Only the River Knows

Something Troubling

There was also something else troubling about the man. Most devotees of S&M are far more interested in the struggle than in its ultimate resolution, she said. "Some people like the struggle. It's the control. The S&M thing...you're watching for a struggle, how long can you struggle under that person's control under water...and they...let you go to the top," she said. "This is supposed to be... 'We're going to play a game together'...This is not supposed to be sadistic."

But that was not the way things worked with Brown's quarry.

"When you get right down to it...his version is more about, 'I'm holding you under the water. You're struggling. I watch the bubbles come up...' that's his whole thing. To watch you drown, to watch your eyes when you're drowning," Brown recalled.

"He would take me under water in various forms of nudity or non-nudity, in different water settings and he would watch me struggle and die. That's when he would have an orgasm," she said.

But there was also something calculating about the man, Brown noted. During one of their chats, for example, while fantasizing about murder by drowning, the man noted that he would take great pains not to kill in a state that had the death penalty. "He said he'd never kill in Missouri," Brown recalled, "because it's a death penalty state." Minnesota, where Chris Jenkins died, has no death penalty. Nor does Wisconsin.

In the end, Brown concluded that the man that police had asked to her evaluate on the QT was every bit as potentially dangerous as he claimed to be. "He's a psychopath," she told this reporter. "A lot of people have fantasies but when you talk to them on the Net, or you try to role-play with them you can tell that they aren't a psychopath. They have too much feeling for you and the bad things that happen...if you have those feelings about a person you're not a psychopathic type of personality; chances are you're not going to cross that line."

But to her, the man who had drowned her dozens of times in the ether of the Internet was very capable of doing the same thing in real life. While others may doubt that a serial killer might be at play in La Crosse, Brown is not particularly skeptical, and even if the man who she spent countless hours role-playing in cyber hell is not that killer, he may well be a carbon copy of him.

"First we have a guy who is a psychopath and there's no question in my mind that he's one of them," she said. "Everything he's ever done is psychopathic, very badly psychopathic. Then you look at a person whose life is falling apart, whose life is going badly enough that they don't really give a damn, and this is (the man's) life.

"You look for a person who is full of anger and rage," she said, and again, her quarry seemed to be brimming with it. But more than anything else, the serial killer is driven by a need for power and control, and there too, she says, the man in Missouri fits the bill. In her mind, he "wants power and control because he doesn't get any respect."

Perhaps the most chilling note about Brown's subject came in court papers filed two years ago in Missouri, when a warrant was issued for the man's arrest on charges that he made sexual advances toward the teenage son of the owner of the funeral home where he worked. Authorities told Stuff that when the father confronted the man, he threatened the owner's entire family, a crime for which he was later convicted and for which he served just over a year in prison. In the warrant for his arrest, St. Charles police wrote, "The defendant is a danger to the community...because he goes for white males between the ages of 16 and 25...and had serial-killer tendencies." In what may be a measure of the man's tendency toward violence, at the time of his arrest, the man led police on an hour-long chase that began when he slammed his vehicle into a police cruiser. In July, after spending seven months behind bars, the man was released.