Murder.com

by Christopher Berry-Dee

  ‘By then, Bill had become a major part of my life. I felt good because he spent most of his chatting time with me,’ she recalled. ‘I got very jealous when he teased the other girls, or talked to them. I wanted him all to myself. So, when he asked me to get a camera and microphone, I readily agreed.’

  From then on the cyber couple talked about their aspirations for the future. She used the webcam to show him her dining room and he did likewise, showing her his office. Then they started to engage in cyber sex. Bill would tell Susan what he wanted her to wear, and during the sessions she would use a Mars Bar to satisfy herself while he masturbated.

  During the fourth session she climaxed for the first time in her life.

  ‘You know this is all very silly,’ she said, clearly embarrassed. ‘Strangely enough, I was not at all shy with him. He told me that he hadn’t had a girlfriend for years and I wanted to please him as much as possible… The climax? It was fantastic!

  From there, things got hotter between them.

  ‘He would hint at a subject, just to see what my reaction would be. It was like he was fishing,’ Susan explained. ‘For instance, he would talk about mirrors, or ask what my thoughts were on blue movies. He asked if I had ever watched them, and I said, “Yes!” Sexy mags? All that stuff. When we were hot enough we would do cyber sex, then wash and return to chat about a future – maybe together.’

  Looking back on this now, Susan agrees that she was being groomed. ‘It was so subtle. So clever. He pretended to tease me, or ask my opinion about sexual issues. I enjoyed it because he knew when not to mention sex and, when he did, his timing was perfect.’

  In early September, Bill told Susan that his business required that he visit Wales for a few weeks. From there he said he would travel on to the Middle East, but this second claim turned out to be a lie. She suggested that he might like to visit her in Emsworth and stay over. ‘The Featherman’ accepted the offer immediately and a date was set. He would arrive five days earlier than planned to spend time with her. She would drive to Heathrow Airport to collect him in her car.

  On Thursday, 27 September, Bill Chandler (name changed for legal reasons) arrived in the UK. Wishing to make a good impression, Susan met him wearing an expensive, revealing leather top which accentuated her full breasts, a short leather skirt and a pair of knee-length black boots which she had recently bought in Milan while on a free trip she had won as top salesperson for her sales region. With her long, natural golden hair, she must have been a knockout and undoubtedly would have taken the man’s breath away.

  ‘I have never felt so nervous in my life,’ she says. ‘The plane was a bit late, too. But when he walked through arrivals he looked at me, blew me a kiss and within moments he hugged me tight and kissed my cheek.’

  When they arrived at her cottage after a two-hour drive, she freely admits, ‘We were as hot as hell. He was the perfect gentleman and we exchanged gifts and opened a bottle of Champagne as soon as we got in the door.’

  She had bought him two bath towels that had little ducks on the corner. She even got him a toothbrush and emptied one of her drawers for his clothes.

  Within the hour they were in bed. Susan had complied with one of her cyber lover’s fantasies and had had large mirrors attached to the wall at the head, to the foot of the bed and to the ceiling.

  ‘I lit candles by the bed… wrote “I Love You” in lipstick on the mirrors, and left a little paper trail into my spare room – squares of paper with arrows – to a place where I had hidden an expensive watch which I bought him in Italy… I even set the time for Georgia…’

  At this point as we talked, Susan became visibly upset. She was clearly a warm-hearted woman who was thinking back to what might have been.

  For 20 minutes we left her to clear away the plates, allowing her time to compose herself. She lit the fire and after a while she apologised, then carried on.

  ‘All those months of wanting him. His accent was fantastic. He just drove me crazy in bed for hours. He was insatiable. It was all so romantic. Crazy, stupid, but so romantic.’

  The day after he arrived they went sightseeing. Susan took him to ‘real English pubs for real English beer’. They went to Portsmouth, took long drives into the country, visited Arundel Castle, did the movies and dined out. ‘We went Dutch at my insistence,’ she says, ‘although he wanted to pay for everything.’

  Clearly, Susan was in love. ‘He loved my little cottage. He loved the swans and I took photos of him with them so he could show his friends back home. He died for the English food… got friendly with people in a local pub. He fitted in straight away. I just felt so good with him. Oh, shit. Oh, fucking shit!’

  On their fifth and last night in bed, Susan agreed to his suggestion that he tie her up for sex and take a few sexy photographs. ‘I trusted him completely,’ she says. ‘He was adventurous, strong, quite dominant, but I felt safe with him. I wanted him to leave with the need to come back. I wanted to please him; after all it is not often that a busy professional man travels halfway around the world to spend time with a woman he has only met in cyberspace… least of all me. I was flattered… You know, I had his home address, his email address, his phone numbers… He even asked me if I would consider moving to the USA, or said that he could easily get a job with his company here.’

  Bill tied Susan’s wrists together and lashed them over her head to the top of the bed. He then pulled up her black leather skirt, spreadeagled her legs and secured her ankles.

  The authors feel that it would be gratuitous to detail what took place other than to report that Bill then attacked her, and what followed was a rape of terrifying proportions. Susan says she was helpless under this onslaught from the powerful man. She felt a hand gripping at her throat, tighter and tighter. Her gasp for air was cut off.

  ‘You frustrated bitch,’ he snarled. ‘You want to be fucked like a whore and used like a fucking whore?’

  Her fingers scrabbled to release his grip. Her eyes started to bulge, and then he slapped her hard across the face, chipping a front tooth.

  Bill Chandler subjected Susan to a three-hour ordeal. Then he suddenly stopped and apologised. He untied her restraints and led her in a state of emotional and physical collapse downstairs to the shower, where he washed her and dressed her cuts.

  An hour later, ‘The Featherman’ ordered a taxi to take him to London. As he walked out of the door, he said, ‘If you call the police, I shall show them evidence of the whore you truly are. I have all your emails and photographs. Just say nothing and be pleased, ’cos I may come back again.’

  Two weeks later the rapist phoned Susan from Cardiff. ‘He was very, very apologetic,’ she said during our interview. ‘He told me that he had never done anything like this before… that my body and clothes brought out the Devil in him… that he loved me desperately and then, with a cheeky laugh, he asked if I could scrub his back again.’

  Bill sent her 20 red roses via Interflora, and Susan explained that during the several phone calls that followed she forgave him. He said that he was so ashamed of himself he had cancelled his trip to the Middle East and wanted to see her again for just one night to patch things up.

  She agreed.

  ‘You will think that I was mad,’ she said. ‘I was mad. But when you have a guy who appears to be crying down the phone, begging forgiveness… Um… the flowers with a little card… Then when he laughs and says something like, “Hey! You shouldn’t have been so sexy, babe,” it throws you.’

  It was then that good luck – if it could be called good luck – intervened. The following evening, expecting Bill to turn up around 7pm the next day, Susan checked her emails and logged on to the Absolute Agency site intending to say ‘Hi!’ to everyone and leave. Almost immediately, she saw ‘The Featherman’. He was talking to another woman who she knew came from Poole in Dorset.

  ‘I was shocked,’ she said. ‘Then they both went off the screen for the night. I tried to phone Bill, but he would not answer my
calls or SMSs. I was numb.’

  Then anger, mixed up with a kind of jealousy, kicked in. She sent Bill a message telling him that all deals were off and that she was going away for a few days. She didn’t want to see him again.

  During a sleepless night, Susan had a premonition that ‘The Featherman’ would turn up anyway, so she arranged to visit her mother and return home about midnight. She reasoned that, if he did turn up, as previously agreed, and found she was out, he would go on his way.

  She was wrong.

  Bill Chandler had indeed arrived at the cottage around 7pm and, so confident was he that Susan would be there, he sent the taxi driver off before he had even opened the garden gate.

  ‘I will never forget what happened that night for the rest of my life,’ said Susan. ‘I got home about 11.30. It was pouring with rain and the place was in darkness. I walked through the garden and let myself in. I went to the kitchen to get a drink and when I looked out of the window I saw a man sitting on the seat under my apple tree. He just sat there and said nothing. I must have passed within feet of him and never saw a thing.’

  Susan says she was very scared, and pretended she hadn’t seen him. Shaking with fear, she went to go to bed and then he tapped on the front door – the only door to the cottage. She ignored him. Then he called out to her several times, softly at first, then the taps became knocks and his voice grew louder.

  Then he kicked the door.

  ‘Will you open this fuckin’ door, please? Just to fuckin’ talk.’

  Although by now terrified, Susan plucked up the courage to tell him to go away.

  ‘He started hammering on the door with his fists,’ she said. ‘He kicked and kicked the door until I thought he would smash it down. Then I called 999 and asked for the police to come quickly as I had an intruder on the premises.’

  Alone, in a cottage at night! No one knows what one would do under such frightening circumstances, so one cannot blame Susan for the actions that followed. She says that, safe in the knowledge that the police were on their way, and concerned about more damage being done to the door of the rented cottage, she called out to him to stop. Leaving the phone off the hook so that the operator could hear what was going on, she released the lock to reason with Bill. She was greeted with a punch to her face that sent her reeling backwards across her front room. She fell, hitting her head on a coal scuttle.

  Susan screamed and screamed.

  ‘Within seconds he was in,’ she said. ‘Trying to grab my throat and hitting me. I told him the police were coming. He kicked me several times. He spat at me. His language was evil. Then he walked off.’

  Emsworth is a small, conservative place where crime is rare. For this reason, emergencies in and around the village are attended by police based some 20 miles away, in either Chichester or Cosham, a northern suburb of Portsmouth. Unless a traffic policeman is patrolling the vicinity, response times can be up to ten long minutes.

  In this case, the switchboard operator was dealing with a situation that could turn into a murder. Officers were galvanised into action and two police vehicles arrived within four minutes of Susan’s call. No fewer than six other units sped into the village. However, because the cottage adjoined other dwellings and stood within a fully enclosed walled garden it could only be accessed by a gate at the end of a little-used alleyway. It would take anxious officers another three vital minutes to gain entry.

  Susan was bleeding. She was hysterical and a female police officer spent an hour trying to settle her down. An ambulance was called, but her injuries were not severe and the medics treated her on the spot.

  Meanwhile, Emsworth was swarming with police, and with only two main roads out of the community it was not long before Chandler was spotted. He was arrested at 1.35am trying to thumb a lift. He spent the night at Cosham Police Station while a statement was taken from Susan Gray.

  ‘I thought about it all that night,’ she said. ‘I knew that he would say that I had encouraged him and that he had photographs and emails recording our dates and chats on the internet. Our sex, the mirrors. It would all come out in court and be in the papers, so I did not press charges.’

  Bill Chandler was released from police custody without charges being pressed. Subsequently, it was reported that he had attacked and raped a 26-year-old woman in Wales. Later, Susan said that he had raped an 18-year-old clerical worker from Poole.

  We don’t know the name of Miss ‘A’ from Cardiff. South Wales Police did receive a complaint from a teenager who was admitted to hospital after being raped and beaten by an American man answering Bill Chandler’s description. However, the young woman also refused to press charges, and as far as the police were concerned there was nothing more they could do.

  Accompanied by Susan Gray, Christopher Berry-Dee met Miss ‘B’ from Poole. The two women had much in common, including the fact that neither had known that Chandler was stalking the other. At the time, Miss ‘B’ worked for a large insurance company in the town and lived with her parents.

  ‘Yes! I met him [Chandler] in AA. Yes! He was much older than me. Yes! He raped me in my car. Me and Susan have talked about him often. He pulled the same dirty stunt on me… There is not much more I want to say because my parents had warned me many times about meeting someone just a bit younger than my dad.’

  Asked how this sickening experience had affected her life, she said, ‘What do you think? I have a steady boyfriend now… he doesn’t know anything. I still shake when I switch on my computer because I know Chandler is there somewhere. I would never do chat again. It is like he would be there watching me. Twisted bastard!’

  Robert Jensen, Associate Professor of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, writes: ‘We live in a culture in which rape and battery continue at epidemic levels. And in this culture, men are masturbating to orgasm in front of television and computer screens that present them sex with increasing levels of callousness and cruelty toward women. No matter how hard it may be to face the reality of a rape culture, at least the culture still brands rape as a crime. Pornography, however, is not only widely accepted but sold to us as liberation. We know relatively much about how violent pornography influences ordinary adult men. There are negative influences on men’s attitudes towards woman. After reception of violent pornography men become more positive to rape and evaluate women more callously. All too often, rape leads to murder.’

  West Sussex Police, like their colleagues in South Wales, say, ‘We treat all complaints of this nature very seriously. Unfortunately, if the victim feels unable to make a formal statement there is little we can do.’

  The FBI are a little more encouraging. ‘We do know Mr Chandler. He has a minor criminal record in the US. If the British Police have evidence that this man has committed serious sexual offences, we would be grateful for this information, and he could be extradited to stand trial in the UK.’

  The FBI also say, ‘Many sexual predators stalk their victims over a period of time. They do it in the real world and now they use the internet. They often gain more sexual satisfaction from the stalking phase than actually committing the offence. To them stalking is control. It gives these people a feeling of power. We are unable to comment on the allegations made against Mr Chandler… it seems that the three English women you mention are the victims of a very sick serial rapist. This man will continue to rape until he is arrested and charged. Failing that, undoubtedly he will commit murder, if he hasn’t already done so.’

  Susan Gray believes that Chandler might have killed her. She no longer dates anyone, but she visits Miss ‘B’ frequently. And Susan has seen ‘The Featherman’ on the internet since her ordeal.

  ‘I know his line of chat,’ she confirmed. ‘He still uses the AA site but under a different name. I have tried to warn the girls but they don’t believe me. They think I am a jealous crank. One guy said, “Prove it, you sad bitch.” Several women, whom I knew from before, told me that I was a liar. I even emailed one of them a photo of me and B
ill together. She replied, “He can fuck me any time,” so I don’t bother any more.’

  The authors asked Susan if she had any advice for women using chatrooms and the internet to find sex or love.

  Her reply was diplomatic. ‘I would say be very careful. I suppose there are a lot of happy couples out there where things have worked out OK. But this experience has wrecked my life.’

  Susan Gray has since moved from Hampshire.

  The Ukraine-based Absolute Agency now monitor their chatroom. Although they can ban visitors who frequently use expletives, they admit that there is nothing they can do to stop scammers or prevent the likes of Bill Chandler from looking for prey. In a statement to the authors, they confirm, ‘We now have a system which is called IGNORE. People can make someone invisible if they want. If we receive many complaints we terminate full membership and there is no refund. We even will ban the same person if he rejoins because we keep email addresses on file. We are not in the business of mind reading. We are in business for bringing people together and money.’

  Indeed they are!

  Eighty per cent of Ukrainians cannot afford bread every day. Fifteen per cent of the population are considered ‘upper-class’, meaning they earn as much as $30,000 a year. The remainder are mega-rich, and we invite you to consider the sums below.

  Absolute Agency is the largest online dating/marriage business in the world. It is a major operation, with another office in Lithuania, and publishes at least 52,000 female profiles and 32,000 male profiles at any one time, with thousands of new profiles added each month. It has a chatroom and video streaming linked to hardcore pornography and prostitution. Absolute Agency has links with thousands of other sites that spread around the globe and the income derived from its business places it at the top of the business league in Ukraine – and one nameless man owns it all.

  While it would be fair to say that the majority of their profiles are genuine, countless thousands are not, for lurking among their members are mafia scammers, countless seriously deranged people and sexual deviants, including paedophiles, serial rapists and stone-cold killers. Log on and, if you are a woman, soon they could be stalking you.