Anyone You Want Me to Be (12 page)

“People on-line may want sex but they crave connectedness to others. The Net provides that in a global way. It’s something totally new, and like all new things, it generates hope. Even if that hope ultimately proves to be false. It’s like taking a little vacation from your own life—and everyone needs that once in a while.”

A
woman who enters a chat room and is willing to identify herself as a woman needs to be prepared for what happens next. Some people in the room will perceive her arrival as an invitation for sexual aggression. She might instantly be asked where she lives, her age, and the size of her breasts. Others will demand that she send them her picture. If she enters a chat room and says that she’s young and blond, a feeding frenzy will ensue, with the woman immediately becoming the center of attention, regardless of who she really is or what she actually looks like. All this can be fun and flattering, but it can also, at least for many women, start to feel invasive, even like an assault. There isn’t much chivalry in cyberspace. On-line you meet new people all the time, things get personal fast, and instant gratification is the common currency. It’s easy to get addicted to the rush of having secret relationships with those who pay attention to you whenever you want this kind of attention. If you are primarily interacting only with yourself and your own emotions, for many people this at least seems as if you’re connected to something outside you.

The Net has a remarkably seductive feel.

What often starts out as an on-line lark can lead to more serious consequences. Stories began surfacing everywhere about relationships and marriages dissolving because of cyber-romance. On the Net, personal interaction quickly moves from casual e-mails to intimate e-mails to sensual/sexual communications to the exchange of pictures to the decision to meet physically, to having an affair, to planning on bolting a marriage—and sometimes to divorce and breaking up households. As on-line love has become more popular, services have popped up offering to track your lover or spouse on the Net, without ever being detected, to see whom he or she is meeting in cyberspace. Private investigation has taken on a whole new meaning.

Many times an abandoned husband or wife never realizes that a spouse has been going on-line and carrying out hidden adultery via the Net for months or even years. Everything has unfolded just a few feet away from the wounded party and has taken place in total silence, within the electronic confines of a computer. Machines, as social critics had been saying for decades, are neutral. It’s what you do with them that matters.

“Technology in any form,” children’s TV star Fred Rogers once said in
ON
magazine, “can be used for good or evil. It all depends on the hearts and minds of those who use it.”

People’s hearts and minds are now being tested in strikingly new ways. Instead of conducting just one illicit affair on-line, some users carry on four or five or six at once, with women or men in countries around the globe. When Internet lovers discover that their on-line partners are not involved exclusively with them, hell occasionally breaks loose. The old emotions of jealousy and rage are still the same; only the technology has changed.

Surfing the Net for love can easily become a minor hobby that evolves into a major pastime that turns into an addiction that can be almost as demanding and consuming as a full-time job.

An altered reality had arrived at the close of the second millennium, and it would most frequently be compared to the Old West in nineteenth-century America, where many people were armed and dangerous and lawmen struggled to maintain order and protect the citizens of the new frontier. That era may have been wild and lawless, but it had not been driven by a rapidly growing, ever-expanding technology. Horses dominated the Western landscape, and both criminals and sheriffs used the same animals in their chosen lines of work. The outlaws and the peacekeepers were fairly evenly matched. When automobiles came along, criminals quickly adapted them to fit their needs, but once again law enforcement easily made the same adaptation. In the on-line world, the old patterns did not apply. Technology was changing so fast that the authorities simply could not keep up with it—at least not during the midnineties, when the Internet exploded onto the American scene. During those years, when dot-com businesses erupted everywhere and fortunes were made overnight, things really were wild in cyberspace.

Near the end of that decade, as law enforcement began to realize just how many different kinds of crime were being committed online, and how insidious some of those crimes were, they’d barely started to train or employ enough experts to fight back. They needed money for education, they needed funds for more and more sophisticated equipment because the technology turned over so fast, and they needed time to absorb what they were learning. Whenever they made progress, the technology surged forward again and was often being used for illegal activities. The great challenges that had always faced law enforcement, especially regarding the most serious crimes, had expanded once again.

Every year for the past decade the United States has averaged about eighteen thousand homicides. Some years we had considerably more and sometimes the number would decrease for a variety of explanations and theories. What has happened over the years is that the clearance and /or solution rate for homicides has decreased. In 1960, the clearance rate was approximately 90 percent. Today the average clearance rate is about 64–67 percent. In 1960, most of our cases were of the smoking-gun variety, which means the subject and victim knew one another. What gradually evolved were the “stranger” homicides or crimes without apparent motive. Due to a lack of resources, both technical and personnel, the bad guys were beginning to win.

Law enforcement responded by developing new forensic tests and other investigative tools. In the late 1970s, my colleagues and I began conducting our own research that would ultimately assist investigators and prosecutors in criminal profiling, assessments, proactive techniques, interview and interrogation techniques, and strategies for the prosecution. What compounded the investigative problem was the mobility of the criminal and the lack of technological tools to assist us in our investigations. It’s hard to imagine that even today we do not have a common technological tool where law enforcement can share information with other agencies conducting similar investigations. We are a country with over seventeen thousand different and separate law enforcement agencies and departments. Many departments don’t have the tools to link cases within their own community. How can they possibly link cases to crimes outside their jurisdiction? You have to rely on the hope that a law enforcement official takes a particular interest in a case, wait for the perpetrator to make a mistake, or get a lucky break.

In 1985, we had a formal ceremony at the FBI Academy for a new program called VICAP. This stood for the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program and was the brainchild of retired LAPD detective Pierce Brooks, who saw the need for it. Brooks would go to the library to review newspapers from around the United States to attempt to link and match unsolved cases. That was nearly two decades ago. VICAP still exists, but it will never be successful if it continues to be a voluntary program. For example, it does no good if the LAPD participates in the program if smaller departments in and around Los Angeles County do not participate.

With the advent of the computer, criminals have found an opportunity where they can for the most part remain anonymous and troll the Internet highways for potential victims. Law enforcement agencies are struggling to keep up with this new and potentially dangerous offender. Men like John Robinson know that it is difficult to catch them because no one central agency is coordinating the effort to fight these enemies, who can sit in the comfort of their homes seeking lonely and needy people who are only looking to improve themselves and make their lives better. People like Robinson believe they are superior in every way to the people they come in contact with on the Internet. These victims are merely objects to Robinson and predators like him. To kill someone whom they feel is inferior to them is like flicking a switch to turn off the lights. They feel nothing for the victims or their families.

Law enforcement was now playing catch-up against a foe that had infiltrated every corner of the Net. In decades past, the dark world of pornography and child pornography could be found either through underground mail or in the seedier parts of town at adult bookstores or other outlets. That era had now died. The Internet brought the most taboo sexual subjects right into the privacy of one’s home or workplace computer. Everything from erotic photos of small youngsters to sadomasochistic Web sites to videos of rape and other forms of sexual violence were only a few keystrokes away. Sex had always sold and now it had found a huge new international marketplace. Money and desire were driving that market forward in every direction.

There were sexual newsgroups for just about every imaginable taste and some that went beyond most people’s imagination. There were listings for those with a special interest in various ethnic groups, in cowgirls, in redheads, and in senior citizens. If one wanted to look at nude pictures of celebrities—including TV stars, movie actresses, and supermodels—services would provide these photos for a monthly fee. In some cases you might be looking at a star’s head placed on top of someone else’s body, but who really knew the difference? There were sites offering graphic pictures of violence being done to women and there were chat rooms where men performed virtual gang rapes on women—and virtual murders. There were pictures of dead people available for viewing.

As disturbing as these things were, they were not as disturbing as the on-line images one could find of small children. The Net offered still and moving pictures of girls five or six years old who were naked with their hands tied in front of or behind them. They were being sexually assaulted. There were pictures of girls with belts tied around their ankles and hanging upside down from the ceiling. Adults were doing unspeakable things to them, and there was money to be made in selling such images. By the midnineties, the Internet had an estimated five thousand worldwide child porn sites, and this number would grow exponentially during the next few years. Those who created and transmitted the images were extremely clever in their ability to hide where the pictures originated and how they were being sent to individuals around the world. In e-mailing a digital photo from, say, Detroit to Miami, it could be routed through Germany, England, and Turkey before reaching Florida. Those who knew their way around the Internet could make this kind of trafficking in child pornography almost impossible to track.

In the past, pedophilia had been viewed as perhaps the greatest taboo in modern society. People engaged in it usually had to pursue it alone and keep it extremely secret. The Net offered pedophiles at least some degree of privacy and had support groups for those interested in molesting children. These sites not only encouraged such predators but advised them on how to lure kids away from their parents and told them the best techniques to seduce children without getting caught.

An entirely new criminal realm had exploded across the face of the globe, and it truly was, in every sense of the word, without boundaries.

Inevitably, scandals started to erupt. In 1996, in Belgium, several children connected to a pornographic ring were murdered. The next year another scandal was uncovered in Spain, and that same year 250 people were arrested in France for selling or possessing videotapes of small children being raped and tortured. In 1998, the Dutch police found a group of child pornographers in Zandvoort who were selling images of kids on the Internet to buyers in Europe, Great Britain, Russia, Israel, and the United States. These images shocked even the most hardened investigators of child porn.

“For professional reasons,” an unnamed psychologist who worked as a police consultant on the Zandvoort case told the
New York Times,

“I have seen a lot of porn, but this left me speechless. It looks like the perpetrators are not dealing with human beings but with objects.”

Predators become predators because they can turn people into objects—and they often save parts of their victims after the killing to remind themselves of what they’ve done. They keep vivid reminders of what they are.

As the twentieth century gave way to a new millennium, the people committing sex crimes on the Internet would cut across all racial, religious, economic, geographical, and professional lines. Doctors would be arrested for soliciting sex with youngsters, as would teachers, police detectives, priests, and a fifty-eight-year-old rabbi in Boca Raton, Jerrold Levy, who pled guilty in federal court to using the Internet to arrange a meeting with a fourteen-year-old boy in a parked car. Rabbi Levy’s other counts of employing the Internet to e-mail child pornography videos were dropped. In 2001, the county of Gwinnett, Georgia, saw twelve criminal cases involving Internet child pornography or child sex.

For some people, the only thing stronger than the urge to express themselves sexually on the World Wide Web was the belief that they would not get caught. In the midnineties, this appeared to be true, because law enforcement was so far behind in detecting many of these developments and it would take years to catch up.

In the last half of the 1990s, with the Net entering tens of millions of American homes, criminals had begun using the new technology to commit fraud, theft, and many other violations of the law. At the same time both law enforcement and private agencies were beginning to study behavior—particularly sexual behavior—in cyberspace and were developing statistics about their findings. The results revealed that huge numbers of people used the Internet for some form of sexual exploration. Self-imposed restrictions were fading and people often did things on-line they might never have done anywhere else. The cyber-world had become the new sexual playground for countless Americans. Something had been released and was running through the Net—from the mainstream to the fringes.