Emsworth is a small, conservative place where crime is rare. For this reason, emergencies in and around the village are attended by police based some 20 miles away, in either Chichester or Cosham, a northern suburb of Portsmouth. Unless a traffic policeman is patrolling the vicinity, response times can be up to ten long minutes.
In this case, the switchboard operator was dealing with a situation that could turn into a murder. Officers were galvanized into action, and two police vehicles arrived within four minutes of Susan’s call. No fewer than six other units sped into the village. However, because the cottage adjoined other dwellings and stood within a fully enclosed walled garden, it could only be accessed by a gate at the end of a little-used alleyway. It would take anxious officers another three vital minutes to gain entry.
Susan was bleeding. She was hysterical, and a female police officer spent an hour trying to settle her down. An ambulance was called, but her injuries were not severe and the medics treated her on the spot.
Meanwhile, Emsworth was swarming with police, and with only two main roads out of the community it was not long before Chandler was spotted. He was arrested at 1:35 a.m. trying to thumb a lift. He spent the night at Cosham Police Station while a statement was taken from Susan Gray.
“I thought about it all that night,” she said. “I knew that he would say that I had encouraged him and that he had photographs and emails recording our dates and chats on the internet. Our sex, the mirrors. It would all come out in court and be in the papers, so I did not press charges.”
Bill Chandler was released from police custody without charges being pressed. Subsequently, it was reported that he had attacked and raped a 26-year-old woman in Wales. Later, Susan said that he had raped an 18-year-old clerical worker from Poole.
We don’t know the name of Miss “A” from Cardiff. South Wales Police did receive a complaint from a teenager who was admitted to the hospital after being raped and beaten by an American man answering Bill Chandler’s description. However, the young woman also refused to press charges, and as far as the police were concerned there was nothing more they could do.
Accompanied by Susan Gray, Christopher Berry-Dee met Miss “B” from Poole. The two women had much in common, including the fact that neither had known that Chandler was stalking the other. At the time, Miss “B” worked for a large insurance company in the town and lived with her parents.
“Yes! I met him [Chandler] in AA. Yes! He was much older than me. Yes! He raped me in my car. Me and Susan have talked about him often. He pulled the same dirty stunt on me… There is not much more I want to say because my parents had warned me many times about meeting someone just a bit younger than my dad.”
Asked how this sickening experience had affected her life, she said, “What do you think? I have a steady boyfriend now… he doesn’t know anything. I still shake when I switch on my computer because I know Chandler is there somewhere. I would never do chat again. It is like he would be there watching me. Twisted bastard!”
Robert Jensen, Associate Professor of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, writes: “We live in a culture in which rape and battery continue at epidemic levels. And in this culture, men are masturbating to orgasm in front of television and computer screens that present them sex with increasing levels of callousness and cruelty toward women. No matter how hard it may be to face the reality of a rape culture, at least the culture still brands rape as a crime. Pornography, however, is not only widely accepted but sold to us as liberation. We know relatively much about how violent pornography influences ordinary adult men. There are negative influences on men’s attitudes toward woman. After reception of violent pornography men become more positive to rape and evaluate women more callously. All too often, rape leads to murder.”
West Sussex Police, like their colleagues in South Wales, say, “We treat all complaints of this nature very seriously. Unfortunately, if the victim feels unable to make a formal statement there is little we can do.”
The FBI are a little more encouraging. “We do know Mr. Chandler. He has a minor criminal record in the U.S. If the British Police have evidence that this man has committed serious sexual offenses, we would be grateful for this information, and he could be extradited to stand trial in the U.K.”
The FBI also say, “Many sexual predators stalk their victims over a period of time. They do it in the real world and now they use the internet. They often gain more sexual satisfaction from the stalking phase than actually committing the offense. To them stalking is control. It gives these people a feeling of power. We are unable to comment on the allegations made against Mr. Chandler… it seems that the three English women you mention are the victims of a very sick serial rapist. This man will continue to rape until he is arrested and charged. Failing that, undoubtedly he will commit murder, if he hasn’t already done so.”
Susan Gray believes that Chandler might have killed her. She no longer dates anyone, but she visits Miss “B” frequently. And Susan has seen The Featherman on the internet since her ordeal.
“I know his line of chat,” she confirmed. “He still uses the AA site but under a different name. I have tried to warn the girls but they don’t believe me. They think I am a jealous crank. One guy said, ‘Prove it, you sad bitch.’ Several women whom I knew from before told me that I was a liar. I even emailed one of them a photo of me and Bill together. She replied, ‘He can fuck me any time,’ so I don’t bother any more.”
The authors asked Susan if she had any advice for women using chat rooms and the internet to find sex or love, and her reply was diplomatic. “I would say be very careful. I suppose there are a lot of happy couples out there where things have worked out okay. But this experience has wrecked my life.”
Susan Gray has since moved from Hampshire.
The Ukraine-based Absolute Agency now monitor their chat room. Although they can ban visitors who frequently use expletives, they admit that there is nothing they can do to stop scammers or prevent the likes of Bill Chandler from looking for prey. In a statement to the authors, they confirm, “We now have a system which is called IGNORE. People can make someone invisible if they want. If we receive many complaints we terminate full membership and there is no refund. We even will ban the same person if he rejoins because we keep email addresses on file. We are not in the business of mind reading. We are in business for bringing people together and money.”
Indeed they are!
Eighty percent of Ukrainians cannot afford bread every day. Fifteen percent of the population are considered “upper-class,” meaning they earn as much as $30,000 a year. The remainder are mega-rich, and we invite you to consider the sums below.
Absolute Agency is the largest online dating/marriage business in the world. It is a major operation, with another office in Lithuania, and publishes at least 52,000 female profiles and 32,000 male profiles at any one time, with thousands of new profiles added each month. It has a chat room and video streaming linked to hardcore pornography and prostitution. Absolute Agency has links with thousands of other sites that spread around the globe and the income derived from its business places it at the top of the business league in Ukraine. And one nameless man owns it all.
While it would be fair to say that the majority of their profiles are genuine, countless thousands are not, for lurking among their members are mafia scammers, seriously deranged people and sexual deviants, including pedophiles, serial rapists and stone-cold killers. Log on and, if you are a woman, soon they could be stalking you.
Absolute Agency can buy whatever and whomever they want. We were cordially invited to visit their offices but respectfully declined, hopefully remaining on cordial terms.
Dr. Robert Johnson: Missing, Presumed Dead!
Forty-five-year-old Dr. Robert Johnson, a six-foot-three black gentleman from London, was divorced and had custody of his five children, and now he wanted a new partner. He had tried the personal columns and local dating agencies with little success.
&nbs
p; Then he fell in love with the idea of taking a Russian woman for a bride.
Now this takes some swallowing, but Robert made this decision after watching Anna Kournikova on the tennis courts at Wimbledon. He was thoroughly smitten and seduced by the glamor of romancing in this way, and in this respect he was not alone, for at any one time at least eight million Western males are seeking a foreign bride. In 2001, it was estimated that these gamblers lost $2.5 million. Today, the figure has rocketed to over $5.8 million, and the figure is still climbing.
Unfortunately, we were unable to thoroughly access Robert Johnson’s outgoing emails because the British Police would have none of it. However, from police sources and one of his friends, we did obtain enough of the emails from the dating agency the doctor became involved with to enable us to piece together much of what took place during the period leading up to his disappearance.
He is now presumed dead—murdered!
Robert told a colleague, “They’re [Russian women] easier to talk to, they have degrees, they seem to be cheaper than Western women, they’re easier to get on with and they don’t ask for too much.”
In making this quite erroneous, somewhat bigoted assumption, Robert, who had been surfing the net for some time, obviously hadn’t done his homework. Nevertheless, in October 2001, he met a young woman who called herself Anastasia Ustinova, a 19-year-old posing as a teacher from Omsk, Siberia. The two swapped emails and she sent him seductive photographs of herself wearing a blue micro dress and white high heels.
Robert flipped and must have completed several cart-wheels. Had he known better, he would have realized that a teacher working in Siberia would be lucky to clear $50 dollars a month, $30 being nearer the mark. However, within a few weeks he would end up sending “Anastasia” the equivalent of six or more years’ wages for an average Russian.
“Anastasia has written back and said she loved me and wants to get to know me,” he told a friend. In reality, all she wanted was his money, and Robert sent her plenty of her favorite commodity to pay for generous living expenses. He also bought her a diamond ring and a gold watch. The sums involved totaled around $3,250, and that was to just to start with.
We know that, on Wednesday, October 17, 2001, Robert emailed Anastasia Ustinova and two days later she replied. On Friday, November 2, she asked for $250 for a visa, which he duly sent by Western Union Transfer.
On Tuesday, November 13, Anastasia sent an email through the Paradise of Angels marriage agency asking for $1,050 for the air ticket and for a passport, and an extra $300 for her to use while she traveled to London. The passport money apparently went astray—although it was sent at the same time as the $1,050—so she asked for a further $100, which he sent on November 14. Mysteriously, the missing money was later cashed at Western Union. Robert was losing money fast.
On November 23, his blonde bombshell wrote claiming that she had been taken ill with liver problems, so he sent her $50 to buy perfume.
Five days later, she wrote to say that she had stopped working because of her poor health. She claimed she had hepatitis C and that her mother and father were nursing her.
The New Year brought little respite for the eager Robert. She wanted money for a new cell phone and cash for credit so she could text him. Her father died suddenly—in a subsequent SMS this was changed to her father-in-law.
On January 2, 2002, Robert wired Anastasia $60 for her medical care.
A week later, he sent her two Western Union transfers totaling $135. Despite this generosity, that very same day she had the temerity to ask for $250—at least four months’ wages for her—to buy sandals as she was soon to leave the hospital.
All the money was sent via Western Union to Anastasia Ustinova, at Gazetnyi, Pereulok 6, Russia, who promptly collected the cash. She took a small percentage for herself, and wired the balance to two of her friends, who were sometimes known as Tatiana Ovdina, Tatyana Perlotva, Angelika, Anna Chuprakova, Elena Artemieva Yalena, Katya, Irina Taralanova, Oksana Stolyrenko and Olen Slepova—all residents of Ekaterinburg.
On January 26, with enough money in their pockets to be able to support themselves for several years, Anastasia and her pals hit Robert Johnson again, this time for $200 for therapy. Then, on March 4, she went the full Monty by explaining that she was going back into the hospital for another operation and even more therapy, which would cost $2,000 plus $50 a day until she was discharged.
Robert was now beside himself with anxiety. He informed Anastasia of his intentions to visit her and help her out. After a few days’ silence, during which she no doubt sought advice from her dating agency, she explained to him that he should only bring new U.S. dollars, as credit card facilities were very limited—and this much was true. Fatefully, he told her that he would bring all the required funds and that he would soon be at her bedside.
Asking a friend to look after his children, he remarked, “I feel stupid. It’s like being robbed. But you have seen her picture, she is a beautiful girl. She needs me, and I need to help her out. I am in love.”
Robert then obtained a 30-day tourist visa, numbered TY 2987847, and on March 21, after confirming his itinerary with Anastasia, he took the 10:30 p.m. Aeroflot A310 Airbus flight from London Heathrow to Moscow, arriving at 5:20 a.m. local time. He had booked a round-trip flight to Omsk through Thomas Cook and the passenger manifest shows that he sat in seat C39. On touchdown at Moscow, he passed through immigration control, caught the free shuttle bus and boarded his connecting flight at the internal airport, Sheremetyevo 1 (SVO 1).
Thereafter, Robert, carrying around $7,000 in new dollar bills and probably the only black man in Siberia, simply vanished.
Of course, for Robert Johnson and his children, this was a terrible tragedy, but at this remove it is probably instructive to remind ourselves of the sums involved. All in all, this single scam netted the dating agency around $11,000, which is the staggering, if not obscene, equivalent of 25 years’ wages to the average Russian. In the West, this equates to about $500,000.
Every year, tens of thousands of Western men travel to Eastern Europe and the Far East in search of true love. They are well catered for because more than a thousand sites advertise their brochures, videos and the “entertainment” events they organize. The phenomenon amply demonstrates how sex-tour companies and certain marriage agencies contribute to the exploitation and objectification of women and women’s bodies by promoting prostitution and pornography.
A few moments ago, we gently questioned the sanity of some of the men who go seeking love on the internet. But, of course, we have done their homework, and when you read the following you may come to the conclusion that men can be even dumber that we initially thought.
One genuine agency did furnish us with correspondence from several male clients, and as we read the letters to a totally honest woman from her prospective suitors we could see how fortunate she was not to pick any of them.
Doctors, surgeons, engineers, property developers, all queued up alongside religious fruitcakes, college dropouts and the lost and the lonely to court this girl. Several of these humanoids had “I am mentally unstable and capable of mass murder” written all over their faces and throughout the text of their letters, one of which bore an uncanny resemblance to the scribbling hand of the serial killer William Heirens, who issued the challenge “Catch Me Before I Kill Again.”
Yet, strange to relate, interspersed among these desperate refugees from Bedlam, this assortment of knuckle-dragging, body-pierced primates were a few honest, well-motivated men who were sincerely seeking love. Nevertheless, we were amused to see that one guy was generous enough to send the lady a dollar bill and a scrap of lined paper torn from a notebook to help her reply to him.
This man, from Los Angeles, said he was a high-powered engineer, yet his grammar and command of the English language said otherwise, being among the worst we have ever seen. His photo, as he stared at the camera, revealed the face of the type of hoodlum commonly seen in Mafia movies garrot
ting someone in the back seat of a large, black car. That this man hoped to win the heart of any discerning woman was sad.
Another of our favorite letters was a handwritten note extolling the sender′s own virtues and pledging his undying love for the recipient. He added, enthusiastically but barely legibly, this unforgettable advice: “Do not trust anyone you meet over the internet. Never meet anyone on railway stations or in bars. They may rape and kill you.”
Surprisingly, he didn’t follow this sanguine warning with an invitation to meet him under the clock by platform eight.
Of course, there were scores of letters from thoroughly decent guys. All well written and very polite, and it was clear that every one of these men was genuinely besotted with the girl. However, letters like these were outnumbered by those from out-and-out fantasists, many bordering on the lunatic fringe.
A splendid example was a typed letter from a man old enough to be her grandfather. Overweight and bespectacled, he claimed to have the strength and physique of a 20-year-old. “I follow a military exercise regime for elite soldiers,” he wrote.
Here, we thought, was God’s gift to all women. And a pillar of rectitude: he didn’t smoke and not a drop of alcohol had ever passed his lips. He also boasted that he lived on Hawaii, an earthly paradise. To back up this wild assertion, he sent a postcard of some beautiful Hawaiian scenery, adding that his house would have been clearly visible were it not for the fact that it was hidden just behind the clump of lush, green trees in the distance. On top of that, his CV read like that of a candidate short-listed for the job of Pope.
This model of all the virtues then demonstrated that he was a gifted diplomat by asking his prospective paramour, “How is your economic situation?” Oblivious to the intrusive nature of his enquiry, he further demolished his credibility by asking baldly, “Do you have any mental or physical diseases or problems? Do you smoke, drink, or use drugs?”
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