"Man Gets 20 Years for Killing Internet Love Rival.“ This deceptively bland headline does not give much of a sense of the disturbingly wacky waking dream described in a Denver Post article (28 Nov 07). "Buffalo, NY: A 48-year old man entangled in an Internet love triangle built largely on lies was sentenced Tuesday to 20 years in prison for killing his rival for the affection of a woman he had never met.“ This, too, sounds like your run-of-the-mill love triangle, with the usual passle of deception and lies involved.
However, the lies in this waking nightmare are not of the usual sort. "Thomas Montgomery, who posed as an 18-year-old Marine in online chats, pleaded guilty in August to gunning down Brian Barrett, 22, at the suburban Buffalo factory where they worked. The motive was jealousy, investigators said.“ The middle-aged killer was posing as a teenager? Both fellows "were involved online with a middle-aged West Virginia mother – who herself was posing as an 18-year-old student." A mother, posing as an 18-year-old student?
"Montgomery began chatting with the woman, identified in court as Mary Sheiler, in 2005. When Montgomery’s wife intercepted a package sent by Sheiler, she wrote back, telling Sheiler her husband’s true age and saying he was married. Barrett, whom Montgomery had mentioned in his exchanges, was drawn into the triangle after the woman contacted him online to confirm what she had been told by Montgomery’s wife.“
A 48-year-old man pretending to be an 18-year-old marine. A middle-aged mother posing as an 18-year-old student. The one truly young person in the triangle gunned down by the pretend 18-year-old. (Or was it by the waking-life 48-year old?) The 22-year old gent, drawn into the dream in order to serve as a badly needed reality check, is the one gunned down.
It would seem that the original e-Romeo and e-Juliet both needed to step out of their virtual dream and evaluate what they were doing. Their romance seems to have been founded on layers of untruths, so that their passions had no waking-life legs to stand on. Yet their virtual passions resulted in real bullets snuffing out a real life. A flimsy daydream, unchecked and untested, all too easily can lead to a waking nightmare, with unforeseen and ghastly consequences.
