Children of the Night

Sex trafficking is Maryland’s dirty open secret.

It was not the first time “Wendy” had run away and not come home. The quiet 15-year-old from Prince William County, Virginia, chafed under the strict control of her single mom. She had lived previously in Maryland and had friends in Washington, D.C., who would help her get by for short periods.

Melvin Douglas approached her as a friend, too—a potential boyfriend even. She’d met him twice before, briefly, a few weeks earlier on the streets of D.C. The third time that 31-year-old Douglas spotted her, they talked more. He offered to buy her a meal and a place to stay. He paid to get her nails and hair done, made her feel special, and told her that he cared about her.

Ten months later, in early 2012, Wendy’s photograph popped up on Cpl. Chris Heid’s computer. She was still missing. Heid had just begun working with the Maryland State Police’s Child Recovery Unit. “She looked like any schoolgirl,” he says of the image of Wendy distributed by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. He asked the Prince William Police Department if they minded if he looked into the case.

Digging through the girl’s old social media accounts, Heid came across a phone number on Facebook. It had been out-of-service for months, but running that number through Google he saw that it was associated with an outdated Backpage.com ad under “escorts”— the Craigslist-like website of choice in the sex trade. Reaching out to administrators at Backpage (a notorious operation that has collaborated with police, at least in part, to protect itself from allegations of abetting prostitution and trafficking), Heid learned that the purchaser of that seven-month-old ad—who wasn’t Wendy—was linked to another, more recent Backpage ad, which was advertising a girl-for-hire in College Park.