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

Valentine’s Day, she told Flying Dust that she had to break up with him. Heflew 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 toldthe 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