Internet Freakshow

Sharon Lapotka

Internet Freakshow - Sharon Lapotka

The internet is great for building communities around common interests. That’s the whole basic point of social media, right? In Facebook you can join groups for TV shows you like or hobbies you may have, or even the neighborhood you live in. On Twitter you can follow brands you enjoy or celebrities you like to see. Meetup is a great way to physically meet other members in your nearby community to share a hobby or a beer with. But what about those people who share interests that are a little less… traditional?

Back in the early days of the internet, 1996 to be exact, long before the social media sites mentioned before, people found other members of their communities in dedicated forum sites, chat rooms, and email.

And that’s the era in which we find Sharon Lopatka. In some ways she was an extremely ordinary woman. Classmates would later describe her as “as normal as you can get”. At age 30, in 1991, she married a construction worker named Victor.

Sharon was interested in the internet early, and made her living with various businesses online. She created websites for selling home decor booklets, writing ad copy, and several websites devoted to psychic readings.

A few hundred miles away from Sharon lived a man named Bobby Glass. Like Sharon, Bobby was a pretty normal guy. In 1996, he’d been married to his wife Sherri for 14 years. They had 3 kids. 2 girls, and a boy. He worked as a computer analyst, so like Sharon he had interest in technology, the internet.

Both Sharon and Bobby shared other interests as well, including hiding private lives on the internet, as well as morbid sexual desires.

In addition to her more typical online businesses, Sharon also marketed pornographic content under various pseudonyms, showing women that had been drugged, bound, and gagged. She sold her used panties. She participated in chat rooms exploring fetishes like necrophilia, bondage, sadomasichism, and more.

And that is the world in which she met Bobby, who also was interested in these topics. By this point, Bobby’s marriage had started to collapse because he was spending too much time chatting and emailing, and not enough time devoted to his wife and children. Suspicious of Bobby’s behaviors, his wife logged into his computer only to find these “raw, violent, and disturbing” messages. Fearing the safety of herself and her children, she left Bobby in May of 1996.

This left Bobby unencumbered and able to chat as much as he wanted with whoever he wanted. He met Sharon in a pornographic chat room, but carried their relationship over to email. Over the next few months, they exchanged many emails. Many, many, MANY emails. Over 900 pages of them, in fact, were recovered.

In the course of these messages, Sharon relayed her desire to be tortured to Bobby. Bobby was a perfect fit, offering to fulfill these fantasies for her.

Just 2 months later, Sharon, now 35, set in motion her plan for both Bobby and herself to fulfill their own fetishes of torture and murder. Sharon left a note for her husband that told him she would not be returning home, ending the note with, “If my body is never retrieved, don’t worry. I’m at peace.” This was not a short journey. Sharon was intent on making this happen, taking an Amtrak from Baltimore to North Carolina, only to be picked up by Bobby and driven another 90 minutes to his home. Plenty of time for changing her mind or getting cold feet and backing out, but Sharon didn’t seem to show any signs of hesitation at all.

It didn’t take too long for Sharon’s husband to alert the police to her missing status and the strange note she’d left behind. The police quickly read her email and had a good guess as to where she ended up. The police staked out Bobby’s house for several days, but never saw Sharon. It took a court-ordered search warrant to get police into the house to look for her, and although they did not find her in the house, they did find many of her belongings.

In addition, they found drugs, bondage equipment, a .357 Magnum, and child pornography magazines.

And finally, less than 100 feet from Bobby’s house, police found the remains of Sharon, buried in a shallow grave. The cause of death was obvious. She’d been strangled with a rope. Motivation was also fairly obvious. For both Bobby and Sharon, they were fulfilling strange sexual fetishes. In Sharon’s case, it was her final indulgence.

Bobby admitted to killing Sharon and fantasizing about the torture and murder, but also claimed her ultimate death was an accident. He was trying to torture her, but just took it too far. He says, “I never wanted to kill her, but she ended up dead.” Emails tell a different story, though. He outright promised to kill her, and she was excited about the prospect of that.

Bobby ultimately pled guilty to voluntary manslaughter, as well as another sentence for minor exploitation to cover the child pornography found on his property. For his crimes, Bobby was sentenced to a meager 36-53 months for Sharon’s murder, and another 27 months for the child porn, to be served consecutively. For those who think this sentence isn’t long enough to cover the terrible nature of murder and child porn, take some solace in the fact that Bobby died in prison of a heart attack before he was ever freed.

This was one of the first cases of using emails and internet chats to help follow a case and find the perpetrator. These days of course it is much more common. Most missing people have their phones tracked and social media investigated for clues, but in 1996 these were still emerging technologies that most people did not use.

This isn’t the first case of people meeting online that results in a murder, however. That honor belongs to Chip Hemenway and Jesse Unger, who met on an AOL chat room. When they met in real life, Chip murdered Jesse. In this case, however, there is no reason to believe that Jesse wanted to be murdered. Instead, Jesse apparently bragged about molesting young children, which enraged Chip, who shot and killed Jesse. In this case, Chip was sentenced to 30 years.

But in the cases of a person in search of their murderer on the internet, it seems Sharon and Bobby were trail blazers. There’s the notable murder in 2001 in Germany, where a victim and his murderer fantasied about their fetish for muder and cannibalism, and ultimately met up. I don’t want to get too graphic and gory here, but the victim was ultimately murdered and eaten over the course of 10 months. This case turned into quite the media frenzy when it occurred, and you still see references to it in many movies, TV shows and songs.

These murders spawn many questions about the internet, meeting strangers online, and of course censorship. While the internet can be used for great things, meeting friends and building businesses and getting involved with hobbies, it also clearly has a dark side.

And in the case of these porn fetish sites and cannibalism sites, should we censor users from exploring these unique interests? Obviously I believe if people are trying to actively participate in torture, murder, and cannibalism, they’ve gone too far. But what about just posting about these topics in chat rooms, role-playing, and fantasizing? Is that going too far?

Your answer to those questions probably relies on many factors. Political leanings, your religion, your own personal interests and fetishes. I think we can all agree though, that the internet, and the free speech it affords us, can be used for good as well as bad. While most of Internet Freakshows focuses on the bad side of the internet, we also need to keep in mind the positive connections that we can make, anonymously or otherwise.