Online Killers (4 page)

Dos Reis looked anything but threatening. One has only to glimpse this man, who appears to be more like a boy, to form
this opinion. A slender-faced, shy-looking fellow, he looks as though he would be more at home delivering the local paper, smiling meekly if ever he earned himself a tip. But Saul was a wolf in sheep’s clothing, seemingly charming, even bookish, yet simmering with anger at the all-American girls because he resented the stigma that he felt came with his Brazilian heritage here in the United States. Quite wrongly, he perceived himself to be a second-class citizen. He had low self-esteem and, although not unattractive to the opposite sex, he felt that he was unable to form a meaningful relationship with a girl in the face of the competition from his thoroughbred American peers.

As he grew older, this view of himself as someone different—someone who couldn’t even speak English when he came to America, so had no chance of chatting to the desirable girls he would see on the school bus—remained with him long enough for Saul to develop a serious grudge against young white females. And, as he would quickly discover after arriving in New England’s “Nutmeg State,” Connecticut was anything but the Land of the Free.

Saul had first set foot on North American soil as a ten-year-old immigrant. This thin, outwardly unassuming boy with thick, dark hair and coffee-colored skin would learn fast that girls in the United States could be quite selective as to whom they spent their time with. This seemed to him to be a pervasive attitude and the impressionable young outcast, in his strange new land, did not care for it one bit.

He festered, withdrawing into a dark world of bitterness and frustration, to become a brooding, sullen loner. Young Saul, with South America in his blood, had felt very much out of place when his family first came to Fairfield County. In Greenwich, with its 60,000 residents, he was not only a long way from home
but also felt all the more isolated as he was part of the mere 1.4 percent of the town’s population that was of Hispanic origin.

In conservative Connecticut, pleasant beaches and rolling hills share the land with bustling cities and seafront casinos; it seems there is something for everybody. With such scenic treasures as Litchfield Hills, Housatonic River and Connecticut River Valley, the state also boasts a variety of parks, quaint village greens and hiking and biking trails. It also has its fair share of deep ravines. If a body were tossed into one of these it could be some time before anybody would find it.

Locked away in his small bedroom, Saul Dos Reis spent hundreds of hours on his computer. Soon he had gained a lot of experience of using chat rooms to ensnare underage girls. In cyberspace he could reinvent himself. He could become anyone he so chose.

Enchanted by the masses of syrupy dialogue spewing forth from him, impressionable teenage girls were very keen to engage with the young and pleasant-looking Dos Reis, who, if they were lucky, would send a photograph of himself. Of infinitely greater importance to the man on the other end of the modem, they would send through a picture of
them
selves.

He would pore over these images, fantasizing about all the things he could do to an attractive, all-American teenage girl. The pictures the girls sent in return only added more excitement to the anticipatory conversations they had shared online.

In 1998, Dos Reis had met a 15-year-old-girl from nearby Prospect with whom he had built a shadowy relationship in a chat room. The girl consented to intercourse with the tightly wound internet Casanova and, for reasons unknown, she was not harmed. Four years and countless obsessive chat room babblings later, Christina Long would not be so fortunate.

Pictures of Christina show a truly lovely young girl. Facing the camera, she is not bashful but smiles happily, her pretty features framed by her flowing golden-brown hair. To Dos Reis, she was a delightful-looking creature, poised and full of life. At her Catholic school, where she was a sixth grader, Christina was a good student. Besides heading the cheerleading squad, she was an altar girl.

“I’m so devastated,” said Andrea Cappiello, Christina’s onetime fifth-grade English and religious education teacher, when asked to comment on the sad death of her former pupil. “She was a very good student and a very good cheerleader. She was very spirited, just a doll.” But the girl also evidenced a harder side. “She was streetwise,” Andrea said. “But you could see the other side coming up, too. It’s clear she was very torn in both directions.”

For Christina was not without her problems.

After striking up some online conversations—chats which became increasingly sexually overt—the ostensibly all-American girl began to fall for the worldly seeming allure of Dos Reis. For example, apparently referring to a Lexus car, he used the screen name “Hot_es300” for the model. Obviously, his intention was to convey smoothness. And along with this came a barrage of lewd dialogue. As Danbury Police Chief Robert Paquette later revealed, “There was some pretty graphic stuff [in the chat room logs].”

Indeed, Christina was no stranger to sexual encounters with partners she had met over the internet. She had become absorbed in an ultimately destructive pattern of dating boys she had conversed with online. And sex was something she was more than prepared to engage in with her “boyfriends.”

She had come to the town of Danbury two years previously to live with her aunt, Shelly Riling, because her parents were heavy drug users. Riling, very concerned about her niece’s welfare, was eventually awarded custody of the girl. She apparently didn’t know anything about Christina’s online activities, although she had had to speak to her more than once about the late nights she sometimes kept.

Over the next several weeks, Dos Reis was finally able to persuade Christina to meet him. The two had several sexual encounters before their fateful rendezvous at the Danbury Fair Mall, and their final fatal date took place in the back seat of Saul’s car.

As Dos Reis is the last man to have seen Christina alive, we must rely on his word as to what occurred in the events leading to her murder. It is doubtful that the version offered by this rapist and strangler of a young girl has any real mooring in truth, but it is nonetheless instructive when exploring the mindset of a sexual criminal and his rationalizations.

Dos Reis later insisted to police that not only had Christina wanted sex but also that she had requested “rough sex.” Unfortunately, this had been taken a little too far and she had somehow accidentally ended up strangled and dead. If Dos Reis expects us to believe that in the throes of passion he had inadvertently choked his young partner, let us note that it takes around five minutes to strangle somebody to death.

Allegedly panicked by this sudden surge of violence, the young man drove to a remote ravine, where he dumped Christina’s body.

Not long afterward, when the police had linked him via an email indicating that he had agreed to meet Christina on that Friday night, Dos Reis immediately caved in and told them his
story. With the FBI involved, it was at their insistence that he led them to Christina’s violated corpse. He displayed not a trace of the bravado that had been the staple of his relationships with his “girls.” Rather, like a naughty puppy, he hung his head in shame. It seemed that his days of surfing the net for young teens were over. As it later transpired, this wasn’t the case.

Dos Reis was later arraigned in the U.S. District Court in Bridgeport on a charge of using an interstate device—the internet—to entice a child into sexual activity. He was ordered held without bond, with a bail hearing scheduled for later that week.

At his trial in Bridgeport, which lasted from Monday, March 3, to Monday, July 7, 2003, he pleaded guilty to manslaughter and three counts of second-degree sexual assault.

Sniffling and speaking so softly that the judge had to ask him repeatedly to speak up, Dos Reis, now 25, apologized for killing Christina Long. “I have not had a single night of sleep when I don’t wake up drenched in sweat,” he said.

Presiding Judge Patrick L. Carroll III said the apology should have come sooner. “That time for mercy was the evening your victim died at your hands,” he admonished the defendant.

During the “victim impact” phase of the case, and before handing down the maximum sentence allowable for the crimes, Judge Carroll heard several tear-filled statements from members of both Dos Reis’s and Christina’s families.

Christina’s grandfather, Lawrence Long, held nothing back, calling Dos Reis a “habitual predator” who used his computer, flashy car, money and previous life experiences to lure Christina to her death. Dos Reis’s supporters presented an entirely different picture, testifying as to how he had provided free meals to the needy at his father-in-law’s restaurant. When his father-in-law’s wife had cancer, Dos Reis cared for her and even
shaved his own head to make her feel more comfortable while she underwent chemotherapy.

After listening attentively to both sides, the judge handed down what he could: 30 years in a state prison on manslaughter and sexual assault charges. It was also made known that in September of the previous year Dos Reis had received a 25-year federal sentence on two charges of traveling in interstate commerce to engage in illegal sex with a minor.

Ten years of the federal sentence was to be served consecutively with the state sentence—a total of 40 years behind bars.

There was one niggling issue, however, and that was whether or not U.S. District Court Judge Stefan Underhill was unreasonable in the matter of Dos Reis’s sentencing, when he handed down a term that did not quite adhere to the usual sentencing guidelines. Under these guidelines Dos Reis’s offenses would have called for a sentence of a little more than seven years.

Later, in the Second Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, James Lenihan, Dos Reis’s lawyer, argued that the sentence was “unlawful” and should be sent back to the district court to be “substantiated.”

Lenihan also said that the district court “mistakenly noted that age was a factor to be considered” under the guidelines, but in fact the guidelines did not make reference to the victim’s age.

Although Christina’s death was not an element of the federal charge, the federal judge took the killing into consideration during the penalty phase. Kevin O′Connor, the state attorney for Connecticut, argued that Judge Underhill did not make a legal error. O′Connor said the departure was justified because the defendant “knowingly risked the life of his victim when he choked her.” He said the sentence was reasonable “in light of the horrific circumstances of the defendant’s strangulation of
Christina, dumping of her dead body, and efforts to cover up his involvement.”

Christina’s death received national attention and sparked a push in Congress for a kids-only domain on the internet. On May 27, 2003, it was announced that legislation allowing Connecticut Police to more swiftly investigate internet sex crimes like the one that led to the death of Christina Long had failed because state lawmakers were concerned about violating civil liberties.

So, while officials praised the quickness of the FBI in tracking down Dos Reis, state experts and local police felt that Connecticut’s reliance on federal agencies was unwise, given the rapid spread of internet sex crime. “Everybody has their own job to do,” said Danbury Detective Captain Mitchell Weston, “and we were lucky in this case that the FBI wasn’t in the middle of something.”

It seemed unlikely that the killing could have been prevented. FBI spokeswoman Lisa Bull said the FBI learned of previous contact between the girl and the older Dos Reis only during the investigation into her killing.

Laws proposed in the General Assembly would have helped track down the perpetrators in cases where police have knowledge of illegal internet contact between adults and children. The bureau responsible for dealing with internet crime—comprising only state police—have written bills empowering state authorities to more easily obtain internet users’ identities and communications logs.

In theory, these bills would have encompassed not only the use of internet messages to lure someone to a potentially indecent encounter, but also the murkier depths of the provision of indecent imagery of children. Unfortunately, they did not survive the legislative committee process.

Griswold’s Democrat representative, Steven Mikutel, a co-sponsor of one of the bills, said the legislature did not have the political will to make it law. “There is a group out there that doesn’t want to put any restrictions on the internet,” he said, adding, “They don’t want to invade anyone’s privacy. But public safety factors have to come into consideration here.”

Danbury Police Chief Robert Paquette offered this: “You’re getting into civil liberties now. I don’t think either the federal government or the state can go that far.”

Later, another man who had had sex with the clearly underage Christina was put out of commission. On March 15, 2004, 24-year-old Carlos Estanqueiro, also a former resident of Danbury, was sentenced to 46 months for the offense. He had pleaded guilty the previous December to using the internet for the purposes of “persuading a minor to engage in sex.”

Estanqueiro, it materialized, had met Christina over the internet in February 2002. The pair had subsequently engaged in sexual activities several times.

New Haven U.S. District Judge Janet B. Arterton ensured that, in addition to the prison time Estanqueiro would serve, there would be an additional three years of supervised release. It was further stipulated that Estanqueiro register as a convicted sex offender on his release. Arterton also ordered that he undergo mental-health counseling, not frequent locations where children are known to congregate and not use a computer except for work-related purposes. Estanqueiro was also an illegal alien. As such, he could be subject to deportation after serving his time.

The battle to protect children from internet stalkers continues. On one website visited by the authors, it is clear that help is available: