Social Media Monsters: Internet Killers (True Crimes Collection RJPP Book 16)

by RJ Parker

  On December 3, 2008, Lacey gave birth to a healthy baby boy, whom she named Garnett-Paul Thompson Spears. She continued to live in the same apartment complex as Chris, who often peered out the window when she came and went to get a glimpse of his own son that he was not allowed to see.

  When Garnett was just five days old, Lacey rushed him back to the hospital. He was suffering from a severe ear infection, high fever, and he was bleeding from his nose. This would be the first of many, many hospital visits for baby Garnett. Over the years, it seemed to outsiders that Garnett was the unluckiest infant in the world, plagued with sickness after sickness. When he was just one month old, he faced surgery to help his acid reflux. At ten weeks, Lacey claimed Garnett simply stopped breathing and doctors found his sodium levels had spiked unexpectedly.

  At ten months, doctors inserted a feeding tube in Garnett’s abdomen because Lacey claimed he couldn’t keep any food in his stomach without throwing it back up. In reality, Lacey had begged doctors at one hospital to insert the feeding tube, but they had refused to do so after nurses came forward voicing their concerns. Apparently Garnett was able to eat and digest his food just fine when Lacey was not around. Infuriated, Lacey took her baby to another hospital, where the feeding tube was inserted.

  Time and time again, Garnett seemed to recover from his ailments during his hospital stays when nurses tended to him, but once Lacey took him home, something would happen and she would return to the hospital again with different symptoms. Just weeks before Garnett’s first birthday, Lacey posted to Twitter, “My Sweet Angel Is In The Hospital For The 23rd Time :( Please Pray He Gets To Come Home Soon…”

  In fact, Lacey was using social media a lot around this time and in the years to come. As Garnett grew older and his long list of illnesses continued, she took to the internet to build quite a large following of supporters who followed his story closely. Calling him ‘Garnett-the-Great,’ Lacy started a blog, ‘Garnett’s Journey,’ where she posted publically about her son’s seemingly endless list of medical issues. She kept her loyal readers of the blog updated through Twitter, MySpace, and even Facebook. In few short years of Garnett’s life, Lacey built up a huge following of supporters and fans, who eagerly waited for the next post to update them about the baby’s condition.

  When Garnett was two years old, Lacey moved out of her apartment building in Decatur and took her son to live with her mother in Clearwater, Florida. There, she worked as a babysitter and joined a support group for parents where she would often share her account of raising a chronically ill baby. She also spoke of Blake, Garnett’s fictitious father who had died in a devastating car accident, leaving her to raise her son alone.

  It wasn’t long after Lacey moved to Clearwater that she became a regular at the emergency room. Garnett was admitted several times for various reasons—a staph infection, high fevers, and blood coming out of his nose or ears. In 2011, two separate people contacted the Department of Children and Families in Florida to complain about Lacey’s parenting ethics and that she was medically neglecting her child. In one of the complaints (from a member of the parenting group Lacey was a member of), it was alleged that Lacey would slap Garnett to make him cry before she would pick him up to soothe him. Other allegations claimed she would take the toddler swimming while his ears and eyes were bleeding, or take him on errands when he was running a fever.

  Investigators questioned Lacey after these complaints were filed and took note of his disturbing medical history, but ultimately did not take any action. Garnett didn’t show any physical signs of abuse and there was not much more the investigators could do. Lacey always took to her public forum whenever someone questioned her parenting skills, preaching that Garnett came first in her life and she would never do anything to harm him.

  In 2012, Lacey and Garnett moved to Chestnut Ridge, New York, where she told others they were practicing holistic healing and living with a secluded group known as the Fellowship Community. The group believes in living off the land and has an exclusive community that interviewed Lacey and others who knew her extensively before accepting her into the community. With each hospital visit, Lacey would keep up with her blog entries and Facebook posts. She also began posting disturbing photos of little Garnett hooked up to machines, struggling to get well. Lacey kept him on a feeding tube, despite the fact that members of the community would witness him eating solid food with ease outside of Lacey’s care in his preschool class. Lacey would tell anyone who asked that Garnett suffered from a “failure to thrive,” a diagnosis given to children who couldn’t gain weight properly. However, in all the years in and out of hospitals, little Garnett had never actually been diagnosed with anything concrete.

  On January 12, 2014, five-year-old Garnett became ill with what seemed like the flu. Over the next eleven days, while Garnett remained confined to a hospital bed, Lacey posted online that Garnett had begun having seizures, and eventually was put on a breathing tube. She asked for prayers for her dying son, prompting a flood of messages from friends and strangers alike who followed little Garnett’s life online.

  On January 19, Garnett was airlifted from Nyack Hospital to the Maria Farari Children’s Hospital, where he was put on life support. Lacey took a photo of Garnett attached to the breathing machine and posted it on Facebook, prompting more words of concern and prayers from her online community. An online fundraiser was started to help her raise money for medical expenses.

  Doctors looking at the records sent over from Nyack Hospital told Lacey that her son’s body had alarmingly high levels of sodium in it and it was “metabolically impossible” for that to occur naturally. Lacey did not have an explanation for them. On January 21, Garnett fell into a coma and never regained consciousness again. His brain had become so swollen from the levels of sodium that there was nothing more doctors could do.

  Over the next two days, Lacey slept on a cot in Garnett’s hospital room, where she continued to update her doting supporters on Garnett-the-Great’s condition. On Thursday, January 23, Lacey wrote on Facebook, “Garnett the great journeyed onward today at 10:20 a.m.” The day before his death, Lacey had contacted a neighbor in the Fellowship and asked her to go to her house and dispose of materials she had been using to feed her son through his feeding tube. The friend initially did as she was told, but contacted police soon after, when she learned of a police investigation surrounding Garnett’s death.

  Doctors were still alarmed at Garnett’s sodium levels and had contacted the police even before the five-year-old slipped into a coma. Police were able to recover the bag Lacey had asked her neighbor to dispose of and discovered the solution she had been feeding him with contained toxic levels of salt. Lacey’s cell phone was seized and investigators discovered that she had specifically researched the dangers of high levels of salt in a child.

  Police also pored over videotape footage taken from Garnett’s hospital room during his stay at Nyack Hospital from January 17 to 19. On the first day, Garnett appeared to be fine and the doctors informed Lacey that he would be able to go home soon if his condition continued to improve. Soon after that, footage showed Lacey removed Garnett from his bed, taking him into the bathroom while holding the connector to his feeding tube and a cup of liquid. Once he was back in bed, Garnett began to flail about in pain and throw up. Lacey continued to take Garnett to the bathroom several more times, and each time she returned him to the bed, he would scream in pain and writhe around in his bed. The video shows Lacey sitting by his bedside, watching him coldly as he screamed. It is only when a nurse entered the room that she began to comfort him. The EEG machine used to monitor Garnett’s brain activity showed that each time Lacey took her son into the bathroom, his sodium levels spiked dramatically.

  Investigators believe that Lacey suffers from Munchausen by proxy, a psychiatric disorder in which parents will cause harm to or sicken their children for attention or sympathy from others. It may be one of the first homicide cases involving the disorder in the era of social med
ia. They believe that Lacey had become so addicted to receiving attention from others, especially fueled by her online community, and her need to continue that attention caused her to deliver a lethal dose of sodium to her son.

  Experts say that most Munchausen cases rarely end in death because once the child dies, the attention and sympathy from others will eventually end. When deaths do occur, it is usually a case of miscalculation or an accident. Many believe that this won’t be the first case of Munchausen by proxy involving the internet—the public arena of social media sites enables those seeking attention to gain quite a large sympathetic audience. If it is attention these individuals seek, they can find vast amounts of doting sympathizers through online avenues.

  A grand jury indicted twenty-six-year-old Lacey Spears in June of 2014 and she surrendered peacefully to police. She was charged with second-degree depraved murder and first-degree manslaughter in Garnett’s death. Depraved murder is a charge that focuses more on extreme recklessness rather than intentional killing. She faces twenty-five years to life in prison if convicted. Prosecutors may have a difficult time proving probable cause, however. In early September 2014, Lacey’s defense attorney, David Sachs, indicated he hoped to keep much of the key evidence police uncovered in their investigation out of the trial, including the feeding tube and bag containing lethal salt levels, Garnett’s extensive medical history, as well as the tens of thousands of Facebook and blog posts detailing Garnett’s short life. He is also trying to prohibit prosecutors from mentioning Munchausen by proxy during the trial. The judge presiding on the case is expected to make a ruling on these motions sometime in October 2014. It is unclear when her trial will begin.

  Chapter 26: Kyle Dube

  Kyle Dube (pronounced Due-bee) grew up in Orono Maine, graduating from Orono High School in 2011. He worked at the Getchell Agency, a small care provider for individuals with disabilities. He lived at home with his parents and he had a four-year-old daughter that friends said he doted on. Most who knew him claimed he was a nice, down to earth guy, but Kyle had run into problems with the law as a teenager. In 2012, he led police on a 130-mile-per-hour chase while on a motorcycle. When he slowed down, his motorcycle hit a police cruiser. He had also been arrested for theft and burglary of a motor vehicle and carrying a loaded firearm.

  Even though he had a girlfriend himself, twenty-year-old Kyle was obsessed with a younger girl from a local town named Nichole Cable. A gorgeous fifteen-year-old with strawberry blond hair, Nichole lived in Glenburn, Maine, just eleven miles away from Orono. Nichole loved music and dancing and was extremely close to her family members, who affectionately called her “CoCo.” Unfortunately for Kyle, Nichole had a boyfriend and even though the two had spent some time together in the spring of 2013, she wasn’t interested in him romantically.

  In an attempt to get closer to Nichole, Kyle created a fake Facebook account in the name of a male teen he knew casually from a nearby high school, Bryan Butterfield. Using Bryan’s photos and the fake profile, Kyle friended Nichole online and the two began to talk.

  On May 11, 2013, Nichole told her boyfriend via text message that Kyle had groped her and tried to kiss her. She claimed she had physically pushed him off of her, but not before he left a bite mark on her skin. Despite this claim, Nichole continued to text Kyle the next day. She was also still talking to him via the fake profile where he was posing online as Bryan Butterfield. ‘Bryan’ tried to get Nichole to go out with him several times, and she finally agreed when he offered to give her a free bag of marijuana. She texted Kyle to tell him she was going to meet a guy named Bryan to get a “free 20 bag,” and asked him if she should be scared to meet him. Kyle encouraged her to go. He told her to call him if she needed him for anything.

  That day, May 12, Mother’s Day, Nichole told her mother she was meeting a friend at the end of their street. She didn’t know that Bryan Butterfield was actually Kyle Dube, wearing a ski mask and holding a roll of duct tape. He had a sinister scheme in mind. He was planning to tape her up with duct tape, kidnap her, and then happen to stumble across her later without the mask, as himself, and rescue her. Kyle thought that this plan would surely win her over—and what could go wrong? He would become her hero and the two could finally be together.

  Police later found evidence of a violent struggle in the woods. It appeared as if Nichole made a run for it, but Kyle chased her down and subdued her. Nichole fought her attacker so hard, her sneakers came off her feet. Kyle taped Nichole up with duct tape and put her in the bed of his father’s pickup truck. According to Kyle’s version of events, when he went to take her out of the truck later, he realized she was dead. He panicked and hid her body in the woods under some brush.

  When she didn’t return by the next morning, Nichole’s mother reported her missing to police. She feared her daughter had been lured out of the home by a stranger she had met online. A huge search party was organized and hundreds of people spent days searching the nearby area for Nichole. Her parents held a press conference in which they pleaded for her captor to return their daughter. Meanwhile, Kyle Dube posted about Nichole’s disappearance on his personal Facebook account. “Please help these [sic] family get back together. Nicole [sic] wherever you are, I hope you’re safe,” he wrote. The next day, he posted a photo of Nichole with the words, “Help find Nichole Cable.”

  Police investigating Nichole’s Facebook account saw her communications with ‘Bryan Butterfield.’ They interviewed the real Bryan Butterfield from Bangor High School, who claimed someone else had created the fake profile and used his photos. He told police that he suspected it was Kyle Dube, who wanted to hook up with Nichole but she wasn’t interested in him. Police then traced the IP address from the fake profile to Kyle Dube’s parents’ home in Orono.

  When police spoke with Kyle, they noticed he had fresh scratches on his face. He told them he had received the scratches at his place of work, where he cared for people with disabilities. Kyle denied having any contact with Nichole on the day she went missing, but his girlfriend, Sarah Mersinger, and his brother, Dustin Dube, told police that Kyle had told them he accidentally killed the girl in a botched kidnapping attempt. Dustin was the one to tell police where to look for Nichole’s body. She was discovered under a pile of sticks in a wooded area a few miles from her home a week later, on May 20. A warden searching the woods with his dog made the discovery. The medical examiner determined that Nichole died from “asphyxia due to compression of the neck.”

  Kyle was charged with one count of murder and one count of kidnapping in the disappearance and death of Nichole Cable in June of 2013. He is currently being held without bail, awaiting his trial.

  In response to the role social media played in the shocking murder of Nichole, many of her friends deactivated their Facebook accounts out of paranoia. Many of them had also been contacted by the fake ‘Bryan Butterfield’ account and went through their friend lists to make sure that they knew all their contacts personally. Nichole’s mother, Kristin Wiley, has made it her goal to teach students how to be safe online. Since her daughter’s death, she has conducted seminars for parents and teens, hoping that she can save other lives by teaching online safety measures. Kristin and her husband, Jason Wiley, also appeared on the Dr. Phil show a few months after Nichole’s death. The episode was geared towards teaching teens about the dangers of meeting strangers online. “My hope is to give parents awareness and give them some safety tips, and to let them know that this can happen to anybody,” she later told the media. “It can be your child and you need to take the precautions knowing every day that something could happen.”

  Chapter 27: Mark Andrew Twitchell

  Fulfilling twisted fantasies has become much easier with the worldwide outburst of internet use. Moreover, the spread of movies and TV shows that glorify killing might seem harmless to some, but could spark an obsession in others. But most people who watch those types of shows don’t actually fantasize about killing other people, right?

 
; Mark Andrew Twitchell was born on July 4, 1979 in Edmonton, Alberta. He was an aspiring Canadian filmmaker. Mark was working on many projects, including a fan-fiction Star Wars film entitled Secrets of the Rebellion and another mystery thriller movie called House of Cards. In October 2005, Mark founded a film promotions company called Xpress Entertainment. The company later focused on film production. Mark was a married father, but he also had a girlfriend.

  In September of 2008, Mark created a short horror movie. He had rented a garage at the south of Edmonton, where he planned to shoot the film.

  Meanwhile, thirty-eight-year-old John Altinger was working for a manufacturer of oil field equipment. John was trying online dating when he met a woman on the website plentyoffish.com. On October 10, 2008, John told his friends that he was meeting this woman at a rented garage. John was expecting a date, but instead he was met by Mark who used a pipe to hit him in the head. After that, Mark stabbed John to death with a hunting knife. Later, he dismembered the body and got rid of the remaining parts in the city sewers.

  John’s friends became worried. They had received strange messages from him telling them that he was going on a trip to Costa Rica with that woman he met on the date. They broke into groups and searched his apartment, where they discovered his passport and realized he didn’t actually pack anything for a trip. They reported him missing and the Edmonton Police Department quickly began a homicide investigation.