This is the story of two ordinary Manchester teens whose extraordinary friendship led to one of the most unusual and bewildering criminal cases in British history. That is what lies at the heart of this story. If converted into a paper pile, she adds, "it would stretch, I think, 46,000 feet high. On Sunday 29 June 2003, Mark brought a kitchen knife under the pretence it was for his mother, carefully avoided the CCTV cameras Janet had warned him about and entered the alley with John. Mark was a college student who worked part-time at a restaurant. . Advertisement 17,029 pages were read in the last minute. "It was like satisfying a craving, you had to be on there, you had to be doing it." He is believed to be known to the victims. It is a paradox that seems to have escaped the British judiciary. It seemed normal. But by the time of a crucial chatroom conversation on 28 June, Mark was still convinced by the order - from the "spy" - to kill John. Police were called to Norton Street, Old Trafford, just before 6pm on 9th September, to. And, on occasion, guilty. He took a cocktail stick and scraped it against his wrist. Police at the scene after a 16-year-old boy was fatally stabbed in Stretford, Manchester (Peter Byrne/PA) "He was just 16 and has been formally identified as Kennie Carter. "Mark must have known at some point that these characters were not real," he later told a therapist. Manchester. He misses him terribly, even while recognizing, as he puts it, "the friendship with Mark was fake." "It was incitement to commit murder - his own murder," said Detective Chief Inspector Julian Ross of Greater Manchester Police. Sally Hogg went directly to the prosecutor with the news. "He didn't feel part of the family," his psychiatrist realized. Mark: And just leave him 2 die in the trafford centre? He stabbed him twice, once in the stomach and once in the chest and then waited 20 minutes before calling the police. Police only became aware of the labyrinthine plot when they examined John's computer. "I love you, bro," Mark told his younger friend as he plunged in the knife. The police concluded John was the mastermind behind it all; he was every character in that chat room, the puppet master pulling the strings whilst Mark played the role of puppet. Police used traffic cameras to track the vehicle, which led Beard to be pulled over near a Dorchester. A schoolboy posed as a female British secret service spy in an internet chatroom to persuade a friend to try to murder him, a court heard yesterday. Since seeing a psychologist, John's mother informed the court, John had been getting along nicely with her live-in companion. Both sets of parents decided there would be no more sleepovers. An all-points bulletin was issued by Detective Chief Inspector Julian Ross, 43, a terse, authoritative figure with an iron jaw and a manner to match. These messages included the following exchange: 'Spy' (in reality Boy B): could you stab someone? That, however, was not how it seemed at the time. But what could John do? They arrived on the scene to see a 14-year-old teenager fighting for his life, bleeding to death after receiving multiple stab wounds. 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. But this time John also was chargedwith inciting murder. Mark was still accused of attempted murder, to which he ultimately pleaded guilty. A person, says the lawyer, whose future may well turn out to be "brilliant.". But here they were thwarted at every turn by the peculiar British legal system. It wasn't John whom Mark loved, the boy knows. His own murder. 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. John's mother, a small, plump woman, who had experienced more than her share of life's anguish, felt a heightened sense of alarm. At the boy's second interview, Ross recalls, Mark finally confessed to the stabbing. A 16-year-old boy is 'lucky to be alive' after he was set upon by a group of strangers and stabbed inside Next at a popular Manchester shopping centre. After months of analysis, detectives were able to establish that it was John who sent the final messages from his home computer on the night of 28 June 2003 and had planned his own murder. The next day, 29 June 2003, Boy A carried out Boy B's orders "to the letter", the court heard. Eventually, the time came when Janet asked Mark to carry out his mission. Minutes passed, perhaps as many as 20. "He was kneeling on me saying, 'Trust me,' holding the knife to my stomach. Paramedics called police to an address on Bednal Avenue, in the Miles Platting area,at 9.30pm on Thursday. "At the police station," Dobinson assured him. "The 14-year-old boy showed no intention to hurt anybody but himself," he A 16-year-old boy who was fatally stabbed in Manchester has been named by police as Kennie Carter. When the murder was completed, Mark would, Dobinson promised, be in very good hands: "I will be a 'detective superintendent.'". Boy B also admitted perverting the course of justice. Murderers? "The aim of it all was to find Janet Dobinson," says Ross. The stab wounds still pain him. When pressed, he told law enforcers only as much as he suspected they already knewor might soon discover. "But these could not be described as any normal circumstances," the judge added. ]]> The second was John himself. It is a spasm of regret that goes unmentioned by police and lawyers alike in my conversations with them. Other characters emerged and were killed off, one even came back from the dead. ", As for John, he, too, was getting what he wanted from his friend, as Dr. Smedley would later recount: "He described a feeling of emotional intimacy he had never experienced before.". "That's the guy that got stabbed," one might say. He might be talking about a particularly apt pupil. 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. Both pleaded guilty and received, to their patent relief, probation. The 17-year-old boy, known only as Boy A . His gall bladder had to be removed and he remained critically ill in hospital for a week. People will hear, please be quiet," the older teenager told him. Whilst the chat included usual teenage topics such as sports, movies and clothing, sex and masturbation was often the focus. At first, the police thought the attack was committed by an adult robber described in precise details by Mark. He couldn't imagine, he says, being stuck with the same person his whole life. A 44-year-old Manchester man, who is believed to be known to the victims, was arrested last night in Kent on suspicion of murder. Dobinson was, as Mark had been informed, 44 and authoritative. The teenager was attacked just before 4:30pm on Saturday on one of the busiest shopping days of the year.. There's no supervision on a lot of these chat rooms. The boy was, no mistaking it, aghast. The character Rachel is writing to Mark: This passage incensed Manchester authorities. They are proud, existential boasts stuffed with lies: livinitlargelad@hotmail.com and livinitlargeladdy@hotmail.com. The boy, John, now 15, groomed a 16-year-old boy, Mark (both pseudonyms to protect the children), with an "elaborate matrix of deceit" involving six fictional characters in the MSN chatroom and correspondence totalling 56,000 lines of text. "The amount of data on those two computers was about 133 gigabytes, masses of data," Sally Hogg, a police analyst, tells me. The boy - who is now 15 and can be referred to only as John for legal reasons - persuaded his friend, known as Mark, now 17, to stab him to death in order to pass a fictitious initiation test for the British secret services in a meticulously planned attack one Sunday evening last summer. A girl in distress, a homosexual blackmailer, a genial schoolboy, a top spy, a rapist, and a murderereveryone checked in regularly with the alternately enraptured and horrified teenager Mark. Tales were told of instant transformations. Rachel's desirability was enhanced by the attachment of a promising photographfrom some source, "although we don't know who," Hatton points out. Threads of plots, no matter how complicated or absurd, were never dropped. He seemed to have half expected their arrival. "Angry and upset" was how he later described his reaction to the news about his "girlfriend." Standing close by was a 16-year-old boy, who was the one who alerted the police to the crime. If he completed his mission hed become a member of the British Secret Service, receive 80 million, meet Tony Blair (the then PM), the Queen and receive sexual favours from Janet, a 44-year-old married woman who lived a double life for Queen and country. Police were able to link all the fictional characters back to John because Ms Hogg's analysis discovered common features in the typing style, such as the misspelling of "maybe" as "mybye", of all the characters. A few days later, however, the case took a surprise turn. If those numbers were uttered on the sunbaked streets of Altrincham, by the shopping center, Mark was told, John would be allowed to live. Much later, after months of wrong turns and huge confusion, the police would be very impressed by his skill. On the one hand, the police were in luck: Mark's computer contained software that permitted retrieval of much of the chat-room dialogue between the two boyssuch sophisticated software is rarely on the home computers of unsophisticated adolescents, and it is possible the boy didn't know of its existence. The Internet did something like that to him, said John. Janet informed Mark that the once valuable asset John was now suffering a brain tumour and needed to be put out of his misery. [1] The incident was the result of a gangland feud between Rusholme Crips and Moss Side 's AO, or, 'Active Only'. "I would say, of the two teenagers, John was the more wicked and more criminally culpable.". It was out of fear. It is clear he doesn't have much sympathy for the boy whose brush with death prompted the unprecedented charge. "And the public, in the submissions of the press, are entitled to be told the truth.". In John's small bedroom, which overlooks a small garden of aloe and yew, the boys played videos. Mark was so convinced of Kevins threats that he agreed to the terms. But "the problem with the MSN chat room is we didn't know whether there were, say, 98 individuals or one person using 98 e-mail addresses.". "Could you stab someone?" "IM NOW IN A POSITION TO TELL YOU WHY," Dobinson wrote back. It will not allow anyone else.". thats wot ur asking? Boy A, a 15-year-old, stabbed Boy B twice, but he did not die, Manchester Crown Court heard. He dresses in a manner equally rigid. On the other, he felt completely trapped. Prime Minister Blair wanted John to be seen as gay, therefore Mark was to carry out oral sex on John to complete the test. They were empty of hope. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. John's mother discovered her son was at the home of an older boy named Mark, about whom she knew nothing. A 44-year-old man was arrested in Kent on Friday night on. Boy A: ok erm well i watch a lot of films, 9.57pm Spy: change of plan dnt wear glove pull knife out and say you took it out. Mark had even been given a codename, 47695, and been provided with an abort code, 6969, should the mission be cancelled. A deliberate stylistic variation of "maybe," shared by four supposedly different people. This is a legal novelty in Britain, and very likely throughout the world. Janet Dobinson, who had watched him masturbating on a Webcam, and who had promised him a lifetime of wealth and glamour, was John. For three months there would be no major reduction in bafflement. But that was because police had possession of the computers and were bound to find out about her anyway. I didn't like it, I couldn't undo it, it was all fake, taking someone else in." ", John felt himself to be so profoundly unlovable that he entered the MSN chat room not under his own name but as a teenage beauty named Rachel West. The crucial character in the deception was a 42-year-old British secret agent called Janet. By April 3, 2003, Mark had grown so smitten with the character Rachel, whom John had equipped with her own e-mail address (Rachel_@hotmail.com), that her creator grew alarmed. Certainly John possessed the determination and industry necessary for success. Then on June 28 Janet told Mark that he had to kill the younger boy. Police Identify Driver Killed in Crash. Earlier this month, a 15-year-old teenage boy was also stabbed to death in Walker Avenue, in Bolton, in another separate attack. John had always been "a very gentle, slightly withdrawn personality," his lawyer, Jonathan Goldberg, would inform the prominent Manchester judge David Maddison in his courtroom, but harbored, despite his introversion, dreams of someday becoming a barrister himself. "In fact, I think MSN themselves should perhaps take some responsibility. Undated family handout photo issued by Greater Manchester Police of 15-year-old Jakub Szymanski, known as Kuba to his family . When investigators seized Marks computer they found over 58,000 lines of text within the chat room. Moreover, he was not to stray from her explicit instructions, because: "4 Agents watching you now ", "Each style of conversation was totally differentI really believed it," marvels Sally Hogg, the police analyst. From John's laptop emerged what the prosecutor would subsequently describe as "an Internet soap opera moving from one scene to another, each character and story line more fantastic than the last." He found he was never tired. For days he lay on a respirator, treated with painkillers and antibiotics, saying little. If Mark played his cards right, wrote John, "by may next year you will be a millionaire. The older boy he had "looked up to and wanted for myself," as John would later express it, had fallen for an imaginary girl. "Mark did it once, stood up, holding me, did it again," the victim told police. The boy is tall for his age, but slight, with olive skin, a long crooked nose, and dark, intelligent eyes framed by thick black brows poised for flight. "My life was on the Internet. the perpetually besotted Mark asked her. Cameron Mounds, age 19, was found in the driveway of 98 Enfield Street where he was pronounced deceased. The teenager was with his friends when. The 15-year-old died in hospital after being stabbed alongside his mother, who remains in a. He, in turn, went to Judge Maddison. Various characters shared the same last nameor, alternatively, although claiming to be siblings, didn't share the same last name. If Mark didnt complete the task Janet would lose her job and national security would be at risk. ", And so John crumpled, a drained, pallid figure muted forever, he thought, by the tall, light-haired boy he considered "perfect" and "out of my league.". There wasn't just one teenager to charge in the attempted murder of young John, said Clarke, there were two. He was the kind of teenager who needed every last detail spelled out. Mark then grew close with her stepbrother John, even meeting up in person and hanging out. Indeed, for all his love for Mark, who was languishing in confinement for eight months while John recuperated at home, the younger boy remained rigidly unforthcoming about his own participation in the scheme. At the time. "It's a hard life!" Soon he was spending upwards of 12 hours a day on the chat room, gradually becoming more and more obsessed with it. "To get him to do what 'they' wanted!". At no point could I find he made a mistake." "Don't let that be the last thing you are saying. But Boy B did not die and spent a week in. And quite a few demands. "I bottled it in," he told the Manchester psychiatrist Sue Bailey. Freezing cold. Manchester Hartford County Connecticut Arrests, Warrants & Most Wanted. A 17-year-old boy died after a horror street fight involving more than 100 people including some armed with 'machetes' on Saturday night (Saturday, September 4) in East London. A murder investigation has been launched after a 16-year-old boy was stabbed to death in Manchester. Detective Chief Inspector Julian Ross, of Greater Manchester police, said: "The initial contact was made when the older boy went into an internet chatroom and talked to a person purporting to be a 16-year-old girl. 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