The Case of the Vanishing Blonde

by Mark Bowden

  A special panel appointed by Hackney the following Monday investigated the charges that the university had brought against individual members of the house for violating the school’s code of conduct. There was never a hearing. Everyone involved was aware that hearings on the charges—the brothers had the option of requesting open hearings—could prove exceedingly embarrassing to everyone involved: to Laurel, the brothers, and the school. The incident had already exacted a toll on everyone.

  So there was a settlement. The specifics of individual agreements are private, but some of the general terms are as follows: The brothers involved never admitted guilt. In return for the university’s promise not to take further action against them, the brothers agreed to perform community service, to complete a reading list of material pertinent to the issues raised by the incident, and to participate in group discussions of those issues. Some of the brothers who would have otherwise graduated in June will not receive their diplomas until they satisfy these commitments.

  “It wasn’t trivial,” said a person familiar with the settlement. “The requirements will take time to fulfill. Individuals who couldn’t arrange to stay around after graduation will be able to meet the requirements where they’ve gone, but they still have to do the work. The general idea, I guess, was that the best thing would be for the fraternity brothers to take something positive away from the whole experience.”

  When Carol Tracy heard of the settlement, she was so angry that she felt like resigning. Some of those involved in the case had been angry all along over what they saw as Hackney’s intervention in the matter. As terms became generally known, they reinforced a notion on campus that the university was reluctant to take the matter seriously. Hackney defended the decision to keep details of the settlement secret. Without knowing more about what actually happened, the community could not fairly assess the appropriateness of the penalties, he said. Months later, the issue still troubled him. In Hackney’s two years at Penn, the ATO incident was the first that kept him awake nights.

  Laurel Brooks did not return to classes on a regular basis that semester. After the investigation, she spent some time in a psychiatric hospital, where she became convinced that she was an alcoholic, and when she checked out she stopped drinking for nearly two months. Then, one day in May, after an argument with her parents, she abruptly left home and returned to Philadelphia.

  Within several days, Laurel began drinking again. Before the week was out, she was back in a hospital for psychiatric treatment. She had retained her own lawyer and was exploring possible grounds for taking civil action against the university and the brothers involved in the incident.

  Weeks after Laurel checked into the hospital, Will Gleason was still wrestling with his emotions. He felt uneasy in some way he couldn’t quite define. He felt, somehow, as though he was just as much to blame for what happened to Laurel as any of the fraternity brothers.

  “I’ve thought about this a lot,” he said. “What difference was there between what I did and what happened to Laurel? Laurel was drunk and tripping the night I met her too. I was out looking to pick somebody up, for some sex, you know? I mean, Laurel was, of course, willing when she came home with me. I don’t know. But where was the difference when she woke up in the morning with me, who she liked, and she looked at me and I was ‘beautiful’ and I was nice to her, and that other morning she woke up alone in horror. I don’t know. The line’s fine. I’ll never . . .”

  He didn’t know how to finish.

  At the end of May, the ATO brothers who had planned to stay in Philadelphia over summer vacation moved out. A few months later, they won an injunction against Penn that allowed them to return until the issue is resolved in court. The brothers, however, remained pessimistic about ever living in the stone mansion again.

  Andrea Ploscowe was working as a waitress in a small restaurant off campus during the summer. The incident, and what was known on campus of her involvement, had made Andrea something of a feminist heroine. She felt certain that she had done the right thing, but still, Andrea was troubled. There was a stubborn remorse in her for betraying her friends at ATO. She missed them and was disappointed that, after everything, they seemed to understand so little.

  “I don’t think they’ve learned a damn thing,” she says.

  The brothers were bitter, certain of their own innocence and convinced that the university was spineless, more concerned with avoiding bad publicity than in seeing justice done. They felt a mixture of sorrow and anger for Laurel. Most reserved the better part of blame for Andrea. They were convinced that it was she who had talked Laurel into considering the incident rape. Andrea had it in for them. They were sure.

  Yet, despite their bluster, it was clear that the brothers were affected in ways they are still reluctant to admit. One hopes someday to be a doctor. After a long and spirited defense of his own actions and those of his friends, he was asked what a good doctor would have done, faced with the scene he witnessed that morning. He spoke slowly, looking down at the table.

  “A good doctor would have acted to stop it,” he said.

  Perhaps, as more time passes, as they work through their feminist reading lists and participate in their assigned group discussions, they will work through the impact of what happened that night. For the brothers of Alpha Tau Omega, things may not work out so badly. Laurel Brooks is still under psychiatric care. For her, it is still too soon to know.

  When this story ran in 1983, I changed the name of the victim and all of the fraternity brothers, and also of Andrea Ploscowe, at her request. Andrea died of cancer in 2017. She became a lawyer and remained an activist for feminist causes throughout her life. I decided to use her real name for this new publication of the story. I have had no contact with Laurel or any of the fraternity brothers since, and often wondered what they think about this episode years later. Carol Tracy is the longtime executive director of the Women’s Law Project in Philadelphia.

  “why don’t u tell me wht ur into”

  Vanity Fair, December 2009

  Detective Michele Deery works in a cubicle in the basement of the Delaware County courthouse, in Media, Pennsylvania. The only window is high on the wall, over a tall filing cabinet, and opens into a well below ground level. The space feels like a cave, which has always struck Deery as about right, because her job is to talk dirty online to strange men.

  Deery seems altogether too wholesome for the work. She has athletic good looks, with tawny skin, big brown eyes, and long straight brown hair that falls over her shoulders. Her parents sent her to Catholic schools, and her mother, a retired district judge, now jokes that she wants her money back. Her daughter’s beat is in the vilest corners of cyberspace, in chat rooms indicating “fetish” or various subgenres of flagrant peccancy. One of the many false identities Deery has assumed online is something truly rare, even in this polluted pond—that of a middle-aged mother of two prepubescent girls who is offering them up for sex. Baiting her hook with this forbidden fruit, she would cast the line and wait to see who bit.

  It usually didn’t take long. Despite the improbability of the scenario, men would begin vying for her attention the minute she logged on, night or day. Deery would begin a dialogue, dangling the illicit possibility, gauging how serious her mark was. There were “players,” those who were just horny and despicable, and there were “doers,” or at least potential doers, the true bad guys. The goal was to identify the latter, hook them, and then reel them in, turning them into “travelers.” A mark became a “traveler” by taking the all-important step out of fantasy and into the real world, at which point his behavior moved from merely immoral to overtly criminal. When the mark delivered himself for the promised real-world rendezvous, instead of meeting a mother and her young daughters, he would find a team of well-armed, cheerfully disgusted Delaware County police officers. As a fantasy, her come-on was overbaked—not one daughter, but two! It is doubtful that such a woman exists anywhere, and yet men fell for it. Her unit had a near 1
00 percent conviction rate. It was rare for those she caught to even challenge the charges in court. The bulletin board over her desk displayed mug shots of her catches, very ordinary-looking men, facing the camera wide-eyed with shock, staring out at the fresh ruin of their lives.

  Which leads to the case presented here. One of the stunned faces in that array belongs to a man I will call J, who would spend a year in prison after Deery plucked him from the precincts of sin—in the case presented here. Both Deery and J were willing to speak about it openly and at length; transcripts of online chats and police interrogations were also made available to me. This account reflects what they and others said about themselves and their actions. It is two stories really, very different yet unalterably joined.

  Shortly before six o’clock on the evening of Monday, September 19, 2005, Deery went to work in her cave, logging in to Yahoo and expertly navigating its public chat rooms. In one of the many rooms labeled “fetish,” she logged in with the suggestive screen name “heatherscutiepies.” At this time of day, the weirdos were coming home from work, bellying up to their home computers.

  She received three instant messages in quick succession from someone using the name “parafling”:

  —hello

  —may I ask what your into or looking for

  —NOTHIG is taboo to me

  Parafling had the detective’s interest. Fluent in the shorthand of instant messaging, she answered:

  —well why don’t u tell me wht ur into

  Entrapment has long been a factor in the enforcement of vice laws, which seek to punish behavior that is furtive and widespread. Such ordinances answer society’s quest for moral clarity, positing a direct parallel between two sometimes unparallel things: right versus wrong, and legal versus criminal. There are many morally reprehensible things that are not criminal. It’s never hard to find sinners. There are many, many more of them than there are criminals. Evil fantasies can become crimes only when acted upon.

  Taking that step from thought to action is key, and many police stings are about presenting sinners with the opportunity to act. American courts have long recognized the right of police to invent ruses, especially when society feels threatened. Sting operations flourish in a climate of fear. Courts and lawmakers become less scrupulous about legal niceties and even basic fairness. The more frightening and reprehensible the threat, the more license and latitude are given to the police.

  For a variety of reasons, few of them valid, the child molester has become the preeminent domestic villain of our time. Deery’s work is part of a national effort. In 1998, in response to growing fears of sexual predation online, Congress provided funding for the Department of Justice to create the Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) task force, which among other things provides federal grants to local police departments for programs to find and apprehend online predators. In practice that means looking for people who potentially fit the mold—people who seem as if they might be poised to molest a child even if they have not yet done so. This leads unavoidably into the gray area of thoughts, intentions, and predispositions—and into the equally murky realm of enticement and entrapment. It is a way of conducting police business that, without extreme care, can itself become a form of abuse—in which the pursuer and the pursued grow entangled in a transaction that takes on a gruesome life of its own. This is the terrain explored by Philip K. Dick in his classic short story “The Minority Report,” and in the Steven Spielberg movie based on it, in which an official government department of “Precrime” identifies, charges, and jails people on the basis of anticipated actions.

  As Jad, one of the policemen in the movie version, says, “We’re more like clergy than cops.”

  * * *

  Bingo! A woman!

  That was J’s reaction when the tag “heatherscutiepies” popped up in a window at the top of his screen.

  He had peeked into a number of active chats to see how many women were there, and logged in to the ones with a promising ratio. His screen name, parafling, was a nod to paraflying, the use of the tiny parachute/tricycle flying machines he had once or twice flown. It was the only really different, exciting thing about him. He imagined it was like a colorful lure on the surface of a pond.

  He was excited to see on-screen that this woman, calling herself heatherscutiepies, lived in his state, Pennsylvania, and was thirty-nine years old. He had immediately tapped her with three messages, and she had responded:

  —well why don’t u tell me wht ur into

  The sun blazed in from the window to his back porch. J had about an hour before his wife would be home from work. She knew nothing of his cybersex life, or if she did, she ignored it. A burly, round-faced man of forty-two, with a thickly muscled neck and shoulders, thinning hair, and a goatee, he was seated before the computer in their living room in a small, two-story town house in suburban Philadelphia. J had just finished a long day of repairing copy machines, driving from one job to the next. This hour at home was his time, a quiet interlude before his wife came in the door from her job at the local hospital. He would then have to deal with her until about eight o’clock, which is when she usually retired upstairs, leaving him alone again with his computer and his obsessions.

  J didn’t sleep much. The steroids he was injecting to help him bulk up made his heart race and filled him with explosive energy and lust. He felt like a walking hard-on. The Internet was his only outlet, and it had become a compulsion. He would open up three or four windows into sexually oriented chat rooms, looking for a woman to talk dirty to him. If he got lucky in one of these early-evening sessions, he would arrange to continue with her later that night after his wife went upstairs. Then they would play together, cooking up an erotic stew. He would enjoy an extended period of arousal and then masturbate. This was his routine. This was his sex life.

  In the years he had been dipping into these chat rooms, J had learned a few things about the women who entered them. They were outnumbered, and they were skittish. J was convinced that everyone, down deep, had twisted sexual desires, and he had reasons in his own life for believing this: his first sexual relationship, as a teenager, which had lasted five years, was with a slightly older girl who liked sadomasochistic play. In this sense, women were no different from men, except they were more reluctant to show themselves. The ones who entered the fetish rooms had desires that were very specific. As J saw it, men were eager and up for whatever, but women were picky. They were looking to scratch a particular itch. He knew that if he answered the query from heatherscutiepies wrongly, she would simply stop responding. Her question was polite nibbling. His response was critical. He had chatted about this precise situation online with other men, comparing notes on opening moves, and the safest approach seemed to be simply to announce that you were into “everything,” right off the bat.

  He typed:

  —I am into bondage s/m breeding incest young rape spanking you name it

  Nine seconds later came her response.

  —cool.

  Hooked! Then she asked another question:

  —where in pa?

  —west of philly, you

  —oh no kiddin im in philly burbs.. just moved outside city not 2 long ago.

  This carried a jolt of erotic possibility. Ordinarily, J had no idea where the person he chatted with was—this was part of the chatroom’s appeal. Many participants had no desire to be identified or found. Yet proximity, for J, spiced the game with a chance at something real. His chats had led only once before to a real encounter, three years earlier. Acting out the online scenario for real had felt awkward. He had done as she asked, and they had had sex, but he left knowing he would never do it again. Reality was stark and messy—it had texture and odor and harsh lighting. Acting out fantasy roles for real felt phony and wrong. It lacked the purity of the idea. The episode had taught him to stay on his side of the line.

  That was before he had started injecting steroids, however. Now the sheer weight of lust was straining him to
his limits. One of his coworkers, a former marine, had counseled him that women were drawn to thickly muscled men, so he had thrown himself headlong into bodybuilding—pumping iron, ingesting growth supplements, and ignoring even the modest dosage restraints urged by experienced gym rats. The results were striking and obvious: his neck, shoulders, and arms were bursting out of his shirts. He found himself picking fights with strangers, screaming at drivers who annoyed him on the road. But his transformation had had none of the desired effect on women whatsoever. It had only redoubled his lust. The news that this willing woman was nearby—a real woman!—came with the exquisite thrill, all but forgotten, of potential.

  Heatherscutiepies wrote him another message. Both used the slapdash vernacular of Internet chat, with its shorthand spelling, frequent abbreviation, and minimal punctuation, which often led to confusion. She explained why she had left Philadelphia for the suburbs.

  —wage tax was kickin my ass

  Then she added, sardonically, the online acronym for amusement:

  —lol [laugh out loud]

  J wrote:

  —damn so very close.

  She asked:

  —ever try any of ur taboo’s or just fantasy?

  —yes I have had sex with cousin and about 10 years ago i did breed a married woman because hubby did not want too, so I did, lol nd never heard from hr after that

  None of this was true. He had learned from earlier chats that if he said he had never tried a thing the woman would stop responding. It was best to claim to have done everything. Besides, making these things up came easily to him. In the years he had been chatting sexually online, J had learned to ease fluidly into a realm of complete make-believe. Already he had covered two of the categories of taboo he had listed at the outset, incest and “breeding”—having sex with a woman to get her pregnant. Neither had seemed to click. All he knew was her screen name, that she lived nearby, and that she was thirty-nine. If he was going to line up some serious sex talk with her later, he would need to quickly find what enticed her. Even in this shameless arena there was courtship. So he asked for some sexual direction, and then followed immediately with two more ordinary conversation queries, showing a willingness to talk about anything she wished.