The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

MeetYourDeath.com: Psychopathic Killers Now Have Internet Access, You Know

Posted on | December 3, 2012 | 14 Comments

Steven Michael Fabi (left) and Leigh Swanson (right)

Dan Riehl brings our attention to the case of 45-year-old Leigh Swanson, who went on a blind date Nov. 16 with a man she met online and whose body was found Wednesday in Michigan:

The Midland County sheriff’s department says 30-year-old Steven Michael Fabi was found dead Tuesday in a bedroom of a home in Edenville Township, in the Sanford area. Authorities say he apparently fatally shot himself as deputies were walking up to his house to investigate Swanson’s disappearance. . . .
Sheriff Jerry Nielsen has said Swanson called her mother from the man’s house on November 18th, two days after she left for the date.

Who was Steven Michael Fabi? We don’t know much about him yet, except that he was the prime suspect in the death of Swanson, whose body was found in woods near the house where Fabi lived with his family. A tip led police to Fabi’s house:

As two deputies arrived at the home, Nielsen said, they heard a loud “boom.”
A man came out of the house, according to the sheriff, and told deputies, “My son just shot himself.”

Swanson evidently had a premonition about Fabi:

“Leigh told me that she had a bad feeling about going on the date … I said, ‘don’t go,'” Swanson’s mother, Beverly Kane, explained.
“But when she got there … she called me … and said everything was OK,” her mother added.

You know when you get a spooky feeling about something? Trust that feeling. Maybe there’s not really anything to worry about, but it’s always better to be safe than to be a dead body in the woods. And let’s talk a bit about this online dating thing:

The social networking website where Leigh Swanson may have met the man who police believe killed her is working with authorities in the investigation.
“We are working closely with the Midland County Sheriff’s department to assist in their investigation of this tragic incident,” said Robin Shallow, MeetMe.com’s executive vice president of communications and public relations, in a statement.
Family told media Swanson met 30-year-old Steven Michael Fabi at MeetMe.com.

Obviously, it would be wrong to blame the proprietors of MeetMe.com for the death of Leigh Swanson, just as it would be wrong to suggest that every guy who uses the Internet to meet women is a potentially dangerous creepazoid. On the other hand, you have to ask yourself, “If Ted Bundy were alive today, how would he stalk his prey?”

 

Category: Crime

Comments

14 Responses to “MeetYourDeath.com: Psychopathic Killers Now Have Internet Access, You Know”

  1. Mike Tuggle
    December 3rd, 2012 @ 2:03 pm

    “You know when you get a spooky feeling about something? Trust that feeling.”

    But then you’d be accused of being prejudiced – and what’s worse than that?

  2. The gift of Trigger-finger
    December 3rd, 2012 @ 2:09 pm

    That picture of him should have sufficed. What on earth. How much loneliness was necessary for that picture to inspire hope of happiness I wonder.

  3. Zilla of the Resistance
    December 3rd, 2012 @ 2:45 pm

    I always trust that spooky feeling, and it has saved my life more than once. Ask me about Robert Golub some time.

  4. richard mcenroe
    December 3rd, 2012 @ 2:50 pm

    Shallow, the proprietor of an online dating service? How Dickensian.

  5. richard mcenroe
    December 3rd, 2012 @ 3:04 pm

    Do you think Fabi knew Bill S?

  6. richard mcenroe
    December 3rd, 2012 @ 3:05 pm

    I’d rather be a breathing bigot.

  7. Adjoran
    December 3rd, 2012 @ 4:20 pm

    Why would you suppose Bundy would use the internet? Unless he had the mad skillz to hide his ID like the Swatters, it would just have led to an early capture.

    Bundy had a fairly foolproof scam. He was a nice looking guy who feigned an injury to arm or leg, which led pretty girls to want to help him with his packages. Once they were within grabbing distance, he tossed them in the car and took off. With no witnesses on deserted streets, he was practically untraceable.

  8. Bob Belvedere
    December 3rd, 2012 @ 5:06 pm

    I’m asking [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Golub].

  9. Zilla of the Resistance
    December 3rd, 2012 @ 6:01 pm

    When I was 16, he was dating a friend of mine. He was creepy. One night he and my friend (who was “seeing” him, which means it was not a relationship with any commitment such as boyfriend/girlfriend) wanted me to go with them to this isolated place with them to smoke a doobie (yeah I was a dumb kid) but something in Rob’s demeanor gave me a really bad feeling and I declined, and the look on his face became one of pure malice. My friend thought it was a joke and she and “Rob” tried physically moving me to go where they wanted to go, but I freaked out and I fought them, even kicking Rob right in his face because something about him just scared the hell out of me. No fucking way I was going with them off into the woods some where by myself. I kept fighting and eventually my friend got the clue and then had to put a lot of effort into getting Rob to back the hell off away from me. I never wanted to be anywhere near him again. A few weeks later my friend called me hysterically crying. She asked me if I saw the front page of Newsday, the local LI paper. I looked at the paper, and I recognized the house on the cover, it was Rob’s house. The girl who was murdered there was the about same size & build as me and had long brown hair which was very similar to mine, she had been mutilated, “gutted like a deer”, and very nearly completely decapitated from one of the cuts to her neck, and then stuffed into crawlspace in the Golub’s basement. I remembered the look on his face (when I was kicking him in it) and wondered if that could have been me, or if he was thinking about me fighting him off when he killed that girl.

  10. Zilla of the Resistance
    December 3rd, 2012 @ 6:14 pm

    One more thing: when they examined that poor girl’s body, there were POST MORTEM bite marks on her buttocks. The bite marks were a match to Rob’s teeth and was one of the pieces of evidence which helped to convict him of the crime.

  11. McGehee
    December 3rd, 2012 @ 7:56 pm

    It’s possble to stalk and identify likely prey without ever interacting online. With the personal information people put on Facebook it would be easy for a predastor like Bundy to use it to spot prey, while still using his low-tech MO for the approach and grab.

  12. AngelaTC
    December 3rd, 2012 @ 9:47 pm

    Bundy managed to find plenty of victims despite living in the technological dark ages. Crazy people are just that.

    What freaks me out the most is that the internet makes it really easy for crazy people to find each other, and in their echo chambers they convince themselves that being crazy is ok, and should be accepted by polite society.

  13. Finrod Felagund
    December 4th, 2012 @ 1:53 am

    Yeah, and they gather in places like DemocraticUnderground.com.

  14. Roxeanne de Luca
    December 5th, 2012 @ 11:54 am

    I met my current boyfriend online, but what convinced me that I wouldn’t die meeting him was simple – I ran his email address through Facebook and saw that he’s friends with the older sister of one of my best friends.