In 2003, a fourteen-year-old boy (John) groomed a sixteen-year-old boy (Mark) online via an MSN chat room to attack and kill someone they both knew. To do so, he constructed a truly remarkable catalogue of lies, tall stories and half-truths, elaborating a vast plotline involving himself and no less than six other, entirely fictional online identities, also played by him. Sounds like an Eddie Murphy movie gone septic, doesnt it? Well, the plot thickens still further. John (the names were changed to protect the kids involved) had a partly requited crush on Mark, which had resulted in at least a little fooling around in real life as well as over webcam although when the latter occurred, Mark was under the impression that he was talking to either the sixteen-year-old girl he was in love with (Johns fictitious step-sister) or the bogus middle-aged sexy spy he had a crush on. The ersatz sister would eventually be written out of the drama, murdered by an imaginary stalker (also played by John). Complicated, no? Well, hows this for the cherry on top of this massive great chocolate fudge sundae of deceit and skullduggery the person that John was grooming Mark to kill was John himself. By now you may have twigged that there was something significantly haywire in Johns teenaged brain. Determined to ensure that he would die, he posed as a secret service agent, a femme fatale who offered the extraordinarily gullible Mark a job as a spy as well as her completely figmental body to kill John, who he was told had an inoperable brain tumour. And Mark went through with it: he stabbed John twice in an alleyway in June 2003. John didnt die, however he spent a week in the hospital. Months later, police were able to piece together the chains of conversation that had caused the act of violence, and knew enough of the story to charge John with incitement to murder and attempting to pervert the course of justice. Mark pleaded guilty to attempted murder and was given a two-year supervision order and banned from any contact with John, who we assume would have been the last person hed want to talk to anyway.
Professional writer, punk werewolf and nesting place for starfish. Obsessed with squid, spirals and story. I publish short weird fiction online at desincarne.com, and tweet nonsense under the name Jack The Bodiless. You can follow me all you like, just don't touch my stuff.
