Cold case cracked by AI: prolific child predator finally put behind bars

Richard Burrows, a prolific child predator, was finally tracked down after Cheshire Police employed artificial intelligence (AI).

AI is being deployed for various reasons — to optimize daily tasks and even automate certain jobs.

But AI can also be used for reasons we may not expect, such as helping catch even the most evasive predators.

Richard Burrows, a prolific child predator who went on the run for 28 years, has been jailed for 46 years for 97 charges of child sexual abuse.

Burrows abused children while working as a housemaster at a boarding school in Cheshire, England, and as a scout leader in the West Midlands in the late 1960s to 1990s, the BBC reports.

The pedophile fled the UK in 1997, and many of his victims believed that locating the man was a lost cause.

The Cheshire Police explored various avenues until last year, when they turned to a website using facial recognition technology.

The facial recognition tool reportedly found Burrows “in seconds” and showed that the fugitive was currently in Thailand.

Cheshire Police used PimEyes, a website that uses AI facial recognition to scrape the web for similar images, the BBC reports.

Detectives uploaded Burrows’ mug shot to the website, and it returned multiple photos of the prolific pedophile from his retirement party in 2019. The giveaway was a blemish or mark on Burrow’s neck.

The images had been published in a newspaper in Phuket under the name Peter Smith, not Richard Burrows, the BBC said.

PimEyes is publicly available and can be used by anyone – it’s not a specialist tool.

The website describes itself as a “Face search engine reverse image search” tool, which allows users to upload photos and “find out where the images are published.”

The BBC said PimEyes, the obscure site created eight years ago in Poland, managed to solve a decades-old case that even the UK’s Crimewatch and Interpol couldn’t crack.