THE death of a suicidal British woman who travelled to America to be murdered by a man she met online has sparked fears about the growth of deadly chatrooms.
Sonia Exelby, a 32-year-old digital content creator from Portsmouth, flew to Florida last month ‘seeking a violent death’ just days before her body was found buried in a shallow grave in remote woodland.
Vulnerable Sonia, whose family say she had mental health struggles, appeared in a shocking video where she hesitantly described how she wanted father-of-two Dwain Hall to hurt her before he stabbed her to death.
Hall, 53, has been charged with Sonia’s murder and kidnapping, having allegedly sexually abused and tortured her before killing her in a remote AirBnB the pair were staying in.
But while Sonia’s case is disturbing and distressing in equal measure, shockingly she isn’t the first victim of these macabre fetish sites.
In 2003, German man Armin Meiwes was convicted of frying and eating another man he met on a cannibalism site.
And other cases have seen an Irish woman murdered by a man she called “master” after they met on a fetish site and a Maryland woman found buried in a shallow grave after joining a “torture” site.
But far from being hidden away on the shadowy dark web, security expert James Bore, who has investigated some of these sick sites and chatrooms says they can be hiding in plain sight on Facebook or Snapchat.
“The dark web is often what gets blamed but it is not as organised as everyone thinks,” he explains.
“There is not a hidden Internet you can search and find these sites. A lot of these sites are not on the dark web infrastructure, they are on public websites.
“They might be part of private forums, they might be part of fetish forums, Facebook groups or Snapchat networks, Signal groups and various other things.”
Armin Miewes met engineer Bernd Brandes in March 2001 after advertising on the now defunct ‘Cannibal Cafe’ for a “young well-built man, who wanted to be eaten”.
Bizarrely, Brandes replied.
They met at Meiwes farmhouse where Mr Brandes swallowed 20 sleeping tablets and half a bottle of schnapps before Meiwes cut off his penis – with his agreement – and fried it for both of them to eat.
Heavily bleeding, Brandes took a bath, while Meiwes read a Star Trek novel.
Finally, Meiwes carried his unconscious victim back into his ‘slaughter room’ where he fatally stabbed him in the neck before hanging his body from the ceiling, removing his organs, washing and decapitating him.
That night he ate his first human flesh, washed down with wine, as his victim’s head stared across the table.
The cannibal then chopped Mr Brandes into pieces, put several body parts in his freezer, next to a takeaway pizza, and buried his skull in his garden.
Over the next few weeks, he defrosted and cooked parts of Mr Brandes in olive oil and garlic, eventually consuming 20kg of human flesh before police finally turned up at his door.
“With every bite, my memory of him grew stronger,” he said.
Meiwes was initially jailed for eight and half years for manslaughter. He was convicted of murder at a retrial in 2005, and jailed for a minimum of 15 years.
Sex ‘slave’
In 2015, Irish architect Graham Dwyer was handed a life sentence for the murder of his ‘sex slave’ Elaine O’Hara.
His trial heard that O’Hara was a deeply troubled, lonely woman who yearned for a baby but also had severe mental health issues – vulnerable to a dangerous predator on S&M websites that Dwyer frequented.
They had initially made contact on a fetish website and embarked on a sexual relationship involving bondage, violence and knives.
Text messages between the pair revealed O’Hara referred to Dwyer as “Master” or “Sir” and herself as “Slave”.
Overall there were 2,600 text messages filled with rape and murder fantasies.
The original trial jury found that Dwyer stabbed Elaine to death on Kilakee Mountain in Rathfarnham on 22 August, 2012.
She had been suffering from depression and had left a psychiatric hospital earlier that day.
Just last year, a self-styled ‘eunuch-maker’ was jailed for life at the Old Bailey for mutilating paying customers and streaming it online.
These sorts of criminals want to be accessible to people that they can attract and it is much easier for them to do that on the normal Internet.
James Bore
Marius Gustavson’s “Eunuch Maker” pay-per-view website advertised services including castration, penis removal and the freezing of limbs.
He admitted offences including five counts of causing grievous bodily harm with intent.
Groomed for death
James says the sites are on the ‘deep web’ which is not as inaccessible as the dark web.
“They sit on something called the deep web, and all that means is that they are not exposed to search engines, so it is not easily findable or visible.” he says.
“People think it is a shadowy criminal conspiracy and I am safe because I am not part of it, I am just talking to my friends. The dark web does exist and it is used for criminal activity, but it is much more for commercial criminal activity.
“Whereas these sorts of criminals actively want to be accessible to people that they can attract and it is much easier for them to do that on the normal Internet. So just because it is online on a normal site, doesn’t make it safe.
“All of it is various forms of radicalisation. It is the same as people being drawn into cults, being groomed, it is the same pattern every single time.”
He made it clear there was no way out unless I shoot him. I was questioning it last night… I thought he’d do it quick and not give my mind time to stew
Sonia Exelby
Sonia flew out to Florida on October 10 and had a return flight booked three days later.
A message she sent to a friend on Discord a day after she arrived expressed her regrets and doubts, investigators said.
“He made it clear there was no way out unless I shoot him. I was questioning it last night… I thought he’d do it quick and not give my mind time to stew,” she wrote.
Detectives said the message “showed that Hall was controlling her, that she was afraid, and had made a mistake”.
Her family back in the UK, including her boyfriend Steve Hunt, reported Sonia missing when she wasn’t on board her return flight.
Mr Hunt posted an emotional plea for help in trying to find her – describing how she had flown to Tallahassee to meet someone and had “got herself into an extremely vulnerable situation.”
Hall, who met her at the airport and took her to an Airbnb, told detectives he had met Sonia on a fetish website two years ago and she had told him how she was suicidal and wanted to be killed.
Investigators recovered a deleted video which allegedly showed her “hesitant” and “visibly upset”, with bruises all over her body, as Hall asked for consent to hurt her.
But while the conversations between Hall and Sonia which ultimately led to her death are tragic and shocking, James Bore says they are not a new phenomenon.
The earliest recorded case of the Internet being involved in extreme fetish murder dates back to the death of American woman Sharon Lopatka in 1996.
She fantasised abut being tortured and was strangled to death by Robert Frederick Glass, a computer analyst, after meeting on a pornographic chatroom.
All of these incidents, every single one, is a tragic mental health story
James Bore
James Bore says conversations can often start on a public forum and then be taken into private chats between two people.
“If it is a fetish website, it may well have been one of the public ones, and within those the private chats are private conversations,” he explains.
“But it is not new that this sort of thing can and does happen. The internet makes it much more accessible.
“If you look at serial killers in prison and the love letters they receive. That was long before we had computers. It is just the connections are much easier to make now.
“Before the Internet it would have to be someone you bumped into in the local pub who was into that sort of thing and then you would get the same process of conversation and grooming, it would be just much less likely that you would meet them.
“You will have people who are members of these sites and members of much more open and public sites and they will get involved with people. Then they will take someone they are grooming and say ‘here is a site I think you will like, here is a community I think you would be interested in.’
“People like Sonia are groomed on these sites. It is very similar to how people are groomed on pro-anorexia sites. They are often brought in from Facebook diet groups and things like that
“It is a social dynamic of people being drawn into a tighter and tighter echo-chamber which becomes more and more extreme.”
While Sonia Exelby’s grief-stricken family are coming to terms with her loss and Hall faces murder charges, James Bore says the law enforcement agencies have their work cut out to shut down these sites.
“There are efforts to root them out,” he says.
“But most of our law enforcement isn’t really set up for that type of investigation. They can only really act after the fact.
“On top of that you have the problem that a lot of these sites are fantasy and fulfilment type things – it is only when the lines get blurred, as they have in this case, or the lines disappear completely that they become dangerous.
“People are allowed to talk about those things – no matter how much other people disapprove – as long as nobody gets hurt.
“You shut one down and another dozen pop up, particularly if you shut a large one down they fragment and split off. They are like mushrooms – they just pop up and you can’t really root them out.”
“Finding them is very difficult because they work through this introduction process. There may be several layers before people hit the bottom of the tunnel, so if you are trying to find the sites you have to work through that.
“They disappear, they pop back up. They are private communities, private messages.
“It is a massive distribution and it’s very difficult for law enforcement to do anything about that, unless we go totally authoritarian and say we are going to monitor everything.
“To do that they would need a lot more resources than are available. There are efforts, but by nature they are often too late because you can’t act on every concern.
“All of these incidents, every single one, is a tragic mental health story.”
