Although she had a high-speed internet connection, Susan had never visited a site like this before and indeed said, “It would have been the last thing on my mind at the time because I believed that people who use chat rooms have no real lives.”
Within the hour and after much more wine, Susan was persuaded to log on to the site. Egged on by her friend, who seemed to know a few of the people who used it, she submitted a profile and photograph. Membership was free for women—for obvious reasons—and she became hooked. Susan chose the name “Susie Q” and selected a female avatar with blonde hair.
“I remember that night very clearly,” Susan says. “All of those people chatting away with each other. But from the moment I logged on the men spotted a new face and I had a swarm of them asking me questions. They were like bees around a honey pot and it clearly upset a number of the other girls who were online.”
The one male icon and name that attracted Susan above the others was an American called The Featherman. “He was very funny, sort of cute and sexy,” she remembers. “The other females liked him a lot, and he teased them along with a few of his male pals in there. His name conjured up the image of a ‘cheeky little duck.’ He was always saying that ducks like water and bubbles, and would anyone like to join him in the bath? It was kind of cute… I expect this sounds crazy. Anyone reading this will say I am mad.”
Carol explained that this guy was very popular. He was a regular and a fully paid-up member—meaning in chat room parlance that he had “cyber cred.” Most of the other males could chat for only 15 minutes because they had not paid to join up.
“This means The Featherman is a serious player,” Carol explained. “Full members are the elite. You get to know the serious guys and they kinda stick together like a club.”
The Featherman was intelligent and his chat was not overtly sexual. His humor was dry and all of this, combined with his cheeky little duck image, attracted Susan to him.
Over the coming days, she spent ever-longer periods in the chat room, and she admits that she started to rush home early from work and immediately logged on to the site to see if The Featherman was there.
“I would feel a pang of disappointment if he was not around,” she said. “I would ask the other members if he had been in earlier, or if anyone knew when he would be back. When he did turn up, I competed for his attentions. Looking back now I realize that I was becoming hooked on this chat room and, this may sound stupid, but I was falling in love.”
Then she made a very interesting comment: “When a woman has been rejected so many times, you start thinking too much about yourself and where you are going wrong. My ego was at an all-time low. The Featherman cheered me up, and I felt somehow wanted again.”
The man then emailed his photograph to Susan, and she returned a number of pictures of herself. They also exchanged phone numbers. He was a little shorter than her five feet nine inches, thinning on top and he had a cheeky smile. Now using his real name, Bill, he informed her that he was single and had never been married. He was a pipeline consultant who traveled the world. All of this was true. He could be away from the United States for months, he told her, while at other times he worked from an office at his home in Augusta, Georgia. Photos of his house with its manicured lawns and of a smart white car
showed that he was a neat and tidy man—an ideal catch for any woman.
“Because of the time difference between our two countries, Bill usually logged on around 10:30 p.m. our time,” Susan said over dinner. “I could understand that basically he was very much a man’s man, well traveled and a guy who kept himself to himself. He wasn’t flashy or anything like that. This is why he appealed to me. We were very much like-minded, I think.”
She could never have guessed that her “ideal catch” was at the same time using other chat rooms to stalk and groom several other women from the U.K.
Knowing that Susan seriously fancied him, in the chat room Bill offered just her a Mars Bar. “You can play with this however you want,” he suggested. This offer drew some lewd comments from the other “chatterers” who were vying for his attention.
“It was so sweet of him,” Susan recalled. “A Mars Bar may sound pathetic, but it was a nice thought… a sexy one at that.
“After that, we often went into the Private Lounge area of the site, where we could chat discreetly. Often it got pretty sexual, and when we returned to the common area people would demand to know where we had been. Several of the other girls would get very bitchy.”
Susan then told us about some of the other “chatterers.” “There was a guy from Washington called ′InsultBot.′ His avatar was an aggressive face with a biker’s cap. It fitted with his rude and blunt attitude … he seemed always spoiling for a fight. ‘Wicked Maiden’ was a female American cop from New York. She was heavily into Bill, and chains and whips. There were dozens of them from all over the world. Homosexuals, bisexuals and lesbians. Some were decent, most were lonely people, others were just filthy perverts.”
Bill and Susan had known each other for about three months. They regularly wrote each other long emails and when he asked her to buy a webcam she did.
“By then, Bill had become a major part of my life. I felt good because he spent most of his chatting time with me,” she recalled. “I got very jealous when he teased the other girls, or talked to them. I wanted him all to myself. So when he asked me to get a camera and microphone, I readily agreed.”
From then on the cyber couple talked about their aspirations for the future. She used the webcam to show him her dining room, and he did likewise, showing her his office. Then they started to engage in cyber sex. Bill would tell Susan what he wanted her to wear, and during the sessions she would use a Mars Bar to satisfy herself while he masturbated.
During the fourth session she climaxed for the first time in her life.
“You know this is all very silly,” she said, clearly embarrassed. “Strangely enough, I was not at all shy with him. He told me that he hadn’t had a girlfriend for years, and I wanted to please him as much as possible… The climax? It was fantastic!”
From there, things got hotter between them.
“He would hint at a subject, just to see what my reaction would be. It was like he was fishing,” Susan explained. “For instance, he would talk about mirrors, or ask what my thoughts were on blue movies [pornography]. He asked if I had ever watched them, and I said, ‘Yes!’ Sexy mags? All that stuff. When we were hot enough we would do cyber sex, then wash and return to chat about a future—maybe together.”
Looking back on this now, Susan agrees that she was being groomed. “It was so subtle. So clever. He pretended to tease me, or ask my opinion about sexual issues. I enjoyed it because
he knew when not to mention sex and, when he did, his timing was perfect.”
In early September, Bill told Susan that his business required that he visit Wales for a few weeks. From there he said he would travel on to the Middle East, but this second claim turned out to be a lie. She suggested that he might like to visit her in Emsworth and stay over. The Featherman accepted the offer immediately, and a date was set. He would arrive five days earlier than planned to spend time with her. She would drive to Heathrow Airport to collect him in her car.
On Thursday, September 27, Bill Chandler (name changed for legal reasons) arrived in the U.K. Wishing to make a good impression, Susan met him wearing an expensive, revealing leather top which accentuated her full breasts, a short leather skirt and a pair of knee-length black boots which she had recently bought in Milan while on a free trip she had won as top salesperson for her sales region. With her long, natural golden hair, she must have been a knockout and undoubtedly would have taken the man’s breath away.
“I have never felt so nervous in my life,” she says. “The plane was a bit late, too. But when he walked through arrivals he looked at me, blew me a kiss and within moments he hugged me tight and kissed my cheek.”
When they arrived at her cottage after a two-hour drive, she freely admits, “We were as hot as hell. He was the perfect gentleman and we exchanged gifts and opened a bottle of Champagne as soon as we got in the door.”
She had bought him two bath towels that had little ducks on the corner. She even got him a toothbrush and emptied one of her drawers for his clothes.
Within the hour they were in bed. Susan had complied with one of her cyber lover′s fantasies and had had large mirrors attached to the wall at the head, to the foot of the bed and to the ceiling.
“I lit candles by the bed… wrote ‘I Love You’ in lipstick on the mirrors and left a little paper trail into my spare room—squares of paper with arrows—to a place where I had hidden an expensive watch which I bought him in Italy… I even set the time for Georgia…”
At this point as we talked, Susan became visibly upset. She was clearly a warm-hearted woman who was thinking back to what might have been.
For 20 minutes we left her to clear away the plates, allowing her time to compose herself. She lit the fire, and after a while she apologized, then carried on.
“All those months of wanting him. His accent was fantastic. He just drove me crazy in bed for hours. He was insatiable. It was all so romantic. Crazy, stupid, but so romantic.”
The day after he arrived, they went sightseeing. Susan took him to “real English pubs for real English beer.” They went to Portsmouth, took long drives into the country, visited Arundel Castle, did the movies and dined out. “We went dutch at my insistence,” she says, “although he wanted to pay for everything.”
Clearly, Susan was in love. “He loved my little cottage. He loved the swans and I took photos of him with them so he could show his friends back home. He died for the English food… got friendly with people in a local pub. He fitted in straight away. I just felt so good with him. Oh, shit. Oh,
fucking shit
!”
On their fifth and last night in bed, Susan agreed to his suggestion that he tie her up for sex and take a few sexy photographs.
“I trusted him completely,” she says. “He was adventurous, strong, quite dominant, but I felt safe with him. I wanted him to leave with the need to come back. I wanted to please him; after all it is not often that a busy professional man travels halfway around the world to spend time with a woman he has only met in cyberspace… least of all me. I was flattered… You know, I had his home address, his email address, his phone numbers… He even asked me if I would consider moving to the U.S., or said that he could easily get a job with his company here.”
Bill tied Susan’s wrists together and lashed them over her head to the top of the bed. He then pulled up her black leather skirt, spread-eagled her legs and secured her ankles.
It would be gratuitous to detail what took place other than to report that Bill then attacked her, and what followed was a rape of terrifying proportions. Susan says she was helpless under this onslaught from the powerful man. She felt a hand gripping at her throat, tighter and tighter. Her gasp for air was cut off.
“You frustrated bitch,” he snarled. “You want to be fucked like a whore and used like a fucking whore?”
Her fingers scrabbled to release his grip. Her eyes started to bulge, and then he slapped her hard across the face, chipping a front tooth.
Bill Chandler subjected Susan to a three-hour ordeal. Then he suddenly stopped and apologized. He untied her restraints and led her in a state of emotional and physical collapse downstairs to the shower, where he washed her and dressed her cuts.
An hour later, The Featherman called a taxi to take him to London. As he walked out of the door, he said, “If you call the police, I shall show them evidence of the whore you truly are. I have all your emails and photographs. Just say nothing and be pleased, ’cause I may come back again.”
Two weeks later the rapist phoned Susan from Cardiff. “He was very, very apologetic,” she said during our interview. “He told me that he had never done anything like this before… that my body and clothes brought out the devil in him… that he loved me desperately and then, with a cheeky laugh, he asked if I could scrub his back again.”
Bill sent her 20 red roses via Interflora, and Susan explained that during the several phone calls that followed she forgave him. He said that he was so ashamed of himself he had cancelled his trip to the Middle East and wanted to see her again for just one night to patch things up.
She agreed.
“You will think that I was mad,” she said. “I
was
mad. But when you have a guy who appears to be crying down the phone, begging forgiveness… Um… the flowers with a little card… Then when he laughs and says something like, ‘Hey! You shouldn’t have been so sexy, babe,’ it throws you.”
It was then that good luck—if it could be called good luck—intervened. The following evening, expecting Bill to turn up around 7 p.m. the next day, Susan checked her emails and logged on to the Absolute Agency site intending to say “Hi!” to everyone and leave. Almost immediately, she saw The Featherman. He was talking to another woman who she knew came from Poole in Dorset.
“I was shocked,” she said. “Then they both went off the screen for the night. I tried to phone Bill, but he would not answer my calls or SMSs. I was numb.”
Then anger, mixed up with a kind of jealousy, kicked in. She sent Bill a message telling him that all deals were off and that she was going away for a few days. She didn’t want to see him again.
During a sleepless night, Susan had a premonition that The Featherman would turn up anyway, so she arranged to visit her mother and return home about midnight. She reasoned that, if he did turn up, as previously agreed, and found she was out, he would go on his way.
She was wrong.
Bill Chandler had indeed arrived at the cottage around 7 p.m. and, so confident was he that Susan would be there, he sent the taxi driver off before he had even opened the garden gate.