Murder.com (4 page)

New Haven US District Judge Janet B Arterton ensured that, in addition to the prison time Estanqueiro would serve, there
would be a further 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 counselling, 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:

‘The freedom that makes the internet so useful also makes it dangerous. In teen chatrooms, sexual predators can hunt for their victims online, 24 hours a day,’ it warns. The existence of links such as ‘Wise up to Internet Predators’, ‘Protecting Kids From Internet Porn’ and ‘Children, Sex and the Web’ makes it clear that at least we are on the right track.

A lawyer and expert in the field of internet abuse, Parry Aftab, says, ‘Internet predators attempt to lure thousands of children every year to offline meetings.’

These are her guidelines:

Who’s at risk?

What’s the profile of an internet child molester?

How often does this happen?

Why do the children meet strangers offline?

What can you do to protect your children?

What’s being done to find these predators before they hurt a child?

Whom do you call if you suspect someone is involved with targeting children online?

A survey of 10,800 teenage girls conducted in 1998 showed that 12 per cent of the sample admitted to meeting up with strangers with whom they had first made contact via the internet. Two years later,
Family PC
reported that, in a survey of both sexes, 24 per cent of the teenage girls polled and 14 per cent of the teenage boys were meeting internet strangers offline.

It is truly a shame that Christina Long did not benefit from the various safety precautions now available on the internet. It took her death, among so many others, to bring home to us the dangers of the internet. Had her online activities been more closely monitored through this kind of education, she may never have had the opportunity to come into contact with her dysfunctional killer. Dos Reis was then, and in all likelihood still is, a very dangerous man.

As an obscene postscript to this terrible crime, it was recently discovered that Dos Reis was up to his old tricks again, this time inside prison. In search of female correspondents, he had set up a web page, although this now appears to have been removed. He included a photograph of himself, this time smiling and sporting a tuxedo. Above the ad he had selected the heading ‘The Right One’.

On his web page, Dos Reis went on to describe his perfect penpal as ‘A woman with a good heart that loves to write and that is not afraid of being herself’, adding, ‘I also look for a person that knows what she wants out of life.’

His readers could learn that: ‘I have many qualities which make me unique. I’m romantic, always funny, I always have a positive attitude and have many hidden things as well. I enjoy writing and being silly and funny’ and ‘I also always carry on interesting things to talk about. I’m not just another boring penpal…’

He decided to inform his prospective lonely hearts that he had been convicted of second-degree assault. So, with just a slight deviation from the truth yet again, the ‘Outgoing Heterosexual Male’ made it apparent that he ‘prefers female correspondents but will reply to all letters’. He also claimed to be ‘very good at telling stories which can and will have you shiver’.

Christina’s aunt, Shelly Riling, was shocked by the web page, denouncing it as a prime example of ‘predatory behaviour’. However, Dos Reis’s defence attorney, Peter Tilem, argued that his client’s web page is understandable. ‘This is someone who is going to spend the next 30 years in prison and he’s lonely and scared,’ he said. ‘We can’t imagine how lonely he feels, so I can understand.’

According to inmate.com, prisoners can place an ad for four months for $60 and $15 for each subsequent month. The website designs and posts the ad for the subscriber. Purchasers of premium advertisements, such as Dos Reis, are given a personal email box that allows people to respond to the ad via email. Once a week the service forwards the email responses to the inmate in a letter. And what a nice little earner this is for the site’s owners. For seed money outlay, they rake in $37,000 a year by making it possible for people such as Dos Reis to involve other people in their sickening fantasies from behind bars.

Christina’s aunt did not share Tilem’s assessment. ‘I can’t believe he has a website. It shows that he has a disease and is incurable. He hasn’t learned anything.’

Investigators involved with the Dos Reis case were at a loss to find a motive for the murder. Indeed, even the killer himself was unable to cast much light on his reason for strangling the young woman. However, we know from experience that many people
who spend long periods of time in chatrooms become of another world. Susan Gray, discussed later in this book, is a graphic example of the phenomenon.

These individuals find themselves becoming addicted to the chatrooms and perceive themselves as engaging in very real relationships with other visitors. They are people who have in most cases reinvented themselves to compensate for their own psychological and/or physical shortcomings. For those addicted to the chatrooms, it becomes a meeting of ‘loners’ who bring all of their psychological inadequacies along with them.

These people actually fall in ‘cyber love’ – in much the same way as couples do in the real world. Saul Dos Reis seems, for whatever reason, to have fallen in love with Christina Long in this way. He had become ‘fantasy-driven’. After years of rejection, he imagined he had found his ideal partner, even though she was underage. Christina was promiscuous and her sexual appetite, coupled with her pretty looks, no doubt further increased his need for her companionship. Nevertheless, after she had had sex with him a few times, the feisty girl wanted to dump him and move on. Rejected, and scorned again, Dos Reis killed her.

This scenario of a cyber
crime passionnel
is not quite as crazy as it first appears, as the following cases testify.

On 15 February 2004, a man was found trying to commit suicide at his home in Wuhan, China. Afterwards, he admitted that he had killed his cyber lover on Valentine’s Day evening.

The man, using the net name ‘Flying Dust’, got to know ‘Rain Drop’, a 25-year-old flower-shop keeper, at the end of 2003. They met in a chatroom, but Rain Drop’s parents disapproved of her having such an intimate online relationship. So, on Valentine’s Day, she told Flying Dust that she had to break up with him. He
flew into a rage and strangled her to death, and then tried to cut the arteries on his neck and wrists. ‘I love her, I want to be with her for ever,’ he said later, when asked why he had done it.

On Saturday, 17 April 2004, a man’s body was found in a hotel room in Dengshikou, Beijing. Zhang Yang had been killed by his cyber lover, Liang Yixia, because he refused to marry her. Liang was arrested when she came back to get her mobile phone charger.

According to Liang, in May 2003 she had been raped by three men she met on the internet, and they also took her money. After her ordeal, Zhang, a seemingly gentle and rich man, renewed her trust in cyber love. But, once they had had sex, he told her that for him to marry a cyber lover was impossible. Liang felt so humiliated that she fed him sleeping pills before strangling him with adhesive tape.

At the police station, Liang said she felt no regret for what she had done. ‘He deserved this punishment I gave him,’ she said repeatedly.

In 2001, a West Australian Supreme Court jury found a woman guilty of murdering her internet lover, after he tried to dump her when he discovered that she was married to a biker. The woman was caught on the home-security video of the man she murdered and is now serving a mandatory life sentence for the crime.

Thirty-four-year-old Margaret Hinchcliffe met Michael Ian Wright, aged 30, in an internet chatroom and the two soon began a sexual relationship. In November 1999, Hinchcliffe’s husband, Mark, found out about the affair and inflicted a series of punishments on his wife, driving her to seek help at a women’s refuge on two occasions. A worker from the refuge told
the court that Margaret had been badly beaten by her husband and that he had ordered her to shave her head. He also ordered her to have a tattoo done on her waistline that read ‘Property of Mark Hinchcliffe’.

Mark Hinchcliffe, a member of a bikers’ gang who called themselves the Coffin Cheaters’ Club, visited Wright and threatened him after beating him up. He then ordered his wife to kill Wright, an order she carried out on Sunday, 25 February 2000.

Margaret Hinchcliffe went to the home of Wright’s parents, and when Wright opened the door she shot him at point-blank range, unaware of the fact that the video security system had captured the act on film.

In Columbus, Ohio, Rickie Mandes slipped his old .45-calibre handgun into his pocket before taking one last moment in his lonely apartment to think about his two daughters. Within a few hours, those two girls, aged nine and 15, would be fatherless. Their lives would be shaken by a nightmare of violence, jealousy and revenge. Mandes would be dead, and so would Robert J Fry, the man he believed had stolen his wife’s affection over the internet.

Mandes felt his daughters needed some kind of explanation. And so, in a hastily scrawled note to them, he tried to provide one, writing that the pain and stress he felt after his wife, Rebecca, had left him for a man she had met over the internet was ‘too much for me to take. I am sorry for what I am about to do.’

Authorities said the 45-year-old Mandes confronted his wife and her new lover in the parking lot of the mail-order store where Fry worked and gunned him down, then turned the weapon on himself.

Acquaintances of the Mandeses, who had known the couple in happier days, closed ranks and have refused to discuss the events that led to the brutal murder and suicide. ‘They want their privacy,’ said long-time friend Tammy Campbell of the surviving members of the family.

According to police, the slaying was sparked by an internet romance that had blossomed over two and half months between 34-year-old Rebecca Mandes and 40-year-old Fry.

A little more than a month and a half after the whirlwind online romance began, Fry suddenly quit his job of 22 years at the Orient Correctional Facility in Ohio. He left his wife and children, and moved with Rebecca Mandes and her two girls into a house in the pleasant waterfront community of Westerly. Two weeks before the shooting, he took a job in the receiving department of Paragon Gifts store.

By all accounts, Rebecca’s decision to move out of the apartment she and her husband shared in Pawcatuck was equally abrupt.

There were a few domestic loose ends to be tied up, which provided Mandes with the opportunity he needed to exact his revenge on the man he believed had stolen his wife, so he and his wife had arranged to meet in the parking lot of Paragon Gifts about noon to exchange some items belonging to the daughters.

For a while they stood just outside the office window of Paragon Gifts’ president Stephen Rowley, waiting for Fry to leave work for his lunch break. About a dozen employees were milling about, and a little after 12.30pm Fry approached the pair.

With that, witnesses told police, Mandes pulled out the gun, said something to the effect of ‘This is what you get for messing with my wife’ and opened fire.

Stephen Rowley heard ‘what I’d call a pop, several of them close together’, he said. ‘Then there was a moment of silence, and another pop,’ which he later learned was the sound of the final bullet that crashed into Mandes’s skull, killing the jilted husband instantly.

Rebecca Mandes was not injured in the attack.

The broken-hearted man had left a short suicide note, simply saying, ‘I guess she’s doing all right.’

W
hen Jane Longhurst, a 31-year-old special-needs teacher from the English seaside town of Brighton, vanished without a trace on Friday, 14 March 2003, it was immediately flagged as suspicious. This conscientious, caring young woman would not just up and leave without telling anybody.

Originally from Reading, Jane had moved to the Sussex coast, where, in addition to her teaching, she was a skilled viola player in a local orchestra. She was a bubbly lady with chestnut hair and an effervescent smile. There was a gentle aura surrounding Jane which everyone she came into contact with would attest to.

Jane was described as stable, reliable and dependable and, when suddenly she wasn’t there any more, people took notice. There was no word to her family, friends or her employers. And what of the kids with learning disabilities at Uplands School, who were very close to Jane and relied on the kind and patient teacher to help them with their studies?

No one knew where Jane was; she had vanished into thin air.

The one person who realised straight away that something strange, possibly bad, had happened to Jane was her boyfriend, Malcolm Sentance. Very early on, Malcolm was extremely upset by her disappearance. The couple were extremely close and Malcolm had given her a warm hug and goodbye kiss as he left for work, at about 6.45 that morning, from their home in Shaftesbury Road, Brighton.

This was a routine the two followed each day: they would wake up, complete their morning rituals and bid their goodbyes as they set off for the day. It is what many of us do each morning, comfortable in the knowledge that all is well and that we will be seeing our loved one as usual later that evening.

Sometimes, though, terrible things occur, and they can
happen to anyone. Often the first sign that something is wrong is that our calls are not returned and our texts not responded to. This is what Malcolm Sentance would experience as that gloomy March day wore on, with his calls to Jane unanswered and the voicemail messages that he had left on her mobile phone ignored.

When Malcolm returned home at 3.40 that afternoon, there was no sign of Jane but he was not too worried. But as afternoon became evening his concern led him again to the phone. After fruitlessly calling friends and family, none of whom had heard from or seen Jane, he sat back in his armchair, by now deeply troubled. It was completely unlike Jane to have her phone switched off; even at the school where she taught, she would keep the mobile’s silent facility in operation – especially for him.

Contact by phone during the day was a precious thing to them both. Now Malcolm just could not dispel the feeling that all was not well, that Jane was in some kind of trouble.

When the clock struck midnight and there was still no sign of, or message from, Jane, he picked up the phone once again, this time to call the police. Though they were sympathetic, Jane’s disappearance was initially treated as a routine missing-person inquiry. But, as the weekend passed, with Malcolm in a state of near-panic, a disturbing realisation began to dawn on him.

Five full days after Jane Longhurst vanished, a major police investigation was launched. Officers occupied eight rooms at the Sussex Police Headquarters, and 20 detectives were initially assigned to what had been labelled Operation Keen. Since Jane’s disappearance, it was ascertained that her bank account had not been touched, her mobile phone was switched off and it did not
appear that she had taken any of her personal property, which would have suggested she was leaving Malcolm.

The police had pondered over every possible reason why Jane might simply vanish as she had. The two obvious possibilities were that she had been abducted and killed or that she had willingly accompanied someone and then been murdered. It seemed more likely that she had gone with someone of her own accord because, police later surmised, her physical fitness and strength would have ensured she would not have been taken off without a struggle.

Of course, a blow to the head or a threat from a weapon could equally have ensured her subjugation, but there was no indication that either had occurred. Therefore it seemed prudent to assume that someone had manipulated Jane Longhurst into a position where she could be physically controlled.

As time went on and the circumstances surrounding Jane’s disappearance became more suspicious and the chances of her being dead increased, the missing-person inquiry became a murder investigation and about 20 more detectives were assigned to what was now dubbed Operation Mystic. Up to 70 officers were now involved in the search.

Police helicopters clattered over areas throughout the county and fingertip searches were undertaken in parks, railway cuttings, woods and forests, but very few clues were unearthed.

In order to assist the inquiry, the
Argus
newspaper in Brighton agreed to distribute hundreds of wanted posters featuring the missing woman.

After four weeks in which nothing tangible had emerged, Sussex Police pledged £5,000 for information as they made a renewed appeal for help in finding Jane.

The following Thursday, Detective Inspector Chris Standard, who was heading the investigation, said at the first of a number of televised press conferences, ‘We hope that, by putting up this reward, we will prompt someone’s memory and subsequently locate Jane – that is the main focus of our inquiry.’

Malcolm, and Jane’s mother and sister, joined a news conference to appeal for help. When this achieved virtually nothing, to say the police were surprised would be an understatement. DI Standard admitted that in his 25-year-career as a police officer he had never known anything like it. Normally, appeals such as this produced a wealth of helpful leads. Here there was nothing. It began to seem as though the mystery of what had happened to Jane Longhurst would persist indefinitely.

The officer also admitted that there was by now only a slim chance that Jane was still alive. When he talked about ‘finding Jane’, he was speaking about finding her body.

Finally, on Saturday, 19 April 2003, everybody’s worst fears were confirmed. Jane was found and the circumstances were horrific. She had been discarded like an old mattress in a nature reserve 18 miles from her Brighton home. It seemed impossibly perverse that Jane’s lifeless corpse should end up in an RSPB bird sanctuary.

She had been throttled to death and her charred, still smouldering corpse had very recently been set alight with the help of a fire accelerant. Firefighters had been called to Wiggonholt Common, near Pulborough, West Sussex, at 8.30pm after a motorist spotted a plume of smoke between some trees just off the main road.

At first, the firefighters thought they were dealing with a
mound of rubbish that had been ignited. When it became clear that the blackened remains were those of a human being, they were initially unable to confirm if the body was that of a man or a woman, but the police later confirmed that it was indeed a female.

Jane had been missing for just over five weeks.

As she had been completely stripped of her belongings, police made it clear that they wanted to hear from anyone who may have had knowledge of where her blue Nokia 3310 mobile phone, black Next wallet, shoes and blue denim jacket were.

The following Monday, as tributes were paid to the popular teacher, the officer now leading the inquiry, Detective Chief Inspector Steve Dennis, announced, ‘Our job now is to find Jane’s killer.’ He explained at the press conference that the killer had attempted to dispose of the body as quickly as possible, just before dark. Was the killer afraid of the dark? Of what might be in it for him?

DCI Dennis went on to reveal: ‘Jane’s been kept somewhere, she’s been dead for a long time and she probably died shortly after she disappeared. They have tried to get rid of her in a fit of panic, something spooked them to deposit her where they did, and then they’ve tried to burn the evidence.’

Ominously, he added that the body had been ‘well preserved’ for the four or five weeks since the murder.

What had Jane’s murderer been doing with her?

DCI Dennis rounded off the conference with a message that police were keen to trace three cars seen in the area where the body was discovered.

A statement from Jane’s family, read out at the press conference, said, ‘While we expected the worst, none of us could
be prepared for how devastating this is. We’ve lost a devoted daughter, sister and partner. All who knew her loved Jane and she enjoyed life to the full. She will be missed terribly and her death has left a hole in our lives.’

Colleagues of the murdered school teacher paid tribute to her, describing her as a ‘delightful, genuine and caring person’.

Still hindered at this point by the lack of a viable suspect in Jane’s murder, the police started appealing again. ‘Now is the time for anyone with any information about Jane to come forward,’ said DCI Dennis. ‘As a matter of routine we have been speaking to people who are significant in Jane’s life. At this time, however, there are no suspects.’

This is a procedure that occurs in most murder cases. Everybody needs to be eliminated from the inquiry. As police were quick to suggest, it was likely that Jane knew her killer, though they could not rule out the possibility of a stranger being responsible.

In another statement read at a press conference, Jane’s mother and her sister, along with Malcolm Sentance, appealed for the person, or persons, who may be harbouring the killer to give him up: ‘We are slowly coming to terms with what has happened to Jane and pulling together as a family to support each other during such a difficult time. Our main aim now is to find the person who did this and to make sure justice is done. Recent publicity has prompted a lot of people to come forward and we would reiterate the appeals that the police have been making. Anyone who knows anything about what happened, we beg you to come forward. If you are protecting a loved one, or you think someone is hiding something, try to imagine how you would feel if this was your daughter or partner or sister who has been killed
this way. You too would want to find the person who did it. If you know or suspect anything please contact the police.’

When Jane’s horribly burned remains were removed from the desolate woodland where they had been dumped, the police undertook a meticulous search of the area. They found some items that were deemed to be part of a ‘significant breakthrough’. Among them were the match used to set light to Jane’s dead body, a box of matches – presumably where the match had come from – and Jane’s wristwatch. The items were rapidly sent for forensic testing. With these finds entered into evidence, DCI Dennis soon made it apparent that his team were ‘one step behind’ the killer.

‘[The items] were found around the area where Jane was set on fire – it may be that they have nothing to do with the inquiry but they could also provide vital clues as to who her killer is,’ he said, then, looking pointedly into the television cameras before him, he made a direct appeal to the murderer. ‘If you are Jane’s killer then please come forward now and speak to us. We want to hear from you and find out what has happened. This is the chance to tell us.’

Following all these impassioned appeals from the police and the victim’s family, more than 100 calls were made to Sussex Police in relation to the murder hunt. At first, the information did not seem too encouraging. Then a name came up and the police zeroed in immediately. The name was Graham Coutts. Coutts was the boyfriend of one of Jane’s friends, Lisa Stephens, and it was learned that Jane had made a telephone call to the couple’s flat on the day she went missing.

It was around this time that another name, Paul Kelly, surfaced, as a result of staff at the Big Yellow Storage Company
in Brighton becoming suspicious and alerting the police about an unpleasant smell emanating from the space Mr Kelly had rented. The call was prompted by the extensive coverage surrounding Jane’s disappearance.

When officers were dispatched to check the storage unit on Monday, 28 April, they made some crucial discoveries. Mr Kelly had Jane Longhurst’s mobile phone there, along with her denim jacket, her purse and her swimming kit. Also found was a bloodstained shirt, later discovered to belong to Graham Coutts. The blood on the shirt turned out to be Jane Longhurst’s.

In addition, there was a condom containing semen – Graham Coutts’s semen.

A tarpaulin and a roll of adhesive tape were also present in the space, along with a plastic petrol can.

Mr Coutts certainly had some explaining to do, the more so because he had been captured on CCTV purchasing a can of petrol, a toilet roll and bin liners from a Texaco garage next to the King Alfred Leisure Centre in Hove, adjacent to Brighton. Around 40 minutes after this recording was made, Coutts was seen by a motorist on the common leading to the bird reserve and Jane Longhurst’s burning body.

When police initially interviewed 35-year-old Coutts, a former musician, originally from Leven in Scotland, and his girlfriend, Lisa Stephens, it became apparent that they had been friendly with Jane Longhurst and Malcolm Sentance for some five years.

Subsequently, it was learned that it was Coutts who had answered the phone when Jane had called that day in March. On the pretext of joining her for a swim at the local baths, Coutts instead lured Jane to his flat. Unbeknownst to her, he had decided to play some of his favourite games with her and,
unfortunately for her, his sexual pleasure was in the front of his twisted mind.