The first person to be charged with inciting their own murder
Honestly? We should have seen what the internet was going to turn into a long time ago.
Brainrot. Isolation. Radicalisation. We might think these are all modern reactions to spending too much time online, and to be totally clear, they are absolutely issues of the moment. Several corporations are spending the kind of money that could keep a small nation afloat every single month, trying to keep people scared, susceptible and angry. As we can see from each errant glance at our phones, it works like gangbusters.
However, this has always been the effect of losing oneself online. All these corporations are just taking what happened to vulnerable individuals 20 years ago and maximising it. You want an example of this? Well, brace yourself because it’s absolutely horrible from start to finish, but 2003 saw a news story break that wasn’t only bizarre and disturbing, but also far ahead of its time. Combining what we would now call catfishing and suicidal ideation with attempted murder.
Considering the two central characters of this tale were 14 and 16 at the time of the tragedy, their names have never been publicly revealed. They are only known as 14-year-old John and the 16-year-old Mark. These two boys were known to be best friends until, on a hot summer’s day, Mark stabbed John for reasons unknown. If that sounds strange to you, then hold on. Because this is a story that’s going to get a whole lot stranger.
Why did Mark stab John?
At first, Mark’s story was that John had been assaulted by a knife wielding mad man. However, John’s life was narrowly saved on the operating table and after several interviews, John finally admitted that Mark himself had done it, but he had no idea why. The investigation into Mark led the authorities to his laptop. It turns out Mark did what he did because no less than seven people that he’d met on an online chatroom had been telling him to kill John for months, including a high-ranking member of the British Secret Service who actually gave the supposed order.
It began with a girl named Rachel. Mark met Rachel on this online chatroom and quickly became infatuated with her, talking with her any chance he got over the course of a few weeks. Eventually, Rachel introduced Mark to her brother, John and the two developed a friendship that was just as intense. Of course, Mark wanted nothing more than to meet Rachel in person, but something always came up for her. At least he could meet John in person though, bringing their friendship offline as well as on.
A few weeks after Mark and Rachel had started talking, something truly awful happened. Rachel had not appeared online for a few days and it was up to John to tell a heartbroken Mark that her boyfriend, who Rachel had wanted to leave for Mark, had sexually assaulted and murdered her. In fact, Mark had actually spoken to him on the same chatroom this whole sordid saga was conducted on, begging to know why he’d done it and threatening to call the police on him.
If the whole things sounds unbelievable, it’s because none of it was true. The whole thing was a hoax. Rachel’s boyfriend wasn’t who he said he was. Rachel wasn’t who she said she was. Each of them had in fact been John, who had over 30 seperate online personas he was play-acting on this chatroom. Unbeknownst to anyone outside of John’s immediate family, John was in the process of more or less removing himself from any part of life that wasn’t online. Logging on once he got home from school at 4pm and not logging off until 7am the following morning.
While Mark wasn’t the only person he was catfishing in this way, Mark was by far the one he was most invested in and arguably the one who was most fooled by it. Thus, John became enamoured with Mark to point of obsession. This was a kind of attention he wasn’t getting from anyone else in his life. he became addicted to it, and their relationship began to become as dangerously co-dependent offline as it was online.
How deep did this rabbit hole go?
Once John was fully sure that Mark would believe everything he was told, John’s stories began to get bigger. He introduced the character of “Janet Dobinson”, a high ranking member of the British Intelligence service who was, for some reason, slumming it on a chatroom flirting with teenage boys. Bless his cotton socks, Mark wasn’t the brightest stick in the bundle and seemingly bought this hook, line and sinker, just as he did with all of John’s characters.
However, the introduction of Dobinson is the moment this already dark story takes its darkest turn. You see, while John relished the attention he was getting from Mark, he also knew that it was all a lie, and that Mark would never love the real him the way that he loved his fictional universe. John saw no reason to keep on living and thus, put a plan in action. While acting in the Janet Dobinson persona, he told Mark two important things.
The first was that John was secretly one of the richest people in the world, thanks to a vault of jewels that was sitting at the bottom of the North Sea. The second was that John had an inoperable brain tumour and needed to die as soon as possible. An act for which Mark would be richly rewarded with John’s inheritance, a job in the British Intelligence service and sex with Dobinson. Mark and the “superspy” planned out the attack and, when the time came, Mark stabbed his best friend with the intent to kill him.
It’s worth noting that while Mark was known to be a gullible soul by most than knew him, after the act was done, there were signs that Mark perhaps wasn’t as fully convinced by the story as he seemed. Not once while he was in custody did he demand to see Janet Dobinson, who had assured him she would be there to whisk him away to his new life in the secret service. Perhaps the moment that he’d try to kill his best friend, everything suddenly became real to him.
How was the charade uncovered?
After John recovered, neither he nor Mark would say anything further to the police. So once these mountains of chat logs were uncovered, they were the only lead available to find out what had happened. Unbelievably, it was a typo that gave John away. Four of his personas, along with John himself, were found to repeatedly spell “maybe” as “mybye”. Once the idea that all of this was John all along was raised, everything clicked into place. John was arrested on suspicion of inciting his own murder shortly after he’d returned to school from hospital.
Both boys pled guilty when their court date came through and were sentenced to probation. Their internet access was to remain strictly monitored, and the two boys would never see each other again. What terrifies me writing this is that twenty years on, stories like this have only got more commonplace. People have seemed to take the horrible story of Mark and John not as a warning, but as a blueprint for how to target isolated and gullible minds online and get them to do whatever you want.