The Cutprice Guignol

Please note that this article will contain explicit discussions of sexual violence, child sexual abuse material, and suicide.

Early in the morning of 13th October, 1996, Sharon Lopatka told her husband Victor that she was leaving their shared home in Hampstead, Maryland to visit friends across the country in Georgia. Unbeknownst to Viktor, Sharon had no intention of returning, leaving a note in their shared home that included a promise seemingly intended to salve Victor’s incoming grief: “if my body is never retrieved, don’t worry,” she wrote to him. “Know that I’m at peace.” At a glance, your first assumption might be that this note indicated Sharon Lopatka’s intent to take her her own life. and Lopatka did intend to die – but not by her own hand. Rather, she planned to meet with a secret internet acquaintance with whom she had shared a month and a half of intense conversation regarding Lopatka’s desire to be tortured to death for the purposes of her own sexual gratification – a desire that, ultimately, she would come to fulfill.

Despite her modern infamy as one of the first true crime cases connected to the early internet, Sharon Lopatka – born in 1961 as Sharon Denburg – led a relatively average life until the early 1990s. She grew up in Baltimore, Maryland, the eldest daughter of an observant Jewish Orthodox family – singing in the school choir, taking part in sports, and navigating her identity as part of her devout family. Against her parents’ wishes, she married construction worker Victor Lopatka in 1991, and the couple moved to Hampstead to begin their life together.

By the mid-1990s, the internet had begun to take root in the American mainstream – in Spring 1995, the last restrictions on commercialization for internet traffic were removed, leaving entrepreneurs to make use of this new platform to draw customers and make money. Amongst them was Sharon Lopatka, then 34, who began a number of business ventures to pull in extra money. She began with House of Dion, a site that offered $7 interior design catalogues purporting to be full of “never before seen” tips and tricks to mimic the glamour of Hollywood homes, and soon expanded to rewriting copy for advertisements for around $50 apiece.

It didn’t take long for Lopatka to find her way to UseNet, an early version of social media for the nascent internet, where users gathered across dozens of forums to discuss issues from love to politics to getting into a romantic relationship with the fictional character Severus Snape (though that’s a whole rabbithole of its own). Lopatka found her way into forums focused on love and romance, offering love spells and other supernatural support in finding a soulmate – under the name Vilado Dion, she claimed to be “America’s Favorite Mystic” capable of helping you attain “ANYTHING or ANYONE YOU DESIRE!”.

Despite scepticism from other users (“Nice scam,” replied one user. “I need one like that), under her maiden name, Sharon Denburg, she effusively assured other users that Dion was legitimate – “Vilado Dion cast some love spells for me and my friends and it really worked!” she wrote on UseNet in April 1996. “This spell stuff is really awesome! I’m really excited about this!”.

By May 1996, amongst the aliases that Lopatka adopted to promote her services online was Nancy Carlson, a twenty-five-year-old, 120-pound woman from the USA who was keen to sell her worn underwear and willing to ship them anywhere in the world in the process. This appeared to be Lopatka’s first foray into selling sexual content of some description, though it would be far from her last – in the following months, she would make posts to everything from foot fetish forums to giantess admirer groups, offering to sell videos that fit their particular niche interest. The videos, she claimed, were made by Nancy Carlson productions, which just so happened to operate out of the same Hampstead base Lopatka and her husband shared.

Initially, these videos, while niche, seemed relatively harmless. Her dramatic, ellipses-heavy advertisements (“DO YOU DARE ENTER…..”THE LAND OF THE GIANTESSES”???“) were regularly sighted across fetish communities, all offering hour-long VHS videos, sent in a plain brown envelope through the post, packed with content suitable for the paraphilics who sought them out.

However, within a few months, Lopatka’s postings would grow more violent. She started offering videos (which she claimed to have been privy to the production of) of women who had been nonconsensually rendered unconscious, and, presumably, assaulted in the aftermath – Lopatka described with lascivious detail the “big element of surprise and even shock for these women as they encountered…REAL chloroform… REAl gas…and REAL knockout drops. NOTHING IS ACTED OUT IN THIS FILM. All scenes are uncut…..and exactly as they happened. That is the pure beauty of this film. The realism.”.

It should go without saying that what Lopatka offered here was entirely illegal and immoral, and very likely a depiction of sexual assault. The good news, in this regard, was that Lopatka most likely never actually owned or produced any of the videos she was trying to sell – numerous warnings sprung up around her profile, including one from user RobotDoll (who described themselves as “always looking for films and pictures of women acting like robots, androids, mannequins, dolls, wind-up toys and hypnotized/mechanical sex zombies”) claimed to have a “LONG” list of users, including himself, who had sent her money for her videos, only to receive nothing in the months that followed.

But these forays into the darker side of sexuality accessible on the internet seemed to only be the beginning for Lopatka, who, under her various usernames and aliases, began engaging with a number of controversial fetish communities. Amongst these were forums for somnophiliacs (people who enjoyed having sex with those who are asleep or unconscious) and feeder communities, which fetishized often-extreme weight gain in the submissive “feedees”. It was in one of these groups, in August 1996, that Lopatka posted under another pseudonym, Gina, seeking a “feeder” (the dominant in a feeder relationship) who was willing to help her gain from 235lbs to 475lbs, promising that she was “willing to be forcefed” if that’s what it took to get her to her goal weight. Perhaps most concerning were her posts to a forum for necrophiliacs (people who fetishize sex with dead bodies), where she posted the not-unusual title “Want to talk about torturing to death?”, in which she expressed a “fascination” with being tortured to the point of murder by a sadistic man.

While these fetishes are controversial and their actual application in real life risky if not impossible, Lopatka’s involvement in these groups was no different to the thousands of other users who made use of such forums. For the majority of the people on these forums, such fetishes were a fantasy, an escape from the rest of the world, a chance to rescind or claim power that they felt they didn’t have an option to in their real lives.

But, for Lopatka, these fetishes were not contained to the annals of shady internet forums. In conversation with a few other members, Lopatka spooked some by indicating that she had a genuine desire to actually see the fetish through – users later recalled that she described safe play rules as “wimpy“. Despite attempts from other forum users to mitigate the harm she might do to herself and others, she continued to post in the forums with no disclaimers or indication of fantasy that she was seeking a man to torture her to death. One fellow user, Tannith Tyrr, reached out to Lopatka regarding her messages, receiving a curt response from Lopatka: “I want the real thing. I did not ask for you preaching to me.”

And, in August 1996, the very man willing to carry out such an act was perusing the same forums as Shannon Lopatka.

Robert Glass, 44 at the time that he and Lopatka first encountered each other on these extreme fetish forums, had recently faced a series of challenges. In April 1996, as Lopatka had been selling interior design catalogues in Maryland, Glass’ wife had just left him, taking their three children with him. Part of the lead-up to their estrangement, according to his wife, was his extensive use of his computer and obsession with the internet matched with his declining interest in her – she described having to drag him to bed in the early hours of the morning as he dedicated his evenings to chatrooms and other interpersonal interaction online. She left Glass living in a trailer a few miles outside of Lenoir, North Carolina, where he would to commute to work as a computer analyst, and then return home to spend hours conversing with other users on extreme fetish forums under the username slowhand.

Amongst those users, of course, was Lopatka, who Glass first connected with in August 1996 over their shared interest in erotic murder. Over the following six weeks, they exchanged a hefty 900 pages worth of messages, in which Glass presented himself as the ideal lover – making claims of his prowess in the bedroom, and even highlighted his birthday on Valentine’s Day as proof of his passionate nature.

The exact contents of the messages exchanged between Glass and Lopatka during this six-week acquaintance have not been made public. But, judging by comments made by Lopatka’s husband and authorities, it seems clear that they contained explicit discussions of Lopatka’s desire to be tortured to death. Glass described in detail how he would torture Lopatka, murder her, and dispose of her body on his property – the real thing Lopatka had told Tyrr she wanted so badly, it seemed, was finally within her grasp. And so, just a month and a half after meeting Glass, Lopatka wrote a note for her husband and left her home to travel to North Carolina and meet with Glass in person.

What we know for sure is that Lopatka, 0n 13th October 1996, instead of boarding the train to Georgia as she had told her husband she would, instead, take a train to Charlotte, North Carolina, where Glass was waiting to drive her back to his trailer around 80 miles away. What exactly happened between Lopatka and Glass is unclear, but, a week later, Lopatka’s body would be discovered buried in a shallow grave a few yards from a swingset meant for Glass’ three children.

It took around a week from Lopatka’s initial abscondment from her home in Maryland to the day Caldwell County police tracked her body down to the cabin that belonged to Glass. Her husband, after discovering her note, filed a report with the local police. Sharon Lopatka’s computer was investigated, and chat logs and messages between her and Glass soon uncovered her plans to head to North Carolina to fulfil her ultimate fetish. After alerting authorities local to Glass, police acquired a search warrant and attended his trailer. A number of discoveries were made on his property, including magazines containing child exploitation material, bondage equipment, and drugs, but most relevant to the case was a mound of freshly-overturned earth in his yard – soon, they confirmed that the pseudo-grave contained the body of the recently-deceased Shannon Lopatka, who had been strangled to death in the days prior.

According to Glass, her death had been entirely accidental. He confirmed that they had engaged in violent sexual activity during Lopatka’s time in North Carolina, describing how he tied her with rope and used various objects to penetrate her, during which he claimed she orgasmed several times (an orgasm, to be clear, does not inherently indicate consent). As their sex play escalated, he wrapped a rope around her neck and used it to strangle her during climax, but, caught up in the moment, failed to realize that he had killed Lopatka during their encounter. Afterwards, he dug a shallow grave in his yard and dumped Lopatka’s body into it.

The scandalous nature of the crime soon grabbed headlines across the country and even the world – as Glass faced trial for the murder, questions about Glass, the communities that he and Lopatka frequented, and the ethics of violent sexual fetishes took place on the very UseNet forums where they had met. Users who had interacted with Glass were quick to denounce him, with one declaring him a “fool” who used the BDSM subculture as a shield for his abusive and violent tendencies – “he is an abuser of woman and a
murderer. Pure an simple”. Others expressed questions over the nature of Lopatka’s mental state, with some suggesting that her death was not much different than an assisted suicide for someone with terminal illness, albeit one with a rather less altruism on the part of the person doing the assisting. One question, though, seemed to rise above all others – the question of whether or not Sharon Lopatka was able to consent to her own murder.

Legally, the answer was no. Glass was initially charged with first-degree murder, but eventually pled guilty to manslaughter and sexual exploitation charges that saw him imprisoned until his death from a heart attack in 2002. But, in broader terms, the question of Lopatka’s death has been highly-debated in the years since her passing – and, in light of recent changes to laws regarding death by sexual misadventure, it’s perhaps an even more relevant discussion than ever.

In the decades since Lopatka’s murder, the matter of violence and murder and where it overlaps with the BDSM and kink communities has grown into a far more pressing social movement. Campaigns such as We Can’t Consent to This in the UK and cases such as that of Grace Millane in New Zealand drove attempts to change the view of rough sex and the protections it offered perpetrators of violence, some of whom claimed that their victim had been interested in extreme sexual scenarios and had consented to the acts that led up to their death. In the last few years, laws have changed in the UK and the defence has made news in the USA and beyond. It’s a campaign of vital importance, as the nature of standard sexual practice shifts towards more extreme acts – and, while Lopatka’s case may exist on the very extreme end of the spectrum, it’s still relevant to this conversation.

Even if Lopatka did consent to everything that happened between her and Glass, up to and including her own murder, did the very fact that she was willing to be murdered, apparently for the sake of her fetish, negate her ability to consent at all? Does the very fact of offering oneself up for murder render consent irrelevant? Because her desire was apparently sexually-motivated, should Lopatka be looked on as suicidal, sexually deviant or something else entirely?

The issue of violence and sex raises a thorny question of consent, privacy, and where the line between personal and legal responsibility lies – all applicable to Lopatka’s murder. It’s clear that Lopatka had an interest in being tortured and murdered before she met Glass, a fetish known as autassasinophilia – a fetish on the extreme end of the masochism scale, though not without its enthusiasts. It has its overlaps with suicidality, but the fetish usually (for obvious reasons) remains a fantasy for those who indulge in it, due to the rather final nature of its climax.

And, while we cannot know exactly what happened between the two in the hours leading up to her death, it’s tempting to view her final moments as something she ultimately wanted, because the alternative – that she was violently tortured, sexually and physically, before she was murdered at the hands of Glass and dumped in his yard – is such a hideous prospect.

But, as has often been discussed in spaces related to kink and fetish, a fantasy is not necessarily direct proof of a desire to play out a certain act in real life. And, while Lopatka had expressed her desire to see through her fantasy in the real world, she was doing so under a pseudonym and had created a fake profile to engage with such matters – perhaps, despite her interests, she still wanted to keep some part of these fantasies firmly in the realm of the imaginary. With that said, the note she left for her husband serves as strong evidence that she truly intended to go through with the murder, though whether her mind changed in the hours before her death we can’t be sure.

Of course, beyond Lopatka’s consent, there’s also the question of whether Glass was willing to consider her consent whether she provided it or not. And, in this specific case, based on the information we have access to about Glass, there is evidence that the consenting nature of those he used for sexual gratification was not of great importance to him. To be frank, the discovery of child sexual exploitation material on his property indicates that the willingness or even ability to meaningfully consent was not something he always sought out. Alongside the comments from people who interacted with him in the online forums who viewed him as a potentially-dangerous abuser, the picture painted of Glass is not one of a man committed to the safe, sane, and consensual mantra that underscored the BDSM community at the time.

Piecing together this story from the scattered scraps of communication that exist on what survives of the UseNet forums, it’s virtually impossible to come down confidently on one side or another regarding Lopatka’s true feelings about her murder (a sentence I truly never thought I would write). But what Lopatka’s case has left us with are lingering questions about consent, sex, and violence – questions that might be even more relevant today than they were in 1996.

I know this is a case that has remained of great interest in the near-three decades that have passed since, and it’s one that I would be sincerely interested to hear your take on – please share your thoughts in the comments below, and consider checking out some of my other articles on sex, internet oddities and true crime below:

Daddy’s Little Toy, the Arrest of Tori Woods, and the Nebulous Context of “Immoral” Literature

The Sex Slave, the BDSM Blog, and the Murder: A Deep Dive into the Delia Day Case

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(header image via Morbidology)