by RJ Parker
On his Facebook page, David listed Faust, the main character of a classic German legend, as his favorite character. The character was highly successful but dissatisfied with his life, so he had made a pact with the devil. Politically, on Facebook David listed himself as liberal, and as for his relationship status, he was single. Some of his favorite bands were Metallica, Queen, and the Foo Fighters; some of his favorite movies were Pulp Fiction and Star Wars; some of his favorite activities were football, chess, video gaming, and using the internet.
When he was not at his work, David was online, surfing the world of online games. He spent many hours in internet forums chatting with other people who had the same interests in gaming, especially strategy gaming. However, David felt a bit jealous of these people whom he chatted with online because many of them were able to attend college, unlike him.
Warcentral.com was a website managed by twenty-year-old Matthew Pyke and his twenty-year-old girlfriend, Joanna Witton. David spent much of his time chatting with other gamers on this Advance Wars fan website, which contained around 300 members. There, he used the nickname ‘Eagle the Lightning,’ where he could pretend he wasn’t David, a man who could not afford to go to a university.
During that time, David became interested in Matthew’s girlfriend, Joanna, who went by the online nickname ‘Jojo.’ At one point, he sent her a message declaring his love for her. It said,
"I love you Jojo more than anything else in my life. I shouldn't, but I can't help it, and to be honest, it's a great feeling. You are my first thought when I wake up and the last one when I go to sleep."
Although they had not yet met, David began stalking Joanna online, sending her messages, going through her Facebook profile, and checking her online diary. He kept doing so even though she never encouraged his behavior. By June 2008, David was able to get Matthew and Joanna’s home address in Nottingham, and he traveled from Germany to England to pay them a visit twice, once in June and once in August.
David continued his obsessive behavior, despite Joanna’s rejections. She advised him to seek professional help from a psychologist, and blocked him from the website. By September 17, 2008, Joanna had stopped all contact with David. He could not take it, so he decided to pay Matthew a deadly visit. On September 19, David flew to the United Kingdom one more time. He waited outside Matthew and Joanna’s apartment until Joanna had left for work. Then he knocked on the door and as soon as Matthew opened the door, David attacked him. He stabbed Matthew eighty-six times, ultimately killing him. Joanna discovered Matthew’s body later that day. David left the scene after trashing the apartment to make it look like a robbery attempt gone wrong, got rid of the knife somewhere along the way, and caught a flight back to his home in Germany within sixteen hours.
Before Matthew died, he tried to write the name of his killer using his blood, and he managed to write “DAV.” On September 24, 2008, David was arrested at his home. David claimed that he was acting in self-defense. He claimed that Matthew had attacked him first with the knife. However, in May of 2009, David was sentenced to a life in prison. The judge, who described David’s motive as “bizarre,” ordered him to spend at least eighteen years in prison before he would be eligible for parole.
When Matthew’s mother heard about her son’s death, she could not believe it, especially because Matthew was not the type to get into a fight. His brother, Adam, later expressed how difficult it was to accept his brother’s death, and talked about how great Matthew was. During the trial, when asked why she didn’t block David earlier, Joanna replied that she was afraid that she would only escalate the situation, and when the defense asked what she meant by that, she tearfully replied, “Look what happened. I’m sorry, but look what happened.”
The case received a lot of attention because of the way in which David had met Mathew and Joanna, how he became obsessed with Joanna, and how in the end he plotted to kill Matthew. It brought light to the amount of people who live their lives online believing their virtual lives and relationships are real and falsely believing that the digital age provides them with true anonymity.
Chapter 13: Lisa M. Montgomery
Lisa Marie Montgomery was born on February 27, 1968 in Melvern, Kansas. Her childhood was anything but happy. She later reported suffering physical and sexual abuse at the hands of her stepfather, whom her mother divorced when she was sixteen.
Lisa married her stepbrother, Carl Borman, in 1986, when she was just eighteen. According to Carl, Lisa loved the attention she got when she was pregnant. The couple had four children in less than four years. Lisa later claimed that Carl and her mother forced her to undergo a tubal fulguration (a process in which a woman’s fallopian tubes are cauterized using an electromagnetic current, causing sterilization) to avoid having any more children. Over the next few years, Lisa pretended to be pregnant twice. Tired of her lies, Carl divorced her in 1993, but the couple married again in 1994. They finally broke up for good in 1998, when Lisa took the children and moved in with a man named Kevin Montgomery, who lived in Melvern, Kansas. He had three children of his own and lived with his parents. The couple married in 2000.
During her marriage to Kevin, Lisa pretended to be pregnant several times, and each time she eventually claimed she had lost the baby due to miscarriage. During those times, she would wear maternity clothes and tell others about her approaching due date. Not knowing that Lisa had undergone sterilization, Kevin believed his wife was actually pregnant each time.
Meanwhile, Carl was busy battling Lisa in court for custody of his children. He knew she was still lying about becoming pregnant and told her he would make her admit her lies in open court, which he believed would give him an advantage in the custody battle. As the court date loomed, Lisa began scheming. She began watching videos online of home births and Cesarean section procedures.
On December 15, 2006, using the name ‘Darlene Fischer,’ Lisa contacted a woman named Bobbie Jo Stinnett in an online forum called ‘Ratter Chatter,’ where rat terrier breeders often posted about dog shows and puppies for sale. Lisa was a frequent poster to the forum, and in fact, she had met Bobbie Jo earlier that year at a dog show in April, right around the time Bobbie Jo had begun telling people in the forum she was pregnant and due in January. Lisa also began telling people she was pregnant again around the same time, claiming her due date was December 16. Bobbie Jo and her husband, Zebulon (Zeb) James Stinnett, were dog breeders. The two were high school sweethearts and this would be their first child. Bobbie Jo had also posted pictures on the website for her breeding business, Happy Haven Farms, indicating that she was pregnant. Posing as ‘Darlene,’ Lisa told Bobbie Jo that she wanted to buy one of her rat terrier puppies. Bobbie Jo gave her address to Darlene, who agreed to meet her the next day. Lisa then searched the internet for directions to Bobbie Jo’s home and there is evidence she actually drove the 130 miles to Skidmore, Missouri that day as a ‘dry run.’ Bobbie Jo told her husband and her mother that she had a potential buyer for one of the puppies in their litter and she would be stopping by the next day.
On December 16, Lisa again drove the 130 miles to Bobbie Jo’s home. Inside her jacket, she concealed a white cord and a sharp kitchen knife. Witnesses later recalled seeing a red Toyota Corolla parked in the driveway of the Stinnett residence. A gruesome and violent struggle took place inside the home that day, ending with Lisa fleeing the residence with Bobbie Jo’s premature baby.
When Bobbie Jo’s mother arrived at the home about an hour later, she found her pregnant daughter lying dead in a large pool of blood in the dining room. According to court documents, she called 911 in hysterics and told the operator that it looked like her daughter’s stomach had “exploded or something.”
Paramedics tried to revive Bobbie Jo, but it was clear that she had died at the scene. Crime scene analysts determined that she had been strangled from behind and her stomach had been sliced open laterally with a kitchen knife. The fetus had been pulled from her dead mother’s body and her umbilic
al cord had been cut. Investigators also found strands of blondish-brown hair in Bobbie Jo’s closed fist, indicating she had fought violently with her attacker.
Alarmed that this mother to be had been brutally murdered and her premature fetus had been cut from the womb, quick-thinking police issued an AMBER alert, along with the description of Lisa’s car that had been parked in the driveway earlier. They had no idea if the baby had survived the attack, but the AMBER alert helped spread the word quickly.
Meanwhile, Lisa called her husband a short time later, claiming she had gone shopping out of town that day and had gone into labor. She told him that she had given birth to a healthy baby girl at a women’s clinic in Topeka, Kansas. Miraculously, the baby had survived the brutal attack with little more than a cut over her eye. Lisa clamped the umbilical cord by herself and placed the infant in a car seat she had brought with her. Kevin and two of his older children met Lisa in Topeka and they all drove home.
The next day, Lisa and Kevin took the child, whom they named Abigail, out on the town. They went out for breakfast with the infant and showed her off to everyone they saw. Witnesses later described being alarmed that the couple had taken a one-day-old infant out around town.
Police made quick progress tracking down Lisa. They had a description of her car, thanks to neighbors who had remembered seeing it parked outside the Stinnett’s home. Word in the Ratter Chatter forum about Bobbie Jo’s horrific murder spread quickly and one of the members contacted police about something she remembered from the day before the murder: a meeting Bobbie Jo had arranged with a woman named Darlene Fischer. Police quickly tracked ‘Darlene’s’ IP address to Lisa’s home in Melvern, Kansas, where they spotted the same car described by witnesses, and Lisa with an infant.
On December 17, just one day after Bobbie Jo’s murder, police knocked on Lisa and Kevin’s front door. They told the couple they were investigating the murder of Bobbie Jo Stinnett and began to ask Lisa about her baby. At first, Lisa told the same story she had told her husband—that she had given birth at a women’s clinic in Topeka, Kansas the day before. She then asked to speak to the officers in private. Outside of her husband’s earshot, she told police that she had actually given birth at home and she had thrown the placenta in a nearby river. At this point, officers brought Lisa to the Sheriff’s office, where she ultimately confessed to killing Bobbie Jo and cutting the infant from her womb.
The child was safely returned to Zeb Stinnett, who named her Victoria Jo. The pastor who had married the couple just one year earlier gave a eulogy at twenty-three-year-old Bobbie Jo’s wake.
Lisa was charged with kidnapping Victoria Jo, resulting in the death of Bobbie Jo. Her defense team claimed insanity, asserting that Lisa suffered from various mental diseases such as depression, borderline personality disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, and pseudocyesis, a clinical term describing a condition in which a woman believes she is pregnant when she is not. People with this condition may even experience symptoms of pregnancy, such as swelling of the abdomen, enlarged breasts, menstruation cessation, and even sensations of faux fetal movement. The defense did not try to deny that Lisa had killed Bobbie Jo; rather they tried to convince the jury that her mental state, along with the physical and mental abuse she had suffered from as a child, caused her to commit the crime in a delusional dissociative state.
The jury didn’t buy it. Confronted with testimony from the state’s expert witnesses, along with gruesome crime scene photos, and the 911 call from Bobbie Jo’s mother, jurors found Lisa Montgomery guilty and later issued a death penalty verdict. Lisa’s attorneys filed an appeal, trying to get their client off on a technicality. They claimed that Victoria Jo could not be considered a person until she was removed from her mother’s womb, and since Bobbie Jo had died before Victoria Jo was removed, the charge of kidnapping resulting in death wasn’t a possible scenario. A federal appeals court panel upheld the conviction in 2011. In 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court denied to hear the case.
Lisa currently sits on death row in Fort Worth, Texas, awaiting her execution.
Chapter 14: Edward Frank Manuel
Sharing personal information online is a somewhat new trend. People write about their interests and meet new people without ever actually knowing whom they might be talking to. It could be a man pretending to be a woman or a criminal pretending to be interested in the services offered in ads. Dangerous murderers are luring their victims through the internet on sites like Craigslist and chat room websites. Although it’s been harder for the police to prevent these kinds of crimes, in the very few times in which a would-be-murder-victim is saved from a killer, it is considered a victory. This is what happened with the case of Edward Frank Manuel.
Edward was a fifty-five-year-old man living in Houston in 2003. He was married and worked as a technical communications consultant. He began frequenting suicide chat rooms, meeting people. There are reports that Edward had bragged to others in this particular chat room that he had helped suicidal people end their suffering. It was there he met an anonymous woman from Wisconsin who expressed her desire to die. She asked Edward for his help and he agreed to kill her.
Edward allegedly told the woman to sell all of her belongings and make the trip to Texas where the two would meet up at the Houston bus terminal. They agreed they would dig her grave together in a state park. Then Edward would strangle her during sex, place a yellow rose on her chest, and bury her where no one would find her.
On his way to the bus station, the police stopped Edward in his car. With him, they found yellow roses and what appeared to be a strangling device, but the police have never disclosed what that device really was. The would-be-victim who did show up and was waiting for Edward at the bus stop was actually playing a part in this planned police operation, but her identity remains unknown. It is unclear if she contacted the police after having second thoughts or if the entire operation was a plot to capture a potential murderer.
After Edward bonded out of jail for $10,000 and was waiting for his next court appearance in January 2003, the media nicknamed him the “Internet suicide chat room killer.” He was facing a possible twenty years behind bars for an attempted capital murder charge.
You might find it odd that a man who did not actually commit murder or even attack this woman could be charged with attempted capital murder. Even if he did have yellow roses in his car, along with some sort of device that may have been used for strangling, did the police have probable cause to arrest him when he could have been meeting the woman out of curiosity?
His lawyers must have thought the same thing. They were able to arrange a plea bargain with the state of Texas. Edward pleaded guilty to attempted murder, and he was given just ten years of probation, which he completed in 2013, and no additional jail time.
The suicide chat room disappeared, but the postings appear somewhere else online. The woman’s motives are unknown and it is still unclear if she was working for the police the entire time. What is clear is the fact that potential killers will look anywhere to find vulnerable victims, including places where people go to find comfort and feel safe.
Chapter 15: George Bernard Lamp, Jr.
In this new age of technology, finding things has never been easier. Whether a person is looking for a job, items to buy at lower cost, services… practically anything can be found with the help of the internet. However, the internet is also at the disposal of criminals who are able to find their victims with a just few clicks. One of the widely used sites for these kinds of services is Craigslist. As a result, we have seen a new type of killer dubbed by the media as ‘Craigslist killers’ and George Bernard Lamp, Jr. fits right into that category.
George Bernard Lamp, Jr. was born on December 21, 1957. Before he committed his first and only murder in March 2008, George was charged with kidnapping and an attempt to sexually assault a woman he met online in the fall of 2007. The woman was working as an escort (like his next unlucky victim). George was using the name Greg
Lamp. They met on October 8, 2007 at a convenience store close to Troutman, North Carolina. George drove her to Perth Road, where he attempted to rape her and then forced her to perform a sexual act. Then he tied her up, put her facedown in the backseat, and drove to the northbound rest area on Interstate 77, near Mooresville. As he was pulling her out of the car, she was able to break free and escape. George jumped back into his car and drove away. However, there was someone who witnessed what had happened. George was arrested, and after he pleaded guilty, he received a probationary sentence.
George used Craigslist to lure his next victim. On the February 10, 2008, he placed an ad under the category ‘erotic services,’ claiming he was searching for a woman to keep him company. He described himself as a “good looking white professional male.” Unfortunately for fifty-two-year-old Bonnie Lou Irvine, she responded to the ad.
Apparently, George and Bonnie exchanged a number of emails in which he identified himself as Greg Lamp. She also directed him to other pictures of herself at other websites popular to men searching for prostitutes. Her friends and family last saw Bonnie when she left her home in Cornelius, North Carolina on February 28, 2008. George killed her and her body wasn’t found until March 14.
On March 2, George placed another ad on Craigslist, this time looking for a mechanic. He said that he was having problems with the alarm system of his girlfriend’s Volvo—it was going off and he wasn’t able to get into the car (the car was actually Bonnie’s). On March 13, George placed his last ad looking for a woman. Although Bonnie was last seen on February 28, her roommate did not report her missing until March 8.
