Online Killers

by Christopher Barry-Dee;Steven Morris

  A lawyer and expert in the field of internet abuse, Parry Aftab, says, “Internet predators attempt to lure thousands of children every year to offline meetings.”

  These are her guidelines:• Who’s at risk?

  • What’s the profile of an internet child molester?

  • How often does this happen?

  • Why do the children meet strangers offline?

  • What can you do to protect your children?

  • What’s being done to find these predators before they hurt a child?

  • Whom do you call if you suspect someone is involved with targeting children online?

  A survey of 10,800 teenage girls conducted in 1998 showed that 12 percent of the sample admitted to meeting up with strangers with whom they had first made contact via the internet. Two years later, Family PC reported that, in a survey of both sexes, 24 percent of the teenage girls polled and 14 percent of the teenage boys were meeting internet strangers offline.

  It is truly a shame that Christina Long did not benefit from the various safety precautions now available on the internet. It took her death, among so many others, to bring home to us the dangers of the internet. Had her online activities been more closely monitored through this kind of education, she might never have had the opportunity to come into contact with her dysfunctional killer. Dos Reis was then, and in all likelihood still is, a very dangerous man.

  As an obscene postscript to this terrible crime, it was discovered several years later that Dos Reis was up to his old tricks again, this time inside prison. In search of female correspondents, he had set up a web page, although this now appears to have been removed. He included a photograph of himself, this time smiling and sporting a tuxedo. Above the ad he had selected the heading “The Right One.”

  On his web page, Dos Reis went on to describe his perfect pen pal as “A woman with a good heart that loves to write and that is not afraid of being herself,” adding, “I also look for a person that knows what she wants out of life.”

  His readers could learn that “I have many qualities that make me unique. I’m romantic, always funny, I always have a positive attitude and have many hidden things as well. I enjoy writing and being silly and funny” and “I also always have interesting things to talk about. I’m not just another boring pen pal…”

  He decided to inform his prospective lonely hearts that he had been convicted of second-degree assault. So, with just a slight deviation from the truth yet again, the “Outgoing Heterosexual Male” made it apparent that he “prefers female correspondents but will reply to all letters.” He also claimed to be “very good at telling stories which can and will have you shiver.”

  Christina’s aunt, Shelly Riling, was shocked by the web page, denouncing it as a prime example of “predatory behavior.” However, Dos Reis’s defense attorney, Peter Tilem, argued that his client’s web page is understandable. “This is someone who is going to spend the next 30 years in prison and he’s lonely and scared,” he said. “We can’t imagine how lonely he feels, so I can understand.”

  According to inmate.com, prisoners can place an ad for four months for $60 and $15 for each subsequent month. The website designs and posts the ad for the subscriber. Purchasers of premium advertisements, such as Dos Reis, are given a personal email box that allows people to respond to the ad via email. Once a week the service forwards the email responses to the inmate in a letter. And what a nice little earner this is for the site’s owners. For seed money outlay, they rake in $37,000 a year by making it possible for people such as Dos Reis to involve other people in their sickening fantasies from behind bars.

  Christina’s aunt did not share Tilem’s assessment. “I can’t believe he has a website. It shows that he has a disease and is incurable. He hasn’t learned anything.”

  Investigators involved with the Dos Reis case were at a loss to find a motive for the murder. Indeed, even the killer himself was unable to cast much light on his reason for strangling the young woman. However, we know from experience that many people who spend long periods of time in chat rooms become of another world.

  These individuals find themselves becoming addicted to the chat rooms and perceive themselves as engaging in very real relationships with other visitors. They are people who have in most cases reinvented themselves to compensate for their own psychological and/or physical shortcomings. For those addicted to the chat rooms, it becomes a meeting of loners who bring all of their psychological inadequacies along with them.

  These people actually fall in “cyber love”—in much the same way as couples do in the real world. Saul Dos Reis seems, for whatever reason, to have fallen in love with Christina Long in this way. He had become “fantasy-driven.” After years of rejection, he imagined he had found his ideal partner, even though she was underage. Christina was promiscuous, and her sexual appetite, coupled with her pretty looks, no doubt further increased his need for her companionship. Nevertheless, after she had had sex with him a few times, the feisty girl wanted to dump him and move on. Rejected, and scorned again, Dos Reis killed her.

  This scenario of a cyber crime passionnel is not quite as crazy as it first appears, as the following cases testify.

  On February 15, 2004, a man was found trying to commit suicide at his home in Wuhan, China. Afterward, he admitted that he had killed his cyber lover on Valentine’s Day evening.

  The man, using the net name “Flying Dust,” got to know “Rain Drop,” a 25-year-old flower-shop keeper, at the end of 2003. They met in a chat room, but Rain Drop’s parents disapproved of her having such an intimate online relationship. So, on Valentine’s Day, she told Flying Dust that she had to break up with him. He flew into a rage, strangled her to death and then tried to cut the arteries on his neck and wrists. “I love her, I want to be with her forever,” he said later when asked why he had done it.

  On Saturday, April 17, 2004, a man’s body was found in a hotel room in Dengshikou, Beijing. Zhang Yang had been killed by his cyber lover, Liang Yixia, because he refused to marry her. Liang was arrested when she came back to get her cell phone charger.

  According to Liang, in May 2003 she had been raped by three men she met on the internet, and they also took her money. After her ordeal, Zhang, a seemingly gentle and rich man, renewed her trust in cyber love. But, once they had had sex, he told her that for him to marry a cyber lover was impossible. Liang felt so humiliated that she fed him sleeping pills before strangling him with adhesive tape.

  At the police station, Liang said she felt no regret for what she had done. “He deserved this punishment I gave him,” she said repeatedly.

  In 2001, a West Australian Supreme Court jury found a woman guilty of murdering her internet lover, after he tried to dump her when he discovered that she was married to a biker. The woman was caught on the home-security video of the man she murdered and is now serving a mandatory life sentence for the crime.

  Thirty-four-year-old Margaret Hinchcliffe met Michael Ian Wright, aged 30, in an internet chat room, and the two soon began a sexual relationship. In November 1999, Hinchcliffe’s husband, Mark, found out about the affair and inflicted a series of punishments on his wife, driving her to seek help at a women’s refuge on two occasions. A worker from the refuge told the court that Margaret had been badly beaten by her husband and that he had ordered her to shave her head. He also ordered her to have a tattoo done on her waistline that read “Property of Mark Hinchcliffe.”

  Mark Hinchcliffe, a member of a biker gang who called themselves the Coffin Cheaters’ Club, visited Wright and threatened him after beating him up. He then ordered his wife to kill Wright, an order she carried out on Sunday, February 25, 2000.

  Margaret Hinchcliffe went to the home of Wright’s parents, and when Wright opened the door she shot him at point-blank range, unaware of the fact that the video security system had captured the act on film.

  In Columbus, Ohio, Rickie Mandes slipped his old .45-caliber handgun into his pocket before taking one last
moment in his lonely apartment to think about his two daughters. Within a few hours, those two girls, aged 9 and 15, would be fatherless. Their lives would be shaken by a nightmare of violence, jealousy and revenge. Mandes would be dead, and so would Robert J. Fry, the man he believed had stolen his wife’s affection over the internet.

  Mandes felt his daughters needed some kind of explanation. And so, in a hastily scrawled note to them, he tried to provide one, writing that the pain and stress he felt after his wife, Rebecca, had left him for a man she had met over the internet was “too much for me to take. I am sorry for what I am about to do.”

  Authorities said the 45-year-old Mandes confronted his wife and her new lover in the parking lot of the mail-order store where Fry worked and gunned him down, then turned the weapon on himself.

  Acquaintances of the Mandeses, who had known the couple in happier days, closed ranks and have refused to discuss the events that led to the brutal murder and suicide. “They want their privacy,” said longtime friend Tammy Campbell of the surviving members of the family.

  According to police, the slaying was sparked by an internet romance that had blossomed over two and half months between 34-year-old Rebecca Mandes and 40-year-old Fry.

  A little more than a month and a half after the whirlwind online romance began, Fry suddenly quit his job of 22 years at the Orient Correctional Facility in Ohio. He left his wife and children and moved with Rebecca Mandes and her two girls into a house in the pleasant waterfront community of Westerly. Two weeks before the shooting, he took a job in the receiving department of Paragon Gifts store.

  By all accounts, Rebecca’s decision to move out of the apartment she and her husband shared in Pawcatuck was equally abrupt.

  There were a few domestic loose ends to be tied up, which provided Mandes with the opportunity he needed to exact his revenge on the man he believed had stolen his wife, so he and his wife had arranged to meet in the parking lot of Paragon Gifts about noon to exchange some items belonging to the daughters.

  For a while they stood just outside the office window of Paragon Gifts’ president Stephen Rowley, waiting for Fry to leave work for his lunch break. About a dozen employees were milling about, and a little after 12:30 p.m. Fry approached the pair.

  With that, witnesses told police, Mandes pulled out the gun, said something to the effect of “This is what you get for messing with my wife” and opened fire.

  Stephen Rowley heard “what I’d call a pop, several of them close together,” he said. “Then there was a moment of silence, and another pop,” which he later learned was the sound of the final bullet that crashed into Mandes’s skull, killing the jilted husband instantly.

  Rebecca Mandes was not injured in the attack.

  The broken-hearted man had left a short suicide note, simply saying, “I guess she’s doing all right.”

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  Sharon Lopatka’s Cyber World

  “Hi! My name is Nancy. I am 25 have Blonde hair, green eyes am 5’6 and weigh 121. Is anyone out there interested in buying … my worn … panties … or pantihose….??? This is not a joke or a wacky Internet scam. I am very serious about this. If you are serious too you can e-mail me …!”

  —MESSAGE POSTED BY SHARON LOPATKA IN AN AREA OF THE INTERNET WHERE SEXUAL EROTICA IS THE MAIN TOPIC

  “I don’t know how much I pulled the rope… I never wanted to kill her, but she ended up dead.”

  —BOBBY GLASS ON THE MURDER OF SHARON LOPATKA

  There’s not much to Lenoir, North Carolina, a town of 14,000 at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The monument to the Daughters of the Confederacy in the town square watches over another losing battle, this one economic. Downtown slips silently into the embarrassed embrace of loan companies, storefront churches and used-clothing shops. The stagnant center is skirted by highways, busy chain stores and fast-food outlets. It would not be quite right to say people in Lenoir are surprised at killings in their midst, because they get around six murders a year, even if they could not have dreamed up the scenario that follows.

  Rural America no longer is, and maybe never was, quite so sheltered as its apple-pie image suggests. “People think that, because this is a small town, these things don’t happen. It’s not true. We have people here no different than the big cities,” said Brenda Watson, owner of the Carolina Cafe at 209 Main Street NW. “And I wouldn’t let my kids walk alone here at night.”

  Indeed, former district attorney Flaherty claims, “Most of the murders are love triangles, but when Lopatka lost her life she also lost her anonymity, and she was none of the things she claimed to be.”

  In fact, according to her autopsy report, she was dark-haired with dark eyes set into a heavy face and five foot ten and 189 pounds when she died. Far from the wild video star she claimed to be, she lived her life quietly in a ranch-style home in Indian Court, a cul-de-sac in the quiet, hilly town of Hampstead, Maryland, where children play tag in front yards, dogs tease the post-man and deviancy is a failure to join recycling efforts.

  When Lopatka graduated from Pikesville High School in Baltimore in 1979, her name was Sharon Denburg. She had many friends and was a member of the volleyball and field hockey teams. During her junior and senior years, she was a nurse’s aide, a library aide and a singer in the school’s chorus.

  “She wasn’t an outcast or anything of that nature,” said Steven Hyman, who attended school with her. “She was about as normal as you can get. I think making her this weird loner is just some media thing.”

  Sharon Denburg was the oldest of four daughters born to Mr. and Mrs. Abraham J. Denburg in 1961. The family lived in a suburb of Baltimore. Sharon Denburg’s parents were devout Orthodox Jews, who were active in the Beth Tfiloh, Baltimore’s largest Orthodox Jewish synagogue, where Abraham was a cantor. Sharon had been active in sports, sang in the school choir and was perceived by classmates to be “as normal as you can get,” reported the North Carolina News & Observer on November 3, 1996.

  In 1991, Sharon wed Victor, a Catholic construction worker from Ellicott City, but her parents did not approve. A former high-school classmate told the Washington Post on November 3, 1996, that the marriage was Sharon’s “way of breaking away.” Sharon moved with her husband to a small, ranch-style tract house in Hampstead in the early 1990s. They had no children.

  Sharon started up several small internet business ventures from her home to make some extra money. She made a new friend, Diane Safar, who lived nearby, and the two of them put together a 30-page booklet on home decorating and country crafts entitled Dion’s Secret of Home Decorating Guide.

  “Here we were decorating our houses one day and talking to each other for advice, and we just said, ‘Hey, we should put this stuff in a book,’” Safar explained. “We put it together and then we went around to ladies’ groups and churches selling it. It was fun.”

  “What I want people to know is the woman I knew was not crazy in the slightest,” Safar said of her friend. “She was always a happy person, always bubbly even. This person who was killed was not the person I knew.”

  In her business called Classified Concepts, Sharon rewrote ad copy for advertisers for $50 per advertisement. She also operated several other websites, where she sold psychic readings and advice. On the sites Sharon would also post ads selling other services, with a premium rate number for which she would receive a percentage of the revenue.

  Another way she made money was by advertising pornographic videos.

  All varieties of sex were for sale 24 hours a day in Sharon Lopatka’s world. She could provide nearly anything anybody desired at any time. With a tapping of her fingers on a computer keyboard, she became five-foot-six and a shapely 121 pounds. A few more taps and she was an aggressive 300-pound dominatrix who promised strict discipline. Or she could tap and become “Nancy Carlson,” a screen actress prepared to star in whatever type of sexual video her fans cared to purchase.

  As Nancy
Carlson, Sharon sold videos of unconscious women having sexual intercourse. According to the Augusta Chronicle of November 4, 1996, one excerpt from an advertisement dated Tuesday, October 1, 1996, stated, “Hi! My name is Nancy. I just made a VHS video of actual women… willing and unwilling to be… knocked out… drugged… under hypnosis and chloroformed. Never before has a film like this been made that shows the real beauty of the sleeping victim.”

  Sharon even went so far as to advertise her own undergarments online, with a message which read, “Is there anyone out there interested in buying my worn panties?” She certainly had no qualms about advertising and selling products that would appeal to the lurid sexual fetishes of her customers. She also had her own risque sexual fantasies that she actively sought to fulfill:

  “Do you dare enter… the Land of the Giantess???

  “Where men are crushed like bugs… by these angry… yet gorgeous giant goddesses.”

  Sharon used the web for a variety of purposes, such as to obtain business ideas and make money. However, she also used it to interact with a larger variety of people who shared her unconventional interests. She often ventured into hardcore pornographic chat rooms where subscribers would openly discuss their interests in necrophilia, bondage, fetishes and sadomasochism.

  One of her ads read, “Let me customize your most exciting TORTURE fantasy for you… on VHS… to watch and enjoy privately in the comfort of your own home. A film designed by you… with scenarios of your choice. Films are shipped in plain envelopes to protect your… privacy.”

  She used many pseudonyms and multiple personae in her internet messages. These “masks” allowed her anonymity and the freedom to pursue her unusual fantasies. According to the Washington Post of November 3, 1996, one message Sharon posted stated that she had “a fascination with torturing till death.”