Original subtitles

This programme deals with suicide and sexual abuse,

and contains scenes which some viewers may find disturbing

He seemed to be awake at all times, didn't he?

When did he sleep?

It was clearly an obsession with him.

Blackmail.

Sexual offences.

Intimidation.

Thousands of victims.

Hundreds of thousands of images.

We had 198 charges.

Only a small sample of what McCartney had done.

The absolute tip of the iceberg.

He's not just a catfish, he's a sexual predator.

Compulsive.

More children were being identified all the time.

Police had this imperative to identify the children,

to protect them.

But we can't prosecute a case with thousands of victims.

It's unmanageable for our court system.

So we focus on around about 60 victims,

getting what happened to them fully evidenced.

The case was listed for a hearing in court.

All of my focus was on that date - the 22nd of January, 2021.

If he pleads guilty, that's really the end of the case.

I came into work on the Thursday morning, the day before,

opened my laptop.

An email came through from the police that changed everything.

Hundreds of victims worldwide.

Those figures are going to rise.

My heart dropped out of my chest and I just felt, like,

my whole world collapsing.

This is 232,000 first generation images.

One of the cops in America found a obituary page...

..for a young girl that's taken her own life.

Cimarron. She was a 12-year-old from West Virginia.

Alex created another folder.

There's a number of victims that he's placed in there.

The 12-year-old from West Virginia that took her own life

is within that folder.

I'm now looking at the conversation between

this 12-year-old and McCartney, and I've obviously got the time

and date that it's happened.

Straight away, I can see some of those were on the same day...

..that this little girl has killed herself.

There was two days that they engaged in conversation.

The 7th of May and then the 10th of May.

It was two interactions.

There was one, and then a couple of days later,

there was a second interaction, and, um...

..he got her to do horrendous, horrendous things.

Just before 5.00 in the morning, he says,

"OK, you need sleep and you've done well, so I'll delete the stuff

"and you can block me if you wish.

"You've done good, so I'll treat you nicely."

As though he's kind of like praising her.

And then three days later, Alex is back online.

"Basically, I felt like you made me rush at the end the other night.

"So if you want me to delete the stuff, then I want to play

"one more time, so stay on the chat."

He was trying to get her to perform sexual acts and she refused.

And she refused again and again.

The requests continue.

And then 23.49, that's when she makes the threat of self-harm.

And then he starts with, "Good luck and goodbye.

"You'll see what happens by tonight.

"I tried to be nice by offering to delete them for you,

"but you don't want that."

No reply.

He gives her ten seconds to respond.

No reply.

"That's final, then. Goodbye."

And then she's like, "Why? Please."

And then it's like, "No, you ain't going to obey.

"I gave you your options.

"30 seconds to decide."

And then he counts down.

30, 20, 15, 10, 0.

"Time's up. I'm posting. Bye."

And then one of the most vindictive things I've seen

across all these conversations that I've read, across all

these hundreds and hundreds of children throughout the world,

what he actually threatens then -

"The first person I'm going to send all this to is..."

Actually her father, and he specifically names her father.

And she's, like, panicked then.

"He should see the pics first, I think."

"No, please. I'll obey."

She's panicking.

Two and a half minutes later, he sent her three messages.

"OK, then take the pic I asked you to do.

"You have one minute." And then he waits.

We don't hear from the young 12-year-old again.

And at the point he is typing,

"A minute is up"...

..we know that this 12-year-old little girl,

she has taken her own life.

And this is the point where her sister,

her nine-year-old sister has found her, and she's ringing 911.

SIRENS WAIL

Her sister heard the sound,

and she thought it was, like, a balloon or something.

She really didn't know what it was.

Uh-huh.

She had deleted a lot off her phone.

They went looking for information. Reasons.

And a lot had been deleted off of it.

My son Ben, he said, "Cimarron is in the hospital."

And I said, "How come?"

Thinking maybe she broke her arm or whatever, you know.

He said, "She's been shot."

So we went and got sister and we go to the hospital.

We went in, the surgeon's standing there and talking to me and said,

"There's nothing there."

You know, so we say goodbye to Cimarron

because there's no doubt that she's gone.

Cimarron was the first girl in my family since 1959.

She was always game for everything. If you wanted to go go-kart racing,

if you were willing to do it, she was willing to do it with you.

Adventurous.

Ben, her dad, used to tease her about the gap in her teeth.

This one, we were picking at her, friendly,

because of her Roy Orbison glasses,

and she started wearing this bright red lipstick.

But she always had a smile.

Out of all my photographs, that's the one I like the best.

And I keep that one around a lot.

Cimarron would have been 13 in July.

And so she has bright red lipstick on,

getting into that stage of her life, to be a teenager.

She almost was.

This is the Sunday we took her home before her passing.

This was their woods at their house.

Why?

"Why" was the biggest question.

Why?

The investigating people,

you know, they went to the school and talked to everybody

and nobody had any...thing concrete to say.

It just wasn't her to...do it.

So that was... That was the hardest, was not understanding why she would.

We just spent so much time together that it just did not fit

the facts of our life.

We needed a lot of information about this child.

Has McCartney caused this death?

Can we hold him accountable?

Can we prosecute him for manslaughter?

McCartney was going to already get a huge sentence,

but it was the principle.

We had to try and get justice for this child.

We had to do the investigation first before there could be any decision,

so we went to America and carried out a manslaughter investigation.

We managed to see the police officers.

We managed to get into the crime scene.

We managed to find the bullet hole in the crime scene.

And West Virginia is a place where guns are really common.

It's a big hunting sort of place.

And I spoke to many people whose children

were comfortable around firearms.

American police investigated her suicide.

They had no idea,

had no idea that any of this had happened to her.

Her family had no idea that any of this had happened to her.

They needed to know,

so we had taken two specially trained family liaison officers with us,

and it was their job to go into the family home

and explain to them the reasons why Cimarron had taken her life.

PEGGY THOMAS: Cimarron was...happy, you know, and everything.

So there was no indication to us in any way.

So it's like, did we miss something, you know?

Was there something underlying there that we didn't know about?

And so...

So it gave us an answer to what we had been wanting,

you know, a reason why she took her life.

We were all really keen to understand and know

what mum had said. How mum was, how dad was.

Erm...and then...

..we learned that her dad,

his life had basically unravelled.

I don't know the order here.

He's got all different school pictures, different ages there.

He was so young then.

SHE CHUCKLES Was a soldier through and through.

Ben and Cimarron had a very close relationship.

They did a lot together.

And Ben tried to train her in basic things.

Ben would take her out to the garage, work on the vehicle,

the lawnmower, you know, whatever.

He taught his girls young how to use weapons, you know,

took them to the range, taught them about how you take care of a weapon,

where you keep it, and they both could shoot.

It was January 2020.

His mental health deteriorated.

He started drinking.

Ben just missed her.

He just kind of withdrew and...

Deteriorated slowly.

Because he couldn't deal with all of it.

Got down just about to skin and bones.

It was just... The bulk was gone.

The interest was gone.

The attitude was different.

And he went out and took his own life.

And, uh...

So from the tragedy of Cimarron,

we've now got the added tragedy of her father,

directly linked, and as a result of the death of his daughter.

Alex McCartney...

..has caused all this trauma to families around the world.

And to kids who have never, ever

even told their parents what's happened.

We couldn't hold Mr McCartney accountable

for this child's father's death,

but morally, I think he was responsible.

We had to try and get justice for this child.

There are three things that we have to prove

to get him found guilty of manslaughter.

First is that he committed an unlawful act.

The second, we have to prove it's a dangerous act

that any reasonable person would foresee could lead to a risk

of physical harm to the victim.

And the third thing we have to prove is that it caused her death.

One of the things that we have to prove from the manslaughter case

was that he foresaw the risk to the 12-year-old.

Did McCartney foresee what the consequences of his actions were?

The examinations of the different devices disclosed

some really important stuff for us as the investigation team,

and was particularly relevant in the case we were building.

Having read the stuff that he did to those children,

and having seen the pictures, the videos, it wasn't an uncommon thread

throughout his offending, where young children

would have threatened to harm themselves because of the pressure

and the stress that he was putting them under.

We know that the young girl from West Virginia killed herself,

and she killed herself on the 10th of May.

Um...this 14-year-old is about two weeks before the conversation

with the 12-year-old from West Virginia.

And within this conversation, she actually goes on camera.

"I'm going to kill myself," is what she says.

22.49, they're her words.

"Please, please, please.

"I'm sorry, I can't.

"I feel like I'm drowning."

And then he says no, she makes one more threat to self-harm.

And then his response is, "IDC,"

which I think means "I don't care." Yeah. Yeah.

That is absolutely typical of his response to all these kids.

And then after that is when she slices her arm on video

and sends that video to him.

I could see that she'd threatened the self-harm, and his response is,

"I don't care."

And then she's gone on and self-harmed.

So he knows that children are threatening to self-harm,

that if he doesn't stop, there's a real risk that they're going to

go on and do that, because that's what she did.

He can foresee the consequences of his actions.

It was a moment of - he's here, we've got him.

I built this case now for this manslaughter.

To have a suspect, McCartney, in Northern Ireland

and a victim in another jurisdiction -

first of its kind, certainly within the UK. Pretty big.

Looking forward to being able to tell all the victims

their images are going to be destroyed.

Never going to hit the internet.

So the comfort that that will bring to them,

it'll be great to be able to tell them.

Hello. Welcome to BBC News.

You join us with breaking news.

A life sentence for the online predator

who drove one of his young victims to kill herself.

One of the world's most prolific online abusers, Alexander McCartney,

has been sentenced to life with a minimum of 20 years.

As well as manslaughter, McCartney has pleaded guilty

to charges including 59 counts of blackmail

and 70 counts of inciting children to engage in sexual activity.

It's hard to think of a sexual deviant who poses more risk

than this man.

I'm just going to warn you that details that we will be hearing

following this breaking news are upsetting,

so I'm just making that absolutely clear

before we go any further with this breaking news story.

This was one of the most depraved, distressing, and prolific cases

of child sexual abuse that we have ever seen

in the Public Prosecution Service.

Cimarron Thomas was one of thousands of victims of McCartney's abuse

around the world.

He has caused immeasurable damage to children and their families.

To me, she was the greatest thing walking, but...

You know, I'll live with what I had.

You know, we were fortunate to have those years.

Right? Right.

And so we celebrate her life.

Ben would have... I can't say how he would have handled it.

I think it would have given him a reason to know why.

In his mind, I think that would have helped...

..him accept it maybe a little better.

But we'll never know that.

No.

WIND CHIMES TINKLE

You know, I don't know if I'll ever know why he did the things he did,

or he is the way he is.

I don't think why matters.

And I hate everything about the situation.

It's a nightmare to think about,

and I'm just glad that no-one else is going to get hurt.

I don't think I'll ever not be angry.

I've nothing to say to him.

It won't change what he did.

Nobody should have got hurt.

Being catfished is such, like, a light term for this situation.

Like, to me, being catfished is, like, you're on a Tinder profile

and your pictures look different than what you look like in real life.

Like, that is not this.

People have lost their lives over this.

I reported him and he got caught.

Speak out, because you truly never know the magnitude of the situation

you're dealing with.

It's, like, seven years later.

I spoke out, and talking about it definitely helps.

Like, I like who I am nowadays.

I know his name.

I've learned a lot more about him and how he operated.

I know he's behind bars.

There were some tears and, you know, hugs from both my parents.

It felt good to have that support from them.

You know, everybody's got a phone, everybody's got a computer.

You know, you can't find a house anywhere these days

that is not internet connected.

That's just a limitless possibility for somebody who wants to do harm.

Think of it as strangers showing up at your door,

would you just let them in your house whenever they knocked?

Well, that's exactly what we're doing with the internet.

We're allowing strangers into our house.

If you have children with devices

and they have access to the internet, then you need to

supervise that access and talk to your children about

how to keep themselves safe online,

and that if something does happen to them, they can talk to you.

You don't have to suffer in silence.

There are people there to help you, erm, and people do overcome it.

I think it's important that children that are being violated online

realise that they can come forward and open up a conversation.

I think that's really important.

We really need to get the message out to children that

you can't trust people online,

that you don't know where people are abusing children online.

They may hear about this case and realise you can be held accountable.

So would that give people pause for thought?

Well, we really hope so.

A lot of times, when we get a complaint,

they've done what they thought was right.

They delete it and get rid of everything because they're scared.

Can't blame them for that. But ultimately,

from a law enforcement standpoint, that's the best evidence.

The quicker we have the information, the quicker we can act on it.

People have a really hard time talking about sex crimes,

but I think when it's in this big of a magnitude,

you need to use big words.

It is a sex crime and it is horrible.

And that's not something people should take lightly.