Murder.com by Christopher Berry-Dee, Steven Morris Read Free Book Online

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 peoplewho 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