What woman wouldn’t melt under such a charm offensive?
At this point, we had intended to move on, but before we do we can’t resist unburdening ourselves of just one more of these lovelorn suitors.
A man of exemplary humility and modesty, “Mike” told this lass he had spent over a year searching the internet for the perfect wife. “I have looked at several thousand pictures and read all the biographies,” he said, adding, “I have researched and sorted until I have narrowed my choices down to nine women, of which you are one that I am writing to.”
A mere nine women! Wasn’t she a lucky girl! We are talking Russian Playboy centerfold material, a woman fluent in four languages and studying her fifth, Japanese, who wakes one morning to find that Dame Fortune has plucked her from obscurity and made her one of nine women that Mike has chosen as a possible candidate for a wife. She would be walking on air. No doubt he would, generously, sleep with each in turn to aid him with his selection.
Several months later, the thoughtful Mike sent her a second, identical letter, apparently having forgotten the content of his first one. Despite his clumsiness, it was the audacity of the man that appealed to us.
For this we give him credit. No, we will award him first prize!
After all, Mike was, in his own words, “a quite famous French chef.” A man who “became tired of cooking fine food in the classic manner for people who could not taste the difference…” “Romantic and very much an old Knight or gentleman” was his self-effacing description of himself. This man ignorantly assumes Russian women are so naive and stupid that they cannot read between the lines.
Any man who is keen to meet a Russian bride might be interested to learn that one of the Soviet Union’s greatest achievements is education. From being an agrarian society in which literacy was limited to the few in the upper classes, the Russian Federation has developed to achieve a literacy rate of 98 percent, among the best in the world, and truancy is unknown. Modern Russian women are a damn sight brighter than the three Western clowns featured above.
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Appendix: Hard Facts
“I was exposed to pornography for years. It led me to my violent ways.”
—TED BUNDY, CONVICTED SERIAL KILLER, TO DR. JAMES DOBSON ON THE NIGHT BEFORE HE WAS EXECUTED IN FLORIDA′S ELECTRIC CHAIR
The internet is a great place to be. Used wisely, with strict controls on which sites are suitable for our children, it can be entertaining, educational and it can bring folk of all races, ethnic groups, religions, pastimes and interests together. And it is now essential for global trade—so indispensable, in fact, that, if the internet collapsed tomorrow, the effect, in fiscal terms, would be a thousand times more devastating than the Asian tsunami or Hurricane Katrina.
Of course, the internet will not collapse. Segments of its cell-like structure may do so under the onslaught of a virus, but, in its totality, the web cannot fail. It is here to stay, and millions of people rely on it, almost as much as on the air they breathe and the food they eat.
For good or for bad, the web is the primary means of global communication. It has become a multifaceted god that we all worship. Conversely, there is the Antichrist, and this is what this book is all about.
The journey undertaken throughout this book has been a difficult one, and your authors have arrived at something resembling a conclusion—one that may find favor with many yet receive the disdain of others. But let’s not kid ourselves: access to the unfettered freedom and breadth of the web has produced a cyber environment where those with dark, subconscious desires can explore these impulses and even act them out, where the true seed of evil can propagate into flowers of destruction.
Sadly, the cases we have considered above are just the tip of the iceberg, for what follows will shock even the hardened soul.
An article in the Wall Street Journal of Monday, May 3, 2004, stated that, after carrying out a ten-year research study of 1,500 sexual addicts, Dr. Carnes from Texas estimated that about 8 percent of men and about 3 percent of women in the United States are sexually addicted—figures that translate into over 15 million sex addicts.
Citing U.S. Justice Department statistics, it said that in 1998 there were 28,000 X-rated websites, generating a revenue of $925 million in revenue. “Pornography in many forms is invading people’s homes and it is available 24 hours a day,” the article concluded. And the invasion has been quite successful. Only six years later there were ten times as many such websites, generating nearly $9 billion.
To even start to comprehend the sums involved, you will need to lie down, take a stiff drink or smoke something illegal about a foot long. Imagine you are in a vault with that amount of money all around you and you are told that you can keep each dollar bill you can initial. Say, too, for the sake of argument that you could initial one dollar bill each second and that you worked without ever stopping. How long do you think it would take to count $9 billion? Go on, take a guess. Twelve weeks? Five years?
Well, starting in 2010, if you initialed a dollar bill every second, you would make $1,000 every 17 minutes. After 12 days’ nonstop effort, you would acquire your first $1 million. So it would take you 120 days to accumulate $10 million. After 31.7 years you would become a billionaire, and in 2305 you would have counted your last dollar bill.
Reversing the procedure, if today you started handing back the bills one every second, you wouldn’t be destitute until 1715, more than 60 years before the American Revolution began.
One of the ten largest individual buyers of bandwidth in the world is a California-based firm in the adult online industry. Formerly a leading producer of pornographic movies and videos, this company’s profits were multiplied eight times over in the first year it went online. Almost from the outset, e-business, especially when it involved sex, was the place to be. To give you a few examples: at the start of 1995, there were just 200 businesses on the web selling “erotica services” and products, from condoms to pornographic videos. By 1997, it was 14,000. According to Naughty Linx, an online index, in 2004, in excess of eight million sites were selling sex products.
A search for sexual material on Yahoo between August 1995 and August 1996 revealed that in August 1995 the category “Sex” had 391 listings for phone-sex numbers, adult CD-ROMS, X-rated films, adult computer software, live sex videoconferencing, prostitution tours, escort services and mail-order bride agencies. By August 1996, there were 1,676 listings—a four-fold increase in one year. In 2005, there were 170,000 listings. That is an average of 58 new sites being added each day.
In the U.K., in 2010, there are an estimated 16 million single males. Four in ten of them use a dating service.
These “punters” (British slang for “gamblers,” which accurately characterizes the clients of online dating services) have access to no fewer than 366,000 British online dating agency listings, and Dating Direct alone boast 1.5 million male and female members on their home page. Worldwide, today there are 33 million links to online dating agencies, compared with 13.1 million in March 2003.
In the year 2009, according to Nielsen Online and the International Telecommunication Union, 1,734,000,000 people worldwide used the internet frequently—a 380-percent increase over ten years, representing about 29 percent of the earth’s population. Two hundred twenty-seven million Americans have internet access, and 6.5 percent of all male internet users are compulsive cyber-sex addicts hooked on porn sites, X-rated chat rooms or other sexual materials online.
In the U.K., at least 600,000 male internet users are hooked on cyber sex.
Cyber sex is the crack cocaine of sexual addiction and it reinforces and normalizes sexual disorder. A public health disaster is coming because very few are recognizing it as such or taking it seriously.
Recent studies, including the MSNBC/Stanford/Duquesne Study, agree that men prefer visual erotica twice as much as women. Women favor chat room
s twice as much as men. Women have a slightly lower rate of sexually compulsive internet behavior, and 70 percent keep their habit a secret.
There are over 12,200 websites—and these are just the advertised sites—dedicated to snuff rape and killings, cannibalism and necrophilia.
Every year many thousands of Western males travel to Eastern Europe, the Far East and Central and South America in search of cheap, most often sordid, sex. One company based in Miami, Florida, offers its clients tours to Costa Rica, the Caribbean and South America and advertises: “Whatever your personal preference, Latin, blonde, black, mulatto, petite, etc., [the girls] will be friendly, attentive and eager to please you.”
Sexually transmitted diseases caught through sex tourism are reaching epidemic proportions, adding to the 333 million new cases being reported worldwide each year.
Thanks to the criminals who use the internet, the United Nations estimates, between 700,000 and four million women and children are now trafficked around the world for the purposes of forced prostitution, labor and other forms of exploitation every year. Trafficking is, on its own, estimated to be a $7-billion-a-year business. Victims of trafficking are subject to gross human rights violations, including rape, torture, forced abortions, starvation and threats of torture or murder of family members.
Some 2.5 million sites promote “Boy Sex” and four million advertise “Extreme Sex.”
Despite a crackdown in recent years, the U.S. Customs Service calculates that there are more than 100,000 websites offering child pornography—which is illegal worldwide. Estimates of the industry’s revenue range from about $200 million to more than $1 billion per year. These unlawful sexual images can be purchased as easily as music, DVDs or vacations on the internet. “Subscribers” typically use credit cards to pay a monthly fee of between $30 and $50 to download photos and videos, or a onetime fee of a few dollars for single images.
The U.S. National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children reported on October 8, 2003, “More than 20,000 images of child pornography are posted on the internet every week. 140,000 child pornography images were posted to the internet according to researchers who monitored the internet over a six-week period. Twenty children were estimated to have been abused for the first time and more than 1,000 images of each child created and downloaded.” The British watchdog group Internet Watch Foundation reported that the number of child pornography images on the internet quadrupled in the next four years. The U.S. Department of Justice conservatively estimates that at any given time, despite law enforcement efforts to take them down, there are more than one million child porn images on the World Wide Web—with 91 percent depicting subjects age 12 or younger.
Professor Max Taylor, of Combating Pedophile Information Networks in Europe, stated in March 2003, “Demand for pornographic images of babies and toddlers on the internet is soaring. More babies and toddlers are appearing on the net and the abuse is getting worse. It is more torturous and sadistic than it was before. The typical age of children is between six and 12, but the profile is getting younger.”
The same report said, “Approximately 20 new children appear on the porn sites every month—many have been kidnapped or sold into sex.”
Perhaps even more disturbing is to learn that there are just under ten million websites dedicated to teen sex, each containing thousands of photographs and hundreds of streaming video clips.
And there are also the collateral financial costs to consider. Billions of dollars and pounds are lost each year to all industries and governments through staff logging on during working hours to surf the internet for sex. Individuals from all walks of life: the judiciary, police, the Church and teachers are hooked on pornography.
As we said, this is just the very tip of the iceberg. Unless we wake up, we face a cyber Armageddon.
About the Authors
Christopher Berry-Dee is an investigative criminologist who has published several papers and books, including Serial Killers: Up Close and Personal and How to Make a Serial Killer. He is the director of The Criminology Research Institute and owner of The New Criminologist, the world’s most respected professional journal on all matters criminology. He consults with law enforcement worldwide, lectures on serial murder and is responsible for solving a number of U.S. murder cases. Chris has homes in the U.K. and Samara, Russia.
Steven Morris, co-author of How to Make a Serial Killer, has immense knowledge of serial homicide, psychology, the causation of serial murder and internet crime in all its varied forms. He lives on the south coast of England.
Published in the United States by
ULYSSES PRESS
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www.ulyssespress.com
First published as Killers on the Web in 2006 in the U.K.
by John Blake Publishing Ltd.
eISBN : 978-1-569-75942-4
Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2009943776
Acquisitions: Keith Riegert
Managing Editor: Claire Chun
Editor: Richard Harris
Editorial/Production: Lauren Harrison, Judith Metzener
Interior photographs: © page 138 top Associated Press/Uwe
Zucchi, bottom Associated Press/Michael Sohn; page 139 top and bottom Associated Press/Douglas Healey; page 140 top Associated Press/Ron Heflin, bottom left and right Associated Press/The Dallas Morning News; page 141 top Associated Press/Matthew S. Hicks, bottom Associated Press/Vincent Yu
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