by Mark Bowden
Some of the thirty-one hundred men arrested under the federal program may be genuine predators. With stern prison sentences in play, a lawyer defending an accused man is understandably hesitant to try an entrapment defense when prosecutors offer a plea deal to some lesser charge, with a relatively short period of imprisonment followed by treatment. Judges and juries have little sympathy for anyone who would entertain sex with a child, even as a fantasy, and detectives such as Deery are well schooled in the rules. After only his first conversation, J’s legal case for entrapment was weak. In his opening line he listed “young” among his other sexual interests without any prompting. All Deery had asked was, “why don’t u tell me wht ur into?” And if you read this initial conversation looking for evidence of predisposition, it was there aplenty. It would take a careful parsing of the dialogue, and a subtle understanding of the context, to conclude anything other than J’s guilt.
His case illustrates just how slippery is the terrain. To the detective, J was a potential child molester. To J, he was a desperately horny man trying to arrange a sexual encounter.
As J tells it, theirs was a no-holds-barred erotic negotiation, something that had started as a game but that rapidly evolved into the possibility of a real-world assignation. J had read heather quickly and correctly: she was primarily interested in arranging for him to have sex with her girls. He wanted the sex with her, not with the daughters, but picked up quickly that the former could not be had without promises of the latter. So, as men have throughout time, he was prepared to pledge the one thing in order to get the other.
As Deery saw it, there were people who preyed sexually on children, and her job was to stop them. To find those people, she had to visit some very ugly virtual places, adopt some awful personas, and engage in highly distasteful conversations. The bad guys revealed themselves to her in her disguise. All she did was create an opportunity. She had not suggested having sex with her “daughters”—parafling had. His graphic scenarios were disgusting and damning, and sounded like the comments of someone intimately familiar with child rape. They had spilled out after only general prompting. As she saw it, this asshole was a dangerous predator. His insistence on meeting her alone before being introduced to the girls was, she believed, a ploy. TV shows like Hansen’s had made the bad guys wary. He wanted to see her alone only to make sure she wasn’t a cop before proceeding further.
The challenge would now be to avoid the request for a one-on-one encounter and get him to act directly on the sexual encounter with her imaginary girls, and to lure him into the open.
Heather had asked J a question:
—u ever playd w yung?
J was ready to play that game with her, to engage in her fantasy in order to set her up for what he wanted: a chance to meet and have sex with her alone. To make that happen, he would become the perfect answer to her dark wish. So he lied to her. He told her he had once licked the vagina of a nine-year-old girl. She responded:
—k
After reassuring her on that count, J immediately came back with the scenario he preferred.
—I am looking to have you first then you and the girls or any way you feel comfortable. We would go as far as you want on any level
—so ur not new 2 this
—been 10 years or more but i will get back in the groove, lol
—lol
She asked about his marriage, and J told her, “she is into NOTHING at all I mean NOTHING. she knows nothing about me like this.”
He wrote:
—so all we do willbe between you and I baby
—cool w me
—OH I will get out I drive all day long I could meet you during the day too even if girls were not there
—they get hm by 3 school is rite dwn the street
J saw the pattern. Every time he mentioned having sex with her alone, she would bring back the girls—“they get hm by 3.” He could work with that:
—then at evening or weekend can please you and girls, shades drawn . . . could do you in AM then back for them, lol I can be flexaable darling
—ur pretty creative
If he could get her alone they could play, and he would be long gone by the time she came home with the girls. That could work. Real sex! He was tremendously excited by the idea.
—I have thought about this for so long baby
—yea its been a while for them
Them. “OK,” he thought. “I get it.” At this point J plunged in, inventing a sexual encounter with her and the girls, giving heather exactly what he thought she was after. The details were so graphic they were grotesque. This kind of sex talk was not completely new to him. He had engaged other women online within the last few weeks with highly descriptive talk about sex with their children. So he asked specific questions about how physically able the girls were to have sex, and then slid back onto his own erotic turf, asking her if she liked to be tied up or to have clamps applied to her nipples. She wrote three successive lines:
—not so much no
—depends i guess
—how did u get into yung? u grow up in it too?
Back to the girls. Clearly this was a fixation with her. This was the itch she wanted scratched, no doubt about it. J ran with it. In his fantasies, there were no boundaries he was unwilling to cross. He would play her game because the prospect of meeting her in real life and having real sex had suddenly become the compelling drive of his life. It was a must. He conjured an especially lurid scenario that involved his deflowering a child. She responded:
—nice
Running bizarrely with the fantasy, J wrote:
—I know you cannot but I love the idea of breeding a mom, and in time doing my own daugter with you
—u seem like a for real dude
J set about trying again to arrange a rendezvous with her alone, suggesting mornings, when the girls were in school. She balked. She reminded him they did not get off school until three o’clock, writing:
—IM SO not a am person lol. im a night owl
J pushed:
—maybe you will want your lover to yourself some times, lol
She brushed aside the idea:
—lol
When he persisted with the idea of a morning romp, just the two of them, she grew adamant:
—im NOT A MORNING PERSON DEAR not my thing
And J backed off:
—ok as you wish
She asked him again to describe what he wanted, and he unfolded a scene where he would watch the three of them, mother and children, playing sexually with one another.
—so ur more into watchin?
Uh-oh. He could lose her with this.
—NO want to see that and as you all are doing things i wil be doing things too but love to see that
—ok
J heard his wife opening the front door, and quickly shut down the computer. He didn’t have time to sign off. Four times later that night he wrote lines to heather, whenever he would see her name on the list of active participants on his screen. He apologized for signing off without saying goodbye, explained, and reiterated his interest. At 10:36 that night he wrote “HI baby,” but there was no response. He tried once more at 1:01 a.m., with a hopeful, “HI baby hope we can talk agin::.”
No answer.
J’s plaintive “HI baby hope we can talk agin::” entered just after one in the morning, hung there on the screen until he gave up and finally went to bed. He found her reassuring answer in the morning.
—no biggie.. just lemme know when ur around
J pounced on the response immediately, in a froth of desire.
—I want you so fucking badly PLEASE hold
His wife was on her way out the door. J left the screen for a few minutes and then came raging back with a graphic description of the various sexual acts he would like to perform with heather alone. Her response was skeptical:
—o?
J regrouped:
—you dont want that darling BUT you know what I really wa
nt?????
—what?
—to please you and please your daughters
He offered to come by and see her that day, and launched again into a litany of sexual acts he was eager to perform with her. He suggested that when they had finished she might show him pictures of her daughters. This prompted a complaint:
—ur flip floppin its confusing me . . . i mean it just seems like ur more into me then all of us..thats all
There it was, the deal again. J backtracked fast.
—NO NO,,,,,,, want to please you first and get the ball rolling that is all it will be hard to be with you and them all, for the first time that is all i am saying would like to have you first then i will have the girls over and over YUMMMMMMMMMMMMM
And so the negotiation proceeded for the next month. She would back off whenever he talked about having sex with her alone, so he would indulge her, conjure up more graphic scenes of sex with her and the girls, but always he would return to his preferred plan for their real-world rendezvous. And consistently she would steer him right back to the daughters.
—what should i tell the girls is what i really wanna know?
When he persisted in asking her to describe herself, she complained:
—your annoying me now
After weeks of this, down in her basement cubicle at the courthouse, Deery was at an impasse. It wouldn’t do to arrange a meeting with parafling without her “girls.” There was no crime in arranging a kinky sex session with an adult woman. The meeting had to be on his terms, and if what he wanted was just to have sex with her, all he had to do was admit it, and she would drop her investigation. She kept offering him the door out.
—ok i understand i think .. whatever u want .. its up to you
—well I would LIKE to meet you make love to you, then return to take your girls, with you there. like the senerio we spoke about,,,,, that is what I would like,,,,, just need you to be ok with that
—ill think about it .. that just seems kinda weird to me ill let u know . . . just seems odd to me that you woudl want to come here to do me .. then come back to do them .. seems shady
She had put her finger precisely on J’s game. He intended to show up, have sex with heather, and then split, but if she suspected that, he knew his opportunity would disappear. He poured cold water all over that suggestion:
—shady?? really,,, WOW well it is NOT NOT at all,,, just a comfort level thing NOTHING shady at all ,,,,,,,,,
Heather drifted away. The next day she gave him a series of one-word responses. Then she was gone for days. On Wednesday of the following week they again began trying to work out a rendezvous and again got hung up over his desire to meet with her alone. She complained:
—u say ur not really just into me, but it is still odd to me that you just wanna meet ME..
—ok allow me to explain, ok,,,, as i told you before it was only a comfort level,,,,, all 3 hot woman all new, might me overwhelming and way HOT, lol so I only SUGGESTED to meet you first for a comfort level thing,,,,,,,,,,,
Whenever he went back to talking about sex with her daughters, heather would warm to the dialogue. After outlining one such imaginary encounter, he asked her:
—and you will like that too???, me playing with you and them???
She wrote:
—when they r happy i am too that’s why i said it seemed lk u were into me n not them.. if that’s the case thats cool.. just say that no biggie
—NO into ALL want ALL
—k
—but if I can meet and play sometimes when the goirls are NOT home, we can still play right, I want all when ever I can, you, you and the girl, just the girls, what ever
—ok thats fair
They made plans to meet the next day, and then J launched into another explicit fantasy of how sex between her and the girls together would go. Heather encouraged him to continue, interjecting:
—I like how creative u r
and
—tell me
and, referring to an explicitly described sex act with her eleven-year-old,
—she will like that
and
—then what
Except that, revealingly, she noticed that the fantasy he was spinning did not include him. He was the watcher, as she played sexually with the girls. No crime there, at least on his part. She would be the main actor. She complained:
—here is a tidbit of info . . . i can do all that w out you here . . . so clearly you are more into me then all of us whch is fine but u should be upfront about that from the get go
J tried to recover, but she retreated, writing:
—just sounds kinda off to me i gotta go .. tt u later
She was gone.
This was the pattern their dialogue assumed for another month. J was on the line looking for heather every morning and evening. He followed the same routine he had for years. He would log on in the morning before he left for work, then in the evening when he got home, and then again at night, when he would turn on the TV—that was his cover, just watching the tube—and then slide over to the chair before his computer cabinet and reenter his fantasy realm. If he heard footsteps on the stairs he would quickly close the cabinet doors over the screen and jump back to the couch in front of the TV. But once his wife went upstairs, she usually didn’t come back down.
Again and again J would propose an actual meeting between himself and heather—she told him that was really her middle name, which she used online. His repeated efforts to engage her in a discussion of adult sex and to focus on the sex acts they would perform alone were gently but persistently rebuffed.
When he kept asking her to describe herself, she complained:
—your annoying me now
And she would stop responding. This was not what she wanted. After one such exchange, J typed:
—ok I guess your not talking to me now, it is cool, don’t worry about it we will talk some other time,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, you have a great day
She repeated again and again that her girls came home from school at three, and just as stubbornly J kept trying to arrange to see her before then. When he abandoned efforts to arrange a morning tryst, he started pushing to meet with her an hour before the girls got out of school, promising to come back another time to meet the girls. On the morning of September 22, he wrote:
—what time, 1:30 ish to meet and make love to you or 2 what works best
—2 is actually better
—and the girls get there at 3
—yea
—ok we will play fast then
—but ur comin back tomorrow rite?
—just want you and I not to scare them, LOL
—how would we scare them?
—walking in to you and I fucking
—lol come on now
—LOL tits tied with zip cords, LOL
—that won’t scare them goof
—and do you have handcuffs
The detective must have gotten a real-world chuckle out of that question. But this guy definitely posed a problem. An assignation with a grown woman was hardly a crime. He was promising to drive out on Friday, September 23, to meet her, but she was not content with the timing. She wanted him to push the time back, which would enable her to provide a frame for the meeting that would be incriminating. At the later time, “the girls” were off school. She wrote:
—so ur comin tomorrow 2? Just don’t wanna think ur just into me n not them.. kinda getting that vibe
—OH NO don’t think that, that would be a mistake baby just need you first THEN them
—ok
If he was going to come to meet with her alone, she would like to have some evidence that he planned to stick around for criminal sex with the girls.
—girls like presents lol bring us presents lol u been thinkn bout this a lot huh?
—I told you I want ALL
—ok just checkin
—we will talk today about presents to bring them baby
—k
She gave
him her phone number during that Thursday-morning conversation. J called her six times in the next twelve hours. She did not answer. On Friday morning he typed a note of greeting to her and got no response. She wrote him back hours later when he was out doing his rounds. She sounded peeved.