Murder.com (9 page)

That same day Bobby Glass was arrested at his workplace – 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 26 October, 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 sensationalise 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.

‘The Mardi gras phenomenon’ is a term used by psychologists to describe the ability to mask oneself and assume a variety of personalities, allowing one to speak and act freely with little or no consequence. This phenomenon is particularly prevalent on the internet, where users can use online chatrooms and news groups to air their opinions and vent their feelings uninhibitedly and in many cases anonymously.

Sharon’s death and the publicity surrounding the case led to a
growth in interest in understanding deviant sexual behaviours, especially sadism, masochism and the use of asphyxia during sexual intercourse.

The pioneering 19th-century German psychologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing first coined the terms ‘sadist’ and ‘masochist’ to describe behaviour in which sexual arousal was achieved through, respectively, the infliction and reception of pain.

According to Reber’s
Dictionary of Psychology
, sadism is the association of sexual pleasure with the inflicting of physical and psychic pain on another, including humiliation, exploitation and debasement. Masochism refers to ‘any tendency to direct that which is destructive, painful or humiliating against oneself’.

It was Sigmund Freud who was the first to combine the two terms into ‘sadomasochism’ in order to emphasise the reciprocity of the use of pain during sexual intercourse.

A controversial form of deviant sexual play practised by some sadomasochists employs strangulation. Psychologists use the word ‘asphyxiophilia’ in connection with sexual strangulation. By this they mean the practice of controlling or restricting oxygen to the brain by ‘interfering with the breath directly or through pressure on the carotid arteries’ in order to achieve sexual gratification. In many cases, the hands are used or a tourniquet is tied around the throat during intercourse or masturbation to achieve the feeling of euphoria and elation that accompanies a lack of oxygen to the brain. Supposedly, this can increase the intensity of orgasm.

According to
The Deviants’ Dictionary
, sexual strangulation practised with a partner is a form of ‘edge play’, in which one’s life is literally in the hands of another. The thrill is said to lie in
the danger and vulnerability associated with the activity. However, there have been cases in which edge play has resulted in unintentional death.

The American Psychiatric Association claims that each year in the United States about 250 deaths occur involving strangulation or chokeholds during sexual activity. A large majority of these fatalities have occurred during auto-erotic asphyxiation, in which one restricts one’s own oxygen during masturbation, or ‘solo play’.

Jay Wiseman, of the Society for Human Sexuality, confirms this finding, saying that only a few of the cases where death occurs as a result of strangulation or a chokehold involve sexual play with a partner.

What makes Sharon Lopatka’s case exceptional is that she ventured into the relationship with Bobby Glass with one apparent intention – to die. In short, she was a suicidal masochist. But she was not the first in history to seek out a willing participant who would fulfil a request to be strangled to death for sexual gratification.

Knud R Joergensen wrote in 1995 about the case of composer Franz Kotzwara, who in 1791 enlisted the help of a London prostitute, Susannah Hill, to assist him with his bizarre wish. After paying Hill two shillings, Kotzwara asked her to cut off his genitalia – a request the prostitute refused. Yet Hill did agree to her client’s sexual wish to strangle himself with a rope. It was the first documented case of death by sexual strangulation. Hill was eventually arrested for Kotzwara’s murder, but later acquitted when the authorities learned that she was more or less an innocent bystander. By contrast, Bobby Glass, 200 years later, faced first-degree murder charges for the sexual strangulation
death of Sharon Lopatka, though the charge was eventually reduced to voluntary manslaughter.

The case against Glass included several lengthy delays and dragged on for three years. But on 27 January 2000 he pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter, as well as to six counts of second-degree sexual exploitation of a minor that resulted from the discovery of other pornographic material on his computer. He was sentenced to 36 to 53 months in prison for the manslaughter of Sharon Lopatka and 21 to 26 months for the possession of child pornography.

He was sent to Avery-Mitchell Correctional Institution in North Carolina. On 20 February 2002, two weeks before his release, Bobby Glass had a heart attack. He was pronounced dead at 1.30am at Spruce Pine Community Hospital in North Carolina.

Among Sharon’s final messages posted on the internet is a note addressed to people who had sent for the videos, failed to receive them and posted their own notes, calling the advertisements a fraud. ‘I’m just one person trying to fill all these orders. I don’t even have time to HAVE A LIFE,’ she complained.

But perhaps the last, poignant word should go to Reverend Clarence Widener, who had officiated at Mr Glass’s wedding many years earlier. He said, ‘He was a very nice fellow. I don’t know what could have happened to him.’

O
riginally, it was Anastasia Solovyova alone who dreamed of settling in America. The beautiful blonde daughter of two music instructors from Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, excelled at piano and chorus but also studied English assiduously, babysat for an American diplomat in Bishkek and, when she was old enough, joined a bridal agency that would introduce her to American bachelors.

For all of her success in Kyrgyzstan, it was apparent that the 18-year-old ethnic Russian felt that she could build a better life
by leaving the former Soviet republic and heading for the United States.

So, when the mail-order bride agency delivered a squat, balding man of almost 40, both she and her parents optimistically saw Gifford Indle King Jr for his finer qualities: intelligent, attentive, well dressed, and he spoke glowingly of his upper-middle-class life and family back in America.

After a few meetings, the Solovyov family was sold.

In their small apartment in Bishkek, Anastasia’s parents had no way of knowing that their future son-in-law was actually bisexual, a financial and emotional failure, a man with a history of relying on his well-to-do parents for money and a proclivity for violent relationships. Nor could they have conceived that, just a few years earlier, he had been divorced by Yekaterina Kazakova, another mail-order bride whose court petition alleged that he had hit her in the head with his fist, thrown her against a wall and repeatedly pounded her head against it.

Unaware of King’s previous history with international marriage, Anastasia Solovyova soon left Bishkek for a comfortable townhouse just north of Seattle. ‘At first she seemed happy. She thought she loved him,’ said Natasha Jankauskas, 22, who worked with Anastasia King at a downtown Seattle seafood restaurant soon after she arrived in America. ‘But they were never suited for each other… She was tall, beautiful and outgoing, and her husband was very monotone and pretty unattractive.’

After a few months, the couple’s problems exceeded mere incompatibility. ‘He started getting frustrated with her,’ Natasha remembered. ‘And then it got to the point where Anastasia came into work crying one day because he had smacked her during a driving lesson.’

Yet Natasha, a music teacher, later described Anastasia as ‘amazingly hard-working’ and a ‘universal favourite, constantly surrounded by friends. She persevered and even thrived in America’.

Anastasia studied with determination when she wasn’t working as a restaurant hostess and within two years gained admittance to the prestigious University of Washington, where she intended to study law.

At the same time, she appeared to be bracing for her own legal battle. She began keeping a diary and journals to document the increasingly dysfunctional relationship with her husband, and eventually stored them in a safety deposit box at a local bank, away from his controlling eye.

According to court documents, the diary detailed ‘instances where [Anastasia King] was the victim of domestic violence, invasion of privacy and sexual assault’. It also included mentions of her ensuing disgust with her husband and evidence of her own extramarital affairs.

Indle King filed for divorce in 2000. In September of that year, Anastasia visited her parents in Kyrgyzstan and then flew back to Seattle, but never returned to work. Co-workers reported her missing on 2 October. Then, on 28 December, police found her body wrapped in a dog blanket and buried in a shallow grave at a scrapyard on the Tulalip Indian reservation north of Seattle. But, just when Anastasia’s already stunned family and friends were expecting murder charges to be filed in Snohomish County Superior Court against her husband, the investigation began to focus on Daniel Kristopher Larson, a 20-year-old registered sex offender who himself had rented a room briefly at the Kings’ home.

It was Larson who first brought investigators to Anastasia King’s body, after he claimed that Indle King had made a confession to him. However, further questioning led them to conclude that Larson himself had strangled her while her 270-pound husband pinned her down. Furthermore, investigators said, one of the reasons for the murder was that Anastasia had discovered that Larson and her husband were lovers.

At King’s trial, Anastasia’s father shook his finger at the killer and berated him in Russian for his cruelty. ‘You dragged her to the grave you dug… You stripped her corpse, mocking her. You saw the ring on her finger and you cut off her finger. What cruelty! You placed her body face down into the dirt – your beloved wife. An ordinary person cannot even imagine it.’

Because Larson was already in jail for soliciting sex with a 16-year-old Ukrainian girl, prosecutors had worried that he was an unreliable witness. Anastasia King’s funeral took place in Seattle on Saturday, 3 February 2003, at St Nicolas’s Cathedral on Capitol Hill. Her grave is under a young evergreen tree in a local cemetery.

Whatever the specifics of why, how or even who committed the crime, people agree that the woman from Kyrgyzstan was ultimately a victim of the leap of faith her family took to help her find a new life in the USA.

Ironically, in the process of trying to come to terms with their grief in this faraway country, Anastasia’s father, 63, and mother, 55, had also fallen under America’s spell. At the end of two weeks which had included gruelling interviews with the prosecution, at a tearful Orthodox memorial service for their daughter the grieving couple held what was to be their final press conference. ‘I hope,’ Anatoly Solovyov told the assembled reporters wearily,
‘that authorities will find a possibility to allow us to remain here for the rest of our lives.’

On 23 March 2002, Larson was sentenced to 20 years in prison and King to 29 years.

The case of Anastasia Solovyova was not the first internet-related homicide to visit Seattle.

Susanna Blackwell met her husband through an internet marriage agency and in 1994 left her native Philippines to move to Washington State to marry him. During their short marriage, Timothy Blackwell regularly abused his wife physically and within a few months she had left him and begun divorce proceedings. The couple had been separated for more than a year when Timothy Blackwell learned that Susanna was eight months pregnant with another man’s child. On the last day of the divorce proceedings, he shot and killed Susanna, her unborn child and two friends who were waiting outside the Seattle courtroom.