RedHanded - Episode 58 - Sharon Lopatka: The Woman Who Dreamt of Being Tortured to Death

Episode Date: August 23, 2018

This week Hannah and Suruthi delve into the dawn of the web, following the case of Sharon Lopatka, a woman who fantasised about being tortured to death. One day Sharon had enough and decided to make her fantasy a reality; she met her dream man online - a man who dreamt of torturing women.  Eventually Sharon was found buried in a shallow grave, but the state of her remains left many unanswered questions about what really happened to her...   See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to Red Handed early and ad-free. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. and lives can disappear in an instant. Follow Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Hannah. I'm Sruti. And welcome to Red Handed. Can a homicide ever be consensual? And if it can, what separates a consensual homicide from an assisted suicide? We're back at the dawn of the internet this week, and we have been here before with our German cannibal

friend Armin Meibus. And if you haven't listened to that episode, here is a quick summary. Armin really, really wanted to eat a person. But the key was that the person had to want it. That's what he got off on, the consenting eating of a person. So through 90s internet chat rooms, he found his willing victim, Burnt Branders. Then he killed him, chopped him up and ate him over several months before handing himself in to the police. This case shone a light on the relative anonymity the internet can hold for people and how this enables those with darker sides, fetishes or fantasies to explore their limits at will. The internet has made it much easier for people to find others who are just like them. And although the idea of internet friends is a nice one,

there are darker corners of the web where cannibals, fetishists and torture porn enthusiasts discuss their most violent and horrifying fantasies. And there obviously is a difference between a fantasy and actually carrying out the acts you think about and describe in great detail to strangers on the internet you've never met. But what happens when you do meet them and the emails and messages you have sent are used as evidence of premeditation? Can it be proven to be just a fantasy if in the emails you have written that you are absolutely serious? I think that's the thing that's really interesting about this case and other sort of internet-based cases like that cannibal cop one. And if you haven't seen the documentary Thought Crimes, The Case of the Cannibal Cop, seriously, go watch it. Go watch it today. It is so good and so interesting. It's all about if you've said you're

going to do something, is that enough to prove that you did it? At what point does it stop being a fantasy and become a conspiracy to murder? Because conspiracy to murder, conspiracy to kidnap are crimes that you can be convicted of but at what point does it stop being a fantasy and become that is really fascinating and i think the internet plays a massive role in it because it's easy to find easier than it ever has been now to find people who are into the very niche things that you're into absolutely we're so connected now across the world and what were the chances before you were just going to meet someone in your little town who wanted the exact same weird fucked up thing you did and you happened

to meet at the post office and openly talk about that and it's all documented on the internet so not only can you find these people but everything you say you can't actually delete anything like it is all accessible every text you've ever sent every email like it's horrible when you think about it you know digital footprint or whatever is forever you can't ever really remove something from the internet and that is fucking terrifying be careful what you say oh my god especially our younger listeners when you are on social media think before you say something think before you post something because there's been i've seen recently that guy who i can't remember a fashion magazine uh instated like a new editor or something and then someone dug out

some like super racist tweets from like 2002 and he lost his job yeah i mean actually how many people does that happen to that guy who was the movie director for whatever movie the guardians of galaxy dug out some i mean i don't know whether they're jokes whether they're serious whatever dug out old tweets fired and this is the thing actually i just said be careful what you post on social media i saw this woman talking about it and she made a really good point she was like stop using the word post because post makes it seem like you can delete it later publish Be careful what you publish on your social media. It could come back to haunt you.

I think about it a lot. I like rack my brain of like everything I've ever said because I've got one of those like really obnoxiously good memories. I just think if you wouldn't say it at work in an open setting, then don't say it on the internet. There's our rules for not letting the internet fuck you over and ruin your life. In more recent years, the most extreme internet forums have set up shop on the dark web, where there are no regulations and even more anonymity

than an avatar and a fake name can give you on the normal internet. But fetish forums do remain. And from time to time, the question arises, should we be censoring what people are saying on the internet? Should someone be allowed to publish on a chat room that they are looking for someone to torture them to death for their ultimate sexual experience? Because that is exactly what Sharon Lepaka did

and her posts would lead to her death. This case is another example of why you need to be careful. Not only could your horrendous tweets from 10 years ago come back to get you sacked, you posting or publishing things on the internet could mean you get murdered. Sharon was described by those who knew her as the most normal person you could possibly meet. She was born in Baltimore in 1961. Her family were Orthodox Jews and her dad was a cantor in their local synagogue. Nothing out of the ordinary happened to Sharon during

her childhood. She was not especially quiet or especially loud. She did all right in school and played on loads of sports teams. All round, she was very, very normal. Perhaps a little too normal. And in 1979, the same year Sharon graduated high school, she married Victor Lepatka and her family were not super happy about it. Although Victor seemed like a pretty normal guy, he had a steady job working in construction, Sharon's family just weren't that keen. And from what we can find, it really just seems like

her family were super Orthodox Jewish. They had really high sort of social standing within the Jewish community and Victor, by everything we can find, was a Catholic. So probably why they didn't like him very much or like the idea of Sharon marrying him. And 19's a bit young. I mean, maybe, but... Maybe not for Orthodox Jewish communities. I don't know. I reckon it was just she wasn't marrying an Orthodox Jew and why are you doing this to us, Sharon? But she was like, whatever. And she married him anyway. And to the outside observer, they look like a normal couple couple by the time Sharon was 30 in 1991

she was living in Hampstead Maryland with Victor I think it really was like a rebellion because her life like nothing bad happened to her like it doesn't seem like she hated her parents or whatever but like her life had just been so even keel like everything had been definitely set out for her I'm very lucky that my parents aren't like this, but the extended community from which I classify having been a part of are very concerned with who people marry, who they go off with, what is the rest of the community going to say?

And actually, because my parents afforded me so much freedom, never cared who I was with or what I did, I never felt any need to rebel. Absolutely no need to rebel about anything. But all the girls I knew who had very, very strict rules placed upon them by their families, you bet they were the ones fucking rebelling. Not that her marrying Victor is particularly crazy,

but the more safeguards you place around your child and tell them not to do things, the more likely they are because you're just giving them something to rebel against. Maybe that's what this was for Sharon. I mean, maybe it's what this whole case is about for Sharon. Ooh, good point. Maybe. I mean, we'll go on to see that Sharon has some very out there sexual vestiges. And maybe that's right.

Maybe it's a sexual rebellion against her vanilla life and her vanilla husband. The World Wide Web went live in 1990 and Sharon was obsessed with it. She had a really entrepreneurial mind and she saw the internet as her chance to get rich. She had countless money spinning schemes. She wrote copy for ad agencies at $50 a pop and she called this company Classified Concepts. Sharon also ran an online catalogue site called House of Dion, which people could pay $7 to view. And this online magazine boasted home decorating secrets seen in the posh homes from the New England states to the Hollywood homes

can now be yours, never published before. Thousands of decorators will be furious when they hear that we are giving away their professional trade secrets unknown outside of the industry. So she's basically selling home decoration tips and secrets. And I also think you could probably like order a pillow. But do you know my favorite, favorite etymology fact ever? I feel like I maybe once did and I've forgotten. What is it? So the word posh, the origin of the word posh comes from when people would go on big ships like the Titanic from England to America. And if you are posh, if you are wealthy, you would want to stay out of the sun so you wouldn't get dark skin. So they would go port side out starboard home to avoid the sun.

And that's where the word posh comes from. Wow. And that is my favorite fact. Do you know what I'd really love? I'd love to do like a 15 minute daily podcast of like Hannah's etymology facts. If you listen to that, let me know. I might do it. I support it.

I support you. You should do it. I don't know if I've talked about it before, but my favorite one is not as interesting as that, but it's where the word hysteria comes from. It comes from womb. Wandering womb. Yeah, because they thought women were hysterical because their wombs had detached and they were floating around their bodies, attaching themselves to their brain, making them hysterical. Slap her, she's hysterical.

Her wandering womb is attacking her brain. That is fantastic. Whenever anyone says anything about like, oh, well, medicine says this, so it must be that. I'm like, well, medicine used to think that wombs wandered around and like beat people. So maybe keep an open mind keep an open mind but also i'm not a fan of what's happening at the moment with all this kind of undermining of the expert because everyone is like i don't need to trust that person we don't need to trust science we can just believe whatever we want to believe no you can't fucking stop it flat earthers is that real or are they trolling us all i really really don't understand. Very bizarre. Why did B.O.B. get involved in that? What's going on with him? Anyway, presumably though, as you said from this

House of Dion thing that Sharon was running, people could presumably order things for their home to make them look posh. And whether Sharon had anything to do with those orders or whether the stock was actually real is a whole other story. But these two businesses side by side were still not enough for Sharon. And she had absolutely no problem with ripping people off and scamming them out of their money. She's another Del Boy. Covered a couple of them. Yeah, absolutely.

Absolute Del Boy. So Lepatka took the next logical step for someone looking to rip people off and started to offer her services as our favorite thing a medium called velanda dion that is a great name though that's a good name she offered psychic readings for people over the phone and used incredibly expensive premium phone lines a friend of mine from university did her dissertation on sex as performance so for her field work she worked on a sex line like a phone sex line and she made eight dollars a minute oh fucking hell a minute with those premium numbers in the states you can make an astonishing why are we doing anything else why don't like i honestly

don't know we both got full-time jobs and do this on the side let's just fucking pack it all in and start a phone sex line she did say though that like she only did it for six weeks but she was like i couldn't really look a man in the face for a really long time oh god a lot of poo stuff apparently a lot of people wanting oh okay i'm i'm stopping this conversation well the thing is like if you're calling a phone sex line you've got to be into something pretty niche, do you know what I mean? I don't want to know. Okay, so as if the premium phone sex lines weren't enough, Sharon also started advertising love potions. This is the ultimate. But the worst thing is that she didn't advertise these love potions she made just anywhere.

She advertised them in forums that were specifically for heartbroken teenagers. And that is just fucking predatory. It is. Going after like heartbroken teenagers, the first time you get your heart broken as a teenager, you feel like everything is done. The world is over. Oh, absolutely. And I also think what's really key to remember is like,

this is the first time that this has ever happened. Like the internet is so new. Like now when you see like pop-up ads for like mediums, you're like, oh, this is bullshit. But that's because we've been so exposed to it. But this idea of exploiting young listeners or young viewers is definitely something we see. I think not so much in the podcast community, but on the YouTube community. Some of those YouTubers have got such young followers and like listeners and viewers, whatever. And the shit they sell to them and the prices they charge it's not love

potions but fucking hell it's outrageous it's absolutely outrageous and that's the thing like if you have no scruples if you don't care about scamming people broken-hearted teenagers are a gold mine definitely and that's how kim kardashian makes her money did you see that thing where she was advertising appetite suppressant lollipops on her instagram feed yes i did that is appalling oh like not only am i giving you this ridiculous like ideal of beauty with all of my doctored images but i'm gonna tell you not to eat i'm just like who is looking at that looking at her plans and like yeah that's a good idea you should sell appetite suppressant lollipops to kids that's fucking like meth on a stick because yeah kids top tips kim kardashian's top tips just don't be hungry just don't be hungry and then you'll be super happy fuck off

anyway but this targeted post did get sharon into some trouble one user posted on the group where on earth do you get off posting your booby trap for neurotics in a group designed for teens? Because they are more likely to go through troubled phases in their lives, thus fall for your money-grubbing drivel, which is exactly what she's done. And then another user who called themselves Studly Muffin, which I am convinced is a Simpsons reference, but I cannot find it. Do you know what I mean? Are you not thinking of like disco stew no I'm sure anyway if you can find it listeners please let me know because it's driving me oh is it is it the guy on the burly towels oh maybe but his name was like Chad Sexington

sorry guys we're both very into the Simpsons. So, Studley Muffin says, Are you expecting any serious replies? Don't you think it's a tad unethical to dangle poisoned carrots in front of a hungry donkey? Which I thought was quite a good description. I'm going to use that. It's good. I like it. And of course, that's exactly what Sharon was doing. She was dangling poisoned carrots in front of stupid hungry donkeys. But the dawn of the internet probably isn't the time for ethics.

And this is what we have to remember. The internet was so new that there were no specific laws against what she was doing because it was so new. And what Lepatka was doing was most definitely questionable morally. But how different is it really than churches that use premium phone lines to collect tithe from their congregations? If you buy into the ideology, you could argue that it's money well spent. If you think love potions work, you'll pay for them. This is why we need people to critically engage with things. We need to be teaching critical analysis. We don't do that enough. Everybody is out to con you. Go into every situation thinking

that everyone is trying to con you and then wonder why it costs you $8 a minute to call this person or why they want $50 for a fucking love potion. Be skeptical. Oh my God, I watched this thing, which you'll really like actually, called Afflicted. It's on Netflix and it's about these people who are like just allergic to the world.

I saw the advert for it. And there's this one woman who like, I think some of them are legitimately ill, but I do think this one woman is making it up because she hates her husband. She spends an enormous amount of money calling these people who are energy healers and they energy heal her through the phone the guy who lives across the road from me and if i can dig out the headlines i will find them and post

them because they were like in our local newspapers he is a ghost healer no yeah can we go should we go he's got the shed so basically he's got his house that's opposite us and then he built like this giant building next to it and they like people come there all the time and i don't know what they're doing in there but they have like little seances and ghost healings and shit like that and it's very weird and then i'm sorry he's also like a member of the local conservative club so all of those people are the people who come to this ghost healing thing and then he like says things like who in here has a wife named barbara who died and then they're like oh my god but i'm like

he fucking knows you he knows all of you he's lived in this town his entire life and also guessing that someone called barbara during a chorey meeting is pretty it's pretty spot on i would never go there i feel like it's some get out shit if I went over there. I'll go. I'll do deep cover. He doesn't know me. I'll go. I'll record. I'll wear a wire. Anyway, where were we? But with Sharon, just like with many, many other people who do the same thing, getting called out on targeting lovesick teens wasn't enough to stop her. But her internet dabblings definitely became more adult. Lepaka added a few more strings to her internet bow. She started posting in pornographic forums and chat

rooms under many different usernames, offering many different services. Sometimes Sharon claimed to be a dominatrix called Carlson, who offered her services on BDSM sites. Other times, she was Nancy, who was a blonde with green eyes weighing about 121 pounds, which is about eight and a half stone, or around about 54 kilos, who innocently wondered if anyone would like to buy her worn underwear. And I'm sure some people took her up on that. Nancy assured anyone reading her post that it wasn't a joke or some kind of wacky internet scam. But of course, that is exactly what it was. Sharon also posted on pornography forums that she had VCR tapes,

VCR tapes. I know, so retro. Of women who had been willingly drugged or hypnotized before they were violently raped multiple times. Sharon also encouraged site users to contact her directly and tell them what their fantasies were so she could make a porn film for them and bespoke pornography today is basically the only thing keeping pornographers afloat financially because the rise of you porn there is so much free porn

knocking around that people are only willing to pay for something super niche same with the phone lines they're only going to pay for something they can't get for free on the internet. And because there is so much free porn, like you have to be into something really quite strange for there to be no porn for you for free. And the weirdest one I've heard of, this is quite famous, I think, is the stamp man. So basically, this man sent in a bespoke request to this porn film company in California. And he said that he wanted his incredibly expensive stamp collection that he'd spent his whole life compiling he wanted it to be ripped up and burned by women in their underwear whilst telling him through the camera that stamp collecting was a really stupid thing to have spent so much time on and he paid like thousands of

dollars to have that film made there are just so many things going on in that story aren't there so many but people are into very weird things and we're not here to kink shame anyone either do what you want as long as it's consensual no one's getting hurt and if you are physically hurting someone or being hurt do it safely there are literally bdsm helplines for that exact reason to make sure that people are being kinky but they're being a kinky as safely as they possibly can i do find it quite funny there's literally a helpline you'd be like um i'm stuck in my sex swing please help me one of the more niche fetish videos that lopaka claimed to have for sale was one featuring a giant goddess crushing men like bugs according to sharon this video could be yours for just 33 and she also claimed to have, this video could be yours for just $33, and she also claimed to have shot this video herself.

But there is no evidence that this film, or the one with all of the drugged women being raped, actually existed. People who ordered the VCRs from Lepaka complained that they never actually received them after sending their money. One disgruntled user posted that Nancy Carlson, the pseudonym Sharon was using at the time, presumably a mix of Nancy the Dirty Knickers Girl and Carlson the £300 Dominatrix, was a bullshit artist. This poster claimed that they had reached out to Nancy Carlson after they didn't receive the tape, only to be fobbed off multiple times and told that it would be delivered on Friday. Again, you're buying this kind of weird extreme pornography, niche pornography off the internet. If it doesn't arrive, are these people going to go to the police and tell them that they bought pornography on the internet and it didn't arrive? This is the dream group to go after and victimize and target for money because they aren't going to report you. They're just going to bitch about it on the internet. Exactly. I think, you know what it really

reminds me of is that Ricky Gervais film, The Invention of Lying lying like when he just wakes up one day and he's like i can just say things and they're not true like i literally feel like sharon's been like i can sell things on the internet and not do it exactly it doesn't have to exist exactly and then she fucking had a great time until it all fell apart but it would appear that le pac didn't make the move into the pornography game purely for business she had quite a few extreme fetishes of her own. That's her mistake right there. You never mix business and pleasure. Yeah, she's getting high on her own supply a bit here.

So she posted, again under assumed name, but this time on a cannibal forum, stating that she was looking for a feeder to help her reach her extreme weight gain goal. Sharon posted that she wanted to be force-fed until she was at her target weight of 475 pounds. That's 215 kilos or a staggering 33 stone and nine pounds. She specified that she was willing to relocate for the right feeder but was not interested in a phone feeding or just an email correspondence. But that wasn't all sharon went on to state that once she had reached her enormous goal weight both she and

her feeder could indulge their ultimate cannibal fantasies by eating her together which if you are 475 pounds like that is big you can't just slice off your fat and eat it like you need to be eating muscle she doesn't she hasn't thought this through from a biological standpoint i don't think oh my god i can't it's too much it's too much i'm tapping out oh god have you seen this movie i mean it's a terrible terrible terrible terrible movie called feed it's awful no but you love shit films that's like your your fave but this is like too shit oh too shit even for you i watched it and it's more like it becomes very comical it's just about this woman who like this guy who like wants to feed this woman to death and like films that puts on the internet but i mean i feel like my uh film choices on this podcast get really torn

apart on social media seriously i i I recommended Martyrs, which I felt was good. And then I still stand by Open Water 3. I got a lot of shit for that. I think it's a fucking good film. Yeah, you did get quite a lot of shit for that. Good, you're all such snobs. You're all such snobs. Go watch it and then tell me. So as taboo as all this might be, there was one taboo that Packer was not interested in, and that was adultery. I mean, it's good to know where you draw your lines, isn't it? Because she clearly stipulated in her ad that any married feeders need not apply, as she had no interest in breaking up a marriage. It would also appear that no one took Sharon up on this offer, so she

started posting in different pornographic groups, especially ones specializing in necrophilia. And it was through these posts that she would get her wish and meet her end. Her message read, Hi, my name is Gina. I was wondering if anyone out there would want to talk about the subject mentioned above with me. I kind of have a fascination with torturing till death. Of course, I can't speak about this with my friends or family. Would love to have an email exchange with someone. If you're interested, email me at gina108ataol.com. Am I the only person who sees an AOL email now and is like, are you lost?

Whenever someone sends me something from an AOL email I'm like do you need a time machine back into the black and white times like what's wrong with you get a gmail and to use a meme from like eight years ago do you even internet who is using AOL which is incredible because really like AOL brought the internet oh yeah basically everyone but now we're like oh we've outgrown you evolve or die A, and you died. Evolve or die. That's the name of your autobiography. It's the name of the business book I'll write.

Despite her very offensive email, Sharon did receive a few responses, but none of them seemed like they really meant it. Until two days after Sharon had posted, she received a response from Bobby Glass, a recently divorced man living in North Carolina. He said, of course, we all have our fantasies. Would like to share mine with. One of mine is to torture a naked woman to death. I think this is like a dawn of the internet thing where people just aren't writing proper sentences. Like, do you remember when like you could only fit so many characters in a text so you do short i think that's what's happening here which is what i haven't just like missed out a

word that's how it's written so this is the absolute jackpot for sharon lapaco the two exchanged emails over six weeks and it amounted to 900 pages of correspondence that would later give the police everything they needed don't you just love the beginning part of a relationship you just can't stop talking to each other about all of your cannibalistic fetishes. And it goes on for 900 pages of correspondence. Fucking hell. That's the thing that makes this case a landmark one. And I'm surprised there hasn't been more coverage of it because it was one of the first, if not the first case where all of the evidence used to get a search warrant was entirely emails. And we take it for granted now, when someone goes missing, the first thing

we do is go through their phone and their computer. But this is in 1996, and this was brand new territory for law enforcement. But the trail of emails she left behind made it pretty easy for the police to locate her after she went missing on the 13th of October 1996. Her and Bobby Glass had been messaging each other, concocting a plan since August of the same year. Bobby Glass, unlike Sharon Lepaka, had three children with his ex-wife Sherry. And yes, you heard that correctly. Her name is Sherry Glass. I lost my mind when I read that. I think that is so funny. How tired are you? Quite.

Sherry glass. Brilliant. I've lost it. Oh mate, I know. I feel you. This week, Ken, during the research, I genuinely fell asleep over my laptop for at least three hours. And I woke up and everything had just shut down because the battery had run out. And I was like, how did I get here? I'm so tired. What year is it? I've got an AOL email address. What's happening? It's okay. I'm going on holiday next weekend. It's all going to be fine. So the pair, Bobby Glass and Sherry Glass, had been married for 16 years. But Sherry left him in the April of 1996 because she said that he spent far too much time on the computer. She told reporters that the final straw came when her children asked her, why doesn't daddy love us anymore? Did your kids really say that?

I feel like when people say that their kids say something, I'm like, did they? Did kids say things like that? She said that in an interview to the Washington Post, I think. But I think this is obviously after everything happens. After hearing that from her kids, supposedly, Sherry decided that she had to know what could possibly be more important to her husband than his children. So she went through his computer. Uh-oh.

I know. Red alert. We need a siren that we can just play at times like this. Can you drop in a siren like beat into this thing? Because we all know that snooping on your partner's computer use never, ever ends well, especially not when your husband has a whole glossary on fetishes that you didn't know about. Sherry described finding hundreds of violent and disturbing messages that her husband had been exchanging with multiple women.

These messages had been sent under the usernames Toybox and Slowhand. Creepy, isn't it? That is really creepy. And in that moment, she discovered that she never really knew her husband at all. She gathered her children and left immediately. Her and Bobby Glass were divorced very shortly after. I mean, you would freak out, wouldn't you? I'd freak out.

But, you know, you never really know a person. I mean, yeah, but I reckon it's more like you never really knew that they didn't like pineapple on their pizza and they were just going along with it all these years because they didn't want to cause a fuss. Not that they're secretly into fucking, like, cannibal fetishism. Yeah, that's true. But this, of course, made Bobby fully compliant with Sharon's no married men rule. So he invited her to stay with him. On the 13th of October 1996, Sharon told her husband Victor that she was going to see some friends in Georgia. Although Georgia is an incredibly long way from Maryland where she has lived her entire life. And Victor wasn't aware of his wife having any friends there either. But he still just let her go without asking any questions just off to Georgia. Sharon left while he was at work and he would never see her again. Victor raised the alarm when he found a note that his wife had left behind. It told him that she would never be returning to Maryland and that if her body is never recovered that he shouldn't

worry he should just know that she's at peace. And I have read some accounts that Victor didn't find the note that Sharon left him until a week after she went missing. But that just seems absolutely bonkers. Like, I really don't see how that can be true. But no matter when he found it, the note is enough to freak anyone out. So Victor Lopaka called the police, who pretty quickly located Sharon's emails and figured out where she went. Sharon had driven to the train station where she caught the 915 train. She arrived in Charlotte, North Carolina at 8.45 that evening. This is a long way to travel for something you're not serious about. Surely you've got to be so committed to this and so fucking serious to go all that way.

And this is what makes me think that she really did want to be tortured to death surely she could have found someone to play act the fantasy with like much closer to home so i really think that she did want to die i mean it's the same thing as like people paying loads of money to have their stamp collection ripped up like people will go out of their way if it's something that they can't find anywhere else and they really want it and i think this enormous journey is evidence of that absolutely he's the only one that she believed was absolutely serious about doing this and isn't it is i know it's so crazy we don't even need to comment on the fact that what she wants to have done is so crazy but it's usually like i spend my entire life trying to not end up in this situation where i'm being tortured to death. And this is, she actively is going to look for this. It's, this case is nuts. So Bobby Glass picked Sharon

up from the train station in Charlotte and drove her a further 80 miles. This is the thing again, it's like, God, at what point? She, at no point during this entire massive journey, this like fucking epic odyssey she goes through to get there. Does she think maybe I should stop now. Maybe this has gone far enough. Further 80 miles to his trailer. On the edges of Pisgah National Park in an area called Lenore. Fucking terrifying.

Just like a random trailer in the middle of nowhere next to a national park. No thanks. Yep. Pretty, pretty terrifying. And for the next three days, according to Bobby Glass, the pair acted out multiple torture fantasies and essentially fucked each other sideways. The police, driven by Victor Lepakka's concern for his wife, were hot on their tails. On the 25th of October 1996, Judge Beale granted a search warrant to the North Carolina police,

who had been staked out at Bobby's trailer for some time, but they had not seen a single trace of Sharon. And remember, this is one of the first search warrants ever granted on purely email evidence. 22 days after Sharon had left Maryland, the investigators searched Bobby Glass's trailer while he was at work. And he was a computer analyst. He loved the computers, clearly. And he was like, when she was in his trailer, he was a computer analyst he loved the computers clearly and he was like when she

was in his trailer he was just he was still going to work like he never missed a day of work he was just like okay see you later help yourself to any food in the fridge i'm off to fucking work mate take a fucking day off they found in the trailer a number of items that they managed to confirm to be the property of Sharon Lopatka. They also found a gun, torture equipment, drug paraphernalia, and, more damningly, reams and reams of pornography, a decent proportion of which depicted children. This guy had three kids, let's remember that for a moment.

So there was all of this evidence, but no Sharon. Until the police searched the land outside the trailer, which was littered with rubbish and broken toys. Their attention though was drawn to a mound of recently disturbed earth. Again, maybe you just want to fucking, you know, pat that down, put something over it. He's lazy. He's a lazy killer. The stakeout team had noticed a pack of dogs

hanging around this mound only a few days before. They only needed to dig and this is just proof of how fucking few days before. They only needed to dig, and this is just proof of how fucking lazy he is, because they only needed to dig about two and a half feet before they found the decomposing remains of Sharon Lepaka. Sharon's body was found with a rope around her neck and her wrists were bound. There were scratches on her neck and breasts, but nothing to suggest that she had endured three days of intense torture. Which is interesting because they obviously also found the torture equipment in the trailer. Yeah, but like she didn't have a single bruise on her.

Like she had some scratches, but no bruising at all. That's crazy. It turns out that Bobby had buried her just 75 feet from his front door. And what is really fucked up about this is that he lived, as we said, on the edge of a fucking national park. And he didn't even think that it may have been more effective to bury her in there. D.A. Brown, the lead investigator on Sharon's disappearance, stated to the press that if he had bothered to bury Sharon in the forest, they probably never would have found her, and he might have gotten away with it. Bobby was arrested the next day and swore to the police

that it was the classic sex game gone wrong and that he never meant to kill Sharon. It had been a total accident. Bobby admitted that he and Sharon had been having sex when he, at her request, choked her with a rope and he had simply done it for too long and Sharon had died. Bobby said that he panicked, got rid of the body and presumably the panic is what caused him to bury her on his front doorstep instead of the actual forest behind his trailer. But this is where it gets weird. The autopsy of Sharon's body concluded that she did die from asphyxiation, or at least something.

Her body looked like it was consistent with asphyxiation being the death, cause of death. But the coroner, John Butts, and associate Dr. Robert Thompson confirmed that her body did not show the signs of a person who had been tortured for three days. They didn't find any evidence that she had been beaten. There were no new wounds or old scars. And also Glass had claimed that he had strangled her with a rope, but there was no bruising or marks on her neck to indicate this at all. That is a bit that just makes none of this make any sense because if you are choking somebody with a rope, apparently if you're like standing up it doesn't take as long if you're sitting down it takes a

bit longer if you're lying down apparently can take up to 12 seconds before that person even loses consciousness at which point you would then have to carry on further until they died that's intense you have to put a lot of pressure on somebody to like choke them to death with a rope your neck is going to be all sorts of fucking bruised up. It's just going to be destroyed. There's just no way you can strangle someone to death with a rope and there have been no sign of it on their neck. Just no. It's impossible.

And also the side of it like being an accident. I find it questionable because 12 seconds, even if you say it's not that long, even if it's eight seconds, that's a really fucking long time. And the person loses consciousness and you would have to carry on before they die how does this happen by accident loads of people do die by like in sex games gone wrong that's not unheard of but we were talking about this before and i genuinely think the majority of those cases are probably auto erotic asphyxiation people who are hanging themselves on their own to get off because there isn't somebody around to do it and they don't have a person to save them if it goes too far and they die how often does it happen when there's two people involved because don't people have safe words and

shit it's a tough one i think but maybe not these two because i think it happens but i think you're right i think it's much more likely to happen if it's a person on their own i don't get what happened here unless it was like i don't't know, he was going to torture her. He just got so excited and ended up killing her too quickly before they could get to the torture. But I don't see how this happens by accident, I think. Maybe it's like a Charlie Brant thing where he flips,

he kills her, and then it's like, oh, fuck. I had all these big plans for our time together. So, get this. The Ontario Liberals elected Bonnie Crombie as their new leader. Bonnie who? I just sent you her profile.

Her first act as leader, asking donors for a million bucks for her salary. That's excessive. She's a big carbon tax supporter. Oh yeah. Check out her record as mayor. Oh, get out of here. She even increased taxes in this economy. Yeah, higher taxes, carbon taxes.

She sounds expensive. Bonnie Crombie and the Ontario Liberals. They just don't get it. That'll cost you. A message from the Ontario PC Party. They say Hollywood is where dreams are made. A seductive city where many flock to get rich, be adored, and capture America's heart.

But when the spotlight turns off, fame, fortune, and lives can disappear in an instant. When TV producer Roy Radin was found dead in a canyon near L.A. in 1983, there were many questions surrounding his death. The last person seen with him was Lainy Jacobs, a seductive cocaine dealer who desperately wanted to be part of the Hollywood elite. Together, they were trying to break into the movie industry. But things took a dark turn when a million dollars worth of cocaine and cash went missing. From Wondery comes a new season of the hit show Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder. Follow Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder. Follow Hollywood and Crime,

The Cotton Club Murder on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of The Cotton Club Murder early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus. You don't believe in ghosts? I get it. Lots of people don't. I didn't either until I came face to face with them. Ever since that moment, hauntings, spirits, and the unexplained have consumed my entire life. I'm Nadine Bailey. I've been a ghost tour guide for the past 20 years. I've taken people along with me into the shadows, uncovering the macabre tales that linger in the darkness, and inside some of the most haunted houses, hospitals, prisons, and more.

Join me every week on my podcast, Haunted Canada, as we journey through terrifying and bone-chilling stories of the unexplained. Search for Haunted Canada on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you find your favorite podcasts. And also, that's all sort of irrelevant because there's no fucking bruising on her neck to indicate that that's how he killed her. I think he must have gagged her. He must have put something in her mouth and she choked on it and she died.

I think that's how that must have happened. Which means whatever she choked on, he's removed it and that's somewhere. Also, why lie though? If you gagged her and she died on that versus you actively strangled her with a rope, why would you tell the story that you actively strangled her with a rope rather than just you gagged her and she died? To bury her with it as well is weird. I don't understand how this makes him seem better than if she just choked on a gag. Yeah, but he's also an idiot. Like he's not a smart guy. I mean, that is true. So Bobby Glass's lawyer, Neil Beach, had an interesting take though on these autopsy findings. He quoted Bobby saying,

I didn't know how much I pulled the rope. I never wanted to kill her, but she ended up dead. And in an interview with the Associated Press on November the 1st, 1996, Neil Beach said that the autopsy report supported his client's claim that the death was accidental. Neil Beach also said, It is hard for me to believe the woman was tortured for three days. If the medical examiner of North Carolina couldn't find any indication of that, it is much easier to understand or picture an accident occurring during sexual activity than it is to conjure up an image of a man as a cold-blooded premeditated killer. Okay, so at this point he's saying, look, the autopsy absolutely shows she wasn't tortured for three days. It absolutely

does. There's no way she can have't tortured for three days. It absolutely does. There's no way she can have been tortured for three days because there were no marks on her body. So I guess what he's saying is kind of true. It's like we've talked about it before. Occam's razor. You can't fucking make the case that he tortured her to death. It fits much more. It's much more likely you have to answer fewer questions, explain away fewer things if you just accept what we're telling you that it was an accidental death yeah but then it doesn't fall into his narrative of why there's no bruising

on that doesn't make any sense but he's saying regardless of that it's easier to believe this than to go down that road of what you're claiming yeah i suppose it's still like i don't understand how she really died and i don't think yeah i don't think anybody does it's very bizarre it's very bizarre why he's lying about it as well so when bobby glass was arrested and charged with the murder of sharon lepacca he didn't say a word glass was charged with murder in the first degree and also picked up some federal charges for possession of all that child porn during the run-up to his trial bobby never wavered from his story he told everyone who would listen that sharon's death was an accident and despite 900 pages of emails suggesting to the contrary he had never meant to

kill her. Bobby's charge was dropped from first degree murder to a charge of voluntary manslaughter which is defined as the crime of killing another person unlawfully in circumstances that do not amount to murder. For example without premeditation or as a result of mitigating circumstances such as diminished responsibility so the voluntary part is not actually what i originally assumed it has nothing to do with the idea that sharon wanted to die is that a fair charge or is it actually an assisted suicide like if we believe that sharon did want to die that's why she went all the way to North Carolina to do it. And he does it in the way she wants it to be done.

Isn't that assisted suicide? But again, I think it comes down to the burden of proof that she actually wanted this to happen because... Oh, totally. But if we believe that she did, if we take away any doubt about that, if we believe that that is what she wanted i think it's an assisted suicide my biggest thing and i've been thinking about this what is the difference between consensual homicide and assisted suicide is that okay in an assisted suicide if we think about it in the traditional meaning of what we would picture in our minds when we say that phrase is say a loved one who is sick they don't want to carry on with life they they feel like they don't have the quality of life

that they want to have and you as a friend or a family member who loves them, does the, you know, heartbreaking thing to help them out of that situation that maybe they can't themselves get out of. You get no sexual gratification from it. It breaks your heart. You're doing it because you think it's what they want. In a case of this, he was fantasizing about it with her. He was getting his rocks off on the idea of killing her, whether she wanted it or not. So therefore, for me, we can't put it in the same box as an assisted suicide, as what some people are campaigning to be made legal because they want to have the choice over whether they live or die. In this case, if he's getting his rocks off on it, he's, you know, sexually invested in this. It, to me, feels like it stops being a case of assisted suicide and becomes something different yeah i also think that if you are posting on internet whatever that you want to be tortured to death and you're serious about it then maybe you're not in the best mental health place you've ever been so can you actually give your informed consent to be murdered exactly when you're in a

situation like that what is then becomes a difference between somebody, we talked about this during the Arm and Mivis cases, somebody taking advantage of somebody who is go find a victim that is quote-unquote consenting. How can we prove consent if they are not in a fit state of mind to be able to give consent? I think that is the big issue in this. So Bobby Glass also pled guilty to the possession of child pornography on the 17th of January 2000. His sentence was fucking mental for the voluntary manslaughter of sharon lapaka glass was sentenced to 36 to 53 months in prison firstly when did prison sentences start getting issued in months when they are most definitely more than a year it is like when parents like oh this is george he's 24 months what he's two years old yeah that's literally be like, oh, hi, I'm Hannah. Oh, how old are you? Oh, about 50, 57 months. Glass was also sentenced to 21 to 26 months in prison

for sexual exploitation of a minor. And don't worry, we've done the maths for you. Bobby Glass faced a minimum sentence of four years and nine months and a maximum sentence of six years and six months. Which, for killing Sharon and burying her in a shallow grave seems a bit fucking light to me you remember at the start of the show when we were talking about the cannibal cop case that guy valet in his original trial faced life and he didn't even kill anybody and this guy fucking killed somebody and he faces a maximum sentence of six years and six months what the

fuck and he only actually went on to serve two years of this because on the 20th of february 2002 bobby glass died of a heart attack in a medium security prison interestingly the maximum sentence for assisted suicide in the uk is up to 14 years and this year in charlotte north carolina so 80 miles away from where sharon was killed a guy called Timothy Leonard was sentenced to three to six years in prison for holding his wife Danielle's head underwater in a bath at a motel in what her family described as an act of love. Danielle suffered from debilitating migraines and they plagued her whole life. She'd been suicidal for years and she'd finally had enough. But I think you're right, you know, I think is the the sexual investment in it that makes it not the same thing but he got more time yeah that's crazy drowning his wife and again you know we don't know I don't know the case we don't know sometimes it could just be like she's been fucking miserable for years I was putting her out of her misery and I don't want a situation to be allowed where people can just kill their disabled or like long-suffering partners who

maybe don't want to die just because they're like oh it's a mercy killing because people definitely do mercy killings and they're fucking sick it's all about choice and it's all about consent i believe in that but this is totally different like we said glass was totally fucking sexually into this and that makes it something and that makes it a totally different beast to me and another question that this case throws up is can online fetish forums be doing anything to stop these kind of interactions happening that lead to murders like obviously they're so rare and i really don't want anyone to be like to think that we're shitting on bdsm community because we're not people have fetishes and that's fine but not everyone who has the fantasies of

being killed or killing someone is actually going to do it so how do you tell those people apart from people like bobby class who are going to do it how do you separate the two how can you police it it's like exactly what we said at the top of the show what's the difference how do you prove fantasy from evidence? thing like this that may be a bit more on the extreme end of the spectrum i think it just comes down to sadly like personal responsibility for people to make safe choices and find the right people i don't know how this could be policed i literally i have no idea how this could be policed no because apparently one like a safe sex activist or whatever got in touch with sharon when she was still alive and she's posting all this stuff on the groups and they said you can't post this stuff and she was like fuck you i'm gonna do it like you can't exactly it's all about safe sex

whatever you're into even if it's just ordinary stuff and you're meeting a guy on tinder and going on a date with him like wherever you sit on the extreme you have to take responsibility you have to be careful about what you're doing because whether it's the internet or whether it's real life there are fucking crazy people out there who want to kill you that's what it comes down to and you know we have talked about this in the case of like very much not believing bobby glass and feeling like he was he did this on purpose but perhaps like we said her death could have been accidental maybe because according and i was really interested in this figure. According to the American Psychiatric Association, about 250 people a year die in the US because of strangulation during sexual activity. Yeah, but don't like 500 people a year get killed by toilet seats.

Like, it's not like a massive, massive number. No, it's not a massive number. And I, like I said before, I wonder, like, I'm willing to bet that a massive majority of that 250 is people who were doing it on their own and died. Because I just think choking someone to death in Texas, like that takes a fucking long time. And I think people underestimate like the amount of pressure you have to put on somebody to kill them through strangulation. It's not easy. But also could the lack of bruising on Sharon's neck indicate that she didn't actually want to be tortured to death, even though that's what she'd been talking about in their whole like 900 pages of correspondence. Maybe she just wanted

some rough sex and Victor wasn't into that. And so she had to find this guy, Bobby, to do it. And he really did just kill her by accident. I don't know. Again, I just feel like it's really hard to fucking accidentally kill somebody with your bare hands or even with a rope like you would stop before then if you didn't mean it the key thing for me though is if she didn't want to be tortured to death if we put the lack of bruising aside for a second if she didn't want something as specific and as extreme as that why did she travel for over 12 hours leave her husband leave her life it doesn't make sense if it wasn't something super extreme. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. That does make sense. But maybe it comes back to what we

were talking about at the start. Maybe this was about rebellion. And also, I did have an interesting thought while we were doing this. Maybe Sharon, because clearly she had very few sort of like scruples. She was very okay to con people out of their money. We could say that she was a person who had maybe little empathy for people. And I don't want to just make a brash statement that, oh, she's a psychopath. Oh, she's a sociopath. But why this might be linked is,

have you heard of that experiment? You probably have. Do you remember that experiment where they did on psychopaths and sociopaths and they would hook them up to electrodes and they would tell, and they did it with a control group of people who didn't show psychopathic tendencies. They told them, you're going to be electrocuted in three seconds or five seconds or whatever and there'd be a countdown. And they were also, their heart rate, everything was being monitored.

People who showed no psychopathic tendencies were freaking the fuck out. Their heart rates were elevating. They were panicking before the electric shock was delivered. But people who showed psychopathic tendencies were just chill, totally chill. Right up until the point that they were electrocuted, they were just like, ah, and then they're just normal, baseline, back to standard. So we've said this before, time and time again, of the number of people who are psychopaths, one of the key tendencies is that higher level of threshold that needs to be met before they feel a thrill. And so maybe Sharon just felt like it was just a thrill for her. She just needed to go along with his fantasy.

She needed to push it to the extreme, go to meet this guy. Maybe she didn't really want to die. Maybe she just wanted to role play. But that extreme level of that very high threshold that psychopaths need to meet to feel the same kick that we may get from something much more ordinary. They get bored very easily. That's a really good point. Maybe that's what was going on with Sharon. We don't know. We don't know. And to be honest, I think like whatever really happened during those three days is anyone's guess because the truth died in 2002 with Bobby Glass. That is it. That is Sharon Lopatka. Thank you very much for listening.

You can follow us on Instagram and on Twitter at Red Handed The Pod. You can also find our Facebook group by just searching Red Handed Podcast in the little Facebooky searchy bar thing. And also, before we wrap up the show today, you know, we know we only release an episode once a week. If you've got some spare time on your hands, want to check out a couple of other podcasts, go out hollywood true crime scene a couple of you were talking about it in the facebook group they're good they're funny go listen to them it's good yeah really funny and also sofa king they're also cover like true crime all sorts of

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In season two, I found myself caught up in a new journey to help someone I've never even met. But a couple of years ago, I came across a social media post by a person named Loti. It read in part, three years ago today that I attempted to jump off this bridge, but this wasn't my time to go. A gentleman named Andy saved my life. I still haven't found him. This is a story that I came across purely by chance, but it instantly moved me. And it's taken me to a place

where I've had to consider some deeper issues around mental health. This is season two of Finding. And this time, if all goes to plan, we'll be finding Andy. You can listen to Finding Andy and Finding Natasha exclusively and ad-free on Wondery Plus.

Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Harvard is the oldest and richest university in America. But when a social media-fueled fight over Harvard and its new president broke out last fall, that was no protection. Claudian Gay is now gone. We've exposed the DEI regime, and there's much more to come. This is The Harvard Plan, a special series from the Boston Globe and WNYC's On the Media. To listen, subscribe to On the Media wherever you get your podcasts.