0001: I expect you to believe that it’s possible they were. I expect you to take comfort in that and move on.
0417: You sound like my old therapist.
0417: Are you still there?
0417: Hello?
0001: Harris Blanchard just won a humanitarian award at school. Do you feel the good deeds he racked up to win that award outweigh what he did to your daughter?
0417 is typing . . .
0001: How do you think the mother of Richard Ashley Shawger’s victim feels when she hears about what a “lifesaver” he was?
0417 is typing . . .
0001: You don’t think someone else would have saved that girl if he hadn’t been there?
0417: What do you mean, his victim?
0001: You buy into this narrative that Shawger was a hero. That he saved that girl out of the goodness in his perfect, self-sacrificing heart. You believe everything you read in the press. Is that right?
0417 is typing . . .
0001: If we only knew each other from press reports, we wouldn’t know each other at all. How is it, 0417, that I have to TELL you that? YOU of all people, who have been so terribly misrepresented and maligned.
0417: Did you know who Ashley Shawger was before you sent me to his store? Did he kill someone’s child? Was this all planned?
0001 has left the private chat.
I KEEP THE private chat window open, even though it’s a blank box and I’m alone in it, the conversation lingering in my mind like a scene out of a fever dream I haven’t completely woken up from.
“I thought the collective was a game,” I whisper.
But did I? Or did I just believe that it was possibly a game? So I could take comfort in that and . . . On the main chat page, a member called 6267 is venting her rage over the loss of her teenage son, shot dead by a woman who claimed self-defense and got away with it. My son was learning disabled, she’s just typed. He knocked on her door to ask directions, and she killed him. Ours is a “stand your ground” state and she said he was trying to break in. He wasn’t. He was lost. He never hurt anyone. Her attorney called my dead son “dangerous” in the courtroom, in front of me. In front of his grandmother.
2223 is the first to respond. I know her story. Her teenage daughter was one of many girls lured into “working” for a fifty-year-old billionaire who had promised her a modeling career. Her first “photo shoot,” 2223 had told us, was in his Mercedes, on a desolate road in Rockaway Beach, twenty miles away from the New York City studio where the fourteen-year-old thought she was going. She was drugged throughout it. There was no crew or photographer.
2223 has never mentioned the billionaire’s name, but I know it. We all do. He was big in the news five or six years ago, accused of running a child sex ring but convicted on much lesser charges—attempting to solicit a minor, as I recall—by a friendly DA. He served a few months in a Club Fed, then went back to his Long Island mansion and his hedge fund business, telling the world that he’d “simply befriended the wrong people” and he just wanted to “lead a quiet life.”
Meanwhile, 2223’s daughter got addicted to drugs, lost thirty pounds, pulled out most of her hair, and jumped out of a twenty-story window.
In a just world, 2223 tells 6267, you could put that murderer’s own gun in her mouth and pull the trigger. In front of her lawyer. Call them both dangerous, because they are.
More numbers join in, agreeing and commiserating, and I’m struck by how many of us there are here, on this one page in the depths of the dark web. It must be one of the most common things in the world—losing your child to a murderer who continues to thrive.