"The continuity and his memory were phenomenal.". A man has been arrested in Kent on suspicion of murder after a boy died in north Manchester. No madman in a hooded jacket, the authorities quickly realized, would ever be found. Boy A: and just leave him 2 die in the trafford centre? He was the kind of teenager who needed every last detail spelled out. He, in turn, went to Judge Maddison. Dobinson, too, was interested in watching sexual activity via the Webcam. Not a spelling or grammatical error, Hogg decided. What appeared on the screen was a revelation of flattering significance: "This is the UK's biggest secret I CAN TRUST YOU WOULD IT BE POSSIBLE TO LOOK AT YOU WHILE I TELL YOU?". As solace, John eventually allowed Rachel to return from the dead, at which time it was explained that she had simply slipped into "a coma," and had, moreover, despite her previous conditionand the fact that she had never actually met himgiven birth to Mark's baby. Once John had introduced himself as Rachel's brother, the two boys just clicked, John was later to explain. Mark was now a suspect and after he was shown the CCTV footage, revealed the truth that he was the one who stabbed John. put her head under water. It is instructive, for example, to analyze the dialogue of the character John called Janet Dobinson (No. Previously acceptable grades at his relatively undemanding high school dropped to C's and F's, Hatton, his attorney, tells me. 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.". "Mark must have known at some point that these characters were not real," he later told a therapist. His e-mail addresses contain no hint of his real name. At school his geography teacher saw a change in her pupil. When the murder was completed, Mark would, Dobinson promised, be in very good hands: "I will be a 'detective superintendent.'". "Incitement to murder," said the prosecutor. The lawyer suspects that, on being arrested, Mark "was still believing he was acting on behalf of the British secret service, and held a fear if he said anything he might be in danger himself.". His own murder. Thanks very much. "At the police station," Dobinson assured him. As for himself, John was a virtual Scheherazade, a gifted fabricator. Both sets of parents decided there would be no more sleepovers. By February 2003 he was contacting 20 to 30 people a night in chat rooms; within a week he had found Mark. These documents sketch a different, complex picture of John, victim and criminal. When it was unveiled in court, Mark couldnt believe hed been so gullible. When the sentence came down, Mark winked at his mother, and Sally Hogg, whose work had uncovered the degree of his manipulation by John, wept for the duller, more susceptible boy. But "the problem with the MSN chat room is we didn't know whether there were, say, 98 individuals or one person using 98 e-mail addresses.". "I just thought, It could have been my son," she says. Shortly after her appearance, John suddenly emerged in the chat room as himself (saying that he was Rachel's brother), and these two were followed by still other fantastical alter egos equipped with wild backgrounds but dull, repetitive names: Lyndsey East, Rachel East, Kevin McGregory, Dave McNeil, Janet Dobinson. Perhaps it was "warped" to spend so much time in chat rooms, he reflected, sleepless and typing ceaselessly. In the meantime, Dobinson added, Mark was to make sure to buy the right type of knife. "Your Lordship may think he would make a very good barrister." It is clear he doesn't have much sympathy for the boy whose brush with death prompted the unprecedented charge. ("Wud u h8 me if i told u that i pretended to be rach 1nite?" The boy was, no mistaking it, aghast. Belinda Sproston, of the parental control software firm CyberPatrol, said: "The conversations that these boys were having would not have been allowed in a monitored chatroom. And not just one. From John's laptop emerged what the prosecutor would subsequently describe as "an Internet soap opera moving from one scene to another, each character and story line more fantastic than the last." He was given a three-year supervision order, banned from contacting Mark or using the internet without strict adult supervision. He had to wait. As Hogg sorted for clues through the stacks of transcripts of Internet chat, however, she noticed a repetition of a certain word. "She" then introduced him to her stepbrother, who was John. When a 14-year-old British boy was savagely stabbed, no one could have imagined the bizarre chat-room fantasy world that lay behind the attack. No pocket knives, she told him. After the investigators had poured through the thousands of lines of text from the chat room, they realised most of the people on there were fake. He was never in any trouble and was close to his family. Wot shud i say 2 him? For one thing, Agent Dobinson was promising extraordinary rewards for his service to the Crown: 80 million, she estimated, sexual favors, a career in the intelligence service cemented by a contract. "But these could not be described as any normal circumstances," the judge added. He found he was never tired. Perhaps his girlfriend has access to the Internet; she doesn't believe him, John reports. Feelings of depression overwhelmed him. The character Rachel is writing to Mark: This passage incensed Manchester authorities. This time the order came from Tony Blair himself, via Janet. If Mark played his cards right, wrote John, "by may next year you will be a millionaire. Sally Hogg went directly to the prosecutor with the news. Deceitful. tragedy it all was.". He stabbed him twice, once in the stomach and once in the chest and then waited 20 minutes before calling the police. "No offence but wot does she do neway?" A 16-year-old boy who was fatally stabbed in Manchester has been named by police as Kennie Carter. Certainly not with his mother, who noticed that the more time her son spent online the more he was becoming "secretive" and snappish. At first it seemed as though a brutal, but straightforward, robbery had gone wrong. A deliberate stylistic variation of "maybe," shared by four supposedly different people. 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. We finally saw that the last person to use the laptop at John's house [before the stabbing] was Janet Dobinson.". Boy A admitted attempted murder and Boy B has admitted incitement to murder. A closed-circuit camera at the base of the alley had recorded all the foot traffic. 'Spy': well think please And he would sit and read a book rather than talk with his friends," she revealed. Judy Bachrach is a Vanity Fair contributing editor and the author of Tina and Harry Come to America: Tina Brown, Harry Evans, and the Uses of Power (Free Press). His mother, an office manager, also disappoints him, he suggested to therapists. 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. In his head. Sally Hogg, the police analyst, recalls that "there were 193 separate e-mail addresses" culled from the computers. ", John felt himself to be so profoundly unlovable that he entered the MSN chat room not under his own name but as a teenage beauty named Rachel West. His friend John marveled at such a trusting, suggestible nature. not believe Boy B intended to harm him. We are no longer accepting comments on this article. Two years ago, she found another companion, a plumber who moved in with them, and it seemed to John that this newcomer was receiving more attention than he was. ", Detective Chief Inspector Julian Ross said John's actions remained baffling. When investigators seized Marks computer they found over 58,000 lines of text within the chat room. An intricate web of deceit had been spun by the boy on the chatroom to recruit another teenager as his would-be killer. In her line of work, after all, she was expert at assuming all sorts of identities. But that was because police had possession of the computers and were bound to find out about her anyway. "Call an ambulance!" Janet had used it and so had John. The court heard Boy B's actions were part of an "extraordinary suicide attempt". ", "Erm I duno. Detectives launched a murder inquiry after a mother and son were both stabbed at a house in Miles Platting at around 9.30pm on Thursday. That is what lies at the heart of this story. It was then that Janet entered the chat room. Nor do the multiple therapists appear to have noticed it.). The female creations came across, police decided, as archetypes of femininity, and not simply to a 16-year-old mind. Moreover, added the mother, despite his earlier homosexual leanings, John now had "a girlfriend." The 15-year-old died in hospital after being stabbed alongside his mother, who remains in a. Nov. 29, 2022. "It was like satisfying a craving, you had to be on there, you had to be doing it." But this time John also was chargedwith inciting murder. His time online, however, began spiralling out of control. Sometimes, as night falls over Greater Manchester, the ingenious adolescent returns to the place where he was stabbed last year, when he was 14. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Cond Nast. "The aim of it all was to find Janet Dobinson," says Ross. John's mother discovered her son was at the home of an older boy named Mark, about whom she knew nothing. Into the chat room, therefore, came a new character, Lyndsey East, equipped with all that was required for instant membershipLyndseyeast2k3@hotmail.com. Something had to be done to forestall the moment of truth. He was infatuated with this woman. Next to it is the headline BOY STABBED. Also in evidence were communications to both boys from someone who claimed to be a 44-year-old top administrator in the British secret service. They were ordered never to meet again and they could only go on the Internet with supervision and never onto chat rooms. Only in the second instance is John's real name excised from accounts. "In fact, I think MSN themselves should perhaps take some responsibility. His mother, Katarzyna Bastek, in her 40s, was also stabbed in the incident and is recovering in hospital. John returned to his laptop. The lawyer is distinctly impressed by his client. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. And that raises the question: How much of this elaborately constructed Internet fantasy did Mark really believe, at heart? Authorities allege she fatally stabbed John Glennon on Friday in Manchester, New Hampshire. "We couldn't get our heads around it." After months of analysis, detectives were able to establish that it was John who sent the final messages from his home computer on the night of 28 June 2003 and had planned his own murder. "I haven't really thought about it," Mark replied. "He said he'd done it because he'd heard voices." Lyndsey East, who had briefly enchanted him and then disappeared without a word of good-bye, was John. must stop st8 away with 6969," Dobinson warned Mark, thus neatly uniting her creator's two major obsessions, sex and death. 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. He was the only child of working-class parents, well mannered and respectful, bound, he thought, for a local business college. Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in, Please refresh your browser to be logged in, Boy, 14, 'posed as spy to arrange his own murder', Extra 20% off selected fashion and sportswear at Very, Up to 20% off and extra perks with Booking.com Genius membership, $6 off a $50+ order with this AliExpress discount code, 15% off orders over 15 with this eBay discount code, Compare broadband packages side by side to find the best deal for you, Compare cheap broadband deals from providers with fastest speed in your area, All you need to know about fibre broadband, Best Apple iPhone Deals in the UK February 2023, Compare iPhone contract deals and get the best offer this February, Compare the best mobile phone deals from the top networks and brands. That was how the child discovered that the man who had been living with his mother was not his father, as he had supposed. Manchester Grammar School pupil Yousef Makki was attacked in Hale Barns, Greater Manchester, on 2 . But this was just a brief spasm of fear. None of it? The police appealed for witnesses whilst seizing CCTV footage of the surrounding area. 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. Odd that Dobinson used it. "I would say, of the two teenagers, John was the more wicked and more criminally culpable.". The stab wounds still pain him. Boy A: ok but it will only hve one set of fingerprints? This, however, made little difference; at night the boy would manage to retrieve and re-assemble the laptop and modem. Threads of plots, no matter how complicated or absurd, were never dropped. Detective Chief Inspector Julian Ross of the Greater Manchester police force gazed at the mountains of chat-room printouts in utter dismay. The following day, June 29 2003, boy A "carried out his orders to the letter" and stabbed boy B once in the chest and once in the stomach. They had desires they expressed frankly, ardently, threateningly, as the occasion warranted. "How cud I have been there when i didnt kno where she woz," the bewildered adolescent wrote back. On Sunday 29 June 2003, Mark brought a kitchen knife under the pretence it was for his mother, carefully avoided the CCTV cameras Janet had warned him about and entered the alley with John. Freezing cold. [CDATA[// >