Martin, 35, is now chief investigator of the LAPD's Sexually Exploited Child Unit, the first of its kind in the country. Last year, as a congressional witness, his testimony was instrumental in producing landmark legislation extending Mann Act protection to males as well as females and making it a federal crime to use minors in sexually explicit material transported across state lines. One result of the law in California is that child pornography has virtually disappeared from the shelves. Most of his time now is devoted to tracking down molesters of young girls and "chicken hawks," street parlance for men with a sexual preference for boys. "They are not necessarily the men in the dirty trenchcoats who sit in playgrounds with a bag of jelly beans," he says. "Many of them are corporate executives."
When Martin began police work, no one in the department had taken much interest in sexually exploited children—or wanted to. But a stint on the vice squad convinced Martin of the problem's scale, and on his own he assembled a casebook of evidence that won over his captain. Given a month to work on the situation, he rounded up 300 suspects, and his findings so alarmed the city council that Martin was assigned a unit of his own.
Even his seven-member squad is hard pressed to cope with the estimated 30,000 young victims in his city who are the molesters' easiest targets. Since victims rarely come in voluntarily for help, Martin and his crew must seek them out, and each case is enormously time-consuming. "I have to spend the same amount of time with them and show as much interest as their exploiters did," he explains. "Then they will trust me and give me statements and names."
Martin's empathy for youngsters in trouble stems in part from his boyhood in Conway, Ark. His mother died when he was 3, and Lloyd was reared by a grandmother on a hardscrabble cotton farm. When he was 12, he remembers, "I just threw down my hoe and ran to Daddy's house. When he opened the door, I said, 'Daddy, I've come to live with you.' " Martin did for four years until his father moved to California. Then for the 12th grade he was taken in as a boarder by the local sheriff. At school assemblies "Martin, Lloyd" was seated alphabetically next to "Manville, Beth." They were married when both were 18 ("If I had waited until I was 30 I would not have found a better wife") and are now parents of three teenagers. Martin's main worry these days is that he devotes so many hours working with lost and lonely kids that he can't always give enough attention to his own. As often as possible he expresses his affection for them—"because if I don't someone else will."
And that, Lloyd Martin believes, is what his work is all about. "These are children from your home and mine," he says, arguing that their safety depends on aggressive law enforcement and greater public awareness of their plight. "Nobody wants to know this problem exists," he says in palpable dismay. "But whenever I feel down, I think about a 12-year-old boy who called me one night when he felt the need to respond to an offer of attention and affection from a chicken hawk. He said, 'Investigator Martin, please find someone to love me.' " Martin did—a good foster family—and the boy is now a straight-A student. "He still calls," says Martin, "to say thank you."
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
