by Jack Davis
The man’s father, worked for the Endicott Johnson Shoe Company, the industry the town was founded on. Brett was a shallow and petty man, jealous of the new brash IBMers when the company took off in the sixties. The snobby white-collar workers went to work in air-conditioned offices in white shirts and ties, had large paychecks, cradle-to-grave security, and a country club on the hill. Basically, he was jealous about the new industry supplanting the old and the fact he was locked into the old. Most Fridays and some Saturdays he tried to drink his feelings away. In one of the hundred corner bars that dotted the area, he railed against IBM, and what it was “doing to the Triple Cities.”
Eventually the jealousy, anger, and one other dynamic pushed Brett to leave Endicott for good, but only after he had cleaned out the family’s bank account. For a few years he sent cards on birthdays and Christmas, but over time that faded and finally stopped altogether. He died in Santa Barbara in 1981 while driving drunk. The man never knew or cared, which was a step up from how he felt about his mother.
Susan was a domineering shrew of a woman who had a hand in driving her husband to drink and eventually disappear. With Brett gone, she only had one outlet for her anger and disappointment, the one person she could control—and this time completely—her son.
A product of the late fifties, Susan had a strict Christian upbringing. She had watched with yearning and curiosity as the sexual revolution of the sixties came into full swing. With the departure of her “worthless husband” she took full advantage of her new freedom. Initially she tried to be discreet, but after a while she stopped caring what her son thought, heard, or saw.
In a small town, it didn’t take long for Susan’s reputation to get around and get back to her son. Any feelings of remorse or shame she felt were initially drowned by alcohol and later rationalized. A number of times she remarked to her son that his friends “wished they had parents as liberated as I am.” He most certainly was not.
The boy had a dour and angry disposition. His mother often commented to her many male friends, “He came out angry and has stayed mad ever since.” The compounding effect of his mother’s behavior and his predisposition to being unhappy and hard to please was a bad combination. His embarrassment and disgust with his mother’s behavior grew steadily. As her open promiscuity became more blatant, his feelings easily changed to loathing. It grew to proportions that can only be reached when betrayal of love kindles hatred.
The intensity of hatred that the son felt for his mother took place without her ever knowing. When she passed away from a combination of cirrhosis of the liver and diabetes, the son had her body donated to the local teaching hospital. He felt that her body had not been worth anything in life, and that maybe in death it could be used for something other than sexual gratification. He relished the thought of a med student dissecting her. He lied to anyone who asked and said his mother had wished to donate some of her organs and then be cremated.
While still alive, the man’s hatred for the woman who bore him was textbook. He exhibited his mother’s penchant for needing control, but as a young boy, he could control very little. His mother’s cat was the first unfortunate victim of his misplaced rage. One morning as his mother lay semi-nude on the couch after her evening’s companion had left, the son went into the backyard and dug a deep hole. He got a towel and went looking for Linus. He had taunted the feline every chance he could, so it took a while for him to find and catch the animal. Wrapping Linus firmly in the towel, he took the squirming bundle to the hole. His initial plan was to kill Linus, bury him, and tell his mother she had run over it the previous evening. He liked the idea because it hurt her twice—her grief at the loss of Linus coupled with her responsible for the death.
As the son got to the hole, in a flash of demonic inspiration, he came up with a more inhuman idea. He decided it would be more fitting if the cat suffered. He placed the towel in the hole and, started piling dirt on top of it. As he set a heavy garbage can over the ground, he felt a great sense of satisfaction. And so, the boy’s first victim was a seven-year-old calico cat named Linus.
Over time, the man took out his frustration on more and more animals. It became a needed release for him. Initially, he was content to only watch their suffering and eventual death, but over time he graduated to enjoying the anticipation of pain, whether it was poisoning neighborhood dogs or feeding birds Alka-Seltzer and watching them writhe as their stomachs distended and burst. He reveled in the agony of other living creatures and enjoyed both causing it and watching it.
While other children his age immersed themselves in activities, hobbies, or sports, Susan’s son became more and more interested in torture, pain, and suffering. Also like his adolescent contemporaries, he put an extreme amount of time, thought, and creativity into his new passion. This became extremely unfortunate for dozens of souls later in his life.
By the time he reached his early teens his favorite tool was the lawn mower. He used it to run over stray cats he had staked out in his fenced backyard. Seeing the helpless animal’s terror as the mower got closer was exquisite to him. Next it was the sound of the blades slowing as they struck the flesh and bone, and then the spray of pink mist out the side of the machine. The whole process fascinated and exhilarated young man.
During these “formative years,” he learned a great deal that would help him become a more efficient and sadistic killer when he graduated to humans. He learned how much noise a living creature as small as a household pet could make when being slowly tortured. His later killings would all be carried out in secluded areas, or the victims would be silenced. He learned how desperately something can fight when terrified. Later, he would take great pains to incapacitate his victims prior to beginning his procedures. He learned that cuts or amputations needed to be carefully planned so as not to dispatch the victim too quickly through loss of blood.
For the young man, the most important lesson was what he learned about himself. He realized there was nothing that came close to the feeling he got when he watched the eyes of something that knew it was going to die. The eyes showed everything: anger, bewilderment, terror, and hopelessness. The last was by far his favorite.
As soon as he turned seventeen, he joined the military. He wanted to get as far away from his mother as possible. She gladly signed the papers for her underaged son. He joined the Air Force, and even though he hadn’t finished high school, his high test scores allowed him to get a position as an electrician. He was an eager pupil and did well in all his classes. As in every other school he had attended, he didn’t fit in and spent most of his time alone. The instructors and other students tried to interact with the new airman but were always rebuffed. His abilities and work ethic allowed them to overlook his reclusive nature.
He spent his spare time reading and taking additional courses, eventually in computers. The military was glad to have people with specialized skills, and they helped with his electronics and then computer training. The problem was that, as time went on, the man became more of a loner.
At his proficiency evaluation during his fifth year in the military, his lieutenant determined the man needed to talk to a mental health professional. His antisocial personality and hostility toward others was enough for the psychologist to require him to seek additional help.
The man knew the problem was not with him, but the military. This would be a theme for the remainder of his life—no introspection. No matter how many times he came up against the same problem, it was always someone else’s issue, not his. He did not reenlist when his tour of duty was finished, convinced as he was that his skills were being overlooked and underutilized.
What the man found early on was that while his skills could land him the job, he could not keep his personality in check for more than a few months at a time. He was either asked to leave or he quit three jobs within two years of leaving the Air Force. He rationalized all the moves and told potential employers that like many in the industry, he was moving from job to job for “better
opportunities” or “greater challenges.”
This period in his life made the man realize that his ideal job would be stable, but as importantly, something where it would be difficult to fire him. He found this when he went to college.
One major milestone in the man’s criminal and psychotic development came about innocently enough. To make extra money, he started a business repairing computers. He was by no means an expert, but he knew much more than all his clients, and in the early eighties that was enough. If he couldn’t fix a machine, he claimed it was beyond repair. No one challenged his diagnosis.
He built up a surprisingly large word-of-mouth business because he charged less than anyone else. Not being in it for the money was a theme he learned early on that kept him in good stead throughout his life.
While working on an IBM PS-2 for his barber, he came across what would later be known as homemade porn. He was immediately aroused and masturbated while looking at the nude pictures of his barber’s wife in various sexual positions.
Over the next year there were numerous instances where the man found pornography on computers he was repairing. In two other incidents he found homemade porn on machines. Whereas the first two women had been heavy, older, and not really appealing to the man, the woman from the third machine was younger and shapely. The man was instantly obsessed. After three weeks of looking at the pictures he had to see this woman in person. To enhance his fantasies, he needed more. He needed to see how she moved, what her voice sounded like…more than just static pictures. This was the first woman he stalked, albeit clumsily. He used the contact information from his repair bill to set up an appointment and go to the house. His pretext was that he needed to adjust a video card setting. Unfortunately for the man it was summer, and the Wheelers had a pool. The wife was in a bathing suit when she answered the door. When the man saw the object of so many nights of sexual fantasy standing in front of him half naked, he spasmed and had an immediate and embarrassing ejaculation. He ran off the front porch.
With the woman in the bathing suit, the man had taken a huge leap from just being a voyeur to becoming a stalker, and eventually a predator. Pictures were nice, but nothing beat looking at the real thing. Over time he got better at his voyeuristic house calls. He honed his skills, so by the time he was ready to take his next step, he wouldn’t be sloppy and make basic mistakes.
It was the late nineties, and with the drop in the price of computers and hard drives, many people were upgrading to new, faster, more powerful machines. The old ones were sold, thrown away, or donated. The man now had a new source of hard drives to scan. He scoured the newspapers and went to yard sales. He could easily collect three or four a week for little or no money. A third had some porn. The man was amazed that people would only delete the pictures or videos. They didn’t realize that deleting objects didn’t get rid of the images but only hid them from the operating system. It didn’t take much time to uncover the deleted images, and he didn’t mind a little extra effort if the pictures were good. Computer games, terrorizing an occasional small animal, and trying to find pornography were practically his only pastimes. He loved all three with a passion.
44 | Porn and the Rise of the Internet
1980s-early 2000s
Right behind the chicken-and-egg debate comes the question: which came first, the internet or internet porn? The rise of the internet has in some circles been directly attributed to pornography. Statistics have proven the laws of supply and demand for porn fueled the growth of the home PC movement and therefore directly the expansion of the internet. On any given evening the number of people viewing pornography averages sixty percent of all internet traffic worldwide. The man was front and center for both events. For an introvert, this type of anonymous access to pornography was a wet-dream come true. His lifestyle—if not personality—had become like hundreds of thousands throughout the United States and the world. Staying up all night, sleeping during the day, paying little attention to personal hygiene for days at a time, eating poorly, and getting out of shape—all these factors contributed to an inability to meet or have relationships with members of the opposite sex. This, added to the normally introverted personality of his group, was the last nail in the proverbial coffin.
For thousands of men in the eighties, if they had to choose between dressing up, going out, spending money, and getting turned down by average-looking girls at bars or nightclubs, or, staying home in sweats and a T-shirt, eating Doritos, looking at beautiful women doing everything they wished the average girls would do, the choice was easy. The women online didn’t have to be impressed; they didn’t rate their viewers on what type of car they drove or job they had—or didn’t have. They never had a headache or their period, and nobody ever had to worry about size or performance.
The man stopped going to bars altogether before his twenty-fifth birthday and gave up his little used fitness membership a year later.
By the early nineties, the porn sites learned what the video porn industry had learned a decade before: customers wanted variety. Soon the websites created categories, so viewers didn’t have to slog through pictures of Big Beautiful Women if they wanted to see Celebrity Porn. Sites set up categories for subscribers to choose from so they could go immediately to what they wanted.
Initially the man was drawn to voyeur sites. In true hacker fashion, he hacked into the site rather than pay for an account. Since security wasn’t a major consideration for the websites, it took no effort for the man to gain access to the whole database.
In the beginning the man was very careful. He launched his attacks through multiple proxies, making it almost impossible to trace it back to him. Over time, as he realized the sites had little security, he became less cautious. He dropped to one proxy, then over time, to none. Many times, if he was tired and didn’t want to deal with the hassle, he just hacked in directly from his own account.
Another piece of the criminal puzzle, carding, came to the man in the late eighties. As one of the mainstays of the hacking community at the time, the use of stolen credit card numbers to purchase merchandise from mail-order companies was lucrative and low risk.
As in any other criminal endeavor, cyber criminals became more sophisticated. This evolution was in response to advances in law enforcement. In this case, the openness of the sites allowed police to pose as users and gain enough intelligence to start making arrests. This inevitably led online criminals to start using the same precautions other criminals had been using for centuries—vetting. They started limiting access to the forums or carding sites to authorized users only. To become an authorized user, the would-be carder had to either know another member personally who would vouch for them or had to post card numbers for others to use. Posting was the online equivalent of making a gang member commit a crime to prove he wasn’t a cop or an informant. It was part of the initiation. The forum or site moderators felt if the person would post—place a credit card number on the site for others to use for criminal purposes—they could be trusted.
At the time most hackers just used the cards to purchase the latest and greatest computer hardware; the software they pirated—stole or used illegally—and passed between themselves. A few took carding to extremes and rung up hundreds of thousands of dollars, buying everything from cars to exotic fish. These individuals were normally caught because of the easy trail they left for investigators.
The next step in the mail-order and later internet crime process was false ID. Only so many things that can be bought online or over the phone. And companies started getting more sophisticated in the area of fraud prevention as their losses mounted. This, coupled with the fact that using the cards over the phone or on the internet was limiting, helped spawn the false ID market. Instead of just being a means for underage kids to buy alcohol and illegal immigrants to get jobs, thousands used false IDs to purchase merchandise from stores using unauthorized credit cards. A cottage industry grew up on the internet as criminals began to specialize. The good sites had s
pecific areas for Cardz, Warez, id, etc. The best criminals knew what their customers wanted, and made it easy for them to get it, much like successful legitimate internet businesses were doing.
The man especially liked this new aspect of his crime career. He liked making up names and stories to match. He put time and effort into creating each one of his characters. He spent hours coming up with backgrounds and lives for the alternate personas. He thought of himself as a kind of actor and engaged the phone operators in conversation to see if he could stay in character.
In 1990, after a high-profile nationwide Secret Service case, Operation Sun Devil, the man decided he needed a more secure means of obtaining credit cards. Four of the carder sites he’d been using had been closed, while four others went offline. Three of the individuals he had traded cardz and warez with had been arrested. It was widely rumored that some of the others who had been arrested during the operation were cooperating, setting up their associates. Everyone was on edge and most sites shut down, at least temporarily.
The man’s paranoia kept him from communicating with his former online friends for six months. He didn’t do anything illegal on the internet during that time.
After four months of not buying anything except what he could afford on his meager state salary, the man was desperate. Needing a new source of numbers and names, he hit upon the answer one day when he was debugging backup software.