Chilling Cyber-Stalking Case Illustrates New Breed of Crime

Law enforcement officials and stalking experts said Friday that a North Hollywood cyber-stalking case is a frightening example of how technology has spawned a new breed of crime that is proliferating, difficult to police and devastating to many of its victims.

Investigators and the victim’s family revealed new details about the chilling sequence of events that began last spring when a spurned suitor allegedly placed personal ads on the Internet that made it appear the woman was seeking to fulfill fantasies of being raped. On six occasions, men showed up at her door in response to the ads before investigators cracked what has become the first crime to be prosecuted under the state’s new cyber-stalking statute.

Gary Dellapenta, a 50-year-old former security guard accused of the crime, remained in custody Friday and is scheduled to be arraigned next month on charges of stalking, computer fraud and solicitation of sexual assault. He faces up to seven years in prison. His lawyer could not be reached for comment Friday.

The victim’s mother said in an interview with The Times that her daughter’s experience was harrowing.

“Men would come to her door in the middle of the night,” she said. “She got dozens of calls by men who would leave filthy, disgusting messages.”

Her daughter became so desperate that she placed a note on her apartment door saying the Internet ads were fakes posted by someone out to harm her. But new ads and e-mails would be posted, saying that the note itself was part of the fantasy and to disregard it, according to the woman’s mother.

The woman, a 28-year-old office worker whose name is being withheld by authorities, was so terrified by her online stalker that she lost her job, watched her weight plummet from 130 pounds last spring to just 95 pounds today, and on many days can hardly get out of bed, her mother said.

“It just makes me cry to think about it,” said the mother, who asked not to be identified.

Brian Hale, a senior investigator on the case for the district attorney’s office, said he believed the woman “would have ultimately been assaulted. She was terrified. She moved out of her apartment and stayed with friends. She wouldn’t answer the phone and she was concerned about even going out.”

Fred Cotton, director of training for SEARCH Group, a national nonprofit organization that provides training and technical assistance to criminal justice agencies, said the case was the “most egregious I’ve ever seen as far as someone being stalked online.”

“A lot of these crimes have to do with the perceived anonymity of the Net,” Cotton said. “And as more people go online, more and more people will commit these kinds of crimes.”

News of the case prompted a swell of publicity, to the chagrin of many Internet users who believe that the new technology’s troubles are often overblown in the media. The case, after all, involves two people who didn’t meet each other online, and is essentially a high-tech variant of an age-old crime.

But experts said Friday that stalkers have proven to be a particularly adaptive breed, and have been quicker than most to take advantage of the reach and anonymity of the Internet and other electronic communications.

Internet techniques “are now being taught in scores of [largely underground] books on how to harass and take revenge on people,” said Park Dietz, president of Threat Assessment Group Inc. in Newport Beach, and a professor of psychiatry at UCLA. “I would hypothesize that stalkers adopt new technology even faster than the rest of the population.”

Dietz said his firm advises nearly 200 Fortune 500 companies on how to handle workplace threats, stalking and harassment. Of the thousands of cases his office has handled over the last five years, he said, “we have gone very rapidly from 0% by e-mail to probably more than 25% today.” Add faxes and pagers to the equation, he said, and the proportion rises to 50%.

Donna Mason, director of Sacramento Area Stalking Survivors, which lobbied successfully last year for the state’s stalking laws to include stalking by electronic devices, said she has witnessed the devastating effects cyber-stalking has had on victims.

In one recent case, a young Sacramento woman had to flee the city after she was stalked by someone she had met in an America Online chat room for singles under 30, Mason said.

“He kept showing up wherever she went,” Mason said. The stalker “would leave her messages, like ‘I saw you here,’ and ‘I know you’ve been here.’ Being a stalking victim is like living in a glass-enclosed area where someone is watching everything you’re doing. You don’t know when they’re going to strike, and they almost always strike.”

About 20% of the 600 cases reviewed by the L.A. district attorney’s Stalking and Threat Assessment Team last year involved some form of e-mail or electronic communication, said Deputy Dist. Atty. Rhonda Saunders.

Leaving the number “187” on a victim’s beeper--a reference to the state’s statute for murder--has become a common stalking threat, said Saunders, who added that electronic stalking can be particularly traumatic.

“If someone writes a threatening letter, the victim often can recognize the writing,” she said. “If someone makes a threatening phone call, the victim often can recognize the stalker’s voice. With electronic devices, the person on the other end is an unknown. It’s the coward’s way to stalk.”

The cases can also be tough for law enforcement to handle because of the Net’s combination of anonymity and global reach. Often, “there’s no way of proving the identity of the perpetrator,” said David LaBahn, deputy director of California District Attorneys Assn.

Partly through the cooperation of two individuals who responded to the ads, investigators gathered dozens of e-mail messages allegedly from Dellapenta. Hale said they traced his online activities through numerous companies, including Compuserve, Hotmail and America Online. Ultimately, Hale said, the e-mail messages were traced to an account at Sprynet--a Bellevue, Wash.-based Internet service provider--held by Dellapenta.

His alleged target is struggling to put her life back together, her mother said. She lost her job with a large real estate firm, partly because of the harassing calls she was getting at work, but also because her work suffered as her health and emotional state deteriorated. “She’s not doing well,” her mother said.