“Will you please step outside your car, sir?” With that began my journey into the world of a felon.
I traveled from Cary to Hamilton, Ohio to possibly meet a 14 year old girl and take her to a 311 (name of a band) concert in Cincinnati. I had previously discussed possibly having sex with “her” over the internet, while chatting in private messages on Yahoo’s instant messenger. I drove through the Burger King where at the time we were to meet and didn't see her there. Then I drove around Hamilton for a while, exploring the reason I jumped at the chance to come to Hamilton. I remember as a child, Hamilton had square large boundaries on an Ohio state road map, unusual for a town or city. I recalled that map immediatiely when I learned "she" was from Hamilton. I drove through the Burger King again; still not there. So I parked across the street in a church parking lot to wait a little while longer. That's when the opening sentence was heard. I had been talking to a Hamilton sex-crime unit policeman the whole time, pretending he was a 14 year old girl.
I spent the next year in jail and prison in Ohio and Illinois on a related charge of possession of child pornagraphy (1 picture of the side of an undeveloped breast). For the Ohio crime of "importuning" (asking about sex), I was assigned to a sex offender counceling center (CCC) near Monroe, Ohio after three weeks in the Hamilton County Jail. Then back to Hamilton County Jail for another few week stint while I waited for transport to Cary's McHenry County, Illinois. My sister hired a lawyer for me that abandoned my case just before sentencing. I then hired a court-appointed lawyer and he negotiated a plea bargin for two years in prison. I accepted because the alternative was 12 years for 1 picture. This took a time while I sat in the McHenry County Jail. They held me in jail until my two-year sentence was discounted for my "good time" served to one year, so after I checked-in to the Statesville Prison, I was set free in a cold November night with only a shirt.
The use of the internet for sex chat, known as cyber-sex, is the biggest, most-shared secret on the internet (A Billion Wicked Thoughts). There is a very deep and pervasive loneliness in 21st century culture that many men and women attempt to fill with fantasy relationships. Often these on-line relationships start with or evolve into the sharing of sexual fantasies.
For a moment or an hour two people in completely separate locations, even countries, feel loneliness subside. Both “partners” are completely aware that sharing, the caring, the closeness, the love, and the sexual imagery are all pure fantasies.
Both know very little or nothing about the person on the other computer keyboard. The words that show up in chat windows are not even always typed by another person. They may be only words generated by computer programs. These on-line false people are referred to as “bots”, short for computer robots at least on Yahoo. Usually “bots” are easily detectable because of repetitive “messages” that do not respond directly to questions or comments.
These bots usually serve as advertisements for “pay for view” charged by the minute for “web-cam” views, where someone, usually a girl, “performs” in front of a small camera and transmits the images over the internet to “subscribers”. I have never been subscriber to web cams, so I can only guess at what they show.
So the person on the “other end” is an entity of unknown characteristics or character. It might be male, female, young, old, pretty, ugly, tall, short and claim to be something entirely different. I “talked” exclusively with people claiming to be women, mostly in their late teens or twenties (many women claim to be such, many men too).
Screen names usually indicated the sex the person wanted to believe him or her to be. Age was usually indicated in “profiles” or exchanged in “instant messages”. At times I chatted with “women” who I later learned were men. Same with age, I commonly found age claimed by chatters varied from session to session (poor memories? Or too many irons in the fire to remember?).
Pictures were often exchanged but there was no way to determine if the picture was actually of the person sending it, and usually not. Most women were 8 or better on a scale of 10. My suspicion is that most chatters, including me often, claimed to be younger and more attractive than they actually are.
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