ON THE RUN AND LIVING A LIE
How Victoria investigators unravelled the case of an American fugitive, fake identities and 27,000 images of child pornography
As Victoria police investigators sifted through evidence seized from a man believed to be in possession of a massive quantity of child pornography, an officer came across an old photograph.
The man police had identified as David Robert had a photo of a 10-year-old boy in a football jersey bearing the name Stallcup.
The officers didn’t know it at the time, but the jersey was the clue that would unravel the case of an American fugitive on the run for more than a decade.
David Robert Stallcup was eventually extradited to Canada from the U.S. and has pleaded guilty to possession of child pornography.
Victoria police’s Internet child exploitation investigator, Det. Const. Mark MacPhail, said the 42-year-old had one of the most extensive collections of child pornography he has ever seen.
The two-year investigation into Stallcup began in June 2014 after MacPhail noticed a Victoria Internet protocol address while searching for people sharing images of children being sexually abused.
Stallcup was sleeping when investigators knocked on the door of his Fisgard Street apartment on the morning of March 10, 2015.
Investigators spoke to him briefly and asked him to wait at a nearby coffee shop.
The officers seized a computer, USB drives, DVDs and other electronic storage devices that, when analyzed, contained 775 videos totalling 139 hours and more than 27,000 images of child pornography.
By the time the search was over, Stallcup was gone.
“We didn’t know anything about this person except his name,” MacPhail said, referring to the David Robert alias.
The man never returned to his apartment unit, and police had no idea where he went.
In April 2015, an arrest warrant was issued under the name David Robert.
“It wasn’t until we started sorting through all the evidence that we actually found out how much we didn’t know about this person,” MacPhail said.
‘The imagery and the videos I have to suffer through are nothing compared to what the children have gone through’ — Det. Const. Mark MacPhail, Internet child exploitation investigator for the Victoria Police Department
Det. Const. Justin Munro, with Victoria police’s Special Victims Unit, was looking through the seized DVDs when he came across the old photo of the 10-year-old boy in a football jersey.
“We didn’t know if [Stallcup] was a city, a company or an actual name,” MacPhail said.
There were photos of a boy who looked like the suspect that appeared — based on licence plates and other background details — to have been taken in the United States.
There were also identity documents that turned out to be forgeries.
It all came together in June 2016 when Det. Sgt. Kristi Ross did an Internet search for the name Stallcup and learned that their man was in an Oregon jail. Stallcup, who had another alias — David Robert Rhineheart — had been arrested in Oregon in April 2015.
It turned out he had been on the lam for more than a decade, wanted on a 15-year-old warrant.
He had pleaded guilty to using someone else’s name to apply for a passport in 1998 — an attempt to avoid burglary and aggravated car theft charges out of Colorado — but fled before he was sentenced.
The U.S. District Court judge who sentenced Stallcup to a year and five months in jail last January said Stallcup had been “living a lie” in Canada with a new identity.
Stallcup used that identity — David Robert — to obtain a registered nurse certification in the Northwest Territories, where he lived in the early 2000s.
Around 2010, he moved to Victoria, where he also worked as a nurse.
Island Health would not comment on where he worked or whether it is investigating his conduct during his employment.
MacPhail said it’s unclear if Stallcup worked with any children.
Stallcup’s extradition to Canada required approval from the Canadian federal government, B.C. Crown prosecutors, the U.S. Marshall Service and the U.S. Department of Justice. He returned to Canada on Nov. 16, 2016. When MacPhail interviewed Stallcup, the only response was “denial, straight denial,” he said.
The veteran investigator said the images of child abuse discovered in Stallcup’s apartment were too shocking, too terrible to describe.
He said Stallcup’s pattern of creating new identities is rare in child pornography investigations. Typically, individuals entrench themselves in the community, hiding in plain sight.
“It was more about him trying to hide,” he said, “and he was pretty good at it.”
On Jan. 18, the 42-year-old pleaded guilty to possession of child pornography.
He remains in custody until his sentencing hearing in March.
MacPhail spent years as a homicide investigator before moving into VicPD’s domestic violence unit in 2012. He took the lead in the Internet child exploitation unit when it was created the following year, working alongside officers in the special victims unit.
“It’s incredibly motivating to go and investigate these people … who go completely unnoticed in our communities,” said MacPhail, a husband and father who has been policing for 26 years.
“The imagery and the videos I have to suffer through are nothing compared to what the children have gone through. I just feel like if I don’t look at it, nobody will. And nobody will ever know that child’s story.”
Some sex offenders who view child pornography also physically abuse children, but others say they use these images as a sort of “safety valve” to prevent themselves from carrying out physical acts.
“I get that a lot, they say: ‘I have no interest in actually touching a child,’ ” MacPhail said.
“But every picture they look at it a child being abused. They don’t get that they’re feeding that appetite for it. And somebody’s abusing those children and putting them online for that person’s sexual gratification.”