The Case of the Vanishing Blonde

by Mark Bowden

  —what are you into,,,,,,,,,,,, are you married,,,, kids???

  She responded:

  —no kiddin

  This was meant as a humorous lament, but J took it as a question. He thought she was asking whether he really wanted to know.

  —yep no kiddng.

  —im divorced 2 girls

  —WOW age??

  —im 39

  —no sorry girls, lol

  —8 11

  J wrote three lines in rapid succession:

  —I saw your age

  —yummmmmmmmmm

  —tell me what do you look like??

  He followed this immediately with a request for a picture, and she responded:

  —if I get 2 know u a little bettr ill send

  —are you looking for a man to be daddy and take you and the girls???

  —no just 4 sum fun

  —ok can you just describe yourself then to me, and I respect that too

  —dont want any permanent feature here

  —cool

  J was zeroing in. She had two little girls and her screen name was heatherscutiepies. The “cutiepies” were apparently her girls. He had instantly made the connection; she was turned on by the idea of a man having sex with her children. If this was her turn-on, he was neither shocked nor repulsed. Years of immersion in chat rooms had inured him to strangeness. Words were J’s game. Perverse ideas. He had never been aroused by images. He was not a porn addict. What gripped him was a woman limning her darkest dreams—for him.

  This was the essence of his personal fetish, a woman baring all—not the private parts of her body but the private parts of her mind, her unique sexuality, her heart’s most peculiar desire. It drove him wild. He was after heatherscutiepies’ itch, her singular taboo. The key to her erotic zone, the thing J sought to provide in return, was complete acceptance. His chatting partner had to feel free to go anywhere with him. That was now his goal. To get her there without turning her off or scaring her away. To that end, he would become whatever heatherscutiepies wished. The idea was to turn her on. Then he could work gently toward some of the things that pleased him.

  He typed two messages:

  —would you like to be like side lovers doing you and the girls??

  —maybe breeding you and the oldest or anything like that?

  That clicked. There was no mistaking it. He received four responses from heatherscutiepies in quick succession:

  —yea

  —no breedin as of now

  —good god

  —im strapped for money as it is

  Down in her cave, Deery decided that she had a live one. When they were finished chatting, she would type a request on the courthouse’s internal network for a warrant to obtain his IP (Internet Protocol) address. Then she could get private information from his Internet provider.

  He had mentioned “young” right off the bat. That was important. The rules against entrapment forbade her from suggesting the criminal act, but he had brought it up himself. Then he had asked about the “girls,” her imaginary children. When she gave him their ages, he had replied, “yummmmmmmmmm.”

  Except, on closer examination, the import of that expression of appetite was less clear. Sometimes as two people typed out a conversation, with the slight delay that entailed, dialogue overlapped. When she told him she had two girls, he had initially asked, “WOW age??” She had immediately responded, “im 39,” thinking he was asking about her. That line was typed at 5:57:07. Eight seconds later he corrected her, “no sorry girls, lol” and then typed two more messages in the next eleven seconds, “I saw your age,” and “yummmmmmmmmm.” Between those responses, at 5:57:20, she had typed, “8 11.” His comment “I saw your age” came one second after she had given the ages of her girls, so they had been typing those lines at virtually the same time, and J’s “yummmmmmmmmm” had come just five seconds later. Was he reacting to her, or to the ages of her girls? On the screen, and eventually on the printout, the sequence made it look as if he was reacting to the ages of the girls, when in fact it was hard to tell.

  It became more clear thirteen seconds later, when he asked what she looked like and for her picture. His focus seemed to be primarily on her. But then, when he asked if she wanted him to “take” her, he had included the girls. Was he asking if she wanted him to have sex with her and the girls, or was he asking if she was looking for a sugar daddy, someone to take care of her and the girls? The abbreviated, highly colloquial syntax left plenty of room for interpretation. The detective played it safe and assumed he had meant the latter. But then, right away, on his own, he had mentioned, “doing you and the girls.” That was evidence. Parafling was soliciting sex with two minors.

  * * *

  J next sent her a description of himself, including the size of his penis—“7.” (“Why did they all exaggerate?” Deery wondered. It was so lame.) He pushed for more information—asking for her “measurements.”

  Deery typed that she did not know them.

  To J that seemed odd, but then, in this Internet space, who wasn’t? She kept deflecting his interest in her. Was she just being coy, or was she really more into the idea of his having sex with her girls? He wrote:

  —LOL so tell me if and when we meet when and how you would like this

  Again, she did not spell out exactly what she craved, so J continued to make conversation. He asked her about her two jobs—she had told him she cut hair at home and worked as a bartender at night—and then tried to reassure her that he was honest, candid, and serious. He explained his screen name and then urged her to make clear whether she was serious about wanting to meet with him in the real world:

  —if you want cyber then say so, want real say so

  What stuck in his head were those four quick responses when he had suggested becoming “side lovers.” It wasn’t so much what she said, but the responses signaled eagerness. And she lived close by. He began to entertain for the first time in years the possibility of meeting a real woman and having real sex. His typing grew more rapid and error-prone.

  —I am looking for exaclty what you are offering, no strings noperment be there when ever you want I will please you and the girs

  She wrote:

  —u ever playd w yung?

  This woman wanted him to talk about having sex with little girls. It could not be clearer that it was a package deal. She came with her “cutiepies” or not at all.

  The first entrapment defense upheld by the US Supreme Court was in 1932, during Prohibition, when the defendant, a paper-mill worker named Randall Sorrells, was convicted of selling whiskey during a social encounter at his home in Clyde, North Carolina. Sorrells had received several longtime friends, who brought along a visitor from nearby Charlotte. The men were World War I veterans, and the newcomer, who was actually a Prohibition agent, had served in France in the same infantry division. Convivial conversation ensued, and at one point the agent asked his host if he could get him some whiskey. Sorrells told him that he “did not fool with whisky.” The agent was persistent. Again he was rebuffed. After more talk, the agent appealed to Sorrells’s old comradeship and again pleaded for help in getting a drink. Out of fellowship, Sorrells relented. He left the house and returned with a jug. When he handed it over and took the agent’s five dollars, he was arrested.

  Convicted at trial, Sorrells appealed, finally winning his case in the country’s highest court. Writing for the other justices, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes called the methods used in his case a “prostitution of the criminal law.” He noted that the crime for which Sorrells was prosecuted by the government was “the product of the creative activity of its own officials.”

  Since that ruling, the issue of entrapment has come before the Supreme Court several times, and arguments have traditionally turned on what has become known as the “subjective” and the “objective” tests. The subjective test for entrapment considered primarily the defendant’s state of mind: Was the subject inclined to commit the c
rime anyway? The objective test centered more on the action of the investigators: Were their methods sufficient to induce an otherwise law-abiding citizen to commit a crime? If a defendant had a history to suggest he was predisposed to committing a crime, it was very hard to show that police efforts alone were responsible. Both rules left much room for interpretation, and neither was likely to help someone accused of a particularly repellent crime.

  The most recent Supreme Court ruling on entrapment, in 1992, went a way toward knocking down the subjective test. In 1987, a Nebraska man named Keith Jacobson ordered a magazine called Boys Who Love Boys, which was described as a publication containing pictures of “11- and 14-year-old boys engaged in sexual activity.” The magazine didn’t exist: it was the invention of the US Postal Service. Federal agents arrested Jacobson after he went to the post office to pick up his order.

  Jacobson had come to the attention of federal agents because, years earlier, he had ordered a magazine called Bare Boys. At the time such photographs were not illegal. But a record of the transaction had been enough for agents to target Jacobson with come-ons for the imaginary magazine. He had taken the bait only after repeated attempts by two separate federal agencies. The issue of entrapment was raised at his trial, but Jacobson was convicted in federal court of receiving by mail sexually explicit material depicting minors (by then illegal), even though the magazine he had ordered didn’t exist. His earlier purchase weighed heavily against him, because it suggested a predisposition toward such material—the subjective test. There was no evidence that Jacobson had ever approached a child sexually.

  His conviction was overturned by the Supreme Court, in a decision that struck a lasting blow to the subjective test. In the majority opinion, Justice Byron White wrote: “In their zeal to enforce the law . . . Government agents may not originate a criminal design, implant in an innocent person’s mind the disposition to commit a criminal act, and then induce commission of the crime so that the Government may prosecute.” The justices did not address either the subjective or objective tests directly, but they made it clear that predisposition alone did not mean guilt, particularly if the crime was suggested by police to begin with.

  Regulation of sting operations tighten when the crime concerned is less menacing. Judges and jurors are inclined to sympathize with a defendant tempted by ordinary vice. It’s not coincidental that the very notion of entrapment, putting brakes on law enforcement, emerged from a case involving alcohol at a time when the American public was increasingly fed up with Prohibition. When a more sordid offense is involved, or one of greater social concern, the police can get away with more.

  During the past fifteen years, as the Internet has made inroads into every facet of modern life, the fear of online child predation has grown far out of proportion to the actual problem. The belief that sexual deviants by the tens of thousands are prowling the Internet in search of children to entice and corrupt, and that their ranks are increasing rapidly, has won broad popular acceptance. The most widely cited statistic is “one in five,” as the number of children who have supposedly been approached by a sexual predator on the Internet. The origin of this figure is the Department of Justice’s National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which first reported it in 2001. Five years later the center amended the result to one in seven, but by either measure the figure suggests nothing less than an epidemic.

  Until you look closer. The actual question posed in the department’s Youth Internet Safety Survey asked teenagers under seventeen whether they had received an “unwanted sexual solicitation,” which was defined as follows: “a request to engage in sexual activities or sexual talk or give personal sexual information that was unwanted or, whether wanted or not, made by an adult.” Since “adult” in this case was defined as anyone seventeen or older, the definition included many would-be high school Romeos, predators of a highly conventional and not particularly dangerous sort, and also took in a strain of intimate gossip familiar to all teenage girls. As the study’s authors themselves noted, half the solicitations came from other teenagers. Not a single solicitation led to actual sexual contact. Violent sexual predators hunting children are out there, as they have always been, yet they remain blessedly rare, and most young people flee such strangeness instinctively. Only 3 percent of the contacts reported in the survey resembled the one most feared by parents, the adult stranger attempting to seduce a child.

  Benjamin Radford, the managing editor of Skeptical Inquirer magazine, has noted instance after instance of the “one in five” figure and other kinds of misinformation on network TV broadcasts. On April 18, 2005, CBS reporter Jim Acosta declared on the evening news, “When a child is missing, chances are good it was a convicted sex offender.” Radford responds, “Acosta is incorrect: if a child goes missing, a convicted sex offender is actually among the least likely explanations, far behind runaways, family abductions, and the child being lost or injured.”

  The undisputed champ of hyping child sexual predation is NBC reporter Chris Hansen, who has repeatedly warned Americans that “the scope of the problem is immense” and “growing.” For several years Hansen hosted a popular series called “To Catch a Predator” on Dateline NBC. The show turned the moment of an alleged predator’s confrontation and arrest into lurid home entertainment. In the opening episodes, Hansen reported that there were “fifty thousand” sexual predators preying on children through the Internet at any given moment. There was no good basis for the “fifty thousand” figure, and Hansen eventually stopped citing it. His source turned out to be an FBI agent named Ken Lanning, who told NPR’s Brooke Gladstone that he didn’t really know where the number came from but that it was familiar to him from another context. “In the early 1980s,” he explained, chuckling, “this was the number that was most often used to estimate how many children were kidnapped or abducted by strangers every year. But the research that was done in the early 1990s found that somewhere in the neighborhood of two to three hundred children every year were abducted in this manner.” Fifty thousand was “a Goldilocks number,” Lanning said. “It wasn’t a real small number—it wasn’t like one hundred, two hundred—and it wasn’t a ridiculously large number, like ten million. . . . [It was] not too hot, not too cold.”

  Like other popular delusions, fear of the Internet child molester contains a trace of logic. It is reasonable to ask whether the explosion of Internet pornography, including child pornography, might lead more troubled souls down a path to criminal depravity. But the Internet has been with us since the mid-1990s. If it were going to cause a sudden increase in molestation, wouldn’t we have seen it by now? In fact, the trend lines go the opposite way. For instance, sexual assaults on teens fell dramatically—by 52 percent—between 1993 and 2005, according to the Justice Department’s National Crime Victimization Survey.

  Despite numbers like these, people are ready to believe there is an epidemic because they are repulsed by child pornography and assume that anyone who would look at it or think about it is not just perverted but dangerous. Those who take pictures of children engaged in sex acts and distribute them are criminals, and their actions have real victims. They are the most appropriate targets for law enforcement. There is no evidence that their sordid practices have bred an army of Internet predators.

  In the preface of his classic nineteenth-century study, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Charles Mackay wrote, “Men . . . go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.” Defeating this popular delusion is hard because almost no one has sympathy for an accused child molester. Evidence of the predilection alone is enough for many people to want a subject arrested and imprisoned. Who is going to complain loudly about a sicko being put behind bars or closely monitored, even if he has never acted on his desires? Law enforcement officials are not above turning this reality to their advantage.

  But, as ever, belief trumps evidence.

  The Justice Department program that supports Michele De
ery’s work consists today of fifty-nine investigative units throughout the country. Last year alone they arrested more than thirty-one hundred people like those on Deery’s bulletin board. The website for Deery’s unit carries a curiously worded warning that is actually a tacit admission that there is no evidence for its claim. It says that the problem of online child predation “is growing so exponentially as to be impossible to track.” In a 2006 speech at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, then attorney general Alberto Gonzales managed to strike both of this hysteria’s most notorious false notes, citing the one-in-five ratio and the fifty thousand figure. He concluded, “It is simply astonishing how many predators there are, and how aggressive they act.”

  Well, maybe not. Some of the dazed faces of arrested men on Deery’s bulletin board may be genuine predators, but it is likely that most are simply troubled men with poor judgment and oversexed imaginations. They find very little sympathy before judges and juries. Yet, it’s entirely possible that the greater danger to society here is the police. Three researchers at the University of New Hampshire reported earlier this year that during the period between 2000 and 2006, when Internet use by juveniles grew between 73 and 93 percent, the number of people arrested for soliciting sex online from them grew only 21 percent, from 508 to 615. The number of people arrested for soliciting sex from undercover police like Deery, however, rose 381 percent during the same period. In other words, alleged child molesters like J are many, many times more likely to be locked up for approaching detectives than children. And despite this full-court press on Internet child predation, those arrested for it represent only 1 percent of all arrests for sex crimes against children and adolescents.