Cold Cases, Missing and Unsolved Crimes. A boy has been cleared of murdering a 17-year-old he stabbed in the heart with a flick knife. 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. 'Spy': well think please A story of a near-fatal Internet attraction. A 17-year-old boy died after a horror street fight involving more than 100 people including some armed with 'machetes' on Saturday night (Saturday, September 4) in East London. People will hear, please be quiet," the older teenager told him. "John said he invented other personas in the chat room in order to keep Mark interested in him," one therapist was later to learn. Whilst the chat included usual teenage topics such as sports, movies and clothing, sex and masturbation was often the focus. He doesn't think he will ever get married, much less have children. "What emerges from this is an extraordinarily persuasive, inventive boy!" At the time of the stabbing the alley led nowhere; it was cut off by a 40-foot drop. Certainly John possessed the determination and industry necessary for success. The media swarmed all over the case, fighting, in vain, to extract from the principals every last ounce of information. 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. Crime news across America. Turnb There was to be no further communication with the peculiar Janet Dobinson, allegedly of the British secret service. If Mark didnt complete the task Janet would lose her job and national security would be at risk. Prime Minister Blair wanted John to be seen as gay, therefore Mark was to carry out oral sex on John to complete the test. Police have not linked any of the incidents. If converted into a paper pile, she adds, "it would stretch, I think, 46,000 feet high. The beautiful Rachel West, whom he had loved, wooed, and honestly mourned, was Johnas was Kevin, who reveled in the bloody details of her gang rape and murder. 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. Murderers? Anna Delvey led the most lavish lifestyle possible, but none of her friends realised it was all a massive con. But this time John also was chargedwith inciting murder. "And the public, in the submissions of the press, are entitled to be told the truth.". The word was "mybye," and it was used by John, Kevin, Dobinson, and Lyndsey. One of the stab wounds pierced his kidney and lacerated his liver. "The continuity and his memory were phenomenal.". "He says he is unhappy at home, but there is nothing we are aware of.". "The 14-year-old boy showed no intention to hurt anybody but himself," he Start your Independent Premium subscription today. Privately, grief and shame aren't so easy to contain. Janet informed Mark that the once valuable asset John was now suffering a brain tumour and needed to be put out of his misery. They had desires they expressed frankly, ardently, threateningly, as the occasion warranted. A 15-year-old boy has died after police say he was stabbed at the Brimbank Shopping Centre in the Melbourne suburb of Deer Park. The next day, 29 June 2003, Boy A carried out Boy B's orders "to the letter", the court heard. Somehow or other, the boy added, he found himself dragged once again to his feet, then the knife plunged back in. To this day, a British media Web site carries a picture of John, his engaging, shy smile shadowed by a tender hint of mustache. 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. As the boys disappeared into the alley, that camera swung around and followed them. But once Mark began expressing interest in her as well, she, too, evaporated, ostensibly killed by the British government on April 27, 2003. "I love you, bro," Mark told his younger friend as he plunged in the knife. Brilliant. Threads of plots, no matter how complicated or absurd, were never dropped. "I'd stopped eating in March," he would later explain. But when officers examined CCTV footage they realised the story was implausible. 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. As Clarke spoke about how John had manipulated the older boy, deploying a stream of imaginary virtual characters to lure Mark into carrying out his murder, he sneaked a look at Mark's face. Janet: Could you stab someone?Mark: I haven't really thought about it. Janet: Well think please.Mark: OK. At which point, one local reporter informs me, "Everyone in the press put down their pens and pads." John screamed. A man has been arrested in Kent on suspicion of murder after a boy died in north Manchester on 9 June 2022. They were empty of hope. Mark, for example, was to stab his friend while saying: "Love you bro Make sure he knows you love him. A deliberate stylistic variation of "maybe," shared by four supposedly different people. "I am quite convinced it was a deliberate suicide attempt.". He couldn't imagine, he says, being stuck with the same person his whole life. And they shared his mission: to keep Mark perpetually in contact with their creator, John. At school his geography teacher saw a change in her pupil. The mere thought of Mark reduces the boy to tears. For months John had corresponded in an Internet chat room with Mark, a bland-featured 16-year-old who possesses as his most striking traits a vast forehead, a tendency to open every sentence with "Ermmm," and, it would later be claimed, an almost infinite store of credulity. In addition, police managed to recover dialogue from "unallocated clusters," data in storage space the computer is no longer using for active files. "He said he'd done it because he'd heard voices." In her line of work, after all, she was expert at assuming all sorts of identities. "This case serves as a stark warning of the dangers of the dark side of the internet," Nicholas Clarke, prosecuting, told the court yesterday. "Boots," typed Dobinson, referring to a drugstore chain which sells many household articles, including, as it turns out, Sabatier kitchen knives. "Don't let that be the last thing you are saying. On the whole, Goldberg thought, a teenager who could spin such tales was headed in the right direction. "In fact, I think MSN themselves should perhaps take some responsibility. The mother also insisted on meeting Mark's parents, who lived in the middle-class suburb of Stockport, about four miles away. Despite the devastating effect the ordeal had on Boy A, Mr Ross said he did Boy A: u want me 2 take him 2 trafford centre and kill him in the middle of the trafford centre?? "Staggering," said the judge who would hear his case. They might as well have burned them. Certainly not with his mother, who noticed that the more time her son spent online the more he was becoming "secretive" and snappish. 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.". 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. It was she who ordered the teenager to carry out John's murder. 2023 Cond Nast. It will not allow anyone else.". Janet asked Mark in the final chatroom exchange. If he carried out the job successfully, he was told, he would be accepted as a spy. 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 chat room took a dark turn when Kevin declared that hed kidnapped Rachel and would rape and kill her unless Mark recorded himself masturbating via webcam. But more than 500 pages of Internet-chat transcripts, 50 pages of psychological reports, and excerpts from a score of police interviews land in my possession. A. "But these could not be described as any normal circumstances," the judge added. Very busy, this thing with the royal party being disturbed, u will know about it " ), she was always available to Mark. 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." Jakub Szymanski was taken to hospital with stab wounds but later died after officers were called to an address in the Miles Platting area of Manchester on Thursday. 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. 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. But this was just a brief spasm of fear. document.write(new Date().getFullYear()) Mark had been fooled by John into believing he was working for the British secret services. "I was surprised Mark believed it all," John would later admit. "It is a tragic event that a 14-year-old boy would try to have someone kill him. Yousef Makki, 17, a pupil at Manchester Grammar School, was stabbed by his friend, Joshua Molnar, aged 17 at the time, during a fight in upmarket . Sometimes John would approach their bedroom and listen quietly, his ear pressed to the door. Police only became aware of the labyrinthine plot when they examined John's computer. Dobinson, too, was interested in watching sexual activity via the Webcam. 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. 2003 June 29 Historical Events Sports History US Senior Open Men's Golf, Inverness Club: Bruce Lietzke wins by 2 strokes from Tom Watson Golfer Tom Watson Famous Deaths Katharine Hepburn (1907-2003) American actress (Adam's Rib, On Golden Pond), dies of natural causes at 96 2003 Highlights About June 29, 2003 Day of the Week: Sunday Both sets of parents decided there would be no more sleepovers. It all seemed quite unbelievable but for the impressionable and nave Mark, hed believed every twist and turn of the fantasy that had been created for him online. These messages included the following exchange: 'Spy' (in reality Boy B): could you stab someone? A man has been arrested on suspicion of murder after a boy was stabbed at a house in Manchester. Rachel was then apparently released by Kevin, although she would mysteriously disappear from the chat room shortly after. Police continue to investigate at the scene on Bednal Avenue. Apparently a girl named Rachel had signed in to the chat room initially. Not at home: "It doesn't suit me, being part of a family environment, being sucked in," he says. Just a few well-chosen words typed into Google are enough to call up some media stories identifying John as a stabbing victim last year, as well as other articles, more recent, revealing that in fact the victim incited his own attempted murder. Four weeks later, the boy went missing from school, his first act of truancy ever. Mark's worlduntil then packed mainly with soccer, passable grades, and admiring schoolgirlswas alight with these passionate intruders. 'Skilled writers of fiction would struggle to conjure up a plot such as that which arises here.'. Police Identify Driver Killed in Crash. John would later concede that he knew exactly how much he had traumatized Mark by engineering the death of Rachel and permitting the ostensible killer to describe her last moments to Mark himself: "Kicked all her stomach. Mark called the ambulance and told police officers they had been attacked but after CCTV footage disproved his story, he was charged with attempted murder. He took a cocktail stick and scraped it against his wrist. Mark was a college student who worked part-time at a restaurant. On the other, he felt completely trapped. Then out. Had Mark been truly convinced he worked for the spy agency, "he would have said it at the outset," when he was arrested. At the time. In the meantime, Dobinson added, Mark was to make sure to buy the right type of knife. Janet had used it and so had John. ", "Erm I duno. "And that caused us some major concern," Ross says. Nonetheless, he is certain of Mark's sincerity. In July last year, Mark was charged with attempted murder. Various characters shared the same last nameor, alternatively, although claiming to be siblings, didn't share the same last name. Mark then grew close with her stepbrother John, even meeting up in person and hanging out. Mark, who is also from a middle-class family in Greater Manchester, was given a two-year supervision order for attempted murder. No madman in a hooded jacket, the authorities quickly realized, would ever be found. 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. Previously acceptable grades at his relatively undemanding high school dropped to C's and F's, Hatton, his attorney, tells me. As Hogg sorted for clues through the stacks of transcripts of Internet chat, however, she noticed a repetition of a certain word. This delay had also been an order Janet had provided, as it would have given John enough time to bleed to death. The boy was devious. "It was incitement to commit murder - his own murder," said Detective Chief Inspector Julian Ross of Greater Manchester Police. This, however, made little difference; at night the boy would manage to retrieve and re-assemble the laptop and modem. At the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean lay a "huge massive safe" containing "the worlds richest jewels." Wot shud i say 2 him? We let social media get away with murder. Into the chat room, therefore, came a new character, Lyndsey East, equipped with all that was required for instant membershipLyndseyeast2k3@hotmail.com. However much she screamed for u.". The world he had known was John, written, produced, and directed by John. a short-lived character inquires of Mark right after Rachel's "death." an incredulous Mark wrote the British agent Janet Dobinson on June 28, 2003. The following day the two boys met and went to the Trafford Centre where they bought a kitchen knife. But the court was told that in reality Boy B had fallen in love with Boy A, conned him into performing sex acts on a webcam, and tricked him into stabbing him twice in Altrincham, Greater Manchester. They travelled to the Trafford Centre, where they bought a knife. They were ordered never to meet again and they could only go on the Internet with supervision and never onto chat rooms. John, from Greater Manchester, pleaded guilty at Manchester crown court to incitement to murder and perverting the course of justice. "Mark must have known at some point that these characters were not real," he later told a therapist. Manchester. Most views are considerably less indulgent. And she stained my sheets when she was bleeding! Boy A: ok erm well i watch a lot of films. ", The bleakly serious nature of the case is expected to lead to calls for tighter monitoring of internet chatrooms. "The aim of it all was to find Janet Dobinson," says Ross. 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. "U want me 2 take him 2 trafford centre and kill him in the middle of trafford centre??" In the absence of factual press reports, John feels at liberty to craft, for the benefit of his girlfriend, fabulous new tales, starring himself. These characters spoke his language, a blend of northern-England vulgarisms and the cheerful adolescent code of chat rooms. This time the order came from Tony Blair himself, via Janet. 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. Credit: MEN Media. "Only he can walk through the door. The ice-cream vendors and shop assistants engaged in ceaseless surveillance of Mark: all John. Footage captured of the alley entrance showed that no one else had entered it except John and Mark. Moreover, added the mother, despite his earlier homosexual leanings, John now had "a girlfriend." There was, the boy said, "nowhere to go." Credit: Family photo. Dobinson was, as Mark had been informed, 44 and authoritative. He was expecting to meet the prime minister, and be given a gun and up to 500,000 in cash. Officers found three victims had been shot. Police used traffic cameras to track the vehicle, which led Beard to be pulled over near a Dorchester. 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. 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? The boy was, no mistaking it, aghast. 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. Why hasten the inevitable? When pressed, he told law enforcers only as much as he suspected they already knewor might soon discover. "At the police station," Dobinson assured him. (As things turned out, John would never utter the abort code to Mark: "Well I knew that he had to do it because I sort of told him," he later told police.). For days he lay on a respirator, treated with painkillers and antibiotics, saying little. His e-mail addresses contain no hint of his real name. "Just wanted to be on the Internet, that's all that mattered." A man has been arrested in Kent on suspicion of murder after a boy died in north Manchester. AETNUK All Rights Reserved. "Skilled writers of fiction would struggle to conjure up a plot such as that This is a legal novelty in Britain, and very likely throughout the world. 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. The two boys were beginning to meet in person. By all accounts he too, like Mark, was an ordinary teenager, nothing in his history would suggest hed be involved in something so terrible. John was worth exactly 568 billion. John would recover from his near-fatal wounds and whilst Mark was charged with attempted murder, John was charged with inciting his own murder. "Take him [to] a quiet place," advised the British agent. tragedy it all was.". 01:25 AEDT 29 May 2004 Nov. 29, 2022. says Hogg, the police analyst. KROQ Weenie Roast is a multi-artist music concert, presented annually in May by the Los Angeles, California, modern rock radio station KROQ-FM.Since its beginning in 1993, it has been traditionally held on a Saturday in May or June, but due to the COVID-19 pandemic, there have been no editions of the festival since 2019. Friday 3 December 2021, 5:53pm. 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. Though John's life was in the balance for a time, he did not die and was released from hospital after a week. 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