Edmonton authorities are hoping an old image of a child in a purple shirt emblazoned with an innocent illustration will help identify the unknown female sexual assault victim.
Distinctive Shirt Could Be Key
The child’s shirt appears to have been commercially produced, so there could be a number of children who wore the design — but whoever wore that particular shirt depicting "SLEEPOVER WITH MY BFF’S" and three cool-looking kittens would be in their mid-teens now, say investigators with the Alberta Law Enforcement Response Team (ALERT).
ALERT’s Internet Child Exploitation unit (ICE) in October 2025 charged a man after a forensic analysis of computers and electronic devices seized from his Edmonton home. Among the charges: sexual assault, sexual interference; transmits, make available, and distributes child sexual abuse materials; make, print, publish, and distribute obscene material; and bestiality.
Investigation Details
Most of the dozens of exhibits seized related to just one child victim, said Cpl. Matt Pepper in a Thursday interview. However, authorities now believe two young Alberta girls were sexually assaulted — the one identified from the collected evidence, and the unidentified girl in the distinctive shirt.
Publication bans protect the identity of the victims. The man has been known to live either on his own or within families in St. Albert, Stony Plain and Spruce Grove, as well as in Edmonton.
ICE investigators continue to sift through evidence in hopes of identifying the second victim, who would have been around six to eight years old at the time, between November 2017 and February 2019.
How the Case Came to Light
The tip came to light when a report was filed by a technology company that notified authorities through the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.
“They notified us of content that had never been seen before on their platform,” Pepper said. “Every image and video that’s ever uploaded, whether it’s childhood exploitive or Conor McDavid has metadata within it … They can tell whether or not something has been on the internet before, and that includes this exploitation material.”
The offending video was new to the web — as was the initial file leading to the suspect’s October arrest. “From there we … uncovered about 90 exhibits, and it just took some time to get through all 90 of those exhibits, and in the process of doing that, technicians discovered this other child,” Pepper said. “We located self-made child exploitation material as well, with these two so far.”
Appeal to the Public
Anyone with information about the case is asked to contact ICE at 825-556-2423, local police, or Crime Stoppers (1-800-222-TIPS).
“We’re hoping (the shirt photo) will kind of catch somebody’s memory. This is kind of a last-ditch effort for us to be able to locate her … We want to be able to provide them with supports. They may have had unresolved trauma for the last, six years or so that’s just gone completely unresolved,” he said.
