Murder.com (7 page)

There must be scores of latent sex monsters waiting to emerge into the real world once their daily diet of internet horrors is no longer enough to quench their dark and morally perverse cravings. The beast that is Graham Coutts was just one of them.

The tragic case of Jane Longhurst raises more questions than it provides answers. Clearly, Jane was a thoroughly decent and lovely young woman whose precious life was brought to an end at the hands of a depraved monster. This loss can never be replaced. However, I am obliged to focus this postscript more towards the worthless Graham Coutts than his victim, for we can learn much from his behaviour.

Clearly, Coutts was a man predisposed towards anti-social behaviour, as this account has shown, whose tendencies were catered for by certain websites. It is also correct to say that many individuals of his ilk commit similar crimes without being exposed to pornography published on the internet. We only have to look at other men – Ted Bundy, Michael Bruce Ross, Ed Kemper and legions of others who have been exposed to pornography through magazines and video – to know that before the advent of the internet the same types of sex-related murders were being committed.

Invariably, most of these offenders shift the blame for their actions on to their exposure to pornography, as Ted Bundy has stated unequivocally, ‘I was exposed to pornography for years. It led me to my violent ways.’

The argument as to whether long periods of exposure to hardcore porn encourages or triggers rape or sexual homicide has led to a division of opinion into two main camps. There are those who say that there is no empirical evidence to support the contention that exposure to this type of material encourages and triggers these crimes. The other side maintains the opposite.

I would be failing in my role as a criminologist if I did not highlight the obvious fact that millions of men, and a smaller number of women, do enjoy access to hardcore pornography, whether through the internet or through other media, and this appears to have no adverse effects on them as far as anti-social behaviour is concerned.

This being said, we are quite sure most will agree that for a minority of people – those with a latent disposition to committing such offences, as well as those without the normal psychological balancing mechanisms enjoyed by most of us, coupled with low self-esteem and, perhaps, underlying psychiatric problems – exposure to hardcore porn of the kind enjoyed by Graham Coutts is extremely destructive indeed.

Going further, Steven Morris, my co-author, has made an interesting and, I believe, valid observation. He suggests that people like Coutts who harbour such destructive fantasies may actually find support for their warped thinking when visiting these sites which boast tens of thousands of seemingly like-minded users.

‘Subconsciously, Coutts felt he was joining some kind of club,’ says Steven. ‘With his already predisposed warped mindset, these sites started to legitimise his way of thinking.’

This is a perceptive line of thought, and the same rationale may be applied to other types of website, for those concerned
with giving help to would-be suicides and with euthanasia offer similar ‘membership-type’ content that implies ‘that one is not alone’. For loners, in most cases people who are lacking in connection with the real world, these sites become very powerful influences and motivators.

For most people, visiting these sites is merely a ‘healthy’ outlet for their fantasies and no real long-term harm is done. However, there will always be a few individuals – as is illustrated by the cases of the cannibal Armin Meiwes and his victim; the suicidal Suzy Gonzales; and Sharon Lopatka, who wanted to be murdered by an internet lover – who will go beyond the norm, however extreme the ‘norm’ on the internet might appear to be.

Whether Coutts would have killed Jane had he not visited the sites he did is a matter for conjecture – we cannot get inside his head and read his mind. But we can say with confidence that his exposure to these sites pushed him further into his fantasy world.

And it is here that I would like to leave you with a few chilling facts. Please make of them what you will.

There are over 80,000 websites dedicated to snuff rape and killings, cannibalism and necrophilia.

Law-enforcement agencies in the USA, including the FBI, the Customs Service and the National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS), say that medium- to long-term exposure to pornography can trigger sex crimes, including serial rape and sexual homicide.

It is interesting to note that the FBI found that 81 per cent of the serial murderers they interviewed had been exposed to pornography for long periods and indulged in compulsive masturbation.

Every single day of the week, thousands more men, and some women, are committing sex-related crimes, including rape and murder, after exposing themselves to internet pornography, when, without the exposure, they would not have done so.

X-rated internet pornography is a cancer. But there seems to be no way to cut out this social disease and the number of crimes involved is growing exponentially: at any one time over three thousand such crimes are listed on internet pages. Almost every US state has sites dedicated to listing internet-generated sex crimes within its legal jurisdiction. (Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg, for there is also a thriving world of sexual offences not related to the internet.)

In 2003, the web filtering service N2H2 reported that the number of pornographic web pages topped 260 million and that the figure was still growing at an unprecedented rate. N2H2’s database contained 14 million identified pages of pornography in 1998, so the growth to 260 million represents an almost 21-fold increase in just five years. In five years’ time… well, you can work that out for yourself.

For an individual interested – and many are well and truly hooked – in all forms of pornography, this is the equivalent of having instant access to pornographic books and magazines offering a total of 260 million pages of illicit material and images – with hundreds more such publications, covering every conceivable sexual subject, being delivered daily to his home.

Long gone are the days when Dad popped down to the newsagent to collect his fishing magazine and returned home to discreetly slip a copy of
Playboy
under the bedroom carpet.

At the time of writing there are more than 1.3 million porn
websites, and N2H2 says that more than 32 million individuals visited at least one in September 2003 – figures for 2005 are not yet available – and of these nearly 22.8 million (71 per cent) were male.

I
t was bound to happen. First, proponents of the culture of death brought us physician-assisted suicide (PAS). Now we must contend with IAS – internet-assisted suicide. For the promotion and facilitation of self-destruction has entered cyberspace. And how indifferent to the value of human life certain segments of our society have grown, and how callous they are when faced with a despairing person driven to contemplate suicide.

First they bestow moral permission.

Then they teach the intending suicide how to do it.

Finally they keep the person company until the deed is done.

It is the modern version of the howling crowd yelling ‘Jump! Jump!’ at the suicidal figure standing on the window ledge of a tall building.

Wearing a fuchsia wig and carrying a stuffed two-headed cat that she’d stitched together from scratch, 19-year-old Suzy Gonzales zipped around the small ranching town of Red Bluff, Florida, on a red scooter. She came from a tight-knit family, favoured tartan skirts with green sneakers, had earned a full scholarship to Florida State University and possessed a radiant smile.

But she was severely depressed and wanted to kill herself.

Unbeknownst to her loved ones and friends, the teenager logged on to an obscure internet site to confide her darkest thoughts to strangers. There she found people who told her that suicide was an acceptable way to end her despair, and who gave her instructions on how to obtain a lethal dose of potassium cyanide and mix it into a deadly cocktail.

If this sounds vaguely familiar, it should. America’s assisted-suicide advocacy groups have promoted the idea of suicide as the ‘ultimate civil right’ for years. And, just as the denizens of the internet site taught Suzy Gonzales how to kill herself, some publications have long instructed readers how to commit suicide, while conventions regularly feature guest speakers who bring their newly invented suicide machines for conventioneers to ooh and aah over. The devices are a much favoured, and almost instantly available, method of self-dispatch.

During the early hours of Sunday, 23 March 2003, after she cleaned her apartment and fed her kittens, Gonzales checked
into a Tallahassee motel, where she stirred the poison into a glass of tap water, checked its acidity with a pH meter and drank it.

Her family, her best friend and the Tallahassee Police were notified of her death by time-delayed emails that she had prepared with the help of another member of the online community.

‘One last note – I will make this short, as I know it will be hard to deal with. If you haven’t heard by now, I have passed away.

‘I know I should have told you, but I have been depressed and suicidal for a long, long time – it is all right to be sad and it is all right to cry. These types of things tend to happen, and it really isn’t that big of a deal. Death is just another part of life.’

Gonzales’s is the fourteenth confirmed suicide associated with the online discussion group, which the authors do not identify. An additional 14 suicides are listed as ‘success stories’ but cannot be verified because the individuals used anonymous screen names and the group has refused to disclose their identities.

In fact, the number of suicides linked to the group may be higher. There is evidence that at least one person, who never actually communicated with the group, killed herself after downloading its instructions on how to commit suicide by inhaling carbon monoxide.

Founded in 1990, the group defines its philosophy as being ‘pro-choice’ as regards suicide. Participants view the act as a civil right that anyone should be able to exercise, for whatever reason.

Every day the internet site is filled with hopeless rants about life’s miseries, advertisements for suicide partners and requests for feedback on self-murder plans. Among the hottest items is a ‘Murder Methods file’, a step-by-step guide on how to commit suicide, by methods ranging from asphyxiation to rat poison.

The group vigorously defends itself, citing what it sees as a
need for people to express suicidal thoughts without fear of being hospitalised by their therapists or alarming their families. But mental-health experts, and the relatives of group members who have died, charge that the group actually encourages depressed people to kill themselves.

The suicide group that Suzy Gonzales found has made a few headlines outside America. In one case, a 20-year-old Norwegian man placed an ad for a suicide partner. It was answered by a 17-year-old Austrian girl, the two met and in February 2000 they flung themselves off Norway’s 1,900-foot Pulpit Rock.

A year later a German man and a Californian woman, both in their forties, made a similar pact and shot themselves dead in a Monterey hotel.

Again in America, a 30-year-old unemployed salesman drove to a campsite overlooking the scenic Colorado River, lit the two charcoal grills he had stowed in his car and closed the windows. He died from inhaling the noxious gases.

Then there was the English teenager who hanged himself. Just before doing so, the 17-year-old created a website that opened with the message: ‘Hi, and welcome to the homepage of my death.’

Suzy Gonzales first contacted the group on 12 January 2002, when she started a survey entitled ‘Why Do You Want To Die?’ She answered her own question first.

‘I’m bored. I am bored with life,’ she wrote. ‘I cannot possibly think of anything I want to do that is worth doing. I just want to sleep all day.’ She added that she was tired, sad and could enjoy nothing.

Over the next two months, Suzy sent more than 100 messages to the group. She described taking antidepressants that didn’t improve her mood, dropping out of Florida State University,
where she was studying maths and meteorology, and calling a suicide hotline about ‘a friend’ before losing her nerve and hanging up to cry.

‘I have a wonderful family who will support me in all that I do,’ she wrote. ‘I make enough money to get by. I have a few close, excellent friends. I’m not hideous nor morbidly obese. I’m no toothpick supermodel, though. I am just your average Joan who has everything to lose and is willing to lose it for absolutely no reason. I am tired. I want to sleep.’

Like the relatives of other members of the online group who have killed themselves, Mike and Mary Gonzales had no idea of their daughter’s involvement with it until after her death.

When Suzy’s father, a robust 43-year-old retired firefighter, speaks of the online group, rage simmers beneath his controlled exterior. ‘She went to that group, and it was like throwing gasoline on a fire,’ said Mike Gonzales, whose own father died from a long-term illness a week before his daughter killed herself. ‘I’m all for free speech, but, once you start telling young impressionable kids how to kill themselves, that’s crossing the line. Someone should be held accountable.’

Mike Gonzales was particularly close to his daughter. They frequently chatted online and by telephone. Such was his devotion to Suzy that, when she became distressed after the September 11th terrorist attacks, he flew across the country and drove her back home to be with her family.

Mary Gonzales, a 50-year-old hospital administrator, believes that, if her youngest girl could have held on a little longer, she would have learned to navigate the ebbs and flows of life and blossomed into a strong, soulful woman. Instead, she stumbled across an online group that told her that life was not worth living.

‘They [the group] never told her that people do work through depression and get better and go on to live happy lives,’ said Mary, whose voice often dissolves into silence when she tries to put into words what happened. ‘They never gave her hope.’

It took several attempts, Suzy wrote to the group, but she was able to order potassium cyanide online as well as a pH meter, ‘so I can be sure that the concoction isn’t too basic/acidic for my throat’.

To get the materials, Gonzales used a trick recommended by other group members.

Posing as a jeweller, she ordered the cyanide online, ostensibly to polish metal. She also requested several other chemicals to make her order look genuine. Her order, billed to Winston Jewellers, didn’t raise a red flag at the Massachusetts chemical manufacturer that sold her the poison.

‘All the materials she ordered points to a legitimate jewellery operation,’ said Darrell Sanders, who oversees chemical sales at Alfa Aesar. ‘She fooled me – and it hurts, emotionally.’

Suzy patterned her suicide after another member of the group, Dave Conibear, who killed himself in 1992. The 28-year-old Canadian software engineer detailed online the exact proportions of his cyanide concoction. He timed a message to be delivered to the group after his death, and even programmed his computer to dial 911, the emergency services’ number.

Two weeks before she died, Suzy cryptically signed her message ‘2 weeks seven days’, before she signed off with ‘one week’.

On 21 March she wrote, ‘Today, I feel great. Besides feeling a bit light-headed, I feel good. The sun is shining, the air is warm. It feels like such a nice day to just lie in the sun. To quote Richie
Tenenbaum, “I am going to kill myself tomorrow.” I’ve stopped taking my meds so I’m not happy and decide that life is not worth living. I will just get down again someday… I am preventing that.’

Suzy Gonzales last talked to her parents on the evening of 22 March, explaining that she was looking for air tickets to return to California for her grandfather’s funeral.

The last thing she said to her father was: ‘I love you, Dad. I’ll see you soon.’

In December 2002, a Kansas woman named Joanne Hossack filed a wrongful-death suit against a member who posted a message to the same group that Suzy had contacted. In the message, the group member said that she had talked on the phone with Hossack’s 17-year-old son and ‘kept him company’ as he intentionally overdosed on drugs. Hossack dropped the case after learning that her son’s online friend was also a troubled minor.

In May of that year, two Englishmen, Michael Gooden and Louis Gillies, had met through another group, Alternative Suicide Holidays, and made a pact to jump together off a cliff in East Sussex. But, while 35-year-old Glasgow-born Gooden plunged to his death off Beachy Head in June, 36-year-old Gillies changed his mind at the last minute and narrated the episode in a posting online, saying that ‘the act was inspirational’.

Investigators found Gillies’s posting and arrested him for violating the UK’s Suicide Act, which makes it illegal to aid, abet or counsel another person to commit suicide and carries a jail sentence of up to 14 years.

When Gillies failed to appear in court, police went to his flat in London’s West End to find he had hanged himself.

To return to Suzy Gonzales, until 12.01am on 23 March she was conversing online about her deadly itinerary with a member of the suicide group who called himself ‘River’. But River did nothing to stop her.

‘Suzy had me proofread her notes, and we went over all the details of her exit just to be safe,’ he wrote to the group after her suicide, which he referred to as a passage into ‘transition’.

The only information that Mike and Mary Gonzales have about River is that he mentioned he was living in central Florida with a wife and an 18-year-old son.

A few minutes past midnight on 23 March, Suzy Gonzales composed her final note to the group. ‘Goodnight,’ read the subject line.

‘Bye everyone, see you on the other side,’ she wrote, ending the note with her characteristic ‘! Suzy’.

‘Smooth sailing,’ one person online responded.

‘I’ll be following soon,’ replied another sad individual.

Shortly after sending the message, Suzy tucked the can of cyanide into her purse, got into her car and drove to the Red Roof Inn.

In the United States, laws on assisted suicide were passed to prevent people deliberately helping others end their lives by supplying them with a method, such as enough drugs for a fatal overdose, or physically assisting them.

‘Simply informing someone how to kill themselves is another matter,’ said euthanasia activist Derek Humphrey, who wrote a suicide manual for the terminally ill entitled
Final Exit
.

‘I’ve been monitoring the US assisted-suicide laws for more than 20 years, and it does not appear that counselling is a crime,’ he said.

Group members say that discussing their suicidal inclinations online is much easier than in real life.

‘When online, I am calm and collected, but give me a couple of seconds of talking about [suicide] in person and it’s the same as with the suicide hotline,’ Suzy Gonzales wrote ten days before her death. ‘I get shaky and start crying. And then I just feel silly – basically, I just need a friend who will understand me.’

These groups ‘exist because they wanted to be in a space where they wouldn’t be controlled’, says Lauren Weinstein, co-founder of People for Internet Responsibility, which studies cyberspace issues. ‘Fundamentally, these groups bring with them all the benefits and all the risks that are present with unfettered communication.’

Had Suzy Gonzales told a therapist that she had both a plan and a means to kill herself, she could have been forcibly hospitalised. ‘It could be considered malpractice and we could be sued if we didn’t,’ said Herbert Hendin, medical director for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.

Michael Naylor, a psychiatrist at the University of Illinois at Chicago, suggested that Suzy Gonzales’s cryptic countdown and repeated recounting of her plans could have been a cry for help that was ignored by the online group.

‘The only purpose [this group] serves is helping people to kill themselves,’ said Naylor, adding, ‘What a lot of these [people] don’t seem to realise is that suicide is the last choice you get to make. Once you’re dead, you can’t undo that. Life isn’t a game that can be played over again.’