And then they had a minor breakthrough. The team discovered that a sofa seen in some of the images was only sold regionally, not nationally, and therefore had a more limited customer base.

…

The team looked for more clues. And that is when they realised something as mundane as the exposed brick wall in Lucy’s bedroom could give them a lead.

“So, I started just Googling bricks and it wasn’t too many searches [before] I found the Brick Industry Association,” says Squire.

“And the woman on the phone was awesome. She was like, ‘how can the brick industry help?’”

She offered to share the photo with brick experts all over the country. The response was almost immediate, he says.

One of the people who got in touch was John Harp, who had been working in brick sales since 1981.

“I noticed that the brick was a very pink-cast brick, and it had a little bit of a charcoal overlay on it. It was a modular eight-inch brick and it was square-edged,” he says. “When I saw that, I knew exactly what the brick was,” he adds.

It was, he told Squire, a “Flaming Alamo”.

…

Finally they had a breakthrough. They found an address that Harp believed was likely to feature a Flaming Alamo brick wall, and was on the sofa customer-base list.

“So we narrowed it down to [this] one address… and started the process of confirming who was living there through state records, driver’s licence… information on schools,” says Squire.

The team realised that in the household with Lucy was her mother’s boyfriend - a convicted sex offender.

Within hours, local Homeland Security agents had arrested the offender, who had been raping Lucy for six years. He was subsequently sentenced to more than 70 years in jail.

Holy shit, well done everyone