Sharon Rina Lopatka (née Denburg; September 20, 1961 – October 16, 1996) was an internet entrepreneur living in Hampstead, Maryland, whose killing became one of the 1990s’ defining cautionary tales about lethal “consensual homicide” fantasy. On October 16, 1996, she was tortured and strangled by Robert “Bobby” Frederick Glass, a computer analyst from North Carolina. The apparent purpose of their meeting was mutual sexual gratification built around her written desire to be killed. Glass later insisted the death was an accident; police argued the emails proved 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.
This is not a romance of edge play. For anyone who practices BDSM, the Lopatka case is a hard stop: fantasy about dying is not a negotiated scene, email is not a safeword, and no community ethic of SSC or RACK covers hiring someone to end your life. The story still circulates because it sits at the ugly intersection of early internet anonymity, extreme fetish chat, and real criminal homicide.
Background: From Baltimore to Home Businesses
Sharon Rena Denburg was the first of four daughters born to Orthodox Jewish parents, Mr. and Mrs. Abraham J. Denburg, members of Baltimore’s Beth Tfiloh Congregation; Abraham served as a cantor. Raised in Baltimore, she was remembered by classmates as thoroughly ordinary—“as normal as you can get,” The News & Observer later wrote—active in sports teams and her school’s 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 relocated 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 Lopatka began running online advertising businesses from home to earn extra money. Her 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 per advertisement. She also managed websites that distributed psychic readings and took a cut from premium-rate telephone services advertised on those pages.
Alongside the mainstream side hustles she marketed pornographic content under the alias Nancy Carlson—material depicting women unconscious from drugs, hypnosis, or chloroform engaged in sex acts. She sold worn underwear with ads that asked whether anyone wanted to buy her used panties. In fetish chat rooms on sites such as fetishfeet.com and sexbondage.com she used multiple pseudonyms and personas to explore desires society labeled extreme: necrophilia-adjacent talk, bondage, 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 Nine Hundred Pages of Email
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. For fourteen years, until May 1996, he was married to Sherri; they had two daughters and one son. When Sherri logged into his email and found “raw, violent and disturbing” messages sent under the pseudonyms Toyman and Slowhand, the marriage collapsed into separation.
Lopatka and Glass met in August 1996 in a pornographic chat room. Through email she described her torture fantasy in detail; he wrote how he would fulfill it. Investigators later recovered close to nine hundred pages of correspondence between them—an archive that became the spine of the case.
The Trip South
On the morning of October 13, 1996, Lopatka told her husband Victor that she was going to Georgia to meet acquaintances. She also left a note saying she would not return 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 truck to his rural mobile home in Lenoir—about eighty miles (130 km) from Charlotte.
Victor found the note and notified police. Officers uncovered six weeks of email between Lopatka and Glass. In those messages she explicitly asked him to torture her to death. Interviewed later in prison, Glass admitted carrying out the torture fantasy but insisted the death was accidental: “I don’t know how much I pulled the rope. . . . I 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 intentional killing, which they said the emails demonstrated.
Search, Burial, Arrest
North Carolina police staked out Glass’s home for several days without seeing Lopatka. On October 25, 1996, Judge Beverly T. Beal issued a search warrant. Inside the house investigators found Lopatka’s belongings, drug and bondage equipment, magazines containing child sexual exploitation material, a .357 Magnum handgun, and computer disks. Outside they noted trash and toys; then an officer spotted a mound of soil about seventy-five feet (23 m) from the home and found body parts 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 observed that if the body had been buried in the woods behind the house it might never have been found.
Plea, Sentence, Death in Prison
On January 27, 2000, Glass pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and sexual exploitation charges. He was sentenced to 36–53 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 begin the federal term—he died of a heart attack in prison.
Media, Psychology, and Cultural Echoes
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 fixed identity. Writers labeled the pattern an early example of what some psychologists called the Mardi Gras phenomenon: using alternate personas to feel insulated from consequences. The notoriety also pushed clinicians and journalists toward greater interest in atypical sexual 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 and true-crime bibliographies still file the case beside other internet-linked homicides and discussions of autassassinophilia.
What Kink Communities Should Take From It
BDSM culture distinguishes 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 her notes; the presence of child exploitation material in his home underscores that the story is not a pure “two adults and a tragic accident” morality play. Readers drawn to extreme power-exchange fiction should treat this history as a boundary marker: negotiated breath play with training, safewords, and medical sobriety is one universe; arranging death by stranger on a train ticket is another. The Lopatka case remains a landmark of early online fetish danger precisely because the participants tried to script the unscriptable—and someone ended up buried in a yard in Lenoir.
