Why had John done it? "To get him to do what 'they' wanted!". The modem was removed from John's laptop and the computer itself exiled to her room. Boy A, a 15-year-old, stabbed Boy B twice, but he did not die, Manchester Crown Court heard. (It was not the most felicitous evening: the videos were porn, and the two boys engaged in oral sex that night.) For instance, both liked Catch Me if You Can, a movie in which Leonardo DiCaprio plays an adolescent con man who effortlessly assumes multiple identities. The 14-year-old boy, dubbed Boy B in court, created a series of fictional characters in chatrooms, one of which ordered Boy A to murder him. Despite the devastating effect the ordeal had on Boy A, Mr Ross said he did He has told his therapist about his lies to his girlfriend. In her line of work, after all, she was expert at assuming all sorts of identities. A 16-year-old boy has been stabbed to death in Manchester. Posing as the spy on the internet, and promising him sex and cash, Boy B sent messages to Boy A to stab him to death. Janet informed Mark that the once valuable asset John was now suffering a brain tumour and needed to be put out of his misery. "Bear in mind this is a love storythat's why he wanted to commit suicide," says Goldberg. At the end of May, the teenagers, their lawyers, and the press gathered in Judge Maddison's courtroom, where neither boy so much as glanced at the other. Or, more anxiously, "Are you O.K.?" He found he was never tired. Indefatigably. A person, says the lawyer, whose future may well turn out to be "brilliant.". Fifty-eight thousand lines of text were extracted for scrutiny, a fraction of the total. As Mark would discover on the chat-room site, Rachel, along with her "brother" John, were in a state of ceaseless peril, threatened with abduction and rape by a self-proclaimed homosexual stalker named KevinJohn's fourth character. The boy was devious. Being middle-aged, she is "not with teenage talk," Dobinson admonishes Mark in the chat room, and she requests communication in more adult language. The boy - who is now 15 and can be referred to only as John for legal reasons - persuaded his friend, known as Mark, now 17, to stab him to death in order to pass a fictitious initiation test for the British secret services in a meticulously planned attack one Sunday evening last summer. Precise details of the June 29 stabbing, down to the kitchen knife, appeared on the MSN chat-room site right up until one day before the crime, police noticed. "Skilled writers of fiction would struggle to conjure up a plot such as arises here." For another, John, writing under his own name in a more adolescent style, sent Mark careful confirmation of his supposedly fatal condition: "I got a letter today, from my doc, when i went in a few weeks ago cos i was depressed and shit i got a brain thingy tumour but its big.". No madman in a hooded jacket, the authorities quickly realized, would ever be found. Who was she really, anyway? Use of this site constitutes acceptance of Terms and Conditions. John was careful to find an excuse for a certain character to disappear so a new one could enter the online chat. Standing close by was a 16-year-old boy, who was the one who alerted the police to the crime. "Call an ambulance!" Thus, Rachel was only the beginning of what evolved into an intricate Internet folie six. Janet asked Mark in the final chatroom exchange. an incredulous Mark wrote the British agent Janet Dobinson on June 28, 2003. All rights reserved. He had to wait. At the time of the stabbing the alley led nowhere; it was cut off by a 40-foot drop. Writing only in capital letters, Janet convinced Mark she was a spy and he was the reason she had joined the chat room, to recruit him into MI5. Next to it is the headline BOY STABBED. ]]> The crucial character in the deception was a 42-year-old British secret agent called Janet. "There was no verification," Ross says. On the other, he felt completely trapped. Mark obeyed, convincing Johns school he had a dentist appointment. Odd that Dobinson used it. The teenager died in hospital after he was found with stab wounds following a. Jakub Szymanski was taken to hospital. 10th Jun 2022, 4:53pm Detectives in north Manchester have launched a murder inquiry, after a teenage boy died when he and his mother were stabbed at a house last night (9 June). The 15-year-old died in hospital after being stabbed alongside his mother, who remains in a. The answer as to why is still up for debate but some claim he loved John to the point where he knew Mark would not reciprocate if the truth were ever revealed. Credit: MEN Media. One time he tried to depart from this routine, Bailey reported, but "the resulting anxiety was such that he had to go back and dress all over again." that's wot ur askin me?" "The Internet's a very dangerous place to be," the prosecutor says mildly. Police are investigating after a boy who admitted killing his friend took a video of himself in a toilet during his murder trial making stabbing actions. Almost nothing consequential came out, as the lawyer representing the Manchester Evening News, the Daily Mail, and The Sun complained. This Dobinson woman claimed to have urgent business with a very lofty crowd. But by the time of a crucial chatroom conversation on 28 June, Mark was still convinced by the order - from the "spy" - to kill John. Both sets of parents decided there would be no more sleepovers. It is this demand that catches my eye when I open the 15 pounds of chat-room text that I had received. They were ordered never to meet again and they could only go on the Internet with supervision and never onto chat rooms. That month the boy was arrested by police minutes before setting off for school. In July last year, Mark was charged with attempted murder. However tragic for its victim, the condition also had devastating consequences for the British secret service, which needed John dead, she explained, in record time. Some madman had attacked his friend, the boy told the police. An arid pause. Thanks very much. The Madness of Two: Famous Examples of Folie Deux, Peter Farquhar, mentally tortured and murdered in a gaslighting plot, The dark side of social media: deception, obsession and murder, Anna Delvey: The New York socialite who didn't exist, These women wish they'd swiped left on the Tinder Swindler, Crime + Investigation Play - What to watch in March 2023. Indeed, for all his love for Mark, who was languishing in confinement for eight months while John recuperated at home, the younger boy remained rigidly unforthcoming about his own participation in the scheme. That same camera follows John whenever he revisits the scene of the crime. He was the kind of teenager who needed every last detail spelled out. A criminal intelligence analyst, Sally Hogg, pored over 58,000 lines of text generated between them in six weeks. However much she screamed for u.". Manchester Hartford County Connecticut Arrests, Warrants & Most Wanted. To prevent such tragedy, Mark was told, he had to perform sexual tasks in view of the Webcam to gratify the stalker himself. Invention was so easy, "the equivalent of taking heroin," John thought. These books "were about mental illness," the teacher observed. , updated In the universe he inhabited, there was, John felt, no one to sustain himexcept on the Internet, which he peopled with characters of his own device. You might be tsted on that later on. John's mother wasted no time. CHESTERFIELD COUNTY, VA - Chesterfield County Police continue to investigate a fatal motor vehicle crash that occurred in the 9100 block of Midlothian Turnpike. But here they were thwarted at every turn by the peculiar British legal system. When pressed by police, the boy would finally concede, reluctantly and only after changing his story several times, that it was his best friend, Mark, who had stabbed him, though John said he had no idea why. The following day the two boys met and went to the Trafford Centre where they bought a kitchen knife. Over a nine-month period before the attempted murder, John began presenting himself as a 16-year-old girl in search of a cyber relationship, then "introduced" himself as the girl's step-brother. "That was the stumbling point for me. When investigators seized Marks computer they found over 58,000 lines of text within the chat room. We let social media get away with murder. Manchester Crown Court heard that John, who had fallen in love with Mark, also tricked him into performing sex acts on a webcam before tricking him into stabbing him twice in an alleyway at Altrincham on 29 June last year. In fact, John was determined to get himself killed, which is why he never used the abort code - 6969 - that he provided. 3-min read. If he completed his mission hed become a member of the British Secret Service, receive 80 million, meet Tony Blair (the then PM), the Queen and receive sexual favours from Janet, a 44-year-old married woman who lived a double life for Queen and country. People will hear, please be quiet," the older teenager told him. Boy A: ok but it will only hve one set of fingerprints? Murderers? It is a spasm of regret that goes unmentioned by police and lawyers alike in my conversations with them. The Montreal Mafia Murders: Blood, Gore, Cannolis, and Hockey Bags, Palace Insiders Say Prince William Is Already Furious About Prince Harrys Memoir Leaks, Prince Harry alleges Prince William attacked him over Meghan Markle in a new excerpt from, Prince Harry on Williams Hairline and Their Wicked Stepmother. THE CAMBRIDGE GRAMMAR OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE Rodney Huddleston Geoffrey K. Pullum The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language Rodney Huddleston Geoffrey K. Pullum in collaboration with Laurie Bauer Betty Birner Ted Briscoe Peter Collins David Denison David Lee Anita Mittwoch Geoffrey Nunberg Frank Palmer John Payne Peter Peterson Lesley Stirling . John's mother discovered her son was at the home of an older boy named Mark, about whom she knew nothing. He stabbed him twice, once in the stomach and once in the chest and then waited 20 minutes before calling the police. He was infatuated with this woman. It was "like feeding a dog," John would later explain. Friday 17 September 2021, 10:51am. says Goldberg, John's lawyer. What happened to the Hatton Garden burglars? At age four, John found a book with his birth date in it, next to a different last name. It is instructive, for example, to analyze the dialogue of the character John called Janet Dobinson (No. For their protection, the true identity of these boys cannot be revealed, they are simply known as John (14) and Mark (16). His time online, however, began spiralling out of control. When the murder was completed, Mark would, Dobinson promised, be in very good hands: "I will be a 'detective superintendent.'". "He manipulated him," says Hogg. Police Identify Driver Killed in Crash. the perpetually besotted Mark asked her. The mere thought of Mark reduces the boy to tears. Mark was to carry out oral sex on John to complete the test Another test was given. Manchester. A 44-year-old man from Manchester was arrested in Kent on Friday evening. If Mark played his cards right, wrote John, "by may next year you will be a millionaire. "Boots," typed Dobinson, referring to a drugstore chain which sells many household articles, including, as it turns out, Sabatier kitchen knives. "It was incitement to commit murder - his own murder," said Detective Chief Inspector Julian Ross of Greater Manchester Police. Moreover, he was not to stray from her explicit instructions, because: "4 Agents watching you now ", "Each style of conversation was totally differentI really believed it," marvels Sally Hogg, the police analyst. All of it? "We couldn't get our heads around it." "Shush. They then went to Altrincham town centre where Mark stabbed John twice, once in the chest and once in the stomach. Mark never noticed. For example, although the media had named John as a stabbing victim and published his photograph less than a year earlier, no one in Britain would ever be allowed to learn that he had tried to engineer his own execution that hot June day in Goose Green: "As far as the public in south Manchester are concerned there is at large a crazed knifeman who murderously attacked a 14-year-old," said the newspaper lawyer. "She" then introduced him to her stepbrother, who was John. Some of it? You can take any identity you want.". A ring of pedophiles? A court order, citing the age of the culprits, would not permit any media outletincluding Vanity Fairto identify the boys and required every publication to use the pseudonyms "John" and "Mark." He was never in any trouble and was close to his family. "Only he can walk through the door. "My life was on the Internet. This time the order came from Tony Blair himself, via Janet. No media alarm should have been raised. For three months there would be no major reduction in bafflement. The house, which is estimated to be worth $400,000, lies in a slightly more prosperous neighborhood than the one inhabited by Mark's family, where each brick structure is an echo of its modest neighbor. Disaster awaited one young female character, it was noticed, whenever a love-struck Mark attempted to rendezvous with her ("which could not happen due to her not existing," as David Boulger, a probation officer, crisply observed in his report). There was to be no further communication with the peculiar Janet Dobinson, allegedly of the British secret service. As for the father's successor, he was, John declared, "bad on drugs.". Victoria Police previously said the boy was 16 years old but made a . Mark was, he told John, falling in love, ceaselessly trying to arrange a rendezvous with the girl. I havent really thought about it.". Paramedics called police to an address on Bednal Avenue, in the Miles Platting area,at 9.30pm on Thursday. January 13, 2004: New York, NY FKL. The trauma for him!" A murder investigation has been launched after a 14-year-old boy was fatally stabbed at a house in north Manchester. Detectives made appeals for help through the local media for the apparently unprovoked attack in Altrincham town centre. Boy A: ok erm well i watch a lot of films, 9.57pm Spy: change of plan dnt wear glove pull knife out and say you took it out. Cold Cases, Missing and Unsolved Crimes. Another of the characters was then fictitiously killed off, leaving only Mark, John and the stalker. "And so if you are talking about safety, that's one of the big dangers. Then on June 28 Janet told Mark that he had to kill the younger boy. The 14-year-old boy, dubbed Boy B in court, created a series of fictional characters in chatrooms, one of which ordered Boy A to murder him. He routinely washes parts of his body in a precise, unvarying order, no part cleaned more than once. This, however, made little difference; at night the boy would manage to retrieve and re-assemble the laptop and modem. Rhamero West was stabbed to death in south Manchester. John, too, had his suspicions about the degree of his friend's credulity. At school his geography teacher saw a change in her pupil. In John's small bedroom, which overlooks a small garden of aloe and yew, the boys played videos. A murder investigation has been launched after a 16-year-old boy was stabbed to death in Manchester. Another element the teenagers had in common: a Webcam, which allowed them to view each other and any other chat-room member who had one of the cameras. says Hogg, the police analyst. Then out. It showed Mark and John had disappeared down the alleyway - alone - for 25 minutes. But when it emerged that the boys had met through a teenage chatroom, detectives examined their computers. The second was John himself. A great deal of thought went into her gestation. They are proud, existential boasts stuffed with lies: livinitlargelad@hotmail.com and livinitlargeladdy@hotmail.com. Earlier this month, a 15-year-old teenage boy was also stabbed to death in Walker Avenue, in Bolton, in another separate attack. "I just thought, It could have been my son," she says. It's staggering to be dealing with a case that arises out of a 14-year-old boy's invention of false personalities, false relationships and events arranged for his own killing at the hands of a 16-year-old boy who he had met via an internet chatroom.". And not just one. Even though, thanks to the Internet, anyone who wishes can access all relevant information. Two teenagers on a junior high school basketball court after school became involved in a fight and one stabbed the other in the shoulder. He misses him terribly, even while recognizing, as he puts it, "the friendship with Mark was fake." It is a paradox that seems to have escaped the British judiciary. Rachel's desirability was enhanced by the attachment of a promising photographfrom some source, "although we don't know who," Hatton points out. Only a part of this amazing story was ever revealed to the British public. School, despite his excellent grades, was equally desolate. There was Rachel, the 16-year-old whom Mark had grown close to; John (the victim) was her stepbrother; Kevin the decidedly creepy self-proclaimed stalker and finally Janet the spy mistress. And, on occasion, guilty. "I would say, of the two teenagers, John was the more wicked and more criminally culpable.". Mr Ross added: "We have not come across any underlying things that would turn a child to do He was, he told his probation officer, "trapped" in the virtual world, with no way out. And as far as the police could see, it hadn't occurred, at least not the way the older boy had said. Since seeing a psychologist, John's mother informed the court, John had been getting along nicely with her live-in companion. "I am quite convinced it was a deliberate suicide attempt.". The word was "mybye," and it was used by John, Kevin, Dobinson, and Lyndsey. But all he manages to attract is the curiosity of the local police. Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged inPlease refresh your browser to be logged in, Find your bookmarks in your Independent Premium section, under my profile. Which wasn't, unfortunately, saying much. "When will I c u?" A man has been arrested in Kent on suspicion of murder after a boy died in north Manchester on 9 June 2022. Someone stabbed him in Goose Green for revenge, he told her, because he, John, had identified a killer on the loose. "Could you kill someone close to you? Asked if anyone had ever been able to exert control over his private thoughts, the boy said yes. Two of them ceased writing after meeting up with sorry fates: rape, murder, a coma, a baby born during the comaplot twists so messy and operatic that police had to provide themselves with stacks of names and huge piles of colored charts to sort things out. The author knocks on the doors bearing the darkest symbols, behind which lie guns, ammo, antisemitism, antiabortion dogmaand a belief in the coming civil war. A grammar school scholarship boy stabbed through the heart by his ex-public school friend was a "peacemaker", his sister told the inquest into his death. Friday 3 December 2021, 5:53pm. They travelled to the Trafford Centre, where they bought a knife. "How cud I have been there when i didnt kno where she woz," the bewildered adolescent wrote back. But to the authorities who later analyzed and re-analyzed what was written, none of this was ordinary. John pleaded guilty to perverting the course of justice and incitement to murder. "It's a hard life!" Advertisement "Could you stab someone?" From four in the afternoon to seven in the morning, he typed his inventions into his laptop. Judge David Maddison, the recorder of Manchester, said: "Skilled writers of fiction would struggle to conjure up a plot such as that which arises here. 'Spy': well think please He was expecting to meet the prime minister, and be given a gun and up to 500,000 in cash. Intriguingly, the boy never spoke up at this point to reveal that, as he had stabbed his friend only under orders from the British secret service, he was entitled to release. Detective Chief Inspector Julian Ross, of Greater Manchester police, said: "The initial contact was made when the older boy went into an internet chatroom and talked to a person purporting to be a 16-year-old girl. The boy was, no mistaking it, aghast. a short-lived character inquires of Mark right after Rachel's "death." Mark's worlduntil then packed mainly with soccer, passable grades, and admiring schoolgirlswas alight with these passionate intruders. As they poured through the copy, they initially believed they were looking for a paedophile pretending to be Janet and grooming Mark. Mark was still accused of attempted murder, to which he ultimately pleaded guilty. "It has to be big to stab him and make him bleed to death.". One of the stab wounds pierced his kidney and lacerated his liver. A 44-year-old Manchester man, who is believed to be known to the victims, was arrested last night in Kent on suspicion of murder. That was the day before the attempted murder. "John said he invented other personas in the chat room in order to keep Mark interested in him," one therapist was later to learn. "Your Lordship may think he would make a very good barrister." put her head under water. Sally Hogg went directly to the prosecutor with the news. Mark, who "liked me loads," as John realized, would certainly cease correspondence if the truth emerged about his virtual romantic interests. Kennie Carter was found badly injured in Thirlmere Avenue, Stretford, shortly before 19:00 GMT on. Nicholas Clarke, prosecuting, told the court, This case serves as a stark warning of the dangers of the dark side of the internet.. "Don't let that be the last thing you are saying. 'It's a show that I'm passionate about': Will Mellor on 'Cops Who Kill', communicating with via an Internet chat room. "Paki" and "gay" were some of the names hurled at himthe first because "I think my dad must have been Asian," the second "because most of my friends were girls." That is what lies at the heart of this story. A story of a near-fatal Internet attraction. When it was unveiled in court, Mark couldnt believe hed been so gullible. Offences of this kind under normal circumstances would result in an extremely lengthy custodial sentence, Judge David Maddison said, but these could not be described as any normal circumstances. The two were instead given supervision orders, John three years, Mark two. On the one hand, the police were in luck: Mark's computer contained software that permitted retrieval of much of the chat-room dialogue between the two boyssuch sophisticated software is rarely on the home computers of unsophisticated adolescents, and it is possible the boy didn't know of its existence. ", Practically everyone I speak to about this singular boy and his case demonstrates toward him a high level of antipathy, with the notable exception of Goldberg, who compares this story to Romeo and Juliet. 17,029 pages were read in the last minute. As for himself, John was a virtual Scheherazade, a gifted fabricator. said. "Mark did it once, stood up, holding me, did it again," the victim told police. The final internet chatroom exchange took place on 28 June last year. "I was surprised Mark believed it all," John would later admit. Mark was now a suspect and after he was shown the CCTV footage, revealed the truth that he was the one who stabbed John. Authorities allege she fatally stabbed John Glennon on Friday in Manchester, New Hampshire. A teenager has been charged with murder after a 16-year-old boy was stabbed to death . A man has been charged with murder after a 15-year-old boy was stabbed to death in Manchester last week. Police continue to investigate at the scene on Bednal Avenue. "And as nobody's ever been charged with inciting his own murder, it's a novelty.". If those numbers were uttered on the sunbaked streets of Altrincham, by the shopping center, Mark was told, John would be allowed to live. 26 Feb Feb They might as well have burned them. Mark: And just leave him 2 die in the trafford centre? 2023 Cond Nast. None of it? this sort of thing. "Look at how convincing these personalities are!" Boy A: and just leave him 2 die in the trafford centre? Deceitful. The police concluded John was the mastermind behind it all; he was every character in that chat room, the puppet master pulling the strings whilst Mark played the role of puppet. Cameron Mounds, age 19, was found in the driveway of 98 Enfield Street where he was pronounced deceased. Not in Britain, however. Boy B also admitted perverting the course of justice. Just before 8pm on Sunday 29 June 2003, the police were called to a stabbing that had taken place down an alley behind a row of shops in Altrincham, a town in Greater Manchester. The teenager was taken to hospital as well following his injuries but died around an hour after arriving. Mark, who is also from a middle-class family in Greater Manchester, was given a two-year supervision order for attempted murder. John returned to his laptop. ", The bleakly serious nature of the case is expected to lead to calls for tighter monitoring of internet chatrooms. Vanity Fair may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. [CDATA[// >