On Sunday morning, Nov. 9, 2008, Detective Philip Stanford was by himself in the Denver Police Department’s detective bureau. A 2-year-old had been scalded to death, and everybody was out on that case when the phone rang. It was the desk sergeant, down in the lobby. “I picked up the phone,” Stanford recalled, “and he says, ‘There are some kids down here saying they had been tortured and abused for more than a decade.’ ”

That is how Stanford met Kristen and Will Stillman.

They spilled out an outlandish tale of years of beatings, torture and sexual assault by one man and his family. That man, Eric Torrez, had her kids, Kristen said. And could the police please, please get them back. Stanford separated Kristen and Will. First he took Will into a room and began videotaping. The detective remembers how Will unfolded a “convoluted tale of abuse over the last 13 years of his life. And each incident is so horrific that it’s like, ‘Can this really be true?’ ”

Then it was Kristen’s turn.

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