Running away, of course, is as old as family strife and adolescent angst. But today, with teen computer use on the rise—more than half of U.S. 13-to 17-year-olds have logged on at least once, according to a March Gallup poll—cyberchat rooms have become an outlet for kids in search of advice, a sympathetic ear or a way out of boredom. In such rooms—where participant of all age can meet and swap messages with stranger from anywhere in the world—"you can be anybody," says Peter Banks, an executive at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in Arlington, Va. "You can say what's on your mind and not get scorned for it."
In the vast majority of cases, going online is less risky than a visit to the Public library. But in chat rooms, where role-playing and fantasy are often half the fun, new acquaintances aren't always who, or how, they seem. PEOPLE talked to three families with teenagers who learned that hard lesson firsthand.
Date with a vampire
"It started as a game," says Summer Nix of Spartanburg, S.C. In May 1996 the then 13-year-old seventh grader and her best friend, Casey Thompson, then 15, were exploring the Internet. They were visiting a chat room called the Vampire Pub, where participants assumed fictitious names and, via their keyboards, pretended to take part in ghoulish rituals. Because of the room's gothic setting, "you have to talk a certain way," says Nix, "or else they won't let you play."
Thompson, calling herself Mortina online, was a fast learner. During one session, says Nix, Thompson was pretending to be a vampire princess when a would-be suitor who identified himself as Jareth asked if he could taste her blood. Casey offered to bite her lip and kiss him. Jareth—in real life Cash Morriss, then 18, from Sparks, Nev.—was impressed. "Wow, that kiss was incredible," he wrote back. A cyber romance was born. Ultimately, Thompson, who was living with her grandmother in Pauline, S.C., persuaded Nix to run away with her and stay with Morriss in Nevada. "She wanted to take the computer game into real life," Nix says.
On Aug. 13, Nix waited near her home with a duffel bag full of clean clothes and no money. As arranged, Cash Morriss and Thompson pulled up in a burgundy Buick at about 11 a.m., and Nix hopped in. By the time the trio arrived at a trailer outside Reno three days later, Nix was homesick. "They told me I couldn't call home because the phone was tapped," she says.
Two days later, Morriss drove the girls to a friend's party. "There were about 20 guys and three girls there, and black strobe lights," Nix recalls. Around 5 a.m., to Nix's horror, Thompson and Morriss acted out their vampire fantasy and tasted each other's blood—she bit his hand, and he cut her arm with a knife—in what Casey would later call a bonding ritual. Nix stayed silent. "This was my best friend," she says. "I was out there, eight states from home."
Meanwhile, in Spartanburg, Connie Nix, who had alerted police the day her only daughter disappeared, appealed to the media for help. "I was so scared for her," says Connie, 38, a home health-care worker. "You think so many crazy thoughts. You always think the worst." In Nevada, Morriss's friends saw TV news reports about the two underage runaways and warned him (the girls had told him they were 17). Nix insisted she wanted to turn herself in, and on Aug. 20 she called the police from a gas station pay phone.
Nix spent the next three days at a Reno juvenile detention center before flying back to Spartanburg. Thompson was picked up the same day. (Last winter, with the permission of her grandmother, she returned to Nevada and married Morriss.) Nix, however, still has nightmares about what she saw. "When I got back, I didn't sleep," she says. "If I see someone bleed at school, it reminds me of what happened." For the most part, though, her life has returned to normal. "I still use the Internet," she says, "but I don't go into those vampire chat rooms anymore." Her favorites now, she adds, are those devoted to angels.
Seduced in cyberspace
Last Dec. 19, Ceara Kean O'Connell, 15, a shy, introspective and computer-obsessed ninth grader at Rush-Henrietta Senior High School, asked her mom for a ride to meet friends at the Marketplace Mall near her home in Brighton, N.Y. "It was a good sign, actually," says Ceara's aunt, secretary Laura O'Connell. "[I thought,] 'She's getting a social life.' "
By midnight, Ceara hadn't come home. Within hours her mother, bartender Cheryl Kean, a former private investigator, had begun frantically searching for clues to her daughter's disappearance. Gathering shreds of paper from the trash, she pieced together e-mail love letters from Brooker Maltais, whom Ceara had first encountered weeks earlier in a chat room called the Black Rose Nightclub. "I didn't know anything about e-mail," Kean says of the private messages the couple had exchanged. In the notes, Maltais, a 22-year-old divorced Air Force senior airman stationed at Offutt Air Force Base, outside Omaha, told Ceara he loved her and asked her to meet him at a mall near her house. "He was going to take her back to the Midwest," says Kean. "He had every intention of living with my daughter, who is underage."
Indeed, on Jan. 7, Maltais rented a $290-a-month efficiency apartment in Marion, Ill. According to landlords Steven and Lorraine Ross, Maltais said Ceara was his daughter. She reportedly spent her days reading books from the Marion public library while Maltais worked as an appointments secretary at a telemarketing company that sells mausoleums.
For four months neither Kean nor Ceara's father, Bob O'Connell, an attorney in Rochester, N.Y., heard anything of their daughter. "[The police] said there is nothing you can do," says Kean. "If she wants to disappear, she'll disappear. If she wants to come home, she'll come home." The family distributed thousands of flyers with pictures of Ceara and Maltais, whom the Air Force declared AWOL on Dec. 24, and went on TV talk shows. "Our goal," says Ceara's uncle Kevin O'Connell, "became to get the exposure."
In the end, the strategy worked. On April 16, one of Maltais's former coworkers, Michelle Robertson, 26, was watching The Maury Povich Show when a picture of Maltais flashed across the screen. "I thought, 'That girl needs to be back with her mother,' " says Robertson, who called the Williamson County sheriff's office. Ceara was taken into custody later that evening, as was Maltais. Last month, Maltais pleaded guilty in a military court to charges including statutory rape and was sentenced to four years in prison. At his trial, Kean admitted that her lovesick daughter had willingly run away and was not kidnapped. According to relatives, Ceara has been seeing a counselor and no longer has access to the Internet. "[We thought] the Internet was mostly for research," says Laura O'Connell. "We didn't realize there was another side, too—a danger."
Romeo hits the road
Smart, bored and addicted to computers, 16-year-old James "Bode" Wilson of East Dundee, Ill., logged on to a chat room for The X-Files fans a year and a half ago and electronically encountered the girl of his dreams: high school freshman Alexandra Zherebilov, now 16. "She was into movies and theater and had an offbeat way of looking at things," he recalls. Intelligent, artsy and sporting multiple earrings, Alexandra admits to feeling out of place in well-to-do Hingham, Mass., where her family settled after emigrating from Ukraine in 1989. "I got so much crap for just having a weird name and dressing funny," she says.
But not from Bode. A Pink Floyd fan, he seemed to appreciate Alexandra's musical taste, her love of languages (she has studied Russian, French and Latin) and her passion for science fiction. Soon the long-distance soulmates were linking up by computer almost every day. "I just saw it as being friends," confesses Zherebilov. "But I guess he saw it as more than that."
And how. On June 16, 1996, Bode set his alarm for 2 a.m., sneaked out the door of his family's house—Wilson's mother, Toni, 44, is a beautician and his father, Bob, 50, a heavy-equipment operator—and hit the road on his red 12-speed bike. His destination: Alexandra's home south of Boston, a distance of some 1,000 miles. "I had to see her," says Bode, who slung a backpack stuffed with clothes, $300, a cassette player and a few road maps over his shoulders—but neglected to tell Alexandra he was on his way.
It took Bode until 11:30 a.m. to reach Oak Lawn, 50 miles from his home. Suddenly the seven days he had figured the trip would take seemed awfully long. "I was getting really impatient," he says. He opted to pay $149 for a round-trip Greyhound bus ticket to Boston, leaving at 7 p.m.
Arriving at 9:00 p.m. the following evening, Bode was eager to tackle the last leg of his trek on foot—a mere 20 miles. Hingham police officer Katherine Knab spotted the teenager walking alone at 3 a.m. about a block from Alexandra's house. When asked, Bode politely explained his mission. "I told him I didn't think this was the time to be out looking for his girlfriend," Knab says. She had him on a plane back to Chicago by 6:30 a.m.
In East Dundee, Toni and Bob Wilson had spent a frantic 36 hours. "I took it personally," says his mother. "I wondered what I'd done wrong." Police called the family immediately after identifying Bode. The sight of their slightly grubby son at Chicago's O'Hare airport brought a mix of emotions. "I didn't know whether to hug him or hit him," his mother says. "So I did both. I hugged him, then hit him where it hurts: I grounded him from the Internet for a month."
BARBARA SANDLER in Chicago, TOM DUFFY in Boston, MARISA SALCINES in Spartanburg and ANTHONY DUIGNAN-CABRERA in Brighton
- Contributors:
- Barbara Sandler,
- Tom Duffy,
- Marisa Salcines,
- Anthony Duignan-Cabrera.
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