’s been arrested and we’ve subsequently identified and safeguarded the kid as well’.
“I still remember it. I had to get up and walk out. [I was] pretty shaky,” he recalls.
“It was quite powerful. Ultimately that’s the point of what we’re doing: to protect kids and get them out of harm’s way. And it doesn’t happen often, so when it happens, it’s good,” he says.
The man Peterson had seen 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 Heaven’s Helpline, is that Simon Peterson wasn’t the first person outside of the Adams household or a dark-web chatroom to learn about the abuse.
Adams was a member of the LDS church – and two of his bishops had known about the abuse and never reported it to police. The first bishop became aware of it seven years before Adams was eventually arrested.
These bishops didn’t simply make their own independent decisions not to report Adams to the police; they kept this damning information under wraps on the advice of the church’s lawyers, after having called the LDS church’s dedicated 24/7 abuse helpline.
We sought comment from the church in response to the allegations of abuse discussed in this episode. In a statement, the church said, “When a lay leader of one of our congregations learns of abuse, they are asked to immediately call a helpline to assist them to protect the victim and to ensure that perpetrators face the consequences of their actions.” The full statement from the church can be read here.
Heaven’s Helpline is available at iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. The series was made with the support of NZ On Air. For more on this series, go to nzherald.co.nz/heavenshelpline.