It is rare that I choose to quote an entire article from another source but I am going to do it this time because the article was well written and I wouldn’t want to change what the author Heather Mallick wrote in the Toronto Star on May 9, 2011.
The Minnesota nurse convicted of using Internet chat rooms to talk two depressed young people into killing themselves — “I did it for the thrill of the chase,” he told police — has gotten away with it.
On May 11, 2011, William Melchert-Dinkel got a year in jail rather than the 15 years U.S. prosecutors had asked for. His victims were Nadia Kajouji, an 18-year-old student at Carleton University who drowned herself in the Rideau River in 2008, and Mark Drybrough, a 32-year-old IT technician in Coventry, England, who hanged himself in 2005.
Attractive, intelligent people — but too emotionally broken to comprehend how much they were loved — they had made the fatal mistake of talking to a nice lady online called “Li Dao” or “Falcon Girl.”
In fact these two screen names concealed a baby-faced fattish reclusive man typing away on his gruesome laptop in Faribault, Minn. A former nurse, he was once accused of surreptitiously hitting patients. And there he lived in a small town, quietly killing distant strangers, with the usual loyal wife (who showed up in court to support him) and two children.
Melchert-Dinkel says he talked online with about 20 desperate people and entered fake suicide pacts with 10 of them. Five died at his urging, he claims, not including Kajouji and Drybrough, and we’ll never know their names.
The Internet was a gift to people like Melchert-Dinkel. So was the ignorance of Rice County district court judge Thomas Neuville. The nature of online communication — a new technology that has altered human relations forever — eluded the judge who lumped the case in with other assisted suicide cases, only six of which have been successfully prosecuted in the U.S. since 1991.
In fact, Melchert-Dinkel had found a fresh new way to murder, far beyond the ken of a 61-year-old rural judge. To understand this killer, the judge had to grasp the dark side of online anonymity, instant messaging and complete unfettered freedom, how words are like loaded guns appearing on a screen.
Depressed people live in a personal blackness soaked with anxiety and despair. They are limp. They don’t have the strength to be suspicious or even alert. One smart Englishwoman was the key to the killer’s arrest. A computer-literate British youth worker named Celia Blay helped Drybrough’s mother track her son’s emails, uncovered the screen names and finally, the killer’s incautious use of his real name.
Thanks to her, Nadia, that happy pretty young girl just beginning grown-up life, was his last victim.
Depression isn’t new. Melchert-Dinkel’s murder weapon is.
He didn’t hold Nadia underwater with his hands, he did it with his typing fingers. One crime would easily earn a 15-year sentence, the other gives the killer a year in jail and a pointless probation where the killer can still use the Internet for work and may speak to groups about the dangers of the online world. The mind reels. Imagine Melchert-Dinkel coming to your child’s high school.
The judge still lives in a world where blood drips from the knife the accused threw in a dumpster and arsenic dregs still sit in the coffee cup. Online is different.
The judge said at this man's sentencing; “The court does find that what you did was stalking, or soliciting people to die,” Judge Neuville told the court. The judge is wrong. What the killer did was kill people, but he didn’t use a garrotte or a shotgun, the kind of weapons a Minnesota judge would know from TV’s Law & Order.
Indeed, the judge suggested that Melchert-Dinkel wasn’t the only reason the two victims died, meaning that they contributed to their own deaths by being too depressed to fend him off.
The sentence is a travesty and should be appealed. Far from sending a warning to Internet predators, it encourages them. Melchert-Dinkel has been killing from a distance since he first got his monstrous hands on a computer. He’s laughing now.
As I stated in the heading of this article, this creep should have been sentenced to life in prison.
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I too found this to be an exceptionally well written article with only the exception of the criticism of Judge Neuville.
As Nadia Kajouji's mother, I doubt there are many who feel as passionately about this case as I do. I see little difference between Melchert-Dinkel and the infamous Charles Manson. Manson may I remind you, never did any of the killing himself - he only convinced others to do so and was never even present at the time of the murders.
If this article would replace the criticism of Judge Neuville with criticism of the laws instead, I'd then be able to say it is dead on.
Judges contrary to popular belief, do not have the ability to assign any penalty they see fit. They are bound by sentencing guidelines that give them only a small window in which to work.
Although this crime carries a maximum penalty of 15 years, it has NO minimum. With no priors, the penalty is required to fall at or close to the minimum penalty. Melchert-Dinkel would have been required to be a career criminal to get the maximum sentence. However, he had no prior criminal record.
Should we be angry?? Of course we should! We should be very angry. But not at the judge who did all he could without having the sentence overturned. We need to realize the need for changes to our laws and we need to fight to have our laws keep up with a world that no longer bares any resemblance to what it was at the time the existing laws were written.
The Canadian authorities did not even have the courage to pursue charges against Melchert-Dinkel. That should also make us angry. Why should we have to depend on another country to seek justice for one of our own citizens?
We should be very angry. But we should also remember to applaud those who were willing to hold WMD accountable for his actions rather then criticize them for their limitations.
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