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Gainsville Man Indicted in Internet Serial-Killer Hoax

July 3, 2009 schnurbush 10 comments

Gainesville man indicted in Internet serial-killer hoax

By RHONDA COOK

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Wednesday, July 01, 2009

A Gainesville man who called himself the “catch me killer” has been charged with making false claims that he killed 16 people and was responsible for the disappearance of an Oscilla woman.

“We had to spend hundreds of hours and tens of thousands of dollars just to run this guy down,” said Gary Rothwell, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent in charge in Perry.

Andrew Scott Haley was indicted Tuesday in Hall County for tampering with evidence and making false statements, the only felonies in Georgia law that covers the crime he is accused of committing.

The investigation started in February when the father of another missing woman saw a video posted on the internet site You Tube.

The video shows a man, believed to be Haley, with his face concealed and his voice distorted as he explained his “game.” The man claims he had killed 16 people and would kill another if law enforcement tried to fiind him.

The GBI’s Rothwell said in thier investigation they discoved to videos believed to have been made and posted by Haley.

The two videos made a specific references to Oscilla school teacher Tara Grinstead, who was last seen on Oct. 22, 2006. A link to one of the videos — “Confessions of a serial killer” — had been put on a website created by the father of an Orlando woman who has been missing three years, and he called police.

“To me you just can’t hardly get any lower than this,” Drew Kesse told an Orlando television station.

Jennifer Kesse, 24, disappeared from her condominium on Jan. 24, 2006. Florida authorities believe Kesse was the victim of a random crime.

“He had a game he wanted to play on the internet,” Rothwell said of Haley. “He would provide clues [concerning the people he claimed he killed] and whoever was able to follow his clues would ultimately learn his identification. The first clue clearly regarded Tara Grinstead.”

Grinstead, a popular 30-year-old high school teacher and beauty queen, vanished on Oct. 22, 2005. On that day, she helped contestants get ready for the Miss Sweet Potato Pageant in Fitzgerald in south Georgia before she joined friends at a barbecue.The friends said she went home around 11 p.m.

Grinstead was reported missing two days later because she did not report for work. Police found her cellphone at her house and her unlocked car in the driveway, but her purse and keys were gone. They believe she was a victim of someone she knew.

Rothwell said the first video included details about Grinstead — that she was a teacher and a beauty queen. A second video “gave details about the whereabouts of a ring and a hand somewhere near Augusta,” Rothwell said.

“It caused a lot of heartache for the two families,” Rothwell said. “We had this guy mocking them on the internet.”

Police say they do not know what prompted Haley to make the claim to be a serie killer. They don’t beleive he was involved in any homicides.

Are We Safe In Our Own Homes Anymore? Myspace Sex Offenders

February 5, 2009 schnurbush 31 comments

MySpace identifies 90,000 sex offenders on its site

By Karen Freifeld Bloomberg / February 4, 2009

NEW YORK – MySpace Inc. has identified 90,000 convicted sex offenders on its socialnetworking site, 40,000 more than acknowledged earlier, according to Richard Blumenthal, Connecticut’s attorney general.

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The information was turned over in response to a subpoena, Blumenthal said yesterday in a statement. Facebook Inc., which runs another social-networking site, hasn’t yet responded to a similar subpoena, he said. Recent reports indicate substantial numbers of convicted offenders with Facebook profiles, he added.

MySpace.com, a unit of News Corp., and Facebook both signed multistate agreements last year to adopt safety standards to better protect children online. Regulators had accused both of not doing enough to police their sites to shield minors from predators.

“These convicted, registered sex offenders creating profiles under their own names unmasks MySpace’s monstrously inadequate countermeasures,” Blumenthal, co-leader of the state coalition focused on Internet social-networking safety, said in a statement. “MySpace must purge these dangerous offenders now – and rid them for good.”

Hemanshu Nigam, chief security officer at MySpace, which is based in Beverly Hills, Calif., said in an e-mailed statement that the offenders had been removed from the site. “MySpace is proud of its leadership position and hopes that Facebook follows our lead in providing their members with the same protections,” he said.

Facebook, based in Palo Alto, Calif., said it monitors its site and users for suspicious activity.

“We have been working proactively with states’ attorneys general to run their lists of registered sex offenders against our user base,” Chris Kelly, Facebook chief privacy officer, said in an e-mailed statement. “If we find that someone on a sex offender registry is a likely match to a user on Facebook, we notify law enforcement and disable the account.”

Facebook is the world’s largest social-networking site, with 221.8 million unique visitors in December, followed by MySpace with 124.9 million, according to ComScore Inc. of Reston, Va.