(His Lordship, as it happened, did not.). At 13, upon receiving a laptop from his mother (a homework enhancer, she thought), John became a habitu of the Internet. The prosecutor thinks otherwise. ("Wud u h8 me if i told u that i pretended to be rach 1nite?" An intricate web of deceit had been spun by the boy on the chatroom to recruit another teenager as his would-be killer. 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. Manchester Grammar School pupil Yousef Makki was attacked in Hale Barns, Greater Manchester, on 2 . Boy B survived, and spent a week in Wythenshawe Hospital recovering. According to Janet, John was the single most important person in the country, as he knew the code to access a secret safe hidden at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean that only a few countries knew about. He was told that his reward would be money, a job as a British secret service agent and sex with the spy, whom he believed was a middle-aged woman. After the investigators had poured through the thousands of lines of text from the chat room, they realised most of the people on there were fake. We finally saw that the last person to use the laptop at John's house [before the stabbing] was Janet Dobinson.". thats wot ur asking? And he would sit and read a book rather than talk with his friends," she revealed. John saw his friend surrounded by admiring girls. 02:12 AEDT 29 May 2004, King Charles hosts von der Leyen at Windsor Castle, Biden claims ICU nurse would whisper in his ear and BREATH on him, Gabor Mat: No Jewish state without oppressing local population, Amplified jet stream could lead to 'disruptive snow in places', Dashcam captures moment two cars collide on a roundabout, Putin orders intelligence service to find 'scum' who oppose him, Putin spy plane before being 'destroyed by pro-Ukraine Belarus group', Huge urgent police search for missing baby of Constance Marten, Moment police swooped to arrest Constance Marten's boyfriend, Police: Constance and lover arrested on suspicion of manslaughter, AFA president gives passionate rant speaking about student debt, Police search allotment sheds for Constance Marten's missing baby. Mark obeyed, convincing Johns school he had a dentist appointment. Police used traffic cameras to track the vehicle, which led Beard to be pulled over near a Dorchester. But the problem was Mark wasn't the only one in love. Except to his room. Nov. 29, 2022. "It was like satisfying a craving, you had to be on there, you had to be doing it." Perhaps it was "warped" to spend so much time in chat rooms, he reflected, sleepless and typing ceaselessly. Most views are considerably less indulgent. 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. No man in his life had ever meant much to him: he had no recollection of his biological fatherwho had, John's mother later told her son's therapist, not only abducted their son when he was a baby but also abused her physically and sexually. Mark asked the "spy": U want me 2 take him 2 trafford centre [shopping centre, near Manchester] and kill him in the middle of the trafford centre?? But this time John also was chargedwith inciting murder. "My life was on the Internet. The mother also insisted on meeting Mark's parents, who lived in the middle-class suburb of Stockport, about four miles away. January 13, 2004: New York, NY FKL. A. Jakub Szymanksi died in hospital after he was found with stab wounds at an address in Miles Platting on Thursday night. "The amount of data on those two computers was about 133 gigabytes, masses of data," Sally Hogg, a police analyst, tells me. "Skilled writers of fiction would struggle to conjure up a plot such as arises here." Then Mark was invited for a sleepover at John's. Shortly after her appearance, John suddenly emerged in the chat room as himself (saying that he was Rachel's brother), and these two were followed by still other fantastical alter egos equipped with wild backgrounds but dull, repetitive names: Lyndsey East, Rachel East, Kevin McGregory, Dave McNeil, Janet Dobinson. But that was because police had possession of the computers and were bound to find out about her anyway. Two teenagers on a junior high school basketball court after school became involved in a fight and one stabbed the other in the shoulder. For days he lay on a respirator, treated with painkillers and antibiotics, saying little. Every story John spun on the chat-room site, every slithering creation dropped into the ocean of the Internet, Mark avidly reeled in. But Boy B did not die and spent a week in. The police appealed for witnesses whilst seizing CCTV footage of the surrounding area. A great deal of thought went into her gestation. "And the public, in the submissions of the press, are entitled to be told the truth.". But this was just a brief spasm of fear. 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. Manchester Crown Court heard that John, who had fallen in love with Mark, also tricked him into performing sex acts on a webcam before tricking him into stabbing him twice in an alleyway at Altrincham on 29 June last year. There's no safeguards whatsoever.". People will hear, please be quiet," the older teenager told him. Off you go.'" By all accounts he too, like Mark, was an ordinary teenager, nothing in his history would suggest hed be involved in something so terrible. ", Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning. "Only he can walk through the door. It is a paradox that seems to have escaped the British judiciary. He said that under normal circumstances, the offences committed would have resulted in extremely lengthy custodial sentences. Access to that chest was available only through John, who had the combination. There was no reply to this question. Undated family handout photo issued by Greater Manchester Police of 15-year-old Jakub Szymanski, known as Kuba to his family . "And sometimes it would be a week or a few weeks before that character came back," always without a hitch, Hogg says. If he carried out the job successfully, he was told, he would be accepted as a spy. John would later claim that Mark had declared him to be "like a brother"but, as it turned out, he was a lot more than that. Another element the teenagers had in common: a Webcam, which allowed them to view each other and any other chat-room member who had one of the cameras.