Murder.com (8 page)

Suzy sent six time-delayed emails to the Tallahassee Police, telling them that she’d ingested cyanide and that they could find her at the Red Roof Inn. When investigators entered her motel
room, they discovered her corpse alongside the poison, which she’d carefully repackaged.

In her email to her parents, Suzy had a request for her memorial service: ‘Please play “Fire and Rain”’ – James Taylor’s elegy to a friend who committed suicide. That friend was named Suzanne, too.

It is a Saturday afternoon in Red Bluff. Banners flutter over the main drag, advertising the high school’s presentation of
A Man for All Seasons
. A rodeo is under way at the fairground. And, at a chapel, a sombre crowd gathers to remember Suzanne Michelle Gonzales.

On a table at the front of the room there are dozens of framed pictures – one of Suzy coquettishly pulling up her yellow high-school graduation gown to expose knee-high athletic socks; another where she is a bright-eyed toddler gripping her mother’s hand. Near by, the nameless two-headed cat leans against a red scooter. One of the feline’s faces is happy – the other not.

Suzy’s parents walk into the chapel with a beige urn and place it at the centre of these mementoes of their daughter’s life. That same urn had rested between them on the front seat of a U-haul truck as they drove back to California with the contents of Suzy’s Florida apartment.

Nancy Hickson, Suzy’s high-school speech teacher, recalled for the crowd how Suzy gave her a purple wig after she lost her hair to chemotherapy.

‘When I met her, I thought, “Finally, a teen who isn’t afraid to be different,”’ she recalled. ‘Suzy had a creative streak a mile wide.’

John Bohrer, the local Southern Baptist pastor, compared Suzy’s quirky humour and zest for life to that of the actress Lucille Ball.

Her best friend, 19-year-old Desiree Sok, described Suzy as a spontaneous fun lover, someone with whom she’d cruise around Tallahassee in the middle of the night blaring ska music and eating doughnuts. Someone who’d swerve on to the shoulder of a dark road and jump out of the car just to chase fireflies.

‘I don’t think she realised all the memories would stop,’ Desiree said, her voice trailing off.

As the slide show of Suzy’s life was screened, James Taylor’s haunting words and melody provided the soundtrack.

This new and morbid phenomenon of internet-inspired suicide is not confined to the USA. Because of the medium’s huge reach it has become a global issue, and yet internet service providers continue to host these sites.

The discovery in 2004 of the bodies of four young men in a car at a viewpoint near Mount Fuji in Japan appeared to be more evidence of a grim new trend in this prosperous country – group suicides of strangers who meet over the internet. The suicide pacts, which have resulted in at least 18 deaths in Japan since February 2004, are shocking to experts, even in a nation already plagued by an astronomical suicide rate.

The victims are normally young and meet over the internet through a growing number of suicide-related sites, chatrooms and bulletin boards in Japanese – sites where participants go online not to dissuade but to support one another in their desire for death.

In the latest confirmed case in early May 2005, the victims were a man of 30 and two women of 22 and 18. None had apparently known the others before meeting online, where they started planning their suicide. As in several other cases, they died
of carbon monoxide poisoning from a coal-burning stove after sealing themselves in a room using plastic sheeting and duct tape. Others have taken their lives by the same method – promoted by websites as fast and painless – in cars parked in remote mountain areas.

Some suicide pacts have been averted, or ended in injury but not death, as in the case of two girls, 14 and 17, who jumped together off a five-storey building.

The group WiredSafety, which has 10,000 volunteers around the world visiting online chatrooms watching for people who prey on children, reports that it has come across many Japanese suicide websites, including ones that encourage participants to overdose together in front of webcams.

‘We are picking up lot [of suicide sites] that are just in Japanese,’ says Parry Aftab, executive director of WiredSafety. ‘We report them to local law enforcement, or the ISP to have them take down the sites. But they just pop up someplace else.’

Some websites are expressly for meeting suicide partners, while others suggest the best ways to commit the act, including, for example, where to get the coal stoves and how to prepare the car or other suicide site.

T
here’s not much to Lenoir, North Carolina, a town of 14,000 at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The monument to the Daughters of the Confederacy in the town square watches over another losing battle, this one economic. Downtown slips silently into the embarrassed embrace of loan companies, storefront churches and used-clothing shops. The stagnant centre is skirted by highways, busy chain stores and fast-food outlets. It would not be quite right to say people in Lenoir are surprised at killings in their midst because they get around six murders a year, even if they could not have dreamed up the scenario that follows.

Rural America no longer is, and maybe never was, quite so sheltered as its apple-pie image suggests. ‘People think that, because this is a small town, these things don’t happen. It’s not true. We have people here no different than the big cities,’ said Brenda Watson, who owns the Carolina Cafe at 209 Main Street. ‘And I wouldn’t let my kids walk alone here at night.’

Indeed, former district attorney Flaherty claims, ‘Most of the murders are love triangles, but when Lopatka lost her life she also lost her anonymity, and she was none of the things she claimed to be.’

In fact, according to her autopsy report she was dark-haired with dark eyes set into a heavy face and five foot ten and 189 pounds when she died. And, far from the wild video star she claimed to be, she lived her life quietly in a ranch-style home in Indian Court, a cul-de-sac in the quiet, hilly town of Hampstead, Maryland, where children play tag in front yards, dogs tease the postman and deviancy is a failure to join recycling efforts.

When Lopatka graduated from Pikesville High School in
Baltimore in 1979, her name was Sharon Denburg. She had many friends and was a member of the volleyball and field hockey teams. During her junior and senior years, she was a nurse’s aide, a library aide and a singer in the school’s chorus.

‘She wasn’t an outcast or anything of that nature,’ said Steven Hyman, who attended school with her. ‘She was about as normal as you can get. I think making her this weird loner is just some media thing.’

Sharon Denburg was the oldest of four daughters born to Mr and Mrs Abraham J Denburg in 1961. The family lived in a suburb of Baltimore. Sharon Denburg’s parents were devout Orthodox Jews, who were active in the Beth Tfiloh, Baltimore’s largest Orthodox Jewish synagogue, where Abraham was a cantor. Sharon had been active in sports, sang in the school choir and was perceived by classmates to be ‘as normal as you can get’, reported the North Carolina
News & Observer
on 3 November 1996.

In 1991, Sharon wed Victor, a Catholic construction worker from Ellicott City, but her parents did not approve. A former high-school classmate told the
Washington Post
on 3 November 1996 that the marriage was Sharon’s ‘way of breaking away’. Sharon moved with her husband to a small, ranch-style tract house in Hampstead in the early 1990s. They had no children.

Sharon started up several small internet business ventures from her home to make some extra money. She made a new friend, Diane Safar, who lived near by, and the two of them put together a 30-page booklet on home decorating and country crafts entitled
Dion’s Secret of Home Decorating Guide
.

‘Here we were decorating our houses one day and talking to each other for advice, and we just said, “Hey, we should put this
stuff in a book,”’ Safar explained. ‘We put it together and then we went around to ladies’ groups and churches selling it. It was fun.’

‘What I want people to know is the woman I knew was not crazy in the slightest,’ Safar said of her friend. ‘She was always a happy person, always bubbly even. This person who was killed was not the person I knew.’

In her business called Classified Concepts, Sharon rewrote ad copy for advertisers for $50 per advertisement. She also operated several other websites, where she sold psychic readings and advice. On the sites Sharon would also post ads selling other services, with a premium rate number for which she would receive a percentage of the revenue.

Another way she made money was by advertising pornographic videos.

All varieties of sex were for sale 24 hours a day in Sharon Lopatka’s world. She could provide nearly anything anybody desired at any time. With a tapping of her fingers on a computer keyboard, she became five-foot-six and a shapely 121 pounds. A few more taps and she was an aggressive 300-pound dominatrix who promised strict discipline. Or she could tap and become ‘Nancy Carlson’, a screen actress prepared to star in whatever type of sexual video her fans cared to purchase.

As Nancy Carlson, Sharon sold videos of unconscious women having sexual intercourse. According to the
Augusta Chronicle
of 4 November 1996, one excerpt from an advertisement dated Tuesday, 1 October 1996 stated, ‘Hi! My name is Nancy. I just made a VHS video of actual women… willing and unwilling to be… knocked out… drugged… under hypnosis and chloroformed. Never before has a film like this been made that shows the real beauty of the sleeping victim.’

Sharon even went so far as to advertise her own undergarments online, with a message which read, ‘Is there anyone out there interested in buying my worn panties?’ She certainly had no qualms about advertising and selling products that would appeal to the lurid sexual fetishes of her customers. She also had her own risque sexual fantasies that she actively sought to fulfil:

‘DO YOU DARE ENTER… THE LAND OF THE GIANTESS???

‘Where men are crushed like bugs… by these angry… yet gorgeous giant goddesses.’

Sharon used the web for a variety of purposes, such as to obtain business ideas and make money. However, she also used it to interact with a larger variety of people who shared her unconventional interests. She often ventured into hardcore pornographic chatrooms where subscribers would openly discuss their interests in necrophilia, bondage, fetishes and sadomasochism.

One of her ads read, ‘Let me customise your most exciting TORTURE fantasy for you… on VHS… to watch and enjoy privately in the comfort of your own home. A film designed by you… with scenarios of your choice. Films are shipped in plain envelopes to protect your… privacy.’

She used many pseudonyms and multiple personae in her internet messages. These ‘masks’ allowed her anonymity and the freedom to pursue her unusual fantasies. According to the
Washington Post
of 3 November 1996, one message Sharon posted stated that she had ‘a fascination with torturing till death’.

Over several months, the North Carolina
News & Observer
found more than 50 messages of Sharon’s where the overriding
theme was that she wanted to be tortured and killed. Often she would post messages looking for a man to satisfy her wish.

‘I guess some people have some kind of inner thing going on that you just never know about,’ said Debra Walker, Lopatka’s neighbour. ‘I think we knew them as well as anyone in the neighbourhood. She was just like anyone else you know, and that kind of scares me in a way, to think you really never know somebody.’

A sex-rights activist named Tanith, who often visited the sites, said that she became concerned about Sharon’s strange messages. On 3 November 1996, the
Washington Post
quoted Tanith saying that Sharon was ‘going to chatrooms and asking to be tortured to death’. Tanith says she had tried to stop her, but Sharon refused. Sharon replied to the woman,: ‘I want the real thing. I did not ask for you preaching to me.’

Sharon would sit at her computer typing furiously for hours at a time, trying to make contact with the right person to satisfy her strange desires. Numerous responses to her messages offered to fulfil her fantasy, but the senders withdrew when they discovered that her requests were serious.

Eventually, she found a man who swallowed the bait. Several weeks after meeting him on screen, her last wish was to come true.

She arrived in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains while the foliage was still coloured with brilliant oranges and yellows and reds to meet that man in person. And, police say, in the ultimate fulfilment of her desires, she was bound with rope, made to bleed and then strangled, before her nude body was dumped into a shallow grave.

The internet has been blamed for everything from spreading
recipes for bombs to pushing porn to school kids, but the latest claim, that it contributed to the sex murder of a woman in rural America, sounded like an urban myth. Yet it was all too true.

Early on the morning of Sunday, 13 October 1996, 35-year-old Sharon Lopatka travelled to Baltimore and caught a train to Charlotte, North Carolina, having told her husband that she was going to visit friends in Georgia. A week later, Victor was disturbed to find a mysterious note written by his blonde wife that suggested instead a clandestine, apparently final, trip. ‘If my body is never retrieved don’t worry,’ Sharon had written. ‘Know that I am at peace.’

Victor immediately called the police, who looked for evidence as to Sharon’s whereabouts on her computer. They found emails suggesting that she had visited someone in Lenoir, North Carolina.

There, on Friday, 25 October 1996, police officers found Sharon’s naked, decomposing body buried a short distance from the trailer of the person she had gone to visit. Her hands and feet had been bound with rope and a nylon cord had been strung around her neck. Investigators also found scrape marks around her neck and breasts. The medical examiner determined that she died of strangulation – the violent death Sharon had wished for.

Robert ‘Bobby’ Frederick Glass was a 45-year-old computer analyst employed by Catawba County, North Carolina. He had worked for the county for almost 16 years and was a productive worker who was responsible for programming tax rolls and keeping track of the fuel consumption of county vehicles.

Bobby was also a computer enthusiast, according to Sherri, his wife of 14 years. But, she lamented, he had more passion for the friend on his desk than for his marriage. Her
husband was no longer attracted to her and the final straw, she said, was when her children asked why their father didn’t love her any longer.

In May 1996, Bobby and Sherri separated. Shortly afterwards, Sherri left the family home with their three children, daughters aged ten and seven and a son aged six. However, it may have been more than a lack of love that caused the break-up of the family. According to Sherri, there were other marital problems that few had known about; each day Bobby had spent countless hours typing on his computer, and Sherri eventually became suspicious. Bobby subscribed to America Online, a major provider of internet access, and in his net profile he claimed to love photography, music and model railways. In a space reserved for personal quotes he had written, ‘Moderation in all things, including moderation.’

One day Sherri logged on and found worrisome emails saved on her husband’s hard disk. The messages which had been posted under the pseudonyms ‘Toyman’ and ‘Slowhand’ particularly alarmed her because of their ‘raw, violent and disturbing’ nature.

After dinner one evening, she confronted Bobby. Later, she said that ‘all of the colour had drained out of his face’. She realised that there was ‘this side to him’ that was unknown to her. Despite this alarming discovery, Sherri recalled her husband as ‘generally pleasant, hard working and amiable’.

In August 1996, Bobby Glass and Sharon Lopatka became acquainted while visiting sexually orientated internet chatrooms. Bobby displayed a fetish for inflicting pain, whereas Sharon’s desire was to be tortured. In an email message to Bobby, Sharon wrote that she wanted to be bound and strangled as she
approached orgasm. Bobby responded by describing in detail how he would fulfil her dearest wish.

Correspondence between the two lasted for several months. The police were able to recover almost 900 pages of emails from the warped couple’s computers. A senior investigator who worked on the case, Captain Danny Barlow of North Carolina’s Caldwell County Sheriff’s Department, said, ‘If you put all their messages together, you’d have a very large novel with a very sad ending.’

It was discovered that, at about 8.45 on the evening of 13 October, Sharon’s train from Baltimore had arrived in Charlotte, where Bobby Glass was waiting, and that they had driven in his pickup truck 80 miles to his trailer home in Lenoir. The events that followed were later to become a source of speculation among police investigators.

On 30 October 1996, the police department’s newly developed Computer Crime Unit found substantial evidence in Sharon’s computer linking her to Bobby Glass. Police officers monitored Bobby’s trailer for several days. It was hoped that Sharon would be found alive there, but she was not seen during the stakeout.

Then Judge Beal issued police with a search warrant for the trailer, and investigators arrived there while Bobby was at work. The ground surrounding the turquoise trailer was littered with rotting garbage and abandoned toys. The interior was equally dirty and cluttered. Among the chaos, police officers found items belonging to Sharon, as well as drug and bondage paraphernalia, child pornography, a pistol and thousands of computer disks.

Seventy-five feet from the trailer, an officer discovered a fresh mound of soil. After digging only 30 inches beneath the mound,
they found Sharon’s decomposing remains. Caldwell County investigator DA Brown said that, if the body had been buried in the woods behind the trailer, ‘we would have never found her’.