“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 November 3, 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 November 3, 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 nearby, 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 November 4, 1996, one excerpt from an advertisement dated Tuesday, October 1, 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 fulfill:
“
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 chat rooms where subscribers would openly discuss their interests in necrophilia, bondage, fetishes and sadomasochism.
One of her ads read, “Let me customize 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 November 3, 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 by Sharon 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 neighbor. “I think we knew them as well as anyone in the neighborhood. 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 November 3, 1996, the
Washington Post
quoted Tanith saying that Sharon was “going to chat rooms 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 fulfill 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 colored with brilliant oranges and yellows and reds to meet that man in person. And, police say, in the ultimate fulfillment 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, October 13, 1996, 35-year-old Sharon Lopatka traveled 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, October 25, 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 afterward, Sherri left the family home with their three children, daughters, ages ten and seven, and a son, age 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 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 color had drained out of his face.” She realized 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 chat rooms. 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 fulfill 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 October 13, 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 October 30, 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 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 D. A. Brown said that, if the body had been buried in the woods behind the trailer, “we would have never found her.”
That same day, Bobby Glass was arrested at his workplace. It was the first time a police unit had captured a murder suspect primarily on the basis of evidence obtained from emails.
While in custody, Bobby—a member of the Rotary Club, whose sister was a church organist and whose family was well
respected throughout the community—was interviewed about the events surrounding the alleged murder of Sharon. He told investigators that for several days he and Sharon had acted out their violent sexual fantasies in his trailer. He confessed that Sharon had willingly allowed him to tie her up with rope and probe her with objects lying around the house. And he revealed that she allowed him to tie a rope around her neck and tighten it as she climaxed during intercourse. But, according to his lawyer, Neil Beach, Bobby claimed to have accidentally strangled Sharon to death while in the throes of violent sexual play. Later, Bobby was quoted as saying, “I don’t know how much I pulled the rope… I never wanted to kill her, but she ended up dead.”
Sharon Lopatka’s body was sent to Dr. John Butts, North Carolina’s chief medical examiner. The autopsy report stated the cause of death as strangulation. Other tests showed inconclusive evidence of sexual torture or mutilation. Butts believed that Sharon died three days after she arrived in North Carolina.
Attorney Beach said that the autopsy reports supported his client’s claim that the death was accidental. “It is hard for me to believe the woman was tortured for three days if the medical examiner of North Carolina couldn’t find any indication of that… It’s much easier to understand or picture an accident occurring during sexual activity than it is to conjure up an image of this man as a cold-blooded, premeditated killer,” he said.
Search warrant affidavits released by police stated that Sharon intended to meet Bobby specifically to be tortured and killed. Captain Danny Barlow considered a death under such circumstances to be deliberate, not accidental. According to police, emails written under the pseudonym “Slowhand” detailing how he was going to kill Sharon provided further evidence
that the death was premeditated. Bobby was charged with first-degree murder and held without bond in Caldwell County Jail.
On October 26, Superior Court Judge Beverly T. Beal had issued a gagging order to those directly involved in the case. Despite this, the media obtained enough information to sensationalize the Lopatka case. Most of the news stories focused on the dangers of internet-mediated meetings. Sharon’s death spawned debates and discussion groups worldwide. Many called for censorship of the internet to prevent such deaths and to protect children. Conversely, anti-censorship activists argued that the internet was a useful tool, allowing people to express themselves more freely and to voice their ideas in an open forum.