California Man Convicted in Cyber-Stalking Case
By Paul Gustafson
Originally published in the Star Tribune, August 23, 2001
A California man who sent e-mail threats to a Hennepin County woman after she broke off their cyber-relationship was convicted Wednesday by a federal jury in St. Paul of one count of interstate stalking and two counts of making threatening communications.
The woman and Richard T. Rose, 43, of Long Beach, Calif., began a relationship while playing games on the Internet in May 2000. They eventually were sharing intimate details with each other, exchanging photographs and having cyber-sex, according to court papers.
The relationship soured in January after Rose learned that the woman was married, and not a widow as she had told him. Soon after, Rose began sending the woman e-mails threatening to kill her two children.
He also created Web sites on which he posted pictures of the woman's children along with their home address and telephone number. The Web sites said the children enjoyed being raped, and soon after they were created men started to call the woman's family in response, authorities said.
Rose also mailed letters to the woman's neighbors containing damaging claims about her.
No date has been set for Rose's sentencing by U.S. District Judge Donovan Frank.
In closing statements Wednesday, attorneys in the case offered conflicting interpretations of what Rose intended when he sent the e-mails.
Defense attorney Kate Menendez acknowledged that Rose's actions were shocking and hurtful, but she argued that the Hennepin County woman realized the messages were "the ranting[s] of a very angry, very hurt man" who did not mean what he said.
If the woman was afraid and took the threats seriously, she would have changed her telephone number and e-mail address, Menendez said.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Lisagaye Biersay said that Rose intended to terrorize the woman and her family and that he succeeded. Rose knew where the woman lived, took actions that resulted in strangers making frightening phone calls and promised to carry out his threats to kill them, Biersay said.
"This was no longer in the cyber-world. This was the real world, and she felt threatened," she told jurors. "This defendant made a decision to terrorize an entire family. He succeeded in doing that. He went too far, and he broke the law."
