In 1996, the olden days of online hookups, Sharon Lopatka found the man of her dreams on the Internet.
Granted, her dreams were unconventional.
Lopatka’s come-on involved just one “dimension of compatibility,” not eHarmony’s 29.
Posting in an alt.sex newsgroup she asked, “Want to talk about torturing to death?” She added, “I hope you all don’t think I'm strange or anything.”
Some did, but at least one didn’t. And the story of how they got together and what happened when they did set a very high standard for Internet interpersonal nuttiness.
In that era before catfishing and dead make-believe online lovers, a news wire service felt compelled to spell out that things could get kinky between on computers. Knight Ridder explained, “The Internet has become a meeting place for people with an interest in sexual fetishes and practices.”
And as unlikely as it might have seemed, Lopatka — overweight and “as normal as normal can be,” as a friend put it — has to be regarded as a framer for all that.
Born in 1961, she grew up in Baltimore, where her father, Abraham Denburg, spent three decades as cantor at Beth Tfiloh, an Orthodox congregation in Pikesville.
After finishing high school in 1979, she went through a series of jobs, including an 18-month stint as a clerk in an FBI fingerprint lab.
In 1991, at age 29, she quit Judaism and married a Catholic, Victor Lopatka, a construction supervisor. They made a home in rural Hampstead, Md.
While Victor became a familiar face around town, jogging or walking the couple’s pet Labradors, Sharon became a cybergeek, staring day and night into the blue glow of her computer screen.
She tried a dozen different schemes to make a living off the Internet, creating one website that offered $50 copywriting and editing, another offering “home decorating secrets” and a third linked to 900-number psychic hotlines.
After five years of marriage, her Internet interests had grown darker. She began offering her used panties for sale and became a regular visitor to alt.sex newsgroups and sex chat rooms. Using screen names like NanConcentric and Gina108, her posts focused on edgy, illicit themes like sexual torture and snuff sex.
When a newsgroup Samaritan expressed concern, Lopatka sniped, “I did not ask for you preaching to me.”
In August 1996, Lopatka began an online relationship with Bobby Glass, who posted under the screen name Slowhand from his corroded trailer near Lenoir, N.C.
He wasn’t exactly Chippendales material.
A paunchy, 45-year-old Rotarian, Glass had had a long career as a data clerk for the local county government. A father of three, he had separated that May from his wife, Sherri, after 14 years together. She kicked him out, she said, because she’d been replaced by a machine.
“It got so that he was totally into computers,” Sherri Glass told the Baltimore Sun. “He didn’t care about anything else.”
For two months, NanConcentric and Slowhand exchanged dozens of graphic messages about violent sexual fantasies. Police later said a printout of their dirty talk — retrieved from Lopatka’s computer — went on for 870 pages.
Investigators said Lopatka made it clear in the messages that strangulation during sex was her ultimate fantasy. In turn, police said, Glass ‘described in detail how Slowhand was going to sexually torture … and ultimately kill her.”
On Oct. 13, Lopatka left a farewell note to her husband. She wrote, “If my body is never retrieved, don’t worry. Know that I’m at peace.”
She rode the Amtrak Crescent from Baltimore to Charlotte, where her online lover was waiting. They drove 75 miles north to his trailer. There, police said, they acted out their fantasy.
Victor Lopatka called police a week after his wife split. Investigators checked her computer and traced her kinky pen pal to an Internet service provider in North Carolina. On Oct. 25, Glass was in handcuffs after police found Nancy Lopatka’s body buried 25 paces from the trailer.
She had died of asphyxiation, just as planned.
“All of this strikes us as weird,” a shrewd North Carolina police captain told the Baltimore paper.
It was so weird, in fact, that prosecutors were leery of taking the case before a jury, fearing an acquittal because the 12 might find it all inconceivable. In particular, prosecutors feared the testimony of a New Jersey man who backed out after agreeing to deadly sex with Lopatka weeks before she rendezvoused with Glass.
Glass claimed it was an accident when sexual choking with a nylon rope got out of hand.
“I don’t know how much I pulled the rope,” he told investigators. “I never wanted to kill her, but she ended up dead.”
After years of hemming and hawing by both sides, Glass pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter in 2000. He was sentenced to four years and five months for his role in Lopatka’s death and another 26 months in connection with sexual images of children found on his computer.
With credit for the time served between his arrest and sentencing, Glass was due for release on March 3, 2002. Two weeks from freedom, he died in prison of a heart attack.
By David J. Krajicek / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
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