Murder.com (20 page)

On their fifth and last night in bed, Susan agreed to his suggestion that he tie her up for sex and take a few sexy
photographs. ‘I trusted him completely,’ she says. ‘He was adventurous, strong, quite dominant, but I felt safe with him. I wanted him to leave with the need to come back. I wanted to please him; after all it is not often that a busy professional man travels halfway around the world to spend time with a woman he has only met in cyberspace… least of all me. I was flattered… You know, I had his home address, his email address, his phone numbers… He even asked me if I would consider moving to the USA, or said that he could easily get a job with his company here.’

Bill tied Susan’s wrists together and lashed them over her head to the top of the bed. He then pulled up her black leather skirt, spreadeagled her legs and secured her ankles.

The authors feel that it would be gratuitous to detail what took place other than to report that Bill then attacked her, and what followed was a rape of terrifying proportions. Susan says she was helpless under this onslaught from the powerful man. She felt a hand gripping at her throat, tighter and tighter. Her gasp for air was cut off.

‘You frustrated bitch,’ he snarled. ‘You want to be fucked like a whore and used like a fucking whore?’

Her fingers scrabbled to release his grip. Her eyes started to bulge, and then he slapped her hard across the face, chipping a front tooth.

Bill Chandler subjected Susan to a three-hour ordeal. Then he suddenly stopped and apologised. He untied her restraints and led her in a state of emotional and physical collapse downstairs to the shower, where he washed her and dressed her cuts.

An hour later, ‘The Featherman’ ordered a taxi to take him to London. As he walked out of the door, he said, ‘If you call the
police, I shall show them evidence of the whore you truly are. I have all your emails and photographs. Just say nothing and be pleased, ’cos I may come back again.’

Two weeks later the rapist phoned Susan from Cardiff. ‘He was very, very apologetic,’ she said during our interview. ‘He told me that he had never done anything like this before… that my body and clothes brought out the Devil in him… that he loved me desperately and then, with a cheeky laugh, he asked if I could scrub his back again.’

Bill sent her 20 red roses via Interflora, and Susan explained that during the several phone calls that followed she forgave him. He said that he was so ashamed of himself he had cancelled his trip to the Middle East and wanted to see her again for just one night to patch things up.

She agreed.

‘You will think that I was mad,’ she said. ‘I
was
mad. But when you have a guy who appears to be crying down the phone, begging forgiveness… Um… the flowers with a little card… Then when he laughs and says something like, “Hey! You shouldn’t have been so sexy, babe,” it throws you.’

It was then that good luck – if it could be called good luck – intervened. The following evening, expecting Bill to turn up around 7pm the next day, Susan checked her emails and logged on to the Absolute Agency site intending to say ‘Hi!’ to everyone and leave. Almost immediately, she saw ‘The Featherman’. He was talking to another woman who she knew came from Poole in Dorset.

‘I was shocked,’ she said. ‘Then they both went off the screen for the night. I tried to phone Bill, but he would not answer my calls or SMSs. I was numb.’

Then anger, mixed up with a kind of jealousy, kicked in. She sent Bill a message telling him that all deals were off and that she was going away for a few days. She didn’t want to see him again.

During a sleepless night, Susan had a premonition that ‘The Featherman’ would turn up anyway, so she arranged to visit her mother and return home about midnight. She reasoned that, if he did turn up, as previously agreed, and found she was out, he would go on his way.

She was wrong.

Bill Chandler had indeed arrived at the cottage around 7pm and, so confident was he that Susan would be there, he sent the taxi driver off before he had even opened the garden gate.

‘I will never forget what happened that night for the rest of my life,’ said Susan. ‘I got home about 11.30. It was pouring with rain and the place was in darkness. I walked through the garden and let myself in. I went to the kitchen to get a drink and when I looked out of the window I saw a man sitting on the seat under my apple tree. He just sat there and said nothing. I must have passed within feet of him and never saw a thing.’

Susan says she was very scared, and pretended she hadn’t seen him. Shaking with fear, she went to go to bed and then he tapped on the front door – the only door to the cottage. She ignored him. Then he called out to her several times, softly at first, then the taps became knocks and his voice grew louder.

Then he kicked the door.

‘Will you open this fuckin’ door, please? Just to
fuckin’ talk.
’

Although by now terrified, Susan plucked up the courage to tell him to go away.

‘He started hammering on the door with his fists,’ she said. ‘He
kicked and kicked the door until I thought he would smash it down. Then I called 999 and asked for the police to come quickly as I had an intruder on the premises.’

Alone, in a cottage at night! No one knows what one would do under such frightening circumstances, so one cannot blame Susan for the actions that followed. She says that, safe in the knowledge that the police were on their way, and concerned about more damage being done to the door of the rented cottage, she called out to him to stop. Leaving the phone off the hook so that the operator could hear what was going on, she released the lock to reason with Bill. She was greeted with a punch to her face that sent her reeling backwards across her front room. She fell, hitting her head on a coal scuttle.

Susan screamed and screamed.

‘Within seconds he was in,’ she said. ‘Trying to grab my throat and hitting me. I told him the police were coming. He kicked me several times. He spat at me. His language was evil. Then he walked off.’

Emsworth is a small, conservative place where crime is rare. For this reason, emergencies in and around the village are attended by police based some 20 miles away, in either Chichester or Cosham, a northern suburb of Portsmouth. Unless a traffic policeman is patrolling the vicinity, response times can be up to ten long minutes.

In this case, the switchboard operator was dealing with a situation that could turn into a murder. Officers were galvanised into action and two police vehicles arrived within four minutes of Susan’s call. No fewer than six other units sped into the village. However, because the cottage adjoined other dwellings and stood within a fully enclosed walled garden it could only be
accessed by a gate at the end of a little-used alleyway. It would take anxious officers another three vital minutes to gain entry.

Susan was bleeding. She was hysterical and a female police officer spent an hour trying to settle her down. An ambulance was called, but her injuries were not severe and the medics treated her on the spot.

Meanwhile, Emsworth was swarming with police, and with only two main roads out of the community it was not long before Chandler was spotted. He was arrested at 1.35am trying to thumb a lift. He spent the night at Cosham Police Station while a statement was taken from Susan Gray.

‘I thought about it all that night,’ she said. ‘I knew that he would say that I had encouraged him and that he had photographs and emails recording our dates and chats on the internet. Our sex, the mirrors. It would all come out in court and be in the papers, so I did not press charges.’

Bill Chandler was released from police custody without charges being pressed. Subsequently, it was reported that he had attacked and raped a 26-year-old woman in Wales. Later, Susan said that he had raped an 18-year-old clerical worker from Poole.

We don’t know the name of Miss ‘A’ from Cardiff. South Wales Police did receive a complaint from a teenager who was admitted to hospital after being raped and beaten by an American man answering Bill Chandler’s description. However, the young woman also refused to press charges, and as far as the police were concerned there was nothing more they could do.

Accompanied by Susan Gray, Christopher Berry-Dee met Miss ‘B’ from Poole. The two women had much in common, including the fact that neither had known that Chandler was
stalking the other. At the time, Miss ‘B’ worked for a large insurance company in the town and lived with her parents.

‘Yes! I met him [Chandler] in AA. Yes! He was much older than me. Yes! He raped me in my car. Me and Susan have talked about him often. He pulled the same dirty stunt on me… There is not much more I want to say because my parents had warned me many times about meeting someone just a bit younger than my dad.’

Asked how this sickening experience had affected her life, she said, ‘What do you think? I have a steady boyfriend now… he doesn’t know anything. I still shake when I switch on my computer because I know Chandler is there somewhere. I would never do chat again. It is like he would be there watching me. Twisted bastard!’

Robert Jensen, Associate Professor of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, writes: ‘We live in a culture in which rape and battery continue at epidemic levels. And in this culture, men are masturbating to orgasm in front of television and computer screens that present them sex with increasing levels of callousness and cruelty toward women. No matter how hard it may be to face the reality of a rape culture, at least the culture still brands rape as a crime. Pornography, however, is not only widely accepted but sold to us as liberation. We know relatively much about how violent pornography influences ordinary adult men. There are negative influences on men’s attitudes towards woman. After reception of violent pornography men become more positive to rape and evaluate women more callously. All too often, rape leads to murder.’

West Sussex Police, like their colleagues in South Wales, say,
‘We treat all complaints of this nature very seriously. Unfortunately, if the victim feels unable to make a formal statement there is little we can do.’

The FBI are a little more encouraging. ‘We do know Mr Chandler. He has a minor criminal record in the US. If the British Police have evidence that this man has committed serious sexual offences, we would be grateful for this information, and he could be extradited to stand trial in the UK.’

The FBI also say, ‘Many sexual predators stalk their victims over a period of time. They do it in the real world and now they use the internet. They often gain more sexual satisfaction from the stalking phase than actually committing the offence. To them stalking is control. It gives these people a feeling of power. We are unable to comment on the allegations made against Mr Chandler… it seems that the three English women you mention are the victims of a very sick serial rapist. This man will continue to rape until he is arrested and charged. Failing that, undoubtedly he will commit murder, if he hasn’t already done so.’

Susan Gray believes that Chandler might have killed her. She no longer dates anyone, but she visits Miss ‘B’ frequently. And Susan has seen ‘The Featherman’ on the internet since her ordeal.

‘I know his line of chat,’ she confirmed. ‘He still uses the AA site but under a different name. I have tried to warn the girls but they don’t believe me. They think I am a jealous crank. One guy said, “Prove it, you sad bitch.” Several women, whom I knew from before, told me that I was a liar. I even emailed one of them a photo of me and Bill together. She replied, “He can fuck me any time,” so I don’t bother any more.’

The authors asked Susan if she had any advice for women using chatrooms and the internet to find sex or love.

Her reply was diplomatic. ‘I would say be very careful. I suppose there are a lot of happy couples out there where things have worked out OK. But this experience has wrecked my life.’

Susan Gray has since moved from Hampshire.

The Ukraine-based Absolute Agency now monitor their chatroom. Although they can ban visitors who frequently use expletives, they admit that there is
nothing
they can do to stop scammers or prevent the likes of Bill Chandler from looking for prey. In a statement to the authors, they confirm, ‘We now have a system which is called IGNORE. People can make someone invisible if they want. If we receive many complaints we terminate full membership and there is no refund. We even will ban the same person if he rejoins because we keep email addresses on file. We are not in the business of mind reading. We are in business for bringing people together and money.’

Indeed they are!

Eighty per cent of Ukrainians cannot afford bread every day. Fifteen per cent of the population are considered ‘upper-class’, meaning they earn as much as $30,000 a year. The remainder are mega-rich, and we invite you to consider the sums below.

Absolute Agency is the largest online dating/marriage business in the world. It is a major operation, with another office in Lithuania, and publishes at least 52,000 female profiles and 32,000 male profiles at any one time, with thousands of new profiles added each month. It has a chatroom and video streaming linked to hardcore pornography and prostitution. Absolute Agency has links with thousands of other sites that
spread around the globe and the income derived from its business places it at the top of the business league in Ukraine – and one nameless man owns it all.

While it would be fair to say that the majority of their profiles are genuine, countless thousands are not, for lurking among their members are mafia scammers, countless seriously deranged people and sexual deviants, including paedophiles, serial rapists and stone-cold killers. Log on and, if you are a woman, soon they could be stalking you.

Absolute Agency can buy whatever and whomever they want. I was cordially invited to visit their offices but I respectfully declined, hopefully remaining on cordial terms.

F
orty-five-year-old Dr Robert Johnson, a six-foot-three black gentleman from London, was divorced and had custody of his five children, and now wanted a new partner. He had tried the personal columns and local dating agencies with little success.

Then he fell in love with the idea of taking a Russian woman for a bride.

Now this takes some swallowing, but Robert made this decision after watching Anna Kournikova on the tennis courts at Wimbledon. He was thoroughly smitten and seduced by the glamour of romancing in this way, and in this respect he was not alone, for at any one time at least eight million Western males are seeking a foreign bride. In 2001, it was estimated that these punters lost $2.5 million. Today, the figure has rocketed to over $5.8 million and the figure is still climbing.

Unfortunately, we were unable to thoroughly access Robert Johnson’s outgoing emails because the British Police would have none of it. However, from police sources and one of his friends, we did obtain enough of the emails from the dating agency the doctor became involved with to enable us to piece together much of what took place during the period leading up to his disappearance.

He is now presumed dead – murdered!

Robert told a colleague, ‘They’re [Russian women] easier to talk to, they have degrees, they seem to be cheaper than Western women, they’re easier to get on with and they don’t ask for too much.’

In making this quite erroneous, somewhat bigoted assumption, Robert, who had been surfing the net for some time, obviously hadn’t done his homework. Nevertheless, in October 2001, he met a young woman who called herself ‘Anastasia Ustinova’, a 19-year-old posing as a teacher from Omsk, Siberia. The two swapped emails and she sent him seductive photographs of herself wearing a blue micro dress and white high heels.

Robert flipped and must have completed several cartwheels. Had he known better, he would have realised that a teacher working in Siberia would be lucky to clear $50 dollars a month, $30 being nearer the mark. However, within a few weeks he would end up sending ‘Anastasia’ the equivalent of six or more years’ wages for an average Russian.

‘Anastasia has written back and said she loved me and wants to get to know me,’ he told a friend. In reality, all she wanted was his money and Robert sent her plenty of her favourite commodity to pay for generous living expenses. He also
bought her a diamond ring and a gold watch. The sums involved totalled around $3,250, and that was to just to start with.

We know that, on Wednesday, 17 October 2001, Robert emailed Anastasia Ustinova and two days later she replied. On Friday, 2 November, she asked for $250 for a visa, which he duly sent by Western Union Transfer.

On Tuesday, 13 November, Anastasia sent an email through the Paradise of Angels marriage agency asking for $1,050 for the air ticket and for a passport, and an extra $300 for her to use while she travelled to London. The passport money apparently went astray – although it was sent at the same time as the $1,050 – so she asked for a further $100, which he sent on 14 November. Mysteriously, the missing money was later cashed at Western Union. Robert was losing money fast.

On 23 November, his blonde bombshell wrote claiming that she had been taken ill with liver problems, so he sent her $50 for her to buy perfume.

Five days later, she wrote to say that she had stopped working because of her poor health. She claimed she had hepatitis C and that her mother and father were nursing her.

The New Year brought little respite for the eager Robert. She wanted money for a new mobile phone and cash for credit so she could text him. Her father died suddenly – in a subsequent SMS this was changed to her father-in-law.

On 2 January 2002, Robert wired Anastasia $60 for her medical care.

A week later, he sent her two Western Union transfers totalling $135. Despite this generosity, that very same day she had the
temerity to ask for $250 – at least four months’ wages for her – to buy sandals as she was soon to leave hospital.

All the money was sent via Western Union to Anastasia Ustinova, at Gazetnyi, Pereulok 6, Russia, who promptly collected the cash. She took a small percentage for herself, and wired the balance to two of her friends, who were sometimes known as Tatiana Ovdina, Tatyana Perlotva, Angelika, Anna Chuprakova, Elena Artemieva Yalena, Katya, Irina Taralanova, Oksana Stolyrenko and Olen Slepova – all residents of Ekaterinburg.

On 26 January, with enough money in their pockets to be able to support themselves for several years, Anastasia and her pals hit Robert Johnson again, this time for $200 for therapy. Then, on 4 March, she went the full Monty by explaining that she was going back into hospital for another operation and even more therapy, which would cost $2,000 plus $50 a day until she was discharged.

Robert was now beside himself with anxiety. He informed Anastasia of his intentions to visit her and help her out. After a few days’ silence, during which she no doubt sought advice from her dating agency, she explained to him that he should only bring new US dollars, as credit card facilities were very limited – and this much was true. Fatefully, he told her that he would bring all the required funds and that he would soon be at her bedside.

Asking a friend to look after his children, he remarked, ‘I feel stupid. It’s like being robbed. But you have seen her picture, she is a beautiful girl. She needs me, and I need to help her out. I am in love.’

Robert then obtained a 30-day tourist visa, numbered TY
2987847, and on 21 March, after confirming his itinerary with Anastasia, he took the 10.30pm Aeroflot A310 Airbus flight from London Heathrow to Moscow, arriving at 5.20am local time. He had booked a return flight to Omsk through Thomas Cook and the passenger manifest shows that he sat in seat C39. On touchdown at Moscow, he passed through immigration control, caught the free shuttle bus and boarded his connecting flight at the internal airport, Sheremetyevo 1 (SVO 1).

Thereafter, Robert, carrying around $7,000 in new dollar bills and probably the only black man in Siberia, simply vanished.

Of course, for Robert Johnson and his children, this was a terrible tragedy, but at this remove it is probably instructive to remind ourselves of the sums involved. All in all, this single scam netted the dating agency around $11,000, which is the staggering, if not obscene, equivalent of 25 years’ wages to the average Russian. In the West, this equates to about $500,000.

Every year, tens of thousands of Western men travel to Eastern Europe and the Far East in search of true love. They are well catered for because more than a thousand sites advertise their brochures, videos and the ‘entertainment’ events they organise. The phenomenon amply demonstrates how sex-tour companies and certain marriage agencies contribute to the exploitation and objectification of women and women’s bodies by promoting prostitution and pornography.

A few moments ago, we gently questioned the sanity of some of the men who go seeking love on the internet. But, of course, we have done their homework, and when you read the following you may come to the conclusion that men can be even dumber that we initially thought.

One genuine agency did furnish us with correspondence from
several male clients, and as we read the letters to a totally honest woman from her prospective suitors we could see how fortunate she was not to pick any of them.

Doctors, surgeons, engineers, property developers, all queued up alongside religious fruit cakes, college dropouts and the lost and the lonely to court this girl. Several of these humanoids had ‘I am mentally unstable and capable of mass murder’ written all over their faces and throughout the text of their letters, one of which bore an uncanny resemblance to the scribbling hand of the serial killer William Heirens, who issued the challenge ‘Catch Me Before I Kill Again’.

Yet, strange to relate, interspersed among these desperate refugees from Bedlam, this assortment of knuckle-dragging, body-pierced primates, were a few honest, well-motivated men who were sincerely seeking love. Nevertheless, we were amused to see that one guy was generous enough to send the lady a dollar bill and a scrap of lined paper torn from a notebook, to help her reply to him.

This man, from Los Angeles, claimed he was a high-powered engineer, yet his grammar and command of the English language said otherwise, being among the worst we have ever seen. His photo, as he stared at the camera, revealed the face of the type of hoodlum commonly seen in Mafia movies garrotting someone in the back seat of a large, black car. That this man hoped to win the heart of any discerning woman was sad.

Another of our favourite letters was a handwritten note extolling the sender’s own virtues and pledging his undying love for the recipient. He added, enthusiastically but barely legibly, this unforgettable advice: ‘DO NOT TRUST ANYONE YOU MEET
OVER THE INTERNET. NEVER MEET ANYONE ON RAILWAY STATIONS OR IN BARS. THEY MAY RAPE AND KILL YOU.’

Surprisingly, he didn’t follow this sanguine warning with an invitation to meet him under the clock by platform eight.

Of course, there were scores of letters from thoroughly decent guys. All well written and very polite, and it was clear that every one of these men was genuinely besotted with the girl. However, letters like these were outnumbered by those from out-and-out fantasists, many bordering on the lunatic fringe.

A splendid example was a typed letter from a man old enough to be her grandfather. Overweight and bespectacled, he claimed to have the strength and physique of a 20-year-old. ‘I follow a military exercise regime for elite soldiers,’ he wrote.

Here, we thought, was God’s gift to all women. And a pillar of rectitude: he didn’t smoke and not a drop of alcohol had ever passed his lips. He also boasted that he lived on Hawaii, an earthly paradise. To back up this wild assertion, he sent a postcard of some beautiful Hawaiian scenery, adding that his house would have been clearly visible were it not for the fact that it was hidden just behind the clump of lush, green trees in the distance. On top of that, his CV read like that of a candidate shortlisted for the job of Pope.

This model of all the virtues then demonstrated that he was a gifted diplomat by asking his prospective paramour, ‘How is your economic situation?’ Oblivious to the intrusive nature of his enquiry, he further demolished his credibility by asking baldly, ‘Do you have any mental or physical diseases or problems? Do you smoke, drink, or use drugs?’

What woman wouldn’t melt under such a charm offensive?

At this point, we had intended to move on but before we do
we can’t resist unburdening ourselves of just one more of these lovelorn suitors.

A man of exemplary humility and modesty, ‘Mike’ told this lass he had spent over a year searching the internet for the perfect wife. ‘I have looked at several thousand pictures and read all the biographies,’ he said, adding, ‘I have researched and sorted until I have narrowed my choices down to nine women of which you are one that I am writing to.’

A
mere
nine women!
Wasn’t
she a lucky girl! We are talking Russian
Playboy
centrefold material, a woman fluent in four languages and studying her fifth, Japanese, who wakes one morning to find that Dame Fortune has plucked her from obscurity and made her one of nine women that Mike has chosen as a possible candidate for a wife. She would be walking on air. No doubt he would, generously, sleep with each in turn to aid him with his selection.

Several months later, the thoughtful Mike sent her a second, identical letter, apparently having forgotten the content of his first one. Despite his clumsiness, it was the audacity of the man that appealed to us.

For this we give him credit. No, we will award him first prize!

After all, Mike was, in his own words, ‘a quite famous French chef’. A man who ‘became tired of cooking fine food in the classic manner for people who could not taste the difference…’ ‘Romantic and very much an old Knight or gentleman’ was his self-effacing description of himself. This man ignorantly assumes Russian women are so naive and stupid that they cannot read between the lines.

Any man who is keen to meet a Russian bride might be interested to learn that one of the Soviet Union’s greatest
achievements is education. From being an agrarian society in which literacy was limited to the few in the upper classes, the Russian Federation has developed to achieve a literacy rate of 98 per cent, among the best in the world, and truancy is unknown. Modern Russian women are a damn sight brighter than the three Western clowns featured above.