South Bend Tribune
Local case described in crime book
Chapter follows Mitch Kajzer's work to convict teacher.

PABLO ROS
Indiana South Bend Tribune
April 3, 2007

SOUTH BEND -- When a renowned investigative journalist asked the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to share with him some of its success stories, the organization pointed him to St. Joseph County.

It was here that a police investigator with the county prosecutor's office named Mitch Kajzer had jailed a school teacher in 2005 for sexually abusing one of his students. It had been Kajzer's persistence in the case that solved it and made him a name among those who fight child pornography.

"They told me I must reach Mitch. They said he's just so dogged, so determined," said
Julian Sher, a journalist whose book on Internet child pornography devotes a chapter to following Kajzer in his investigation of Timothy J. Wyllie.

The book, titled "Caught in the Web: Inside the Police Hunt to Rescue Children from Online Predators," is in stores this month.

Kajzer is now commander of the county's High Tech Crimes Unit, which is featured in Sher's book along with the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and New Scotland Yard.

"We are honored to be recognized as one of the leaders in protecting children from online predators and child pornographers," St. Joseph County Prosecutor Michael Dvorak said.

Wyllie was arrested in 2004 and pleaded guilty to sexually molesting a 10-year-old girl. Wyllie was caught because he took nude photos of the girl and posted them online. The case made local headlines and is the subject of a lawsuit against the Penn-Harris-Madison School Corp.

In his book, Sher details how law enforcement agencies are working with each other and with Internet service providers in unprecedented ways to fight online child porn.

"The Internet has become a public playground," said Sher in a phone interview with The Tribune last week. "The use of social networks like MySpace and the explosion of wireless technology have made children more vulnerable and predators more difficult to find."

The number of reports of child pornography the NCMEC receives each year has grown from 24,000 five years ago to 340,000 in 2006, partly because of better reporting, according to Sher.

"It's the new face of crime in the 21st century, and we're still grappling with it," Sher said.

Sher said he became interested in Wyllie's victim, a girl he names "Ann" in his book, because unlike other victims of child abuse, she had the strength and courage to report her abuse.

Kajzer met Ann in 2003, a month after becoming an investigator with the St. Joseph County prosecutor's office.

"It was one of these cases that you knew the victim was telling the truth," Kajzer recalled.

Because there was no evidence against Wyllie at first, believing Ann was important.

In child pornography cases, a single picture can make the difference. Where enough evidence exists to file charges, Kajzer said, the conviction rate is 100 percent. That's because the evidence is strong: a visual record of the crime in progress.

"How often do you get a video of someone being shot or murdered?" Kajzer explained.

And yet, finding even a single picture in the vast universe of the Internet can be excruciatingly difficult. It took Kajzer more than 15 months to find his first piece of evidence against Wyllie.

"It was a consuming investigation," he said.

Kajzer led 91 Internet investigations in 2003, a number that grew to 301 in 2006.

According to Sher, about 30 percent of children say their parents wouldn't approve of their Internet activities -- if they knew.

Most victims of child abuse never report it, either because they lack the strength or because they can't, according to Sher, who said almost half of child pornography victims are under age 5.

The St. Joseph County High Tech Crimes Unit was formed in 2005, the same year Wyllie was sentenced to 30 years.

Since then, Kajzer has solved hundreds of cases. But Ann's always will be special to him.

"She's doing fairly well," Kajzer said of Ann, who is now in high school.

<BACK TO INTERVIEWS