Tools of Terror: Scanner, Cordless Phones

A 14-year-old girl was threatened with rape. A gay man was harassed. Single women got voice mail saying they would be attacked as soon as they came home from work.

They were all neighbors in the Timberlake section of Virginia Beach, Va., and they all had cordless telephones.

In a chilling two-year phone harassment case that started with a $100 investment in a police scanner, a 31-year-old Virginia Beach man pleaded guilty last month to 21 counts of intercepting conversations and making harassing calls.

The case against John A. Halstead Jr. included 16 victims, but police say they believe that the conversations of hundreds of Virginia Beach residents were monitored methodically by a man whose casual interest in scanning police calls turned into a devious obsession.

And Halstead, police said, didn’t have to use any high-tech electronic gizmos to terrorize his neighbors.

He had a Radio Shack scanner. He realized his cordless telephone could pick up radio waves off other nearby cordless phones. He then used his scanner to pick up telephone conversations from farther away and started writing down personal information that he overheard about his victims.

Police and the telephone company still haven’t figured out exactly how he did it. But armed with phone numbers and addresses he uncovered, he used two voice mail services--one of them Bell Atlantic’s--to deliver menacing messages, police said.

Sometimes dialing numbers at random, he would find operating but unused voice mailboxes that he would take over, using them to send harassing messages that could not be traced back to his own phone.

“If I was bored, I would listen to the scanner,” Halstead wrote in a statement to police and the commonwealth’s attorney’s office. “Sometimes I could hear someone retrieving messages from their voice mail, a service which I also had. I was familiar with the system and explored the possibility of accessing other voice mailboxes. Eventually I was able to access other voice mailboxes.”

In some cases, he replaced his targets’ voice mail greetings with pornographic messages telling callers they had reached a sex line, then altered the access code of the telephone number so that the resident couldn’t change the greeting.

“Once he got the number to your cordless telephone, he had access to your life,” one of his victims, Sheila Artis, told the Virginian-Pilot newspaper. “I would rather have had someone come into my house and steal from me.”

He managed to program the messaging system to send harassing calls to some residents as many as 50 times daily, and some of the calls continued automatically even after he was taken into custody. He got credit card numbers when he heard neighbors make telephone orders, and addresses when people ordered pizzas. He made a locater map of his neighborhood that showed, with pushpins, where calls originated.

Halstead initially picked up the cordless calls within 150 yards of his home. But Det. J.R. Legg said Halstead also drove throughout the city with the police scanner in his car, monitoring conversations and jotting down information.

Overhearing cellular and cordless telephone calls on a police scanner is common and not illegal. But in Virginia, listening to private calls intentionally is a violation of the state wiretapping law.

“It becomes criminal when someone does it intentionally and writes [information] down,” Legg said.

The scheme was traced to Halstead by one of the victims, who learned from a friend of Halstead’s that he was listening in on others’ conversations. Many of the neighbors could do nothing to fight it except change their phone numbers.

“We don’t know how this guy did it, but it doesn’t appear to be a problem within the phone company at this point,” said Bell Atlantic spokesman Michel Daley. “It does not appear to be something that’s easily accomplished.”

Halstead, who has been held in the Virginia Beach jail since August, when he was arrested, will be sentenced June 1 in Circuit Court.