Sharon Lopatka: Email Was Not a Safeword

Sharon Rina Lopatka (née Denburg; September 20, 1961 – October 16, 1996) lived in Hampstead, Maryland, and made money online from ad copy and porn. Her killing became one of the 1990s’ warnings about lethal “consensual homicide” fantasy. On October 16, 1996, Robert “Bobby” Frederick Glass, a computer analyst in North Carolina, tortured and strangled her. They met, on the surface, for sex built around a desire she had written down: she wanted to be killed. Glass later insisted the death was an accident. Police said the email showed intent. The investigation was widely described as the first in which a police department arrested a murder suspect largely on the strength of electronic mail. For anyone in BDSM this is a hard stop. A fantasy about dying is not a negotiated scene. Email is not a safeword. SSC and RACK do not cover hiring someone to end your life. The story still circulates because it sits where early internet anonymity, extreme fetish chat, and real criminal homicide meet.

Sharon Rena Denburg was the eldest of four daughters of Orthodox Jewish parents, Mr. and Mrs. Abraham J. Denburg, members of Baltimore’s Beth Tfiloh Congregation. Abraham served as a cantor. She grew up in Baltimore. Classmates later remembered her as ordinary. The News & Observer wrote “as normal as you can get.” She was on sports teams and in the school choir. She graduated from Pikesville High School in 1979. In 1991 she married construction worker Victor Lopatka in Ellicott City, Maryland, and in the early 1990s they moved to a ranch-style tract house in Hampstead. A classmate described the marriage as a way of breaking away. Her parents did not approve.

In 1995 she started online advertising businesses from home. The first site, “House of Dion,” sold home-décor guides by mail for seven dollars, promising “decorating secrets” from New England to Hollywood homes. Through a business she called Classified Concepts she rewrote ad copy for about fifty dollars each. She also managed sites that distributed psychic readings and took a cut from premium-rate telephone services advertised on those pages. Beside that work she sold porn under the alias Nancy Carlson: material of women unconscious from drugs, hypnosis, or chloroform, engaged in sex acts. She sold worn underwear and asked in the ads whether anyone wanted her used panties. In fetish chat rooms on sites such as fetishfeet.com and sexbondage.com she used several pseudonyms to explore desires labeled extreme, including necrophilia-adjacent talk, bondage, and sadomasochism. The News & Observer reported more than fifty messages in which she expressed a sexual desire to be tortured to death. One persona cast Carlson as a heavy disciplinarian dominatrix porn actress. The intensity alarmed a sex-workers’ rights activist known as Tanith, who tried to talk her down. Lopatka’s reply was blunt: she wanted “the real thing,” not preaching.

Robert Glass and the trip to Lenoir

Robert Frederick Glass worked nearly sixteen years as a computer analyst for Catawba County, North Carolina, programming tax rolls and tracking county vehicle fuel use. He was married to Sherri for fourteen years, until May 1996. They had two daughters and one son. When Sherri logged into his email and found explicit, violent, and disturbing messages sent under the names Toyman and Slowhand, the marriage collapsed into separation. Lopatka and Glass met in August 1996 in a pornographic chat room. By email she described a torture fantasy in detail, and he wrote that he would fulfill it. Investigators later recovered close to nine hundred pages of correspondence.

On the morning of October 13, 1996, Lopatka told her husband Victor she was going to Georgia to meet acquaintances. She also left a note saying she would not come home and asking him not to track down Glass. The note included the line: “If my body is never retrieved, don’t worry: know that I’m at peace.” That morning she drove her blue Honda Civic about forty-five minutes to Baltimore’s Pennsylvania Station and took an Amtrak train that reached Charlotte, North Carolina, by roughly 8:45 p.m. Glass drove her in his pickup to his rural mobile home in Lenoir, about eighty miles (130 km) from Charlotte. Victor found the note and called the police. Officers uncovered six weeks of email in which she explicitly asked Glass to torture her to death. Interviewed later in prison, Glass admitted carrying out the torture fantasy and still called the death an accident: he said he never wanted to kill her, but she ended up dead. North Carolina’s chief medical examiner, John Butts, concluded she was accidentally strangled three days after arriving. Police disagreed. Search-warrant affidavits described an intentional killing, which they said the emails demonstrated.

North Carolina police watched Glass’s home for several days and did not see Lopatka. On October 25, 1996, Judge Beverly T. Beal issued a search warrant. Inside, investigators found Lopatka’s belongings, drug and bondage equipment, magazines containing child sexual exploitation material, a .357 Magnum handgun, and computer disks. Outside there was trash and toys. An officer then spotted a mound of soil about seventy-five feet (23 m) from the house and found partial remains buried roughly two and a half feet (0.76 m) down. Glass was arrested at work, charged with first-degree murder, and held without bond in the Caldwell County Jail. He also faced state and federal charges for possessing child sexual exploitation material. County investigator D. A. Brown later said that if the body had been buried in the woods behind the house it might never have been found.

The plea, the film, and the line BDSM does not cross

On January 27, 2000, Glass pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and sexual exploitation charges. He was sentenced to 36 to 53 months in the Avery-Mitchell Correctional Institution and to an additional consecutive 27 months on federal second-degree minor exploitation charges. On February 20, 2002, about one month before he was to finish the state sentence and start the federal term, he died of a heart attack in prison.

Because email drove the arrest, the case became a media template for “dangerous internet meetings.” Some voices demanded new censorship to prevent similar killings. Anti-censorship activists answered that open forums let people discuss controversial desire without a fixed identity. Writers treated the pattern as an early example of what some psychologists called the Mardi Gras phenomenon: alternate personas used to feel insulated from consequences. The notoriety also pushed clinicians and journalists toward greater interest in atypical desires, sadism, masochism, and asphyxia fantasies among them. The case inspired the film Downloading Nancy (2008), which premiered at Sundance and reached wider release in 2009. Screenwriter Lee Ross said he knew the Lopatka story and found it “dark, horrible … and intriguing.” Crime libraries still file it beside other internet-linked homicides and discussions of autassassinophilia.

BDSM separates fantasy, role-play, and risk-aware practice from homicide. Lopatka’s written wishes did not create a legal right to be killed. Glass’s participation was a crime regardless of the note. Child sexual exploitation material in his home means this is not a clean story of two adults and a tragic accident. Negotiated breath play, with training, a safeword, and a sober eye on medical risk, is one universe. Arranging to be killed by a stranger at the end of a train ticket is another. The people in any actual scene have to be consenting adults. This history is not a method. Death fantasies, hiring someone to kill, and child sexual exploitation are outside anything a community can negotiate.