Over several months, the North Carolina News & Observer found more than 50 messages of Sharon’s where the overriding theme was that she wanted to be tortured and killed. Often she would post messages looking for a man to satisfy her wish.
‘I guess some people have some kind of inner thing going on that you just never know about,’ said Debra Walker, Lopatka’s neighbour. ‘I think we knew them as well as anyone in the neighbourhood. She was just like anyone else you know, and that kind of scares me in a way, to think you really never know somebody.’
A sex-rights activist named Tanith, who often visited the sites, said that she became concerned about Sharon’s strange messages. On 3 November 1996, the Washington Post quoted Tanith saying that Sharon was ‘going to chatrooms and asking to be tortured to death’. Tanith says she had tried to stop her, but Sharon refused. Sharon replied to the woman,: ‘I want the real thing. I did not ask for you preaching to me.’
Sharon would sit at her computer typing furiously for hours at a time, trying to make contact with the right person to satisfy her strange desires. Numerous responses to her messages offered to fulfil her fantasy, but the senders withdrew when they discovered that her requests were serious.
Eventually, she found a man who swallowed the bait. Several weeks after meeting him on screen, her last wish was to come true.
She arrived in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains while the foliage was still coloured with brilliant oranges and yellows and reds to meet that man in person. And, police say, in the ultimate fulfilment of her desires, she was bound with rope, made to bleed and then strangled, before her nude body was dumped into a shallow grave.
The internet has been blamed for everything from spreading recipes for bombs to pushing porn to school kids, but the latest claim, that it contributed to the sex murder of a woman in rural America, sounded like an urban myth. Yet it was all too true.
Early on the morning of Sunday, 13 October 1996, 35-year-old Sharon Lopatka travelled to Baltimore and caught a train to Charlotte, North Carolina, having told her husband that she was going to visit friends in Georgia. A week later, Victor was disturbed to find a mysterious note written by his blonde wife that suggested instead a clandestine, apparently final, trip. ‘If my body is never retrieved don’t worry,’ Sharon had written. ‘Know that I am at peace.’
Victor immediately called the police, who looked for evidence as to Sharon’s whereabouts on her computer. They found emails suggesting that she had visited someone in Lenoir, North Carolina.
There, on Friday, 25 October 1996, police officers found Sharon’s naked, decomposing body buried a short distance from the trailer of the person she had gone to visit. Her hands and feet had been bound with rope and a nylon cord had been strung around her neck. Investigators also found scrape marks around her neck and breasts. The medical examiner determined that she died of strangulation – the violent death Sharon had wished for.
Robert ‘Bobby’ Frederick Glass was a 45-year-old computer analyst employed by Catawba County, North Carolina. He had worked for the county for almost 16 years and was a productive worker who was responsible for programming tax rolls and keeping track of the fuel consumption of county vehicles.
Bobby was also a computer enthusiast, according to Sherri, his wife of 14 years. But, she lamented, he had more passion for the friend on his desk than for his marriage. Her husband was no longer attracted to her and the final straw, she said, was when her children asked why their father didn’t love her any longer.
In May 1996, Bobby and Sherri separated. Shortly afterwards, Sherri left the family home with their three children, daughters aged ten and seven and a son aged six. However, it may have been more than a lack of love that caused the break-up of the family. According to Sherri, there were other marital problems that few had known about; each day Bobby had spent countless hours typing on his computer, and Sherri eventually became suspicious. Bobby subscribed to America Online, a major provider of internet access, and in his net profile he claimed to love photography, music and model railways. In a space reserved for personal quotes he had written, ‘Moderation in all things, including moderation.’
One day Sherri logged on and found worrisome emails saved on her husband’s hard disk. The messages which had been posted under the pseudonyms ‘Toyman’ and ‘Slowhand’ particularly alarmed her because of their ‘raw, violent and disturbing’ nature.
After dinner one evening, she confronted Bobby. Later, she said that ‘all of the colour had drained out of his face’. She realised that there was ‘this side to him’ that was unknown to her. Despite this alarming discovery, Sherri recalled her husband as ‘generally pleasant, hard working and amiable’.
In August 1996, Bobby Glass and Sharon Lopatka became acquainted while visiting sexually orientated internet chatrooms. Bobby displayed a fetish for inflicting pain, whereas Sharon’s desire was to be tortured. In an email message to Bobby, Sharon wrote that she wanted to be bound and strangled as she approached orgasm. Bobby responded by describing in detail how he would fulfil her dearest wish.
Correspondence between the two lasted for several months. The police were able to recover almost 900 pages of emails from the warped couple’s computers. A senior investigator who worked on the case, Captain Danny Barlow of North Carolina’s Caldwell County Sheriff’s Department, said, ‘If you put all their messages together, you’d have a very large novel with a very sad ending.’
It was discovered that, at about 8.45 on the evening of 13 October, Sharon’s train from Baltimore had arrived in Charlotte, where Bobby Glass was waiting, and that they had driven in his pickup truck 80 miles to his trailer home in Lenoir. The events that followed were later to become a source of speculation among police investigators.
On 30 October 1996, the police department’s newly developed Computer Crime Unit found substantial evidence in Sharon’s computer linking her to Bobby Glass. Police officers monitored Bobby’s trailer for several days. It was hoped that Sharon would be found alive there, but she was not seen during the stakeout.
Then Judge Beal issued police with a search warrant for the trailer, and investigators arrived there while Bobby was at work. The ground surrounding the turquoise trailer was littered with rotting garbage and abandoned toys. The interior was equally dirty and cluttered. Among the chaos, police officers found items belonging to Sharon, as well as drug and bondage paraphernalia, child pornography, a pistol and thousands of computer disks.
Seventy-five feet from the trailer, an officer discovered a fresh mound of soil. After digging only 30 inches beneath the mound, they found Sharon’s decomposing remains. Caldwell County investigator DA Brown said that, if the body had been buried in the woods behind the trailer, ‘we would have never found her’.
That same day Bobby Glass was arrested at his workplace – the first time a police unit had captured a murder suspect primarily on the basis of evidence obtained from emails.
While in custody, Bobby – a member of the Rotary Club, whose sister was a church organist and whose family was well respected throughout the community – was interviewed about the events surrounding the alleged murder of Sharon. He told investigators that for several days he and Sharon had acted out their violent sexual fantasies in his trailer. He confessed that Sharon had willingly allowed him to tie her up with rope and probe her with objects lying around the house. And he revealed that she allowed him to tie a rope around her neck and tighten it as she climaxed during intercourse. But, according to his lawyer, Neil Beach, Bobby claimed to have accidentally strangled Sharon to death, while in the throes of violent sexual play. Later, Bobby was quoted as saying, ‘I don’t know how much I pulled the rope… I never wanted to kill her, but she ended up dead.’
Sharon Lopatka’s body was sent to Dr John Butts, North Carolina’s chief medical examiner. The autopsy report stated the cause of death as strangulation. Other tests showed inconclusive evidence of sexual torture or mutilation. Butts believed that Sharon died three days
after she arrived in North Carolina.
Attorney Beach said that the autopsy reports supported his client’s claim that the death was accidental. ‘It is hard for me to believe the woman was tortured for three days if the medical examiner of North Carolina couldn’t find any indication of that… It’s much easier to understand or picture an accident occurring during sexual activity than it is to conjure up an image of this man as a cold-blooded, premeditated killer,’ he said.
Search warrant affidavits released by police stated that Sharon intended to meet Bobby specifically to be tortured and killed. Captain Danny Barlow considered a death under such circumstances to be deliberate, not accidental. According to police, emails written under the pseudonym ‘Slowhand’ detailing how he was going to kill Sharon provided further evidence that the death was premeditated. Bobby was charged with first-degree murder and held without bond in Caldwell County Jail.
On 26 October, Superior Court Judge Beverly T Beal had issued a gagging order to those directly involved in the case. Despite this, the media obtained enough information to sensationalise the Lopatka case. Most of the news stories focused on the dangers of internet-mediated meetings. Sharon’s death spawned debates and discussion groups worldwide. Many called for censorship of the internet to prevent such deaths and to protect children. Conversely, anti-censorship activists argued that the internet was a useful tool, allowing people to express themselves more freely and to voice their ideas in an open forum.
‘The Mardi gras phenomenon’ is a term used by psychologists to describe the ability to mask oneself and assume a variety of personalities, allowing one to speak and act freely with little or no consequence. This phenomenon is particularly prevalent on the internet, where users can use online chatrooms and news groups to air their opinions and vent their feelings uninhibitedly and in many cases anonymously.
Sharon’s death and the publicity surrounding the case led to a growth in interest in understanding deviant sexual behaviours, especially sadism, masochism and the use of asphyxia during sexual intercourse.
The pioneering 19th-century German psychologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing first coined the terms ‘sadist’ and ‘masochist’ to describe behaviour in which sexual arousal was achieved through, respectively, the infliction and reception of pain.
According to Reber’s Dictionary of Psychology, sadism is the association of sexual pleasure with the inflicting of physical and psychic pain on another, including humiliation, exploitation and debasement. Masochism refers to ‘any tendency to direct that which is destructive, painful or humiliating against oneself’.
It was Sigmund Freud who was the first to combine the two terms into ‘sadomasochism’ in order to emphasise the reciprocity of the use of pain during sexual intercourse.
A controversial form of deviant sexual play practised by some sadomasochists employs strangulation. Psychologists use the word ‘asphyxiophilia’ in connection with sexual strangulation. By this they mean the practice of controlling or restricting oxygen to the brain by ‘interfering with the breath directly or through pressure on the carotid arteries’ in order to achieve sexual gratification. In many cases, the hands are used or a tourniquet is tied around the throat during intercourse or masturbation to achieve the feeling of euphoria and elation that accompanies a lack of oxygen to the brain. Supposedly, this can increase the intensity of orgasm.
According to The Deviants’ Dictionary, sexual strangulation practised with a partner is a form of ‘edge play’, in which one’s life is literally in the hands of another. The thrill is said to lie in the danger and vulnerability associated with the activity. However, there have been cases in which edge play has resulted in unintentional death.
The American Psychiatric Association claims that each year in the United States about 250 deaths occur involving strangulation or chokeholds during sexual activity. A large majority of these fatalities have occurred during auto-erotic asphyxiation, in which one restricts one’s own oxygen during masturbation, or ‘solo play’.
Jay Wiseman, of the Society for Human Sexuality, confirms this finding, saying that only a few of the cases where death occurs as a result of strangulation or a chokehold involve sexual play with a partner.
What makes Sharon Lopatka’s case exceptional is that she ventured into the relationship with Bobby Glass with one apparent intention – to die. In short, she was a suicidal masochist. But she was not the first in history to seek out a willing participant who would fulfil a request to be strangled to death for sexual gratification.
Knud R Joergensen wrote in 1995 about the case of composer Franz Kotzwara, who in 1791 enlisted the help of a London prostitute, Susannah Hill, to assist him with his bizarre wish. After paying Hill two shillings, Kotzwara asked her to cut off his genitalia – a request the prostitute refused. Yet Hill did agree to her client’s sexual wish to strangle himself with a rope. It was the first documented case of death by sexual strangulation. Hill was eventually arrested for Kotzwara’s murder, but later acquitted when the authorities learned that she was more or less an innocent bystander. By contrast, Bobby Glass, 200 years later, faced first-degree murder charges for the sexual strangulation death of Sharon Lopatka, though the charge was eventually reduced to voluntary manslaughter.
The case against Glass included several lengthy delays and dragged on for three years. But on 27 January 2000 he pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter, as well as to six counts of second-degree sexual exploitation of a minor that resulted from the discovery of other pornographic material on his computer. He was sentenced to 36 to 53 months in prison for the manslaughter of Sharon Lopatka and 21 to 26 months for the possession of child pornography.
He was sent to Avery-Mitchell Correctional Institution in North Carolina. On 20 February 2002, two weeks before his release, Bobby Glass had a heart attack. He was pronounced dead at 1.30am at Spruce Pine Community Hospital in North Carolina.
Among Sharon’s final messages posted on the internet is a note addressed to people who had sent for the videos, failed to receive them and posted their own notes, calling the advertisements a fraud. ‘I’m just one person trying to fill all these orders. I don’t even have time to HAVE A LIFE,’ she complained.
But perhaps the last, poignant word should go to Reverend Clarence Widener, who had officiated at Mr Glass’s wedding many years earlier. He said, ‘He was a very nice fellow. I don’t know what could have happened to him.’
ANASTASIA SOLOVYOVA: IN SEARCH OF A DREAM
‘You dragged her to the grave you dug… You stripped her corpse, mocking her. You saw the ring on her finger and you cut off her finger.’
ANATOLY SOLOVYOV, THE VICTIM’S FATHER, TO HER KILLER
Originally, it was Anastasia Solovyova alone who dreamed of settling in America. The beautiful blonde daughter of two music instructors from Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, excelled at piano and chorus but also studied English assiduously, babysat for an American diplomat in Bishkek and, when she was old enough, joined a bridal agency that would introduce her to American bachelors.
For all of her success in Kyrgyzstan, it was apparent that the 18-year-old ethnic Russian felt that she could build a better life by leaving the former Soviet republic and heading for the United States.
So, when the mail-order bride agency delivered a squat, balding man of almost 40, both she and her parents optimistically saw Gifford Indle King Jr for his finer qualities: intelligent, attentive, well dressed, and he spoke glowingly of his upper-middle-class life and family back in America.
After a few meetings, the Solovyov family was sold.
In their small apartment in Bishkek, Anastasia’s parents had no way of knowing that their future son-in-law was actually bisexual, a financial and emotional failure, a man with a history of relying on his well-to-do parents for money and a proclivity for violent relationships. Nor could they have conceived that, just a few years earlier, he had been divorced by Yekaterina Kazakova, another mail-order bride whose court petition alleged that he had hi
t her in the head with his fist, thrown her against a wall and repeatedly pounded her head against it.
Unaware of King’s previous history with international marriage, Anastasia Solovyova soon left Bishkek for a comfortable townhouse just north of Seattle. ‘At first she seemed happy. She thought she loved him,’ said Natasha Jankauskas, 22, who worked with Anastasia King at a downtown Seattle seafood restaurant soon after she arrived in America. ‘But they were never suited for each other… She was tall, beautiful and outgoing, and her husband was very monotone and pretty unattractive.’
After a few months, the couple’s problems exceeded mere incompatibility. ‘He started getting frustrated with her,’ Natasha remembered. ‘And then it got to the point where Anastasia came into work crying one day because he had smacked her during a driving lesson.’
Yet Natasha, a music teacher, later described Anastasia as ‘amazingly hard-working’ and a ‘universal favourite, constantly surrounded by friends. She persevered and even thrived in America’.
Anastasia studied with determination when she wasn’t working as a restaurant hostess and within two years gained admittance to the prestigious University of Washington, where she intended to study law.
At the same time, she appeared to be bracing for her own legal battle. She began keeping a diary and journals to document the increasingly dysfunctional relationship with her husband, and eventually stored them in a safety deposit box at a local bank, away from his controlling eye.
According to court documents, the diary detailed ‘instances where [Anastasia King] was the victim of domestic violence, invasion of privacy and sexual assault’. It also included mentions of her ensuing disgust with her husband and evidence of her own extramarital affairs.
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