High-Tech Stalker Torments Canadian Family, Stumps Experts

The trouble began in December, when puzzled friends told Debbie and Dwayne Tamai that their telephone calls to the couple were repeatedly being waylaid and cut off.

A month later, missed messages and strange clickings seemed minor when a disembodied voice, eerily distorted by computer, first interrupted a call to make himself known.

After burping repeatedly, the caller told a startled Debbie Tamai, “I know who you are. I stole your voice mail.”

Mocking, sometimes menacing, the high-tech stalker has become a constant presence, eavesdropping on family conversations, switching TV channels, shutting off the electricity--and totally baffling the electronics experts trying to track his mischief.

He calls himself Sommy. Neither the Tamais nor the police have a clue who Sommy is, how he does it or why he has targeted this family.

His primary aim seems to be taunting the Tamais while stumping investigators from the Ontario provincial police, the local electric company and the national phone company, Bell Canada.

“He told me I can get the best people in the world to come in my home and they won’t find anything,” Debbie Tamai said. “I’m waiting for the one person to come and tell me, ‘I’ve found something.’ . . . I just want my life back.”

Debbie Tamai thinks Sommy rigged their modest, two-story brick house while it was being built last year, intending to torment whoever moved in. It is one of five new homes along a little cul-de-sac in Emeryville, a town of fewer than 1,000 people on the shore of Lake St. Clair, 20 miles east of Detroit.

“Anyone could have had access to it while it was being built,” she said. “Then when we moved in his fun began. I don’t know why he’d pick us out. We’re not exciting people. We work hard, we come home, we go to bed.”

“We worked a lot of overtime for this house,” Debbie Tamai said last week as she played tapes of Sommy’s calls for a reporter. “We moved from Windsor because we wanted to get away from the ruckus of city life.”

Initially, Sommy’s interference was mostly annoying. Then his harassment turned sinister.

“He would threaten me,” she said. “It was very frightening: ‘I’m going to get you. I know where you live.’

“I befriended him, because the police asked me to, and he calmed down and said he wasn’t going to hurt me. The more I felt I was kissing his butt, the safer I felt.”

But never entirely safe. Debbie Tamai says he’s made it clear that he listens to family talks through household telephones, even with the receivers hung up.

“When I want to have a private conversation, I unplug the phone,” she said. “But we still whisper.”

Police believe that Sommy lives in the area and is under 25. He bragged to the Tamais that police came and went from his house in a door-to-door sweep.

Some private experts have tried to uncover Sommy, including Doug Ralph, a retired electronics-surveillance expert for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. He concluded that Sommy was accessing the Tamais’ house through either underground cables or the nearby Bell Canada wiring station.

“He seems to know an awful lot about the phones,” Debbie Tamai said. “I asked if he had something against Bell Canada. He said, ‘Not really.’ ”

Bell Canada has rewired the house several times--each time, Sommy was able to get back on the line, once within 20 minutes.

“He knows exactly what he’s doing,” said Sgt. Ron Lane, head of the Essex County police crime unit.

At one point, experts sent 600 volts of electricity through the phone line, hoping to blow out Sommy’s equipment.

“He just laughed,” Debbie Tamai said. “He said, ‘What are you trying to do, zap me? I’ve got a backup system, stupid.’ ”

One of the ordeal’s most trying aspects has been the official suspicion focused on Dwayne Tamai, 34, and the couple’s 15-year-old son, Billy. Police analyzed their voices and now say that the family and Billy’s closest friend are in the clear.

“It’s been very hard on Billy,” Debbie Tamai said. “He knew he was being fingered--even though investigators have sat in the kitchen with him while Sommy was talking on the phone.”

Dwayne Tamai works each day at a tool-and-die shop, but Debbie, 36, is too unnerved some days to do her job at a Windsor casino.

“Because I’m a blackjack dealer, I need 100% concentration,” she said. “I’ve had a lot of panic attacks. I got medication for that, but some days there is no way I can stop shaking.”

The Tamais went public with their plight hoping to pressure the phone company to do more and maybe to prompt tips about Sommy’s identity.

Police have received calls from across Canada but no breakthrough tip.

“If he gets caught, I hope they throw the book at him,” Debbie Tamai said. “I’d like to look him in the eyes and let him know what he’d done to me and my family.”

A week after going public with their plight, the couple put their house on the market.

Jim Gammon, who sold it to them, says Sommy’s presence won’t necessarily deter potential buyers. “There’s a buyer for everything,” he said. “Who knows? Maybe some group will buy the home to see if they can find Sommy for themselves.”

The Tamais have simpler aspirations. “We won’t tell anyone where we’re going,” Debbie Tamai said. “I want to find a house that a nice older couple have been living in for the past 50 years without any problems.”