Peter Scully

Peter Gerard Scully (born 13January 1963) is an Australian convicted child sex offender and murderer who is imprisoned for life in the Philippines after being convicted of the murder of a 12-year-old girl, one count of human trafficking, and five counts of rape by sexual assault of children. Scully was sentenced to life imprisonment in June 2018. In November 2022, he received a second conviction and was sentenced to an additional 129 years in prison.

Criminal activities Peter Scully lived in the suburb of Narre Warren in Melbourne with his wife and two children prior to fleeing to Manila in the Philippines in 2011, An investigation by the Australian Securities & Investments Commission from 2009 found that Scully was involved in 117 fraud and deception offenses relating to real estate scams.

Victims were procured by Scully with promises to impoverished parents of work or education, or were solicited by his two Filipino girlfriends, Carme Ann Álvarez and Liezyl Margallo Castaña, and other female acquaintances such as María Dorothea Chi y Chia. Both Álvarez and Margallo also abused children in Scully's videos. One example is in Daisy's Destruction that has been found being promoted on YouTube, showing an infant being hung upside down, tortured, and sexually abused, by an 18-year-old female.

In 2016, prosecutors alleged that Scully and a girlfriend coaxed two teenage girls to come to Scully's house with the promise of food. Due to the graphic content, it quickly garnered attention of law enforcement and media. The Dutch National Child Exploitation Team was the first to open an investigation with the goal of locating the victims. Subsequently, an international manhunt for those responsible for the video's production was launched. Scully was tracked in Malaybalay and arrested on 20 February 2015. Investigators had six warrants for his arrest, all relating to the abduction and sexual abuse of two cousins. He claimed that he had published the video on his own website "in the name of freedom".

Years later, in 2021, Daisy's Destruction resurged after it was found in the possession of American reality television star Josh Duggar.

Criminal charges Scully faced a total of 75 charges, with 7 confirmed victims of rape and trafficking. Margaret Akullo, then-Project Coordinator for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and an expert on child abuse investigations, described the case as "horrific" and one of the worst she had ever heard of. His crimes were deemed so severe that some prosecutors supported the reintroduction of the death penalty as punishment for Scully,

In a March 2015 interview with Tara Brown on 60 Minutes, Scully said that he was writing a tell-all journal in prison where he would reflect on his motivations for raping young children.

In October 2015, a fire severely damaged the evidence room containing Scully's computer logs and videos, destroying key evidence. On 13 June 2018, Scully and his girlfriend Álvarez were sentenced to life in prison. Judge Jose Escobido also ordered Scully and Álvarez to pay 5 million PHP (almost US$87,000) to the victims.

Both Scully and his sister complained about the conditions in the jail Scully is held in. Margallo was sentenced to 126 years, and two accomplices, Alexander Lao and María Dorothea Chia, were given a 9-year sentence each. In total, there have been 60 cases filed against Scully.