Though his emails continued to be filled with promises of love, Myers returned to Japan in September 2006. On October 8 of that year, he sent Joanne an email explaining what was happening in his life:
This is the most difficult letter I will ever write. There have been so many changes in my life in the past 4 days that I am so confused and sad, yet happy.
There are some things that I did not tell you because I never thought they would ever become an issue.
You had asked me a long time ago if I had ever been married. I misread it and thought you asked if I was married. Then you asked me a similar question again and at the time we were not ‘serious’ and I never thot we would ever be, so I just said no. Well, I was married some time ago and I also have two children who I have not seen in a very long time and did not ever expect to see any time soon. Well, 4 days ago they came to Japan. I was shocked, surprised, yet happy to see them after so many years. I have a daughter 16 and a son 14. It has been so hard on me. I had to take a couple days off work and have been scrambling to get into housing which fortunately was not too difficult, yet stressful. My doctor says this was not a good thing for me, but maybe it will help me. I have not been avoiding you, I just have not been online due to the move.
I’m so sorry Joanne. I love you so much, but I will not blame you if you hate me or don’t want to ever talk to me again.
One other thing that surprises me is that their mother, who I have not spoken with in several years came along with them, so I have to provide her a place to stay.
I was able to get a 4-bedroom house and we are all living here together.
I’m not real happy about her being here, but have no choice in the matter.
I love you with all my heart. The doc says I probably shouldn’t have made arrangements for a wedding because that has added a lot of stress on top of the PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder]. I don’t know what to do.
You have been so much of a comfort and joy to me. I love you so much.
Please forgive me. I don’t know what I’m doing anymore. This deployment has wreaked havoc on my psyche and my mind. I’m not the person I was before I deployed. There were so many awful things I saw and was involved in over there.
I’m not asking for sympathy, just for forgiveness.
I love you Joanne
“I was stunned and hurt, and felt so betrayed,” Joanne said. “But I thought we could work through it. I loved him enough to forgive him. He knew my past and how I had a hard time forgiving … but this time I was willing to forgive him. I wanted to be with him. He was my world, the man I was going to marry. I was just going to accept that he made a huge mistake.” But he wouldn’t talk to her.
Joanne was so desperate to salvage their relationship that she made plans to move to Japan to help Myers deal with his PTSD. She had the paperwork for her passport expedited and told her family, friends, and employer that she was going to Japan. On October 13, she waited for Myers to come online so she could tell him she was coming to Japan to be with him. While she was waiting, she decided to type his name into a search engine.
The first result that popped up was a photo of Myers as a U.S. Army chaplain. He had never once talked about God or the Bible with her. He had been truthful about being part of the 441st Military Intelligence Battalion, 500th Military Intelligence Brigade, but he was the chaplain, not an officer. She soon found a link to information about his daughter on a U.S. Army news website. In fact, it appeared that Myers’s wife, daughter, and son had moved from Arizona to Japan with him in 2005. He had been lying the entire time.
In an email, Joanne angrily told Myers what she had discovered. Two days later, he sent her a confusing email about going to counseling with his wife. Joanne had had enough of the lies and called him in Japan. When he answered and heard her voice, he hung up, after which he emailed her, launching a flurry of messages between them. He tried to explain why he hadn’t told her he was a chaplain, but none of it was making much sense. When she asked him again if he was married, his emails turned nasty.
Hurt and angry, Joanne called the base chaplain at Camp Zama on October 18. She told him everything: how she and Myers had planned on getting married, how they had been lovers, and how he never told her that he was married or a chaplain but had claimed to be a military intelligence officer. As her story unfolded, she began to realize that she had ignored all of the warning signs from the beginning.
The base chaplain told Joanne that he would talk to Myers and that the bishop for his denomination in the U.S. would be notified. Myers could lose his sponsorship with his church and be discharged from the army.
Two days later, Myers emailed Joanne and accused her of fabricating the entire story. In response, Joanne pursued the investigation with a vengeance. She sent the paperwork and the naked photos of Myers that he had emailed to her to the inspector general’s office in Japan, as the office had requested. Myers continued to taunt her by email:
Joanne, You really should go for mental health counseling. I can’t believe you fabricated these emails and then of all things sent them to my supervisory chaplain. … You really have done a mean-hearted thing to me and my family. … On Monday I am going to JAG to see about getting a restraining order against you and try to put this scam to rest.
You tell them you are my fiancée? How can that be? I never proposed. … You are a very cruel person. … I am so hurt that you would twist our friendship into something that it is not. Then to send those photos of when we were just playing around, wow, that is something else.
On October 26, an email from someone she didn’t appear to know stopped her cold: “You will soon see photos of yourself on the internet in many compromising poses. David Chalmers.” She looked at the full headers of the message and traced the email back to Japan. She knew it was Myers.
Joanne called Camp Zama to report Myers’s new transgressions using the Chalmers pseudonym and about the photos of her he’d sent to a website for swingers, to friends, and even to her employer. It was obvious he was trying to get her fired. She finally admitted that Myers had a collection of nude pictures of her, which was something she had not mentioned in her initial complaint.
“Turning over those photos [to investigators] was difficult, but I didn’t have any regrets,” she said. She sent an email to the joanneaz [email protected] address and wrote: “Mike, y ru doing this to me?” The person who replied claimed to know no one named Mike. But the profile of joanneaznymph on Yahoo! included a nude photo, her real name, her age, her city and state, and that she was a real estate secretary.
When Joanne contacted the swingers’ website and explained that the account had been forged in her name, the proprietors asked for a copy of her photo ID to prove her identity before they would remove the profile. She followed the same procedure with Yahoo!.
“I didn’t want Mike to do this to another woman,” said Joanne. “Not only pretend to not be married, but to stalk them online, as well.”
On November 3, Joanne’s co-worker told her there were more nude photos of her on another website. A search for more resulted in a seemingly endless collection of sites displaying her profile and photos.
It was May 2007 before Joanne’s persistence finally paid off. Army chaplain Myers was arrested on seven criminal charges: five for cyberstalking and one count each for adultery and conduct unbecoming an officer.
Myers pled guilty in September 2007 to all except one cyberstalking charge, which was dropped because a witness could not travel to Japan for the court martial. During the proceedings, Myers admitted his actions. “I did this with the intent to harass and cause her emotional distress by embarrassing her. … I was angry and I was hurt she had contacted my chain of command,” he said. “I had already told my wife what happened. We worked things out and our relationship is really good again.”
According to an eyewitness report, at the court martial, the 45-year-old Myers sobbed uncontrollably and put his head down on the defense table as the sentence was rea
d. He was sentenced to 6 months in prison, was dismissed from the army, and received a reprimand.
“This was an individual who was a moral role model and authority figure,” said major James Crawford, a Camp Zama spokesman. “The Army does not tolerate this kind of behavior and felt it was important to prosecute.”
For Joanne, it marked the end to a long fight. “I wish he’d gotten more for punishment, but it’s closure,” she said after the court martial. She said she had no regrets about going through with it.
Deceit comes in many forms, but when it happens as it did to Joanne, you don’t expect it to be so deep and dark. “He never spoke of God,” Joanne said. “I was floored. I never would have known if I hadn’t caught him in his web of lies.”
Mike Myers holding a picture of Joanne [Courtesy of Joanne Ruffner]
A personal note to Joanne from Myers [Courtesy of Joanne Ruffner]
Myers with Joanne Ruffner [Courtesy of Joanne Ruffner]
When Online Dating Victims Fight Back
“I made myself believe there had been some sort of misunderstanding and that he hadn’t just raped me.” With that belief, Lisa Banks stayed in a severely dysfunctional relationship for years. It would change her and her daughter’s lives forever.
In the weeks leading up to the night of the rape, Lisa had been seeing a lot of her new boyfriend, Donald Brunstetter, whom she had met on an online dating site. She believed she saw all the signs of a serious relationship. They were spending every available minute together and had recently gotten to know one another’s children. A few days earlier, a week after Memorial Day, Brunstetter had called to ask Lisa if she could pick up his son, Josh, at school. He suggested that Lisa bring her 6-year-old daughter, Lauren, along for the ride. Brunstetter promised he would cook dinner for all of them that evening. After dinner, they watched a movie together, during which the kids fell asleep on the couch. For Lisa, it was the ideal ending to a perfect day.
“When I indicated that I needed to load Lauren into the car to take her home, he suggested I let her sleep,” she said. Brunstetter was inviting Lisa to spend the night.
“If I promise to be a complete gentleman, will you spend the rest of the night in my king-size bed with me?” was Brunstetter’s polite appeal. Lisa agreed. At first, she kept her clothes on, but then he suggested she put on one of his T-shirts to be more comfortable; she agreed, and it was a decision she soon came to regret.
“If what happened next is any indication of what he meant by being ‘a complete gentleman,’ we were obviously operating on different wavelengths,” said Lisa. “He started kissing me, then tried putting his hands under my shirt. I pushed him away and he reached into my panties. I pulled away and he crudely suggested I perform oral sex on him. When I hesitated, he simply overpowered me and had intercourse with me. He was much larger and stronger than I was, and he seemed unaware of my sincerity in asking him to stop.” Since the kids were downstairs, Lisa was afraid to make any noise. Afterward, while Lisa was still reeling over the forceful encounter, Brunstetter told her he loved her. She just wasn’t sure of anything anymore.
In 1998, Lisa was newly divorced and finding it difficult to juggle work, motherhood, and dating in Annapolis, Maryland. Starting over was a big challenge; she was a 36-year-old mom with a 6-year-old daughter. She had waited 2 years after her divorce before deciding it was time to take the plunge into the dating scene again. Since she and her ex-husband remained friendly, she complained to him one day about how hard it was to find a man who wanted to date a single mom.
Her ex suggested she try the free online dating site that he had recently worked on as a consultant. Lisa remembered initially thinking that any of the guys on the dating site could be an ax murderer. But she convinced herself that she could meet an ax murderer just as easily in a bar or at the public library. Besides, she felt she had a better chance of weeding out any undesirables online.
Although the website her ex recommended didn’t do any background checks or verify who was posting profiles online, he reassured her that most of the users were honest people who were having a hard time meeting someone, just as she was. He laughed and said the biggest transgressions most people make on these online dating sites usually involved underestimating their weight and posting old or retouched photos of themselves. If those were the biggest challenges, Lisa felt she could deal with them.
“Initially, I went to the site to see how it worked and to see what sorts of men were listed,” Lisa said. “In order to maintain control and protect my privacy, I did not post a profile of my own—at the time it was not required—but instead looked at the ads posted by men who met whatever criteria I wanted, and initiated contact with those that seemed interesting.”
In March 2000, when she finally decided to post her own profile, Lisa did the smart thing. Instead of giving out her primary email address that she was given by her internet service provider (ISP), she signed up for a free email account through Hotmail. This way, she could easily delete the account if anyone she contacted got out of line. She made sure she didn’t post her last name, the age or name of her daughter, or any other personal information.
“I found numerous listings for men in my area, near my age, some with children, most gainfully employed, and, based on the provided photos, not complete toads,” she said.
Encouraged, she spent several hours going through the profiles. Although most of the men wrote basically the same information in their About Me sections, she ended up finding a few men who shared some commonalities with her, including a great sense of humor and a slight obsession for grammatical accuracy.
Through trial and error, she soon discovered that if you have children or pets, you should mention it early in the online dating process because it’s a deal-breaker for some men. Most of the men she contacted were either single or divorced without children and had no desire to get involved with a mother of young children; even divorced dads—at least those who were divorced without custody of their children—were reluctant to date single mothers.
Lisa continued searching, and she communicated via email and IM with a few men she liked. She was always up front about the fact that she had a child.
“Many of the men I met had turned to online dating because they worked long hours or odd shifts, and some shared custody of their children,” Lisa said. “Nobody seemed in a big rush to meet in person, which was quite convenient. I could get to know someone while baking cookies for the school bake sale, and it was fun having email pen pals.”
Three months went by, and Lisa didn’t feel as though she had made a special connection with any of the men she had gotten to know online. She gradually talked to a few of them on the phone, quickly eliminating some of them. The field finally narrowed to two men: David, who had full custody of his daughter who was about Lauren’s age, and Brunstetter, whose son was also about Lauren’s age and lived with his ex-wife. Both men lived in nearby towns, an added bonus.
Brunstetter would appear and chat via IM for short intervals, but he was always heading out the door on a camping or hiking trip, or to enjoy a weekend at the beach. Because he wasn’t online as much as the others, Lisa found him a bit mysterious and intriguing. Although she hadn’t talked with him on the phone yet, she sensed there was a strong mutual attraction developing.
Lisa decided it was time to meet both David and Brunstetter in person. Her first step was to make arrangements to meet David at one of his daughter’s sporting events at a public place.
“Over the phone he seemed stable and reliable, but also overworked, tired, and disillusioned, like he never fully recovered from the failure of his marriage,” said Lisa. “He was a full-time single dad, working at a demanding job 6 days a week.”
The week before her arranged meeting with David, Brunstetter IM’d her and suggested they talk on the phone. She agreed. “I felt as though I had known him for years,” she later recalled.
Looking back, Lisa dismissed a few red flags during their conversation, in
cluding some off-color comments he made. He often referred to himself as very handsome and said that women found him irresistible. But despite his vanity, there was still something about him she liked. He mentioned he was doing some repairs on his house that weekend and invited her to stop by. Lisa’s daughter was with her father that weekend, so she accepted Brunstetter’s invitation for dinner. He was going to make his famous chicken Alfredo for the two of them.
“I was a little surprised when I pulled up at the curb,” said Lisa. “The house was in disrepair, and the gardens overgrown, but he’d mentioned that he was making repairs, so I assumed he’d purchased the home as a fixer-upper.”
What was even more surprising was the man who answered the door. He was tall and unkempt, dressed in dirty clothes, smelled like cigarette smoke, had childhood acne scars on his face, and held a can of beer in his hand. When he smiled, she saw he was missing a few teeth. This was definitely not the handsome man he had led her to believe he was on the phone, but she shrugged off her misgivings and entered the house anyway.
When Brunstetter asked if she was willing to help him install a bathroom light fixture upstairs, Lisa was flattered. He put her right to work “as if I belonged, and a shared activity seemed a good opportunity to get acquainted.” She added, “I have since learned that this is a technique typically employed by those seeking to exploit others, by creating a false sense of a shared dilemma. In fact, I now recognize many ‘red flags’ that I overlooked in the early stages of the relationship.”
Brunstetter quickly explained why the house was so rundown. He said he had purchased it from a friend who bought foreclosed homes and residences from tax sales. He repaired them and then flipped the houses for a profit. Brunstetter had purchased his place a few years ago when he was planning on getting married. But when the relationship soured and they broke up, the house sat untouched for a while. He finally decided it was time to start fixing up the place.
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