Jefferson County Sheriff Locates Runaway with eMailTrackerPro and VisualRoute

Each year, more than 750,000 children under the age of 18 disappear in the United States. Some are runaways, some are abducted by a non-custodial parent, and others are kidnapped by strangers, according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The Internet tracing capabilities of VisualRoute and eMailTrackerPro have proven instrumental to law enforcement investigators in many of these cases, resulting in these children being reunited with their families.

On June 5, 2003, the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department in Kansas received a report from a distraught mother who said her 15-year-old daughter had run away. Investigators soon learned from the girl’s friends that she had plans to marry her 19-year-old boyfriend and begin a new life in Texas. Investigators issued "Be on the Lookout" bulletins for the teens, but received no leads about their whereabouts. On the fifth day the mother received an e-mail from a Yahoo address stating that her daughter was fine and that she shouldn’t worry. The mother forwarded the e-mail to the sheriff’s office, where it was passed along to Sgt. George Welch, a computer forensic crime specialist with 15-years of department experience, who believed the e-mail could have been sent by the daughter or her boyfriend.

Welch used eMailTrackerPro to analyze the e-mail header, which provided the IP address of the system where the e-mail originated. He then utilized VisualRoute to trace the IP address, and discovered that the IP was actually from a location in Utah. Welch provided the trace results to Utah law enforcement, who in turn used the information to determine that the computer used to send the message was housed at a job service center. As the job service center requires its customers to become registered users, a quick check of the center’s database yielded the name and address of the person that had sent the e-mail. Within six hours of analyzing the e-mail header information, Utah police were on the scene and had taken custody of the missing girl, who is now again with her family.

"Without eMailTrackerPro and VisualRoute this runaway would have been very difficult to find," stated Sergeant Welch. "These are tools that any police department can’t afford not to have — they save a lot of manpower and greatly reduce the need to rely on other agencies for information."