Online Killers (14 page)

“I will never forget what happened that night for the rest of my life,” said Susan. “I got home about 11:30. It was pouring rain, and the place was in darkness. I walked through the garden and let myself in. I went to the kitchen to get a drink, and when I looked out of the window I saw a man sitting on the seat under my apple tree. He just sat there and said nothing. I must have passed within feet of him and never saw a thing.”

Susan says she was very scared and pretended she hadn’t seen him. Shaking with fear, she went to go to bed and then he tapped on the front door—the only door to the cottage. She ignored him. Then he called out to her several times, softly at first, then the taps became knocks and his voice grew louder.

Then he kicked the door.

“Will you open this fuckin’ door, please? Just to
fuckin
′
talk
.”

Although by now terrified, Susan plucked up the courage to tell him to go away.

“He started hammering on the door with his fists,” she said. “He kicked and kicked the door until I thought he would smash it down. Then I called 999 [the British emergency number] and asked for the police to come quickly as I had an intruder on the premises.”

Alone, in a cottage at night! No one knows what one would do under such frightening circumstances, so one cannot blame Susan for the actions that followed. She says that, safe in the knowledge that the police were on their way, and concerned about more damage being done to the door of the rented cottage, she called out to him to stop. Leaving the phone off the hook so that the operator could hear what was going on, she released the lock to reason with Bill. She was greeted with a punch to her face that sent her reeling backward across her front room. She fell, hitting her head on a coal scuttle.

Susan screamed and screamed.

“Within seconds he was in,” she said, “trying to grab my throat and hitting me. I told him the police were coming. He kicked me several times. He spat at me. His language was evil. Then he walked off.”

Emsworth is a small, conservative place where crime is rare. For this reason, emergencies in and around the village are attended by police based some 20 miles away, in either Chichester or Cosham, a northern suburb of Portsmouth. Unless a traffic policeman is patrolling the vicinity, response times can be up to ten long minutes.

In this case, the switchboard operator was dealing with a situation that could turn into a murder. Officers were galvanized into action, and two police vehicles arrived within four minutes of Susan’s call. No fewer than six other units sped into the village. However, because the cottage adjoined other dwellings and stood within a fully enclosed walled garden, it could only be accessed by a gate at the end of a little-used alleyway. It would take anxious officers another three vital minutes to gain entry.

Susan was bleeding. She was hysterical, and a female police officer spent an hour trying to settle her down. An ambulance was called, but her injuries were not severe and the medics treated her on the spot.

Meanwhile, Emsworth was swarming with police, and with only two main roads out of the community it was not long before Chandler was spotted. He was arrested at 1:35 a.m. trying to thumb a lift. He spent the night at Cosham Police Station while a statement was taken from Susan Gray.

“I thought about it all that night,” she said. “I knew that he would say that I had encouraged him and that he had photographs and emails recording our dates and chats on the internet. Our sex, the mirrors. It would all come out in court and be in the papers, so I did not press charges.”

 

Bill Chandler was released from police custody without charges being pressed. Subsequently, it was reported that he had attacked and raped a 26-year-old woman in Wales. Later, Susan said that he had raped an 18-year-old clerical worker from Poole.

We don’t know the name of Miss “A” from Cardiff. South Wales Police did receive a complaint from a teenager who was admitted to the hospital after being raped and beaten by an American man answering Bill Chandler’s description. However, the young woman also refused to press charges, and as far as the police were concerned there was nothing more they could do.

Accompanied by Susan Gray, Christopher Berry-Dee met Miss “B” from Poole. The two women had much in common, including the fact that neither had known that Chandler was stalking the other. At the time, Miss “B” worked for a large insurance company in the town and lived with her parents.

“Yes! I met him [Chandler] in AA. Yes! He was much older than me. Yes! He raped me in my car. Me and Susan have talked about him often. He pulled the same dirty stunt on me… There is not much more I want to say because my parents had warned me many times about meeting someone just a bit younger than my dad.”

Asked how this sickening experience had affected her life, she said, “What do you think? I have a steady boyfriend now… he doesn’t know anything. I still shake when I switch on my computer because I know Chandler is there somewhere. I would never do chat again. It is like he would be there watching me. Twisted bastard!”

 

Robert Jensen, Associate Professor of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, writes: “We live in a culture in which rape and battery continue at epidemic levels. And in this culture, men are masturbating to orgasm in front of television and computer screens that present them sex with increasing levels of callousness and cruelty toward women. No matter how hard it may be to face the reality of a rape culture, at least the culture still brands rape as a crime. Pornography, however, is not only widely accepted but sold to us as liberation. We know relatively much about how violent pornography influences ordinary adult men. There are negative influences on men’s attitudes toward woman. After reception of violent pornography men become more positive to rape and evaluate women more callously. All too often, rape leads to murder.”

West Sussex Police, like their colleagues in South Wales, say, “We treat all complaints of this nature very seriously. Unfortunately, if the victim feels unable to make a formal statement there is little we can do.”

The FBI are a little more encouraging. “We do know Mr. Chandler. He has a minor criminal record in the U.S. If the British Police have evidence that this man has committed serious sexual offenses, we would be grateful for this information, and he could be extradited to stand trial in the U.K.”

The FBI also say, “Many sexual predators stalk their victims over a period of time. They do it in the real world and now they use the internet. They often gain more sexual satisfaction from the stalking phase than actually committing the offense. To them stalking is control. It gives these people a feeling of power. We are unable to comment on the allegations made against Mr. Chandler… it seems that the three English women you mention are the victims of a very sick serial rapist. This man will continue to rape until he is arrested and charged. Failing that, undoubtedly he will commit murder, if he hasn’t already done so.”

Susan Gray believes that Chandler might have killed her. She no longer dates anyone, but she visits Miss “B” frequently. And Susan has seen The Featherman on the internet since her ordeal.

“I know his line of chat,” she confirmed. “He still uses the AA site but under a different name. I have tried to warn the girls but they don’t believe me. They think I am a jealous crank. One guy said, ‘Prove it, you sad bitch.’ Several women whom I knew from before told me that I was a liar. I even emailed one of them a photo of me and Bill together. She replied, ‘He can fuck me any time,’ so I don’t bother any more.”

The authors asked Susan if she had any advice for women using chat rooms and the internet to find sex or love, and her reply was diplomatic. “I would say be very careful. I suppose there are a lot of happy couples out there where things have worked out okay. But this experience has wrecked my life.”

Susan Gray has since moved from Hampshire.

The Ukraine-based Absolute Agency now monitor their chat room. Although they can ban visitors who frequently use expletives, they admit that there is
nothing
they can do to stop scammers or prevent the likes of Bill Chandler from looking for prey. In a statement to the authors, they confirm, “We now have a system which is called IGNORE. People can make someone invisible if they want. If we receive many complaints we terminate full membership and there is no refund. We even will ban the same person if he rejoins because we keep email addresses on file. We are not in the business of mind reading. We are in business for bringing people together and money.”

Indeed they are!

Eighty percent of Ukrainians cannot afford bread every day. Fifteen percent of the population are considered “upper-class,” meaning they earn as much as $30,000 a year. The remainder are mega-rich, and we invite you to consider the sums below.

Absolute Agency is the largest online dating/marriage business in the world. It is a major operation, with another office in Lithuania, and publishes at least 52,000 female profiles and 32,000 male profiles at any one time, with thousands of new profiles added each month. It has a chat room and video streaming linked to hardcore pornography and prostitution. Absolute Agency has links with thousands of other sites that spread around the globe and the income derived from its business places it at the top of the business league in Ukraine. And one nameless man owns it all.

While it would be fair to say that the majority of their profiles are genuine, countless thousands are not, for lurking among their members are mafia scammers, seriously deranged people and sexual deviants, including pedophiles, serial rapists
and stone-cold killers. Log on and, if you are a woman, soon they could be stalking you.

Absolute Agency can buy whatever and whomever they want. We were cordially invited to visit their offices but respectfully declined, hopefully remaining on cordial terms.

Forty-five-year-old Dr. Robert Johnson, a six-foot-three black gentleman from London, was divorced and had custody of his five children, and now he wanted a new partner. He had tried the personal columns and local dating agencies with little success.

Then he fell in love with the idea of taking a Russian woman for a bride.

Now this takes some swallowing, but Robert made this decision after watching Anna Kournikova on the tennis courts at Wimbledon. He was thoroughly smitten and seduced by the glamor of romancing in this way, and in this respect he was not alone, for at any one time at least eight million Western males are seeking a foreign bride. In 2001, it was estimated that these gamblers lost $2.5 million. Today, the figure has rocketed to over $5.8 million, and the figure is still climbing.

Unfortunately, we were unable to thoroughly access Robert Johnson’s outgoing emails because the British Police would have none of it. However, from police sources and one of his friends, we did obtain enough of the emails from the dating agency the doctor became involved with to enable us to piece together much of what took place during the period leading up to his disappearance.

He is now presumed dead—murdered!

Robert told a colleague, “They’re [Russian women] easier to talk to, they have degrees, they seem to be cheaper than Western women, they’re easier to get on with and they don’t ask for too much.”

In making this quite erroneous, somewhat bigoted assumption, Robert, who had been surfing the net for some time, obviously hadn’t done his homework. Nevertheless, in October 2001, he met a young woman who called herself Anastasia Ustinova, a 19-year-old posing as a teacher from Omsk, Siberia. The two swapped emails and she sent him seductive photographs of herself wearing a blue micro dress and white high heels.

Robert flipped and must have completed several cart-wheels. Had he known better, he would have realized that a teacher working in Siberia would be lucky to clear $50 dollars a month, $30 being nearer the mark. However, within a few weeks he would end up sending “Anastasia” the equivalent of six or more years’ wages for an average Russian.

“Anastasia has written back and said she loved me and wants to get to know me,” he told a friend. In reality, all she wanted was his money, and Robert sent her plenty of her favorite commodity to pay for generous living expenses. He also bought her a diamond ring and a gold watch. The sums involved totaled around $3,250, and that was to just to start with.

We know that, on Wednesday, October 17, 2001, Robert emailed Anastasia Ustinova and two days later she replied. On Friday, November 2, she asked for $250 for a visa, which he duly sent by Western Union Transfer.

On Tuesday, November 13, Anastasia sent an email through the Paradise of Angels marriage agency asking for $1,050 for the air ticket and for a passport, and an extra $300 for her to use while she traveled to London. The passport money apparently went astray—although it was sent at the same time as the $1,050—so she asked for a further $100, which he sent on November 14. Mysteriously, the missing money was later cashed at Western Union. Robert was losing money fast.

On November 23, his blonde bombshell wrote claiming that she had been taken ill with liver problems, so he sent her $50 to buy perfume.

Five days later, she wrote to say that she had stopped working because of her poor health. She claimed she had hepatitis C and that her mother and father were nursing her.

The New Year brought little respite for the eager Robert. She wanted money for a new cell phone and cash for credit so she could text him. Her father died suddenly—in a subsequent SMS this was changed to her father-in-law.

On January 2, 2002, Robert wired Anastasia $60 for her medical care.

A week later, he sent her two Western Union transfers totaling $135. Despite this generosity, that very same day she had the temerity to ask for $250—at least four months’ wages for her—to buy sandals as she was soon to leave the hospital.