The first couple of nights, he touched her leg or chest. When it was time for bed that first night, he didn't send her to her room - he told her to get in bed with him. The nightmare began when Masha flew home with Mancuso to his modest, middle-class house on the outskirts of Pittsburgh. 'I remember asking him if I was gonna get a mother, and he'd say that he wasn't married, and that he didn't think I would,' she said. But there was also something strange about him. Masha said Mancuso was friendly and brought her gifts. He said he wanted to adopt a 5- or 6-year-old Caucasian girl, and Mancuso picked Masha out from a videotape sent to him by the adoption agency. Matthew Mancuso had found Masha through an adoption agency in Cherry Hill, N.J. Then one day, a divorced 41-year-old American showed up saying he wanted to adopt her. It was a sad and desperate existence, but because adoption is rare in Russia, Masha expected to live there until she turned 18. When authorities responded, they took Masha away to live in an orphanage.
When she was 4, Masha says, her mother stabbed her in the back of her neck during a drinking binge. She doesn't remember her father, and says her mother was an alcoholic. Masha was born in a small, industrial city in southern Russia. 'He took away five years of my life that I could never get back.'
'It's like he stole my childhood,' the young girl, Masha, said.
