Boy, 14, Arranges Own Murder

(Manchester, England) You're going to love this story. It's that odd.

A schoolboy posed as a female British secret service spy in an internet chatroom to persuade a friend to try to murder him, a court heard yesterday.

The boy, John, now 15, groomed a 16-year-old boy, Mark (both pseudonyms to protect the children), with an "elaborate matrix of deceit" involving six fictional characters in the MSN chatroom and correspondence totalling 56,000 lines of text.

The fictions created by John, then 14, convinced Mark that he was murdering someone who had a terminal brain tumour. He was told that his reward would be money, a job as a British secret service agent and sex with the spy, whom he believed was a middle-aged woman.

In fact, John was determined to get himself killed, which is why he never used the abort code - 6969 - that he provided.

Manchester Crown Court heard that John, who had fallen in love with Mark, also tricked him into performing sex acts on a webcam before tricking him into stabbing him twice in an alleyway at Altrincham on 29 June last year. Though John's life was in the balance for a time, he did not die and was released from hospital after a week.

Over a nine-month period before the attempted murder, John began presenting himself as a 16-year-old girl in search of a cyber relationship, then "introduced" himself as the girl's step-brother. John and Mark then physically met, as did their parents, but in the chatroom John introduced increasingly far-fetched characters, including another boy who "stalked" John and supposedly killed his girlfriend. Another of the characters was then fictitiously killed off, leaving only Mark, John and the stalker.

Other characters emerged and were killed off, one even came back from the dead. But by the time of a crucial chatroom conversation on 28 June, John was still convinced by the order - from the "spy" - to kill Mark. John asked the "spy": U want me 2 take him 2 trafford centre [shopping centre, near Manchester] and kill him in the middle of the trafford centre?? thats wot ur asking me?

Mark said, "Yes." The following day, Mark stabbed John in the stomach and chest.

Mark called the ambulance and told police officers they had been attacked but after CCTV footage disproved his story, he was charged with attempted murder. Police only became aware of the labyrinthine plot when they examined John's computer. After months of analysis, detectives were able to establish that it was John who sent the final messages from his home computer on the night of 28 June 2003 and had planned his own murder.

John lived and was charged with incitement to murder. Mark was charged with attempted murder. Both were sentenced to probation.

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