Mary Gonzales, a 50-year-old hospital administrator, believes that, if her youngest girl could have held on a little longer, she would have learned to navigate the ebbs and flows of life and blossomed into a strong, soulful woman. Instead, she stumbled across an online group that told her that life was not worth living.
‘They [the group] never told her that people do work through depression and get better and go on to live happy lives,’ said Mary, whose voice often dissolves into silence when she tries to put into words what happened. ‘They never gave her hope.’
It took several attempts, Suzy wrote to the group, but she was able to order potassium cyanide online as well as a pH meter, ‘so I can be sure that the concoction isn’t too basic/acidic for my throat’.
To get the materials, Gonzales used a trick recommended by other group members.
Posing as a jeweller, she ordered the cyanide online, ostensibly to polish metal. She also requested several other chemicals to make her order look genuine. Her order, billed to Winston Jewellers, didn’t raise a red flag at the Massachusetts chemical manufacturer that sold her the poison.
‘All the materials she ordered points to a legitimate jewellery operation,’ said Darrell Sanders, who oversees chemical sales at Alfa Aesar. ‘She fooled me – and it hurts, emotionally.’
Suzy patterned her suicide after another member of the group, Dave Conibear, who killed himself in 1992. The 28-year-old Canadian software engineer detailed online the exact proportions of his cyanide concoction. He timed a message to be delivered to the group after his death, and even programmed his computer to dial 911, the emergency services’ number.
Two weeks before she died, Suzy cryptically signed her message ‘2 weeks seven days’, before she signed off with ‘one week’.
On 21 March she wrote, ‘Today, I feel great. Besides feeling a bit light-headed, I feel good. The sun is shining, the air is warm. It feels like such a nice day to just lie in the sun. To quote Richie Tenenbaum, “I am going to kill myself tomorrow.” I’ve stopped taking my meds so I’m not happy and decide that life is not worth living. I will just get down again someday… I am preventing that.’
Suzy Gonzales last talked to her parents on the evening of 22 March, explaining that she was looking for air tickets to return to California for her grandfather’s funeral.
The last thing she said to her father was: ‘I love you, Dad. I’ll see you soon.’
In December 2002, a Kansas woman named Joanne Hossack filed a wrongful-death suit against a member who posted a message to the same group that Suzy had contacted. In the message, the group member said that she had talked on the phone with Hossack’s 17-year-old son and ‘kept him company’ as he intentionally overdosed on drugs. Hossack dropped the case after learning that her son’s online friend was also a troubled minor.
In May of that year, two Englishmen, Michael Gooden and Louis Gillies, had met through another group, Alternative Suicide Holidays, and made a pact to jump together off a cliff in East Sussex. But, while 35-year-old Glasgow-born Gooden plunged to his death off Beachy Head in June, 36-year-old Gillies changed his mind at the last minute and narrated the episode in a posting online, saying that ‘the act was inspirational’.
Investigators found Gillies’s posting and arrested him for violating the UK’s Suicide Act, which makes it illegal to aid, abet or counsel another person to commit suicide and carries a jail sentence of up to 14 years.
When Gillies failed to appear in court, police went to his flat in London’s West End to find he had hanged himself.
To return to Suzy Gonzales, until 12.01am on 23 March she was conversing online about her deadly itinerary with a member of the suicide group who called himself ‘River’. But River did nothing to stop her.
‘Suzy had me proofread her notes, and we went over all the details of her exit just to be safe,’ he wrote to the group after her suicide, which he referred to as a passage into ‘transition’.
The only information that Mike and Mary Gonzales have about River is that he mentioned he was living in central Florida with a wife and an 18-year-old son.
A few minutes past midnight on 23 March, Suzy Gonzales composed her final note to the group. ‘Goodnight,’ read the subject line.
‘Bye everyone, see you on the other side,’ she wrote, ending the note with her characteristic ‘! Suzy’.
‘Smooth sailing,’ one person online responded.
‘I’ll be following soon,’ replied another sad individual.
Shortly after sending the message, Suzy tucked the can of cyanide into her purse, got into her car and drove to the Red Roof Inn.
In the United States, laws on assisted suicide were passed to prevent people deliberately helping others end their lives by supplying them with a method, such as enough drugs for a fatal overdose, or physically assisting them.
‘Simply informing someone how to kill themselves is another matter,’ said euthanasia activist Derek Humphrey, who wrote a suicide manual for the terminally ill entitled Final Exit.
‘I’ve been monitoring the US assisted-suicide laws for more than 20 years, and it does not appear that counselling is a crime,’ he said.
Group members say that discussing their suicidal inclinations online is much easier than in real life.
‘When online, I am calm and collected, but give me a couple of seconds of talking about [suicide] in person and it’s the same as with the suicide hotline,’ Suzy Gonzales wrote ten days before her death. ‘I get shaky and start crying. And then I just feel silly – basically, I just need a friend who will understand me.’
These groups ‘exist because they wanted to be in a space where they wouldn’t be controlled’, says Lauren Weinstein, co-founder of People for Internet Responsibility, which studies cyberspace issues. ‘Fundamentally, these groups bring with them all the benefits and all the risks that are present with unfettered communication.’
Had Suzy Gonzales told a therapist that she had both a plan and a means to kill herself, she could have been forcibly hospitalised. ‘It could be considered malpractice and we could be sued if we didn’t,’ said Herbert Hendin, medical director for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.
Michael Naylor, a psychiatrist at the University of Illinois at Chicago, suggested that Suzy Gonzales’s cryptic countdown and repeated recounting of her plans could have been a cry for help that was ignored by the online group.
‘The only purpose [this group] serves is helping people to kill themselves,’ said Naylor, adding, ‘What a lot of these [people] don’t seem to realise is that suicide is the last choice you get to make. Once you’re dead, you can’t undo that. Life isn’t a game that can be played over again.’
Suzy sent six time-delayed emails to the Tallahassee Police, telling them that she’d ingested cyanide and that they could find her at the Red Roof Inn. When investigators entered her motel room, they discovered her corpse alongside the poison, which she’d carefully repackaged.
In her email to her parents, Suzy had a request for her memorial service: ‘Please play “Fire and Rain”’ – James Taylor’s elegy to a friend who committed suicide. That friend was named Suzanne, too.
It is a Saturday afternoon in Red Bluff. Banners flutter over the main drag, advertising the high school’s presentation of A Man for All Seasons. A rodeo is under way at the fairground. And, at a chapel, a sombre crowd gathers to remember Suzanne Michelle Gonzales.
On a table at the front of the room there are dozens of framed pictures – one of Suzy coquettishly pulling up her yellow high-school graduation gown to expose knee-high athletic socks; another where she is a bright-eyed toddler gripping her mother’s hand. Near by, the nameless two-headed cat leans against a red scooter. One of the feline’s faces is happy – the other not.
Suzy’s parents walk into the chapel with a beige urn and place it at the centre of these mementoes of their daughter’s life. That same urn had rested between them on the front seat of a U-haul truck as they drove bac
k to California with the contents of Suzy’s Florida apartment.
Nancy Hickson, Suzy’s high-school speech teacher, recalled for the crowd how Suzy gave her a purple wig after she lost her hair to chemotherapy.
‘When I met her, I thought, “Finally, a teen who isn’t afraid to be different,”’ she recalled. ‘Suzy had a creative streak a mile wide.’
John Bohrer, the local Southern Baptist pastor, compared Suzy’s quirky humour and zest for life to that of the actress Lucille Ball.
Her best friend, 19-year-old Desiree Sok, described Suzy as a spontaneous fun lover, someone with whom she’d cruise around Tallahassee in the middle of the night blaring ska music and eating doughnuts. Someone who’d swerve on to the shoulder of a dark road and jump out of the car just to chase fireflies.
‘I don’t think she realised all the memories would stop,’ Desiree said, her voice trailing off.
As the slide show of Suzy’s life was screened, James Taylor’s haunting words and melody provided the soundtrack.
This new and morbid phenomenon of internet-inspired suicide is not confined to the USA. Because of the medium’s huge reach it has become a global issue, and yet internet service providers continue to host these sites.
The discovery in 2004 of the bodies of four young men in a car at a viewpoint near Mount Fuji in Japan appeared to be more evidence of a grim new trend in this prosperous country – group suicides of strangers who meet over the internet. The suicide pacts, which have resulted in at least 18 deaths in Japan since February 2004, are shocking to experts, even in a nation already plagued by an astronomical suicide rate.
The victims are normally young and meet over the internet through a growing number of suicide-related sites, chatrooms and bulletin boards in Japanese – sites where participants go online not to dissuade but to support one another in their desire for death.
In the latest confirmed case in early May 2005, the victims were a man of 30 and two women of 22 and 18. None had apparently known the others before meeting online, where they started planning their suicide. As in several other cases, they died of carbon monoxide poisoning from a coal-burning stove after sealing themselves in a room using plastic sheeting and duct tape. Others have taken their lives by the same method – promoted by websites as fast and painless – in cars parked in remote mountain areas.
Some suicide pacts have been averted, or ended in injury but not death, as in the case of two girls, 14 and 17, who jumped together off a five-storey building.
The group WiredSafety, which has 10,000 volunteers around the world visiting online chatrooms watching for people who prey on children, reports that it has come across many Japanese suicide websites, including ones that encourage participants to overdose together in front of webcams.
‘We are picking up lot [of suicide sites] that are just in Japanese,’ says Parry Aftab, executive director of WiredSafety. ‘We report them to local law enforcement, or the ISP to have them take down the sites. But they just pop up someplace else.’
Some websites are expressly for meeting suicide partners, while others suggest the best ways to commit the act, including, for example, where to get the coal stoves and how to prepare the car or other suicide site.
SHARON LOPATKA’S CYBER WORLD
‘Hi! My name is Nancy.
‘I am 25 have Blonde hair, green eyes am 5’6 and weigh 121. Is anyone out there interested in buying … my worn … panties … or pantihose….??? This is not a joke or a wacky Internet scam. I am very serious about this. If you are serious too you can e-mail me …!’
MESSAGE POSTED BY SHARON LOPATKA IN AN AREA OF THE INTERNET WHERE SEXUAL EROTICA IS THE MAIN TOPIC
‘I don’t know how much I pulled the rope… I never wanted to kill her, but she ended up dead.’
BOBBY GLASS ON THE MURDER OF SHARON LOPATKA
There’s not much to Lenoir, North Carolina, a town of 14,000 at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The monument to the Daughters of the Confederacy in the town square watches over another losing battle, this one economic. Downtown slips silently into the embarrassed embrace of loan companies, storefront churches and used-clothing shops. The stagnant centre is skirted by highways, busy chain stores and fast-food outlets. It would not be quite right to say people in Lenoir are surprised at killings in their midst because they get around six murders a year, even if they could not have dreamed up the scenario that follows.
Rural America no longer is, and maybe never was, quite so sheltered as its apple-pie image suggests. ‘People think that, because this is a small town, these things don’t happen. It’s not true. We have people here no different than the big cities,’ said Brenda Watson, who owns the Carolina Cafe at 209 Main Street. ‘And I wouldn’t let my kids walk alone here at night.’
Indeed, former district attorney Flaherty claims, ‘Most of the murders are love triangles, but when Lopatka lost her life she also lost her anonymity, and she was none of the things she claimed to be.’
In fact, according to her autopsy report she was dark-haired with dark eyes set into a heavy face and five foot ten and 189 pounds when she died. And, far from the wild video star she claimed to be, she lived her life quietly in a ranch-style home in Indian Court, a cul-de-sac in the quiet, hilly town of Hampstead, Maryland, where children play tag in front yards, dogs tease the postman and deviancy is a failure to join recycling efforts.
When Lopatka graduated from Pikesville High School in Baltimore in 1979, her name was Sharon Denburg. She had many friends and was a member of the volleyball and field hockey teams. During her junior and senior years, she was a nurse’s aide, a library aide and a singer in the school’s chorus.
‘She wasn’t an outcast or anything of that nature,’ said Steven Hyman, who attended school with her. ‘She was about as normal as you can get. I think making her this weird loner is just some media thing.’
Sharon Denburg was the oldest of four daughters born to Mr and Mrs Abraham J Denburg in 1961. The family lived in a suburb of Baltimore. Sharon Denburg’s parents were devout Orthodox Jews, who were active in the Beth Tfiloh, Baltimore’s largest Orthodox Jewish synagogue, where Abraham was a cantor. Sharon had been active in sports, sang in the school choir and was perceived by classmates to be ‘as normal as you can get’, reported the North Carolina News & Observer on 3 November 1996.
In 1991, Sharon wed Victor, a Catholic construction worker from Ellicott City, but her parents did not approve. A former high-school classmate told the Washington Post on 3 November 1996 that the marriage was Sharon’s ‘way of breaking away’. Sharon moved with her husband to a small, ranch-style tract house in Hampstead in the early 1990s. They had no children.
Sharon started up several small internet business ventures from her home to make some extra money. She made a new friend, Diane Safar, who lived near by, and the two of them put together a 30-page booklet on home decorating and country crafts entitled Dion’s Secret of Home Decorating Guide.
‘Here we were decorating our houses one day and talking to each other for advice, and we just said, “Hey, we should put this stuff in a book,”’ Safar explained. ‘We put it together and then we went around to ladies’ groups and churches selling it. It was fun.’
‘What I want people to know is the woman I knew was not crazy in the slightest,’ Safar said of her friend. ‘She was always a happy person, always bubbly even. This person who was killed was not the person I knew.’
In her business called Classified Concepts, Sharon rewrote ad copy for advertisers for $50 per advertisement. She also operated several other websites, where she sold psychic readings and advice. On the sites Sharon would also post ads selling other services, with a premium rate number for which she would receive a percentage of the revenue.
Another way she made money was by advertising pornographic videos.
All varieties of sex were for sale 24 hours a day in Sharon Lopatka’s world. She could provide nearly anything anybody desired at any time. With a tapping of her fingers o
n a computer keyboard, she became five-foot-six and a shapely 121 pounds. A few more taps and she was an aggressive 300-pound dominatrix who promised strict discipline. Or she could tap and become ‘Nancy Carlson’, a screen actress prepared to star in whatever type of sexual video her fans cared to purchase.
As Nancy Carlson, Sharon sold videos of unconscious women having sexual intercourse. According to the Augusta Chronicle of 4 November 1996, one excerpt from an advertisement dated Tuesday, 1 October 1996 stated, ‘Hi! My name is Nancy. I just made a VHS video of actual women… willing and unwilling to be… knocked out… drugged… under hypnosis and chloroformed. Never before has a film like this been made that shows the real beauty of the sleeping victim.’
Sharon even went so far as to advertise her own undergarments online, with a message which read, ‘Is there anyone out there interested in buying my worn panties?’ She certainly had no qualms about advertising and selling products that would appeal to the lurid sexual fetishes of her customers. She also had her own risque sexual fantasies that she actively sought to fulfil:
‘DO YOU DARE ENTER… THE LAND OF THE GIANTESS???
‘Where men are crushed like bugs… by these angry… yet gorgeous giant goddesses.’
Sharon used the web for a variety of purposes, such as to obtain business ideas and make money. However, she also used it to interact with a larger variety of people who shared her unconventional interests. She often ventured into hardcore pornographic chatrooms where subscribers would openly discuss their interests in necrophilia, bondage, fetishes and sadomasochism.
One of her ads read, ‘Let me customise your most exciting TORTURE fantasy for you… on VHS… to watch and enjoy privately in the comfort of your own home. A film designed by you… with scenarios of your choice. Films are shipped in plain envelopes to protect your… privacy.’
She used many pseudonyms and multiple personae in her internet messages. These ‘masks’ allowed her anonymity and the freedom to pursue her unusual fantasies. According to the Washington Post of 3 November 1996, one message Sharon posted stated that she had ‘a fascination with torturing till death’.
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