Murder.com

by Christopher Berry-Dee

  Absolute Agency can buy whatever and whomever they want. I was cordially invited to visit their offices but I respectfully declined, hopefully remaining on cordial terms.

  DR ROBERT JOHNSON: MISSING, PRESUMED DEAD!

  Forty-five-year-old Dr Robert Johnson, a six-foot-three black gentleman from London, was divorced and had custody of his five children, and now wanted a new partner. He had tried the personal columns and local dating agencies with little success.

  Then he fell in love with the idea of taking a Russian woman for a bride.

  Now this takes some swallowing, but Robert made this decision after watching Anna Kournikova on the tennis courts at Wimbledon. He was thoroughly smitten and seduced by the glamour of romancing in this way, and in this respect he was not alone, for at any one time at least eight million Western males are seeking a foreign bride. In 2001, it was estimated that these punters lost $2.5 million. Today, the figure has rocketed to over $5.8 million and the figure is still climbing.

  Unfortunately, we were unable to thoroughly access Robert Johnson’s outgoing emails because the British Police would have none of it. However, from police sources and one of his friends, we did obtain enough of the emails from the dating agency the doctor became involved with to enable us to piece together much of what took place during the period leading up to his disappearance.

  He is now presumed dead – murdered!

  Robert told a colleague, ‘They’re [Russian women] easier to talk to, they have degrees, they seem to be cheaper than Western women, they’re easier to get on with and they don’t ask for too much.’

  In making this quite erroneous, somewhat bigoted assumption, Robert, who had been surfing the net for some time, obviously hadn’t done his homework. Nevertheless, in October 2001, he met a young woman who called herself ‘Anastasia Ustinova’, a 19-year-old posing as a teacher from Omsk, Siberia. The two swapped emails and she sent him seductive photographs of herself wearing a blue micro dress and white high heels.

  Robert flipped and must have completed several cartwheels. Had he known better, he would have realised that a teacher working in Siberia would be lucky to clear $50 dollars a month, $30 being nearer the mark. However, within a few weeks he would end up sending ‘Anastasia’ the equivalent of six or more years’ wages for an average Russian.

  ‘Anastasia has written back and said she loved me and wants to get to know me,’ he told a friend. In reality, all she wanted was his money and Robert sent her plenty of her favourite commodity to pay for generous living expenses. He also bought her a diamond ring and a gold watch. The sums involved totalled around $3,250, and that was to just to start with.

  We know that, on Wednesday, 17 October 2001, Robert emailed Anastasia Ustinova and two days later she replied. On Friday, 2 November, she asked for $250 for a visa, which he duly sent by Western Union Transfer.

  On Tuesday, 13 November, Anastasia sent an email through the Paradise of Angels marriage agency asking for $1,050 for the air ticket and for a passport, and an extra $300 for her to use while she travelled to London. The passport money apparently went astray – although it was sent at the same time as the $1,050 – so she asked for a further $100, which he sent on 14 November. Mysteriously, the missing money was later cashed at Western Union. Robert was losing money fast.

  On 23 November, his blonde bombshell wrote claiming that she had been taken ill with liver problems, so he sent her $50 for her to buy perfume.

  Five days later, she wrote to say that she had stopped working because of her poor health. She claimed she had hepatitis C and that her mother and father were nursing her.

  The New Year brought little respite for the eager Robert. She wanted money for a new mobile phone and cash for credit so she could text him. Her father died suddenly – in a subsequent SMS this was changed to her father-in-law.

  On 2 January 2002, Robert wired Anastasia $60 for her medical care.

  A week later, he sent her two Western Union transfers totalling $135. Despite this generosity, that very same day she had the temerity to ask for $250 – at least four months’ wages for her – to buy sandals as she was soon to leave hospital.

  All the money was sent via Western Union to Anastasia Ustinova, at Gazetnyi, Pereulok 6, Russia, who promptly collected the cash. She took a small percentage for herself, and wired the balance to two of her friends, who were sometimes known as Tatiana Ovdina, Tatyana Perlotva, Angelika, Anna Chuprakova, Elena Artemieva Yalena, Katya, Irina Taralanova, Oksana Stolyrenko and Olen Slepova – all residents of Ekaterinburg.

  On 26 January, with enough money in their pockets to be able to support themselves for several years, Anastasia and her pals hit Robert Johnson again, this time for $200 for therapy. Then, on 4 March, she went the full Monty by explaining that she was going back into hospital for another operation and even more therapy, which would cost $2,000 plus $50 a day until she was discharged.

  Robert was now beside himself with anxiety. He informed Anastasia of his intentions to visit her and help her out. After a few days’ silence, during which she no doubt sought advice from her dating agency, she explained to him that he should only bring new US dollars, as credit card facilities were very limited – and this much was true. Fatefully, he told her that he would bring all the required funds and that he would soon be at her bedside.

  Asking a friend to look after his children, he remarked, ‘I feel stupid. It’s like being robbed. But you have seen her picture, she is a beautiful girl. She needs me, and I need to help her out. I am in love.’

  Robert then obtained a 30-day tourist visa, numbered TY 2987847, and on 21 March, after confirming his itinerary with Anastasia, he took the 10.30pm Aeroflot A310 Airbus flight from London Heathrow to Moscow, arriving at 5.20am local time. He had booked a return flight to Omsk through Thomas Cook and the passenger manifest shows that he sat in seat C39. On touchdown at Moscow, he passed through immigration control, caught the free shuttle bus and boarded his connecting flight at the internal airport, Sheremetyevo 1 (SVO 1).

  Thereafter, Robert, carrying around $7,000 in new dollar bills and probably the only black man in Siberia, simply vanished.

  Of course, for Robert Johnson and his children, this was a terrible tragedy, but at this remove it is probably instructive to remind ourselves of the sums involved. All in all, this single scam netted the dating agency around $11,000, which is the staggering, if not obscene, equivalent of 25 years’ wages to the average Russian. In the West, this equates to about $500,000.

  Every year, tens of thousands of Western men travel to Eastern Europe and the Far East in search of true love. They are well catered for because more than a thousand sites advertise their brochures, videos and the ‘entertainment’ events they organise. The phenomenon amply demonstrates how sex-tour companies and certain marriage agencies contribute to the exploitation and objectification of women and women’s bodies by promoting prostitution and pornography.

  A few moments ago, we gently questioned the sanity of some of the men who go seeking love on the internet. But, of course, we have done their homework, and when you read the following you may come to the conclusion that men can be even dumber that we initially thought.

  One genuine agency did furnish us with correspondence from several male clients, and as we read the letters to a totally honest woman from her prospective suitors we could see how fortunate she was not to pick any of them.

  Doctors, surgeons, engineers, property developers, all queued up alongside religious fruit cakes, college dropouts and the lost and the lonely to court this girl. Several of these humanoids had ‘I am mentally unstable and capable of mass murder’ written all over their faces and throughout the text of their letters, one of which bore an uncanny resemblance to the scribbling hand of the serial killer William Heirens, who issued the challenge ‘Catch Me Before I Kill Again’.

  Yet, strange to relate, interspersed among these desperate refugees from Bedlam, this assortment of knuckle-dragging, body-pierced primates, were a
few honest, well-motivated men who were sincerely seeking love. Nevertheless, we were amused to see that one guy was generous enough to send the lady a dollar bill and a scrap of lined paper torn from a notebook, to help her reply to him.

  This man, from Los Angeles, claimed he was a high-powered engineer, yet his grammar and command of the English language said otherwise, being among the worst we have ever seen. His photo, as he stared at the camera, revealed the face of the type of hoodlum commonly seen in Mafia movies garrotting someone in the back seat of a large, black car. That this man hoped to win the heart of any discerning woman was sad.

  Another of our favourite letters was a handwritten note extolling the sender’s own virtues and pledging his undying love for the recipient. He added, enthusiastically but barely legibly, this unforgettable advice: ‘DO NOT TRUST ANYONE YOU MEET OVER THE INTERNET. NEVER MEET ANYONE ON RAILWAY STATIONS OR IN BARS. THEY MAY RAPE AND KILL YOU.’

  Surprisingly, he didn’t follow this sanguine warning with an invitation to meet him under the clock by platform eight.

  Of course, there were scores of letters from thoroughly decent guys. All well written and very polite, and it was clear that every one of these men was genuinely besotted with the girl. However, letters like these were outnumbered by those from out-and-out fantasists, many bordering on the lunatic fringe.

  A splendid example was a typed letter from a man old enough to be her grandfather. Overweight and bespectacled, he claimed to have the strength and physique of a 20-year-old. ‘I follow a military exercise regime for elite soldiers,’ he wrote.

  Here, we thought, was God’s gift to all women. And a pillar of rectitude: he didn’t smoke and not a drop of alcohol had ever passed his lips. He also boasted that he lived on Hawaii, an earthly paradise. To back up this wild assertion, he sent a postcard of some beautiful Hawaiian scenery, adding that his house would have been clearly visible were it not for the fact that it was hidden just behind the clump of lush, green trees in the distance. On top of that, his CV read like that of a candidate shortlisted for the job of Pope.

  This model of all the virtues then demonstrated that he was a gifted diplomat by asking his prospective paramour, ‘How is your economic situation?’ Oblivious to the intrusive nature of his enquiry, he further demolished his credibility by asking baldly, ‘Do you have any mental or physical diseases or problems? Do you smoke, drink, or use drugs?’

  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 centrefold 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 per cent, 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.

  MONA JAUD AWANA: CYBER TERRORIST

  The outrage caused by the murder of a young Israeli at the hands of a bloodthirsty Palestinian terrorist group was all the more shocking because the internet had facilitated the killing. For obvious reasons in these troubled times, the manufactured ‘romantic’ chatroom contact that evolved between a Palestinian and an Israeli is not a commonplace occurrence. So, when it became clear that a young Jewish lad had been cruelly tricked by a duplicitous Palestinian girl and viciously slain by her accomplices, the immediate reaction was one of overwhelming anger.

  Incensed exchanges flew across the internet – the very vehicle that had spawned this tragic event – with sites and weblogs springing up to passionately rail against perceived injustices, rekindling dormant hatreds.

  One bitter posting suggested that this salutary case should be required reading within the Israeli school system, and went on to proclaim, ‘For while Ofir had “Sleeping With the Enemy” (another American movie!) on his mind, Mona was out for blood… HIS blood!’

  Anger and resentment abounded, old wounds were reopened and exacerbated – and the internet was a major tool in it all.

  Mona Jaud Awana lived in the small West Bank Arab village of Bir Naballah, just a few miles north of Jerusalem and a short distance south of Ramallah.

  Down the ages, Ramallah has seen much bloodshed, and 23-year-old Awana had a plan that promised more of the same: the abduction of a young Jewish man whom she would later cast into the jaws of death.

  Awana’s first step was to find a sure way of achieving her sinister purpose, and she turned immediately to the internet for assistance.

  In an internet cafe in Ramallah, Awana cast her lure. She was not just someone planning a terrible crime; in fact, she was a spoke in a more ruthless wheel, for she was a diehard member of the student wing of Al Fatah’s Tanzim terror organisation.

  Awana’s plan was endorsed by those around her. She would be charged with drawing a young Jew into her spider’s web, and they would then dispatch the trusting victim.

  Awana had the perfect lure – sex.

  Her first contact was established with a young man from Jerusalem named Meir Karni. Awana delved into an internet chatroom to find him, and quickly set about promising him sex if he would care to visit her in Ramallah.

  As a young, red-blooded male, Meir was intrigued, indeed tantalised, by some of the lewd suggestions Awana put his way, but fortunately for him his savvy prevailed and he declined the offer. There was something about the urgency of Awana’s approach that had made him wary. She seemed just a little too keen to get him to Ramallah.

  Undeterred, Awana adopted the online pseudonym of ‘Sally’ and, after a short period of trawling, hooked herself another young Jew, Ofir Rahum. Sally’s fabricated background led the 16-year-old to believe that her father was of Moroccan descent, her mother Israeli, and that she herself was an immigrant from Morocco, not yet proficient in Hebrew. She let Ofir know that she had not long been resident in Ramallah. To Awana’s delight, the teenager seemed interested. She rushed back to her accomplices to report that her target wanted more. For his part, Ofir entertained his friends with his tale of meeting an older, alluring woman on the internet.

  Along with the many messages he sent via the net, Ofir had emailed Sally a photograph of himself. He looked and sounded exactly what he was: a handsome and intelligent youth. Sadly, even the brightest of individuals, if lonely or desperate enough, sometimes throw caution to the wind. Even so, how could Ofir have fallen for someone he had
never even met and really knew nothing about?

  The answer is, it happens all the time. Just ask anybody you know who engages in – and may even be hopelessly addicted to – internet flirting, whether through emails, postings on discussion boards or in private chatrooms. The young and adventurous especially, believing – because they want to – that their lucky number has come up, will take the most outrageous of risks.

  Meanwhile, the Tanzim posse were thrilled, and instructed their friend Mona to keep a firm grip on this most recent contact. She must tempt him and tease him as much as possible, as a prelude to enticing him to meet her.

  After a number of online chatroom sessions, Awana had decided that Ofir was a suitable candidate. She duly passed this information to a pal, one of those pulling her jaded strings: a brutal terrorist named Hassan al-Qadi.

  Blissfully unaware of the danger he was in, Ofir let his mind be filled with images of the seductive ‘Sally’. Over a couple of weeks, Awana worked hard to lure him to what she called a ‘one-on-one’ encounter at a Jerusalem apartment belonging to one of her girlfriends. However, Ofir told her this would not be convenient for him. He explained he couldn’t travel to Jerusalem, enjoy the proposed steamy interlude, then get back to Ashkelon without his parents becoming suspicious about the length of time he would be away from home.

  Realising that her target would not be swayed, Awana backed off for the moment.

  Later that month, Awana finally succeeded in snaring her prey. On Wednesday, 17 January 2001, the two arranged to meet at the central bus station in Jerusalem. Ofir had been asked to bring a large sum of money with him, and was very excited about the sexual encounter that was surely to follow.