A 20-year-old Massachusetts man has been sentenced to eight years in prison after an investigator with the Utah Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force identified him and one of his victims in child-pornography pictures.

Kyle Fuchs was sentenced June 8 for raping three girls and posting online photos of his victims, according to a news release from the Utah Attorney General's Office.

In 2007, Steve Gamvroulas, an ICAC agent with the Utah Department of Public Safety, discovered 42 images of a victim that had been sent to a Utah man who was suspected of trading child pornography. A school cheerleading outfit, a New England Patriots jersey and a partial word on a sweatshirt were the only clues Gamvroulas had to work with to begin his investigation.

Over the course of time, Gamvroulas was able to use that information to identify the victim.

Massachusetts state police then seized Fuchs' computer, and investigators found 5,000 more explicit images of underage girls, including 174 pictures where the girls could be identified, according to the attorney general's office.

Fuchs had been having sex with a 14-year-old girl he had met on MySpace and posting explicit pictures of her on the social-networking Web site, the attorney general's office said.

"The ICAC Task Force should be proud of stopping a monster," says Attorney General Mark Shurtleff. "The persistence of the investigators to keep looking until they found this girl means that many more girls will not be abused."

— Ethan Thomas