Story Photos
 Leslie Slape / The Daily News
A Longview mother holds e-mails, and the program that tracked them, sent to her 12-year-old daughter by a registered sex offender in Colorado.
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Protective parents sniff out improper e-mails
Monday, May 19, 2008 9:17 AM PDT
By Leslie Slape
Printable version
E-mail this articleWhen a man sent a 12-year-old Longview girl an e-mail asking her for nude photos of herself, the girl’s parents quickly knew. They have an Internet surveillance program.
“Some parents allow themselves the luxury of being naive,” said the girl’s vigilant father.
The mother turned the e-mail and other correspondence from the man over to Cowlitz County sheriff’s Detective Pat Schallart. On Wednesday, armed with a Cowlitz County arrest warrant, Colorado authorities took into custody Benjamin Clinton Stribling, 25, of Elbert, Colo., a registered sex offender, on allegations that he sent the Longview girl sexually explicit e-mail.
“I hope a lot of parents share this story with their kids,” the father said.
The West Longview couple asked that their names not be used to protect their daughter’s identity. Schallart and Capt. Mark Nelson of the sheriff’s office verified the couple’s account.
The mother said she set up an e-mail account for her daughter for a school project. She checked up on the girl’s use of the Internet with Spector Pro, a surveillance program she installed 18 months ago.
Spector Pro secretly monitors e-mail communication and Internet use, she said.
Nelson said he “appreciated and admired” the couple for keeping their daughter safe.
“Allowing your kids to go on the Internet without supervision is no different than sending them out the door with no idea where they’re going,” he said. “Kids throw, ‘You don’t trust me’ at parents” who install Spector Pro, Cyberpatrol, PC Tattletale or similar surveillance tools. “The answer is, ‘Yeah — and look. This is why.’ We have to be willing as parents to address the issue.”
In February, the girl opened an account with TeenSpot, a social networking Web site for teens.
In late March, her mother was alarmed to discover her daughter had begun chatting on TeenSpot with a man who claimed he was 22 years old.
“(Age 22 is) not quite old enough to be creepy but old enough to be interesting — and my daughter was interested,” her mother said. But the mom got a “creepy” feeling about the man and contacted Schallart.
“Then we started sleuthing,” the mother said.
“You have to prove a lot of things,” Schallart said, including that the man knew the girl’s age and had illegal intentions. Schallart also had learn his identity and whereabouts, because he was using an alias and was sending e-mail over wireless Internet away from his home.
The mother said she “chose to sit back and let her continue these e-mail conversations so that the sheriff’s office could do their work. That was hard.”
“You have to allow the case to build,” her husband said.
“It built quickly!” said his wife. “He was vulgar.”
She was appalled when he asked her daughter to e-mail nude photos of herself. The girl refused.
“She actually said, ‘Dude, do you remember how old I am?’ ” the mother said.
When the e-mail became vulgar, the girl told him to quit it and stopped corresponding with him, the mother said. But then the man apologized, became gentle and resumed worming his way into her daughter’s trust, she said.
As she spoke, she held a plastic bin full of correspondence between her daughter and Stribling.
Schallart viewed the relationship as, “A 12-year-old girl who wanted someone to talk to,” and a predator who was grooming her to do his bidding.
“(The Internet is) a fantasy world,” she said. “It’s an encounter between strangers, totally fantasy. Nobody has any idea who they’re dealing with. And (teens will) share information they wouldn’t share with their own parents. They’ll divulge information they wouldn’t normally divulge.”
The girl’s father added, “There’s a strong belief among teens that the older generation are not half as computer savvy or half as computer literate as they are. Society as a whole has presented this idea to teens that they’re this much ahead of the older generation.”
The investigation revealed that Stribling sent more than 100 similar e-mails to young girls all over the country, Schallart said. Colorado Springs Police Department officers and the Internet Crimes against Children Task Force Colorado served a search warrant and seized three computers and pornographic materials involving minors, she said.
The parents said the girl has been made aware of the investigation.
“We had a big meltdown here at the sheriff’s office,” the mother said.
Stribling is being held in Colorado in lieu of $200,000 bail on the Cowlitz County warrant for exploitation of a minor, attempted possession of sexually explicit photographs of a minor and eight counts of communication with a minor for immoral purposes.
Nelson said additional charges are possible in Colorado and Stribling may also be indicted federally. It’s unknown when he will be extradited to Cowlitz County.
Stribling’s criminal history includes sexual assault in 2003 and extortion in 2005. In the latter case, investigators said he hacked into a woman’s Internet account, found erotic photos of her and threatened to post them on-line unless she agreed to have sex with him.
wrote on May 19, 2008 5:02 AM:
carmike wrote on May 19, 2008 8:06 AM:
Granny wrote on May 19, 2008 9:42 AM:
Scooby wrote on May 19, 2008 10:40 AM:
Kudo's to the Cowlitz County Sheriff's
for keeping with it. Officer Schallert must be commended for her thorough investigation into this case. It just goes to show how a few people can make the difference. "
TK wrote on May 19, 2008 12:02 PM:
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