Kiwifarmers can only dream of having a body count like alt.suicide.holiday

Are You Sure You Want To Quit The World?

If you were desperate and hopeless enough to log on to a suicide chat room in recent years, there was a good chance a mysterious woman named Li Dao would find you, befriend you, and gently urge you to take your own life. And, she'd promise, she would join you in that final journey. But then the bodies started adding up, and the promises didn't. Turned out, Li Dao was something even more sinister than anyone thought.

"Check Your E-mail"

The three innocuous words seemed to offer Mark Drybrough the relief he sought. At 32, Mark was beyond tired. Life had long ceased to be the fun it once was. He had been a mischievous kid, an outgoing teenager who would make classmates laugh, leaping the school fence to freedom. At college in Coventry, England, he started out in high spirits, studying computer engineering and finding a girlfriend.

But after a year, the girl came down with a viral infection and then Mark did, and he never really recovered. Though he wasn't formally diagnosed, he felt certain that he'd developed chronic fatigue syndrome. Whatever he had—whether it was in his body or his mind—he couldn't summon the energy to get out of bed. Eventually he got dumped, stopped attending classes, and dropped out altogether.

For the next decade, Mark struggled to find the laughs. He lived in a small house in Coventry that his great-uncle had left him, but he couldn't maintain a job. He battled depression, going through dark periods when he refused to take medication, and he suffered psychotic fits. His mother, Elaine, paid his bills. He had no money, no car, no social life. He knew he was a disappointment—most of all to himself.

In July 2005, under the handle "spooky," Mark posted a request on the Web site alt.suicide.methods: "Does anyone have details of hanging methods where there isn't access to anything high up to tie the rope to. I've read that people have taken their own lives in jail, anybody know of inventive methods, the ones you don't get to read in the paper."

Li Dao knew. She directed Mark to check his e-mail. When he opened her message, he found guidance. She wrote, "Depending on how tall you are, preferable under 6 ft. tal [sic], you can easily from a door using the knob on [the other] side to tie the rope to, sling it over the top of the door, attach the noose or loop to yourself then step off and hang successfully..."

A few weeks later, Mark's older sister, Carol, drove down from Leeds to visit the family. At dinner Carol arranged to meet her brother at a nearby park the next day. They confirmed the plan the following morning, but by four that afternoon he had still not turned up.

Carol drove to her brother's home and knocked on the door. No answer. She let herself in and found a note on the inside door in block letters: Please call the police. Do not go upstairs, go home, hand this note to the police.

Carol rushed upstairs anyway, but the bedroom door was blocked. She forced her way in and found her brother hanging from a white nylon rope attached to a ladder propped by the door. She tried to hold him up, hoping to save him, and immediately called for help. She stood there supporting his weight while she waited for the paramedics, but they would soon pronounce him dead.

Shortly after, Carol returned to her brother's room and logged on to his computer. She learned that he'd spent a significant amount of time in suicide chat rooms, researching an effective way to kill himself. She also discovered that he'd entered into a suicide pact with a nurse named Li Dao. In fact, the nurse had sent her brother a note the day he died.

Her e-mail was brief: "Are you alright, Mark? Li"

Suicide chat rooms can save lives. The very act of logging on to a site like alt.suicide.methods (ASM) or alt.suicide.holiday (ASH) offers a potentially suicidal person the chance of finding support, redemption, or relief from the loneliness that led him there in the first place. Or logging on could be the first step a suicidal person takes to find the expertise, the courage, even the companionship, to go through with it. These chat rooms can provide a lifeline, or they can amount to a death sentence. It all depends on who's online and what they're doing there.

ASH began as a Google discussion group about why suicide rates increase over the holidays, then grew to become a regular destination; ASM bills itself, unapologetically, as "discussions about how to do yourself in." Members consider themselves pro-choice (choice being the right to suicide), and the forums host a range of people—not just those intent on committing suicide. Many do go there specifically to gather information on surefire ways to "catch the bus," or CTB, as suicide is known. But others may be recovering from a previous attempt or feeling down and looking for support among the like-minded. Still others may be there to offer a connection to those in need. Suicide is, for the most part, a solitary act; the majority of the 35,000 or so individuals who kill themselves in the United States every year are isolated and withdrawn from society. Simply accessing a world outside their own heads, as they do on ASH or ASM, might improve their chances of survival.

Mostly, members are supportive of one another, querying those who declare their intention to CTB to make sure they've explored other alternatives. But chat rooms are also places where a person can forge a connection that makes it easier to take that final ride. Some even form suicide pacts, promising to kill themselves at an appointed time, either virtually or in person. Who knows just how many follow through? But it does happen.

In Japan, where suicide has traditionally been considered an honorable act, the pacts have proven contagious. Teenage girls hook up online with like-minded partners whom they then meet in person, taking their lives together. In 2003, according to Japan's National Police Agency, online suicide pacts resulted in at least thirty-four deaths there; the number jumped to fifty-five in 2004 and ninety-one in 2005, but many experts say even those figures are underestimates. As hard as it is to fathom, not everyone who makes a pact is sincere. Disturbingly, some get off on witnessing, even encouraging, the despair of others.

Celia Blay stumbled upon ASH through chance and persistent curiosity. Blay is a 65-year-old grandmother from southern England who takes a kind of childish delight in exclaiming that she "makes whips and thongs for a living." (The implements, she clarifies, are for carriage horses.) In 2006, Blay was on a site devoted to medieval research—looking for charters to prove that some roads in her village should remain open to carriage horses—when she began poking around a member's profile, which somehow led her to ASH. "I thought, My goodness, a news group for suicide," she says. "It never crossed my mind that there would have been such a thing."

And Blay being Blay—which is to say, something of a compassionate busybody—once she logged on to ASH, she quickly made friends. One of them was a 17-year-old Central American girl who'd been sexually abused and was considering suicide. Blay conversed with the teen online for a few weeks and thought the girl was improving.

One day the teen told Blay that she'd entered a suicide pact with a nurse she'd met online. The nurse had been helpful and knowledgeable, telling her exactly how to position a knot for a partial-suspension hanging. "I said, 'Surely this nurse is not going to travel to Central America to hang herself alongside you,' " Blay recalled. "And she said, 'Oh no, we're going to watch each other by Webcam.' "

Blay managed to persuade the teen not to go through with it, but as chat logs show, soon she and others on ASH began to wonder about this nurse the girl had befriended. Her name, they discovered, was Li Dao, and she seemed to go to great lengths to maintain a low profile on the sites, only rarely commenting in the main forum, where all the members could read her posts. And when she did comment publicly, she emphasized her background as a twentysomething nurse from Minnesota. She seemed to be drawn to posters who spoke English as a second language or who seemed particularly naive, and she was fond of endearments like "hun" and the sign-off "hugs."

Li Dao was unfailingly sympathetic and unusually well-informed but maintained a conservative worldview that bordered on the self-righteous. She reprimanded one member for suggesting that the suicidal should try cocaine as an alternative to death. And on a site where members often express hostility toward religion, she was unapologetic about insisting that "the hope of eternal life…is promised to those who believe." She seemed most comfortable, however, dispensing advice, and she was an ardent proponent of hanging. Unlike other methods, hanging offered "very fast and certain death."

On the sites, she usually lurked in the background, initiating a private correspondence if a post in the forum caught her attention. The more desperate the post and resolute the poster's intention to CTB, the more likely Li would respond. In March 2006, "halfjacket" pleaded, "please someone help me die some way that is quick and/or painless directly. I'll do anything please I just need help."

"Check your e-mail," Li wrote back.

And in July, "Jim" wrote, "Think I'm going to be left with no option but to hang myself. I'm a big guy (420 pound) so making sure the rope don't break is vital to me, so I have been looking at climbing rope.… Can anyone shed any technical info on this to make sure I get the right stuff?"

"Check your e-mail," came the reply.

Within two hours of posting suicidal thoughts on ASH, Nikola Trifunovic, a 22-year-old researcher in Zagreb, was directed to his e-mail. Li told him that she understood how he felt and wanted to help him feel better. She said she lived with her parents and had struggled with bipolar disorder and depression for eleven years. Nothing worked—not therapy, drugs, or prayer. Li wrote, "Im really tired of living a false life of pretending everything is ok when it is not and I can't do it anymore." After exchanging e-mails for six months, Trifunovic says he began to care deeply for her. He recalled, via e-mail, "She made me feel I was not alone and that there were many others who feel the same way."

Li said she planned to CTB by hanging from a beam in her basement, once she found the time to be alone. She said she'd practiced hanging herself.

Li coached Trifunovic to hang himself, and the two made weekly suicide pacts, but he couldn't quite bring himself to end it. Strangulation wasn't the pain-free method he'd hoped it would be—"I kept doing it wrong, and it hurt like heck," Trifunovic reported to the ASH forum—but he feared more than the pain. "I was scared that after, there is nothing," he said. "Infinite nothingness." When he shared this fear with Li, she tried to get Trifunovic to believe in God. It was an odd position for a Christian, as Li seemed to be, since the religion discourages suicide.

Then, in September 2006, Li suddenly disappeared. "Li where are you? Get in touch if you're still living this thing," one member posted on ASH.

"Oh frick…that must explain why I haven't heard from her, either," responded another.

Trifunovic assured the forum that Li had to be alive, because he'd corresponded with her only two days earlier. Besides, Trifunovic added, "we kind of promised to each other to do it the same day, she is ready to die she is just waiting for me to be ready."

"She told you that, too?" another poster responded. "Oy."

The next day, however, Trifunovic received an e-mail from a woman claiming to be Li's mother, Xao Pi Zeng, from Li's e-mail account. She reported that her daughter was "found hung in outbasement [sic] at approximately 6:40 this morning.… Of course we be so sad but am Gratefull to God that her pain is now over."

When he learned of Li's death, Trifunovic became determined to try to end his life. Then, to his surprise, two months later, a miracle occurred—Li was resurrected. Someone on ASH reported that he'd heard from her.

It was then that the forum began to realize that Li was not what she seemed. "It's not Li, not Li we know, she doesn't exist, it's some perve fricking with us," Trifunovic posted. "Mawkish" agreed, revealing that he'd IM'd with Li and that she kept trying to persuade him to hang himself. Mawkish tried to talk to Li on the phone, but she would come up with excuses about why she couldn't. He told the forum, "I believe Li Dao got some kind of 'high' or 'rush' from trying to convince people to die."

By now Celia Blay had reached the same conclusion—that Li had encouraged more than a dozen individuals on ASH to commit suicide. (She'd noticed that members often disappeared from the site after exchanges with the nurse.) Then she received a tip that Li was using a new handle, "falcongirl." She immediately searched online and found traces of Li's familiar m.o. When "r-slurstoner" announced on ASH, "I need to die. Tonight. Period," falcongirl responded: "Check your e-mail box."

Blay had seen enough. She took the evidence she'd gathered to the police in nearby Maidenhead. "Look," she told them, "this person is trying to get people to kill themselves." But the man in charge of investigating online crimes wasn't impressed. "His attitude was that this was somebody who was trying to wind up middle-aged women and shock them," Blay recalled, indignant. As Blay left the station, she says an officer gave her a piece of advice: "If it bothers you, look the other way."

FINISH READING ->

Yet more reading !clinklickers Wired Series on ASH...

Part One: On the alt.suicide.holiday website, suicide isn't taboo -- it's "a choice." The site advises suicidal users how to end their lives and has been linked to at least 10 deaths. Relatives say the forum encourages people to kill themselves.

Part Two: A troubled young man's downward spiral before committing suicide is chronicled in posts to an online message board whose participants gave him suggestions about how to kill himself. Is the site responsible for his death?

Part Three: The parents of a young man who committed suicide are suing a woman he met on an online discussion board that provides participants with detailed instructions on how to end their lives. They blame the woman for their son's death.