My name is Thomas. I am fourteen; currently, I am lying down an alley in Greater Manchester, fighting for my life. It is 8 pm on Sunday 29 June 2003; the police have been called. I have multiple stab wounds. 

Standing beside me is my best friend Craig, he is fifteen and staying with me until help arrives. He will tell the police that a hooded knifeman stabbed me. He is lying. They will find this out when they look at the CCTV. It was Craig that stabbed me. I asked him too, in a roundabout way. Let me start from the beginning.

The Chatroom

It all started many months ago when I entered a chatroom dedicated to Manchester teenagers and met Craig. I wasn’t comfortable being myself, so I pretended to be a girl called Rachel; she was my pretend sister. 

Craig and Rachel chatted for many months and started to have a relationship. I began to fall in love with Craig; I am gay, but I can’t admit it. Then it was time to have some fun; enter Kevin, the stalker. I made him up too. He kidnapped Rachel; the ransom, which Craig paid, was a video of him masturbating.

Unfortunately, after this, Rachel would never meet Craig, but her brother met him, me. I started hanging out with him in person, how cool. It wasn’t as fun as a fantasy life, so I created Janet.

The British Secret Service

Janet Dobinson was in her forties and a member of MI5; she recruited Craig to work with them. If he completed his mission, he’d become a member of the British Secret Service. Receive a lot of money, meet the prime minister, and receive sexual favours from Janet. I even gave him his codename, 47695.

We started with small tests for Craig to prove himself before he was given his final mission for entry. First, I had ‘Janet’ convince him I was the most important person on the planet, that I alone knew the code to a secret safe.

On one occasion, Janet asked Craig to get me out of school as my life was in danger. Craig convinced the school I had a dentist appointment. Craig never questioned any of it, he was fascinated with me, well, Janet, but that was me.

My favourite was when I convinced Craig to give me oral sex; I told him the government wanted to discredit me by making me seem gay. I realised then that I couldn’t carry on this lie, that I loved Craig so much I couldn’t keep living.

The Final Mission

I had Janet inform Craig that I was no longer a valuable asset. I suffered from a brain tumour and needed to be removed from my misery. If Craig didn’t complete this task, Janet would lose her job and national security would be at risk.

On Sunday, 29 June 2003, Craig brought a kitchen knife under the pretence it was for his mother. Then, avoiding the CCTV cameras Janet had warned him about, he entered the alley with me. He stabbed me twice, once in the stomach and once in the chest and then waited 20 minutes before calling the police. This delay had also been an order Janet had provided; I didn’t want to survive with these feelings, you see.

Truth is Stranger Than Fiction

This case serves as a stark warning of the dangers of the dark side of the internet. — Nicholas Clarke

Although this sounds like a teenage fiction story, this is an actual case. The criminal justice system changed the names of the boys. Minors committing crimes in the UK have the right to anonymity.

When the police investigated the case, they believed they were looking for a paedophile who had groomed Craig. Craig, for his part, believed every aspect of the story.

As the police studied the thousands of hours of chat history, they soon noticed that most people were fake. They then noticed that Janet and Thomas used the same variation of the word ‘maybe’, writing it as ‘mybye’.

The police soon concluded that Thomas was the mastermind behind the whole story. He played every character in the chat room. He was the puppet master, with Craig as the puppet.

Craig was a college student who worked part-time at a restaurant. He did reasonably well at school, although he wasn’t the most academic person. He never had any trouble and was close to his family. He was, in many regards, an ordinary teenage lad.

When Thomas started luring him in, he changed. His time online began to spiral out of control. He would spend upwards of 12 hours a day in the chat room. 

Convicted of Attempting Your Murder

Thomas recovered from his near-fatal wounds. Craig was charged with attempted murder, whilst Thomas was charged with inciting his murder.

During the trial, Craig was ashamed of how gullible he had been. Before this incident, he was a typical teenager; nothing in his history would have suggested he would be involved in something like this.

Thomas never answered the question as to why he did it. Some would claim that he was in love with Craig and knew it would never be reciprocated. Therefore, the only end could be for him to commit suicide through Craig.

The pair received a very light sentence of supervision orders. Thomas got three years and Craig two. In addition, they were ordered never to meet again; they could only go on the internet with supervision and never into chat rooms.

Offences of this kind under normal circumstances would result in an extremely lengthy custodial sentence, but these could not be described as any normal circumstances. — Judge David Maddison

Thomas is now thirty and Craig thirty-two. Nothing is known about the boys except that they have had no contact since their day in court.

In legal terms, the case remains unique in British criminal history. Never before had someone been convicted of their own murder; to date, no one has since. Nevertheless, the bleakly severe nature of the case called for tighter monitoring of internet chatrooms.

The conversations that these boys were having would not have been allowed in a monitored chatroom. — Belinda Sproston, of the parental control software firm CyberPatrol.

The case also shows that sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction.