Dana
Appearances
Darknet Diaries
140: Revenge Bytes
I, you know, I was loosely aware of what was going on with Madison. Just, you know, they kind of were handling it amongst themselves for the most part. I mean, this kind of situation is like the less people that know about it, the better because you can't trust anybody when it comes to this type of thing. So I sort of let them do their thing.
Darknet Diaries
140: Revenge Bytes
And then, you know, obviously when you get wind that your wife's nude photos are online, I kind of... that's when it really grabbed my attention. And when I really started diving into this, you know, it almost felt wrong for me to dive into it to begin with because those are naked photos of my sister-in-law. You know what I mean? I don't, you know, these websites are horrible, awful places.
Darknet Diaries
140: Revenge Bytes
You feel dirty just looking at it. But once Christine was up on the internet and we knew that was happening, I decided this needed to stop and I was going to put whatever skills I had in this world to try and make that happen.
Darknet Diaries
140: Revenge Bytes
So these shoots that the photographer might take 2,000 pictures in the span of an hour. And if you load those all into an image viewer and just spacebar through them, it's basically like you're watching a low frame rate video because he's just snapping photos constantly, multiple per second. So it's almost like a video when you piece them together.
Darknet Diaries
140: Revenge Bytes
And so the girls, when they would change positions, you know, if they're hiding their breasts with their arms, whatever they're doing, you know, as far as doing these kind of boudoir implied nude photos, at some point they're going to change position or turn to a certain angle or something and there's going to be a nipple or something. And what the boyfriend did... Yeah, we call those nip slips.
Darknet Diaries
140: Revenge Bytes
So what the boyfriend did was go through 1,200 photos on a CD of my wife and pull out the two frames where there was a nipple in it, found it, saved it, sent it to the guy.
Darknet Diaries
140: Revenge Bytes
He was a close friend. He had been to my house that I grew up in in Connecticut and met my parents. We went to concerts together. I knew his family. I had Fourth of July out on Long Island with his dad and his brother. He wasn't my best friend in the world, but certainly he was closer than most. He was a good friend of mine, and I'd known him for over a decade when this had all happened.
Darknet Diaries
140: Revenge Bytes
I remember the night that we figured out it was him very vividly. This one will stick out to me for the rest of my life. I was getting home from a trip as an airline pilot and I got a call from Madison. And I don't ever receive phone calls from Madison. We don't call, we text. So if I get a phone call, something's wrong. And I pick up the phone and she's like, I think we might know who it is.
Darknet Diaries
140: Revenge Bytes
And I'm like, Really? She's like, yeah, I'm pretty sure. And I was like, well, spit it out. Don't make me wait. And she goes, Yankee. I'm like, come on. No fucking way, right? First of all, one of my close friends. Second of all, I didn't even think he was intelligent enough or tech savvy enough to even figure out how 4chan worked. If you knew him well, I mean...
Darknet Diaries
140: Revenge Bytes
It had to have taken a while to figure it out. We are not dealing with a rocket surgeon here. So I couldn't, I told her, I was like, no way. And mind this, Jack, it had been years where anybody in the room could have been the guy. And there were accusations flung at just about anybody in our life. You know what I mean? It's this guy, it's that guy, it's this guy, it's your best friend.
Darknet Diaries
140: Revenge Bytes
Like, you know, all these kind of just weird feelings. Can you imagine? You know what I mean? If those are your photos on the internet and every single person in your life is a suspect, it's got to be horrible, right? So I had heard them postulate that it could be one of my friends several times. And I always said, no, no. And I did exactly what I did on that night.
Darknet Diaries
140: Revenge Bytes
I said, there's no freaking way. It's not him. One, I don't think he's got it in him. He's not that malicious. Two, I think he's too dumb to even figure all this out. But it kind of rattled around in my brain and I couldn't sleep that night. So I got home. And I started looking up the kick names. I started connecting the kick names. And that's what you can do on 4chan.
Darknet Diaries
140: Revenge Bytes
You can't do it even on 4chan because it disappears within two hours. But the 4chan archive sites, you can search them. And that's how we sort of tied him to all these posts was he had about five or six kick names and I just searched the kick names. And all these random women would come up, including my wife and her sister.
Darknet Diaries
140: Revenge Bytes
And then there was one that stuck out that night, and it was a girl, a young girl, looked to be 13, 14 years old in a Catholic school outfit that was posted by the same user as the user that was harassing my wife and my sister-in-law. And I downloaded the photo. It was not a nude photo. It was just a girl.
Darknet Diaries
140: Revenge Bytes
It was a girl, and the text attached to it was horrifying, something like, I want nudes of this girl or I want to rape her or something. And so I download this photo, and there's an embroidered crest or logo on her school uniform. And, um, it's kind of pixelated, but I don't, I, you know, I enhanced it and I sharpened it and I sharpened it.
Darknet Diaries
140: Revenge Bytes
And I finally was able to make out the words on this photo. And it turns out it was a Catholic girls, middle school, middle school in Daytona. Uh, So I said, hmm, okay, well, I know he's got family in Daytona. Maybe there's something here.
Darknet Diaries
140: Revenge Bytes
So you jump on Facebook, and within 10 minutes, I was able to find the girl's name and her mom and dad's name, and they were mutual friends and identified family members on his Facebook page. That was his little cousin. Wow. And that's kind of when it all hit. Like, holy shit, it's him.
Darknet Diaries
140: Revenge Bytes
And then once you had that key piece of information, you keep going back through the other women that he's posting on the 4chan site. And you cross references to Facebook, mutual friend, bang, mutual friend, bang, mutual friend. And there it was. We knew who it was that night. And I just, I absolutely couldn't fucking believe it.
Darknet Diaries
140: Revenge Bytes
Oh my God, and the guilt. Can you imagine? I mean, if the twins had never met me, they'd never meet this guy. You know what I mean? Just the weight of guilt. Yeah. I invited him to social functions all the time. He was a bit of an outcast and an outsider. And I'd invite him in just because he was a friend of mine and almost like a sympathy invite to stuff.
Darknet Diaries
140: Revenge Bytes
And I was the one who introduced him to my wife and my sister-in-law. And he, in turn... you know, tried to destroy their lives. There's a lot of guilt involved with that. Wow, they did it.
Darknet Diaries
140: Revenge Bytes
Am I picturing it right? No, that's exactly correct. And it was a super delicate situation, right? Because We'd already had very limited success with law enforcement to care, to give a shit about what's happening. But we decided as a group that our only real shot to get some attention here is in numbers, right?
Darknet Diaries
140: Revenge Bytes
And we know that there's five-ish other women and girls who are being harassed at the same time. They must be going through hell themselves. in order to get any sort of prosecution, he, one, we didn't want him to wipe his hard drives, and two, we didn't necessarily want him to stop immediately and go into a hole.
Darknet Diaries
140: Revenge Bytes
So we had to be kind of, we wanted to be behind the scenes on this, but we had to also band the other women together without them tipping him off, really. So that was our next move, was to figure out how to do that.
Darknet Diaries
140: Revenge Bytes
there were a few other women that we didn't, that we didn't never even reached out to that he was efforting, efforting nudes of them too at the same time. But we didn't even, we had enough at that point.
Darknet Diaries
140: Revenge Bytes
So I do want to stress that the minor, the 14-year-old, is so incredibly important to the story. I'm not sure, you know, obviously the Manatee County Sheriff's Office did it, you know, the right thing by forwarding it to the FBI. I don't think anybody would have given a shit if the minor wasn't involved.
Darknet Diaries
140: Revenge Bytes
Everything, everything, you know, obviously all these women went through some horrible things. I mean, his, his ex from college tried to commit suicide multiple times over this. That's horrible. He was photographing his fiance in their private home and then posting it on the internet to get off to it. This is awful.
Darknet Diaries
140: Revenge Bytes
And what they did to my wife and my sister-in-law who were just out minding their own business and had nothing to do with this guy is horrible. But I don't think anybody ultimately would have given a shit, really, if this girl was not involved. The posts were abhorrent. I mean, he was basically trying to hire someone on 4chan to rape her and video it and then send it to him.
Darknet Diaries
140: Revenge Bytes
And I think that's what ultimately got the attention to the case.
Darknet Diaries
140: Revenge Bytes
And Dana, what were you working on in school? I'm an airline pilot, so that's what I was working on. I learned to fly in college. I'm an aviation major.
Darknet Diaries
140: Revenge Bytes
I think I remember us all talking in the hallway and be like, dude, if he gets five years, we'd be over the moon.
Darknet Diaries
140: Revenge Bytes
I did. Yeah. I think we all had our own range of emotions, but I certainly did. You know, there was a lot going on there. You know, this was a person that I've known for almost two decades and cared for at one point. And then it was also a person who inflicted some of the worst emotional harm upon my family that you could even imagine. So, you know, that coupled with how long and hard and the
Darknet Diaries
140: Revenge Bytes
You know, the nights we stayed up till four in the morning trying to compile all these things and put this case together and to get law enforcement to care for it all, you know, to see somebody that you once cared about essentially have their lives ended in the same moment that.
Darknet Diaries
140: Revenge Bytes
a case that you've put so much effort towards to get somebody to care, to end that person's life, all happening at the same moment was unbelievable. I did. I didn't think I would react that way, but I did.
Darknet Diaries
140: Revenge Bytes
You know, I don't know if you've ever seen Mary-Kate and Ashley, you know, but that was their idols when they were growing up. And they have their, you know, we can solve any crime by dinnertime. That's the way these two have been since they were, you know, five years old.
Darknet Diaries
140: Revenge Bytes
Yeah, it was just a touch over a year. And for sure, Jack, Christine's kind of a badass. But for me personally, I see this happen and I'm like, oh, you've got to be kidding me. This is how he gets off. This is how he gets off.
Darknet Diaries
140: Revenge Bytes
We had the one judge who gave a shit and the guy who, you know, took all these factors into account and understood what really happened here and nailed him with the sentence that he actually deserved. And now we're kicked back to another judge who's maybe not going to quite understand what actually happened here because they're all a million years old.
Darknet Diaries
140: Revenge Bytes
None of them, you know, the last time they were on the Internet was AOL. They don't understand what this is.