ORLANDO, Fla. — As authorities renew their search for missing Central Florida boy, Trenton Duckett, Local 6 News has learned that a private investigator is looking into his mother’s apparent secret side business of creating and performing in amateur pornographic videos.

Nude photographs of Melinda Duckett, including one image where she is straddling a child’s crib and another explicit video where the sound of a crying baby can be heard in the background surfaced in the missing boy investigation and caused concerns for detectives, the report said.

Before Duckett’s suicide [on September 8], authorities told Local 6 News that they thoroughly looked into her alleged involvement in the adult entertainment industry to see if the 21-year-old made any enemies or possibly had given her son away to someone she met while making the movies. However, there was no connection found between the adult videos and the boy’s disappearance.

Now, Team Trenton investigator P.A. Turner and his staff are looking into who may have purchased Duckett’s adult videos and whether they had direct contact with her son, the report said.

“That’s a risky proposition to place yourself in the position of selling adult entertainment as an individual where it can be traced back to you,” Turner said. “If she is conducting this activity and Trenton is in the home, that would raise questions of who else was available in the home.”

Turner is also trying to determine if Duckett sold adult videos of herself out of her apartment.

“We do know that some of the movies were sold through an out-of-state adult video Web site,” Local 6’s Mike Deforest said.

A source told Local 6 News that the Web site operator paid Duckett to videotape herself nude and even provided the camera equipment for about two years.

“Although detectives have ruled out any connection between the Web site and Trenton’s disappearance, authorities acknowledge they never interviewed the Web site operator saying, ‘We didn’t need to,'” DeForest said.

“If there are other parties involved in the video, then naturally those are individuals who, for lack of a better term, have an intimate relationship with Melinda — we don’t know who those people are and what their background is,” Turner said.

Meanwhile, investigators said Tuesday night that Trenton may still be alive.

A witness said she saw Trenton with his mother, Melinda Duckett, hours before his reported disappearance, said Capt. Jimmy Pogue of the Marion County Sheriff’s Office. Investigators have not clearly determined the mother’s whereabouts in the 24 hours or so before the boy went missing.

Melinda Duckett reported her son missing Aug. 27, telling police she found a cut in his bedroom window screen when she checked on him around 9:20 p.m. She committed suicide Sept. 8.

Melinda Duckett remains the primary suspect, Pogue said.

“He could still be alive, and we need people to start looking for him and stop assuming he’s passed away and that we’re not looking for him,” Pogue said.

The witness reported seeing Melinda Duckett with the boy at a restaurant in Belleview on Aug. 27, Pogue said.

“She believes she saw Melinda and the baby during the time that Trenton is unaccounted for,” he said.

Belleview is 20 miles northwest of Leesburg, where Trenton lived with his mother and her grandparents. More details will be released Wednesday, Pogue said. Authorities focused on Melinda Duckett after some of Trenton’s toys, photographs and a sonogram photo were found in a trash bin in her apartment complex a day after he was reported missing. She refused to take a polygraph test, apparently on the advice of her lawyer.

Trenton’s father, Joshua Duckett, said investigators now share his belief that his son is alive. He also declined Tuesday to release new information about the investigation.

“They’re just going on the same theory I’ve been going on,” he said. “I’m still 100 percent confident he’s alive and well. It’s just a matter of finding him.”

Repeated searches of Central Florida forests and open spaces for any sign of the toddler have failed.