70-Year-Old Victimized by Chat Room 'Friend'

Dec. 8, 2004 -- -- A 70-year-old man, alone on Thanksgiving and looking for a little companionship, found himself duct-taped to a chair and robbed of his money, computer and car by a "friend" he'd met in a chat room, police said.

The crime was the first of its kind that Troy, Mich., police have had to deal with, Lt. Gerry Scherlinck said, but it's part of a pattern that is showing up more and more across the country, as people become more and more comfortable with using chat rooms and chat lines as a way to meet other people.

In Portland, Ore., last month, Douglas Swanson, a 51-year-old lawyer, was found slain in Mount Hood National Forest. Investigators said he was kidnapped and killed by a methamphetamine-addicted woman and her boyfriend after he and the woman became acquainted on a telephone chat line.

Swanson's head was covered with a plastic bag closed around his neck with duct tape, according to court records. His hands and feet were also bound with tape and rope, and tape was used to gag him, court records said.

Many of the warnings on the dangers of the Internet have been focused on those who are most vulnerable -- children who are lured into meetings by adults, often posing as other youngsters, in chat rooms. But as the cases in Troy and Portland illustrate, adults are vulnerable, too.

Scherlinck said there were indications that the robbery in Troy on Thanksgiving might not have been a spur-of-the-moment crime.

"This seemed like a pretty well-planned-out crime, so we're concerned it may have happened to other people," he said.

It has happened to others, according to news reports from around the country, if perhaps not in the Troy area.

Romance and Robbery

In Tacoma, Wash., in October, a 38-year-old man was allegedly robbed when he went for a date with someone he thought was "Ashley," with whom he had chatted online, police said.

He told police he never met any "Ashley," just a 300-pound man who he said told him his intended date was a minor and ordered him to hand over his money, then forced him to go to an ATM and take out $160.

In Jacksonville, Fla., in April, a 22-year-old man told police he arranged to meet a woman he had been chatting with online for two weeks, but shortly after they did -- at 4:20 a.m. at an apartment complex pool -- two other men showed up and robbed him of his watch, gold bracelet and car, as well as his hat and shoes, according to a report in The Florida Times-Union.

And a Florida man wound up under arrest himself, when he believed what a girl told him in their chat room meetings. The 25-year-old told police he thought he was going to meet an 18-year-old when he drove to West Virginia to meet the girl and brought her back to Florida.

Ignorance Only a Partial Defense

But the girl was really 14, and under house arrest at her uncle's after being charged with stabbing her father to death. Police said she apparently was able to leave with the man undetected by gluing her electronic monitoring device to a pet cat.

The man, Troy Gilmore, told police he didn't know any of that.

"We believe him," Altamonte Springs, Fla., police spokesman Paul Machovina told the Charleston, W.Va., Daily Mail. "That's why we haven't charged him with aiding and abetting a fugitive. We took his computers for evidence, so if we find information on there, we could charge him with it."

His ignorance of the girl's real age made no difference, though, Machovina said, and Gilmore was charged with sexual battery after he admitted having sex with the underage girl.

Although police in all of these cases indicated that the arranged meetings seemed to be completely innocent on the part of the men, what happened to them follows a pattern long associated with prostitution, when "johns" thinking they are going to a rendezvous wind up being robbed or worse.

A spokeswoman at the International Association of Chiefs of Police said the organization has heard "anecdotal" evidence that this type of crime is on the rise, but has not monitored it and has no data.

Scherlinck, though, said just the one case his department is involved with is enough evidence to warn people.

"It's probably not going to stop people from getting together with people they meet over the Internet, but we're saying be careful," he said. "Don't give out your name and address. If you do arrange to meet, do it in a public place."

'Suspect Smelled Bad'

While Scherlinck said the Thanksgiving Day incident was the first case the Troy Police Department has dealt with that ended in a crime, he said there have been several others over the last few years when people found the person they thought they'd gotten to know online was not as nice as they expected, and they turned to the police for help.

"They were concerned for their safety, because this is a person who represented themselves one way and turned out to be something else," he said.

That was certainly what happened to the 70-year-old man in Troy.

The man, whose name is being withheld, realized that something was wrong almost as soon as his online acquaintance came to his home, Scherlinck said.

"He told us the suspect smelled bad," Scherlinck said. "The individual came in and immediately asked if he could use the restroom. The victim noticed that when he did go into the bathroom, he didn't use the restroom at all. When he came out at that point, he asked the gentleman to leave."

But the guest pulled out a handgun and let a second suspect into the house and the two bound the 70-year-old's hands and feet with tape, he said. The first suspect threatened the man's life, and they stole his wallet with credit cards and cash, along with a television, a computer hard drive and his BMW, Scherlinck said.

The suspects pulled most of the telephones out of the walls, then duct-taped the man to a chair and started to put him in a closet, where they found a safe they ordered him to open, Scherlinck said. The two allegedly took the contents of the safe and left him taped to the chair.

"He was able, eventually, to get himself somewhat free," Scherlinck said. "He made contact with us through a phone that was untampered with. As we arrived, he was still found partially bound with the duct tape."

Police found the stolen BMW abandoned, but they are still looking for the two suspects.

ABC News affiliates WXYZ-TV in Detroit and KATU-TV in Portland, Ore., contributed to this report.