Facebook murder raises sex monitoring questions

The case of Peter Chapman (left), the convicted rapist jailed for life yesterday for the murder of 17-year-old Ashleigh Hall, has raised serious questions about the monitoring of registered sex offenders.

Chapman, 33, was a known offender who had spent time in jail between 1996 and 2001 for raping two prostitutes. He raped and killed Ashleigh after using the social networking site Facebook to ensnare her.

With the help of a fake photo of a bare-chested young man, he posed as a 19-year-old boy in order to become a "friend" to his victim. He finally trapped her into meeting him last October.

Because Chapman was in reality emaciated and almost toothless, he pretended it was the boy's father who was coming to pick Ashleigh up at her home.

"My Dad's on his way, babe," he texted.

She replied: "He's here, babe."

Chapman drove her straight to a lay-by where he raped and bound her so tightly with tape that she suffocated. He then dumped her body in a field near Sedgefield in County Durham.

Two factors are exercising observers. First, that Chapman was able so easily to make use of Facebook when he was a known sex offender. Second, that his police monitoring had gone so awry that he actually vanished off their radar for more than a year.

On the Facebook issue, a spokesman for the site itself could only say what has been said before in similar circumstances - that people should never agree to meet anyone they've come to "know" over the internet. "This case serves as a painful reminder that all internet users must use extreme caution when contacted over the internet by people they do not know."

However, this sort of advice is unlikely to have deterred a girl like Ashleigh who suffered from low esteem and was easily won over by the advances of Chapman, whom she took to be a hunky 19-year-old. What is needed, says experts, is a system of monitoring the online behaviour of sex offenders

Donald Findlater of the Lucy Faithfull Foundation, a charity with expertise in the monitoring of sex offenders, told today's Independent: "When people have committed such grievous crimes then I think one has seriously to consider how better to monitor their lives in the community, and that includes their lives online. We have the technical means and we ought to be using them.

"In America it is typical that sex offenders are given email addresses which flag up if they attempt to register with social networking sites. The internet can be supervised far better now than ever before with the monitoring technology that is available."

Home Secretary Alan Johnson, talking to the BBC this morning, said he was considering introducing similar measures. "There is an idea we are talking to the Americans about ­ when you log on, if you are a convicted sex offender, that actually there is a way of flagging that up," he said.

However, the Home Secretary did not explain how known sex offenders could be prevented from signing up to Facebook under false identities.

On the general monitoring issue, what is disturbing is that the police lost track of Chapman for more than a year.

When he was released from jail in 2001, after serving five years for the rape of the two prostitutes, he was supervised by the police and the probation service under Multi Agency Public Protection Arrangements (MAPPA).
 
According to the Daily Mail, he moved to Liverpool where he was monitored every three months as a high-risk offender.

In 2007, despite having been arrested twice in the interim on suspicion of rape and kidnap of two more prostitutes (the charges were dropped in both cases), he was down-graded to medium-risk. By early 2008 he was no longer required to report to a probation officer and was only due to be checked by police every six months.

When the police went to visit him in September 2008 at his Liverpool home, they found he was gone. Only a year later, in 2009, did they circulate his details nationally as a missing sex offender.

In October, he was picked up because of the alert and in the course of his interview at Middlesbrough police station suddenly confessed to killing Ashleigh. CCTV footage from the station shows him telling a custody officer: "I killed someone last night. I need to tell somebody from CID where the body is. It hasn't been reported yet."

The fact that he so easily slipped through the monitoring net is reminiscent of the high-profile Californian case of Phillip Garrido, another sex offender allowed far too much room to manoeuvre by the authorities.

Garrido (right) is alleged to have kidnapped Jaycee Lee Dugard at the age of 11 and then held her captive in his back garden for 18 years - all the while, receiving only occasional and haphazard visits from the authorities because of his status as a registered sex offender. Not once, did they ask to see inside his house or garden.

As a video was broadcast by ABC TV at the weekend, showing Jaycee Lee Dugard baking cookies with her mother and attempting to regain a "normal" life, Americans were still asking how the monitoring of Garrido could have been so lax.

In Britain, similar questions are now being asked about the case of Peter Chapman.

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