Thursday 20 January, 2005 at 10:24PM (Nereus)  ::  permalink  ::  comments (0)

Death of a Spammer, in a Place Called Hope

By Todd F. Bryant
Staff Writer

HOPE, CA - In this dusty Mojave town, pop. 5000, which averages roughly one murder per decade, Sheriff James Wilcox recently encountered the first serious crime he was unable to solve in his 25-year law enforcement career.

"Incidents like this don't happen here," said the 50-year-old Wilcox, who has one deputy, his daughter, and operates out of a converted construction trailer with a single makeshift cell, which is rarely occupied. "We're not exactly Crime City, U.S.A."

The crime was murder. The victim was a local resident, a white male, 42, shot six times in the chest and arms. The time was roughly 4 p.m. The location was the post office. There were no witnesses. The Hope post office is staffed only 4 hours a day, but the lobby doors are unlocked around the clock so that residents can access their post-office boxes. The victim, Keith James Lawrence, unmarried, was gunned down in the post-office-box area.

"Heidi [his daughter] and I knew this was going to be a tough one," said Wilcox. "Nobody around to see it. Nobody even heard any shots. Not even a suspicious vehicle seen in the area. Just bad luck for us. It happens."

It was during the autopsy that things took a turn for the weird. The medical examiner noticed an obstruction lodged deep in the victim's throat. He reached in and pulled out the object?a can of Spam. "I knew then that we had something that was maybe out of our league," said the examiner, Dr. Anu Ram, a surgeon at Mojave County Hospital. "I mean, we don't know anything about serial killers here, and I told Jim [Wilcox], 'This is really scary. It's probably some guy traveling around killing random people, and this is his signature.'"

It is perhaps only in small rural towns like Hope that a can of Spam and murder wouldn't immediately conjure up an obvious hypothesis. Wilcox, while not oblivious to the existence of the World Wide Web and email, did not have an Internet connection and hadn't heard the word "spam" used in the context of junk mail. It was only when Wilcox talked to his daughter on the phone two days after the crime (she had gone out of town for a scheduled visit with her husband's relatives), that the pieces began to fit together.

"I told her the victim had a post-office box there, that it had letters in it, with money in the form of money orders and cash, generally five dollars each, and it appeared he was running some kind of a business selling information for a few bucks a pop. It looked legitimate to me, so I wasn't focusing on that. And then I told her about the can of Spam."

"I knew right then, or at least I thought I did, what the motive was," says Heidi Jensen, 29, who has worked with her father since she was 17. "I said, 'Daddy, this guy is a spammer.' And he goes, 'A what?' And I'm like, 'A spammer, he sends out those messages, you know, "make money fast" and "get a new mortgage" and stuff.' He had no idea what I was talking about. He refused to believe that spam could be a motive for murder. I'm like, 'Daddy, you're not on AOL, you don't understand.'"

But Wilcox was not one to ignore what he calls his daughter's "intuition." He acquired an expert in computers - by calling the local computer store, and securing the services of a clerk for $10 an hour - and examined Lawrence's Dell computer hard drive and dozens of CD-ROMs. "It was true, this guy was a spammer," said Wilcox, who is now well-versed in Internet lingo. "He had literally millions of e-mail addresses, and lots of bills from different ISPs, and we determined he'd been doing this for about two years. He grossed about $5,000 a year from it."

At that point, Wilcox called the FBI, who sent an agent to help him scan Lawrence's email and snail-mail records for any particularly hostile messages. Not surprisingly, they found quite a few. In fact, they found so many that they stopped cataloguing them when they reached 200.

"This case is impossible," said Wilcox, shaking his head. "I mean, if you add up all the spam recipients who threatened his life directly, that's probably ten thousand right there, probably more. And really, it's the ones that don't make overt threats who are usually the perpetrators in grudge cases like this, because the folks who write the poison-pen letters get it out of their system. So now you've got to add all of the other people on those CD-ROMs to the list. There's roughly 20 or 30 million suspects in this case, all over the world."

Wilcox tracked down a few more manageable leads. "I thought maybe one of Lawrence's acquaintances might have killed him, knowing he was a spammer, and made it look like a grudge crime. But, no, that didn't really pan out. I couldn't find anything substantial there."

Both the Mojave Sheriff's department and the FBI classify the case as open. At this writing, ten weeks after the murder, no suspects have been interviewed.

"Will [the killer] do it again?" Wilcox asks. "I don't know. But I don't think he was mad at Stanley Lawrence the person. I think he was mad at spammers. And there are a lot of spammers out there.

"And I'll tell you this much: I wouldn't want to be one."

THIS STORY IS FICTION

For more information on this, visit Brian Flemming's weblog.

six apart acquires livejournal

      Saturday 8 January, 2005 at 11:10AM (Nereus)  ::  permalink  ::  comments (0)

Yes it's true. Six Apart, makers of the highly acclaimed Movable Type publishing platform and TypePad personal weblogging service, today announced that it has acquired Danga Interactive, Inc., the operators of the popular service LiveJournal, for an undisclosed amount of stock and cash (MT is what powers this weblog).

As per Barak Berkowitz, Six Apart's chief executive officer, "We are now the only company to offer the full range of weblogging tools to the market. We have a service intended for individuals to interact with family and friends through LiveJournal, a hosted service for avid webloggers who want more flexibility and power with TypePad, and the leading server-based solution for power users, corporations and institutions through Movable Type."

The acquisition of LiveJournal makes Six Apart the industry's largest independent provider of weblogging tools. As of 6th January 2005, the combined user base of both companies exceeds 6.5 million users, with thousands more added daily. In addition, MT co-founders Ben and Mena Trott recently were included in a very small and elite group of PC Magazine's People of the Year, DEMO has named them among the 15 World-Class Innovators of the past 15 years, and they featured on the cover of Fortune Magazine. Impressive.

back to study mode

      Wednesday 5 January, 2005 at 6:46PM (Nereus)  ::  permalink  ::  comments (4)

I started back to class on Monday for the short six week winter semester. Apparently most people tend to take the short winter and summer semesters off for holidays or part time work if they can find it, but there's still a surprising amount of people on campus, much more than I expected at least; I thought it would've been a bit of a ghost town.

The winter semester is basically three months worth of class crammed into six intensive weeks, so I assumed there would be quite a lot of work ..it's actually turning out to be even more full on than I expected. This is the first week of class and getting up at 6am every morning to get there in time, and already I have a calculus exam tomorrow which almost definitely counts towards my final grade, and what's more is we'll be having an exam every week. For some unknown reason the Professor won't tell us how much of our final grade is derived from these weekly exams though, which is frustrating. At least he seems pretty good at teaching calculus, considering what an abstract subject it can be.

IceQueen has taken leave from work and is gearing up for her important core exam in early February, so it's pretty much study-geek-ville at our apartment now; my homework usually keeping me busy to about 9.30pm or later, and Ice is going hard on the study all day (when her work isn't paging her to help fix some coding bug that is), so there probably wont be much news from this end over the next month or two. That's all for now.

bringing in the new year with a bang

      Sunday 2 January, 2005 at 2:45AM (Nereus)  ::  permalink  ::  comments (4)

Hey 2005! Trust you all had a good new years eve! If you're wondering why I'm still up at nearly 3am the night after new years eve, it's because in one of the apartments upstairs some inconsiderate prat has spent the last hour or more using a friggin hammer for gawd knows what. I yelled out earlier for them to shut up and they stopped for a little while, but then they started up again, softly at first, then progressively louder (like I wouldn't notice ..duh).

Things got worse when about twenty minutes ago the neighbours directly above us started having sex. The reason we know they were having sex is because the female yells her head off as loud as she possibly can, I kid you not. It's never really an ecstatic orgasmic type of scream by any means, it's a repetitive top-of-your-voice yell like she's in pain. Perhaps her partner is doing something wrong... or more likely she's just doing it because some creep from way back told her it made them horny, and now she's got it in her head that the louder she yells the better the sex must be.

Whatever the case, I yelled very loudly (primarily aimed at the hammer prat for the moment), "F***ing Pack It In!". I then intended to also yell at the the screaming ho upstairs to stuff a friggin sock in her mouth, but both the hammering and the psychotic yells stopped altogether after my initial 'pack it in' yell. Perhaps they didn't realize they were keeping other people awake? I'd like to think so, but unfortunately it's more likely they're just trying to figure out what the hell 'pack it in' actually means. *sigh*

I'll update soon how IceQueen and I spent our Christmas Day and New Years Eve. On Monday my classes start for the winter semester as well ..calculus *ack*. No more snow here yet either, and no sign of any on the ten day forecast.

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