Little Old Detective

This is kind of a stunning story.

You're a 65-year-old woman in Maiden Bradley, England*, just computer-literate enough to chat online and make the odd friend. You become friendly with a very depressed young woman who's seriously contemplating suicide--she's entered into a suicide pact. You talk her out of it, and then--concerned--you go looking, electronically, for the girl's partner in the pact. What you find is weird. And scary. The suicide-pact-partner, a woman with the screen name Li Dao, is all over the internet in suicide chat rooms, making suicide pacts right and left, encouraging desperate people to kill themselves, giving useful advice on troubleshooting methods (don't have a high enough point in your room to hang yourself? Use the doorknob). What do you do?

Celia Blay kept at it, enlisting friends more computer-savvy than she. Together they found that Li Dao, and her alter-ego, Cami, were fiction; they traced the screen names back to a middle aged Minnesotan, an LPN named William Melchert-Dinkel who had been haunting internet suicide chats for years, encouraging suicides. Stunned, I imagine, by all this, Blay and her friend put it to the test: they ran a sting in which the friend posed as suicidal in one of Melchert-Dinkel's favored chat rooms. She was solicited for a suicide pact by Melchert-Dinkel. Blay went to the cops.

For some time she had no luck getting anyone in authority to take her seriously--a combination of "there, there, dear. Don't you have a garden to tinker in?" and unwillingness to engage with the sprawling international chaos that is the internet. It wasn't until she found someone local to Minnesota to go to the police there that she got some traction. Even then it was a gray area: was Melchert-Dinkel engaging in assisting suicide? Suborning it? The fact that he wasn't in the room (or on the bridge or handing someone the pills) makes it a tricksy question. He has been charged with two deaths that the police actually know about; he himself thinks there may have been many others. He says he's always been obsessed with death and suicide; that it's an addiction.

I think Celia Blay is kind of a hero.

*and I love that the Times links to a PDF of the Maiden Bradley parish plan, which I intend to read thoroughly.

Okay, Going a Little Crazy Here

I have been reading a biography of Mary Todd Lincoln, much maligned in life and pretty after death too. One of the things I've been learning is that the storied romance between Lincoln and Ann Rutledge (and the implication that Lincoln settled for Mary later,) was exaggerated by Mary's enemies after Lincoln was assassinated.

Anyway, this called up a memory for me of a musical about Lincoln's early years that I saw when I was a kid. I've had one of the songs (the reprise of the song in which Ann Rutledge teaches Abe to dance--in the reprise she's on her last legs, dying of consumption or some other pathetic wasting disease). I have tried to search Google to find it--or some evidence of it. It was likely done in 1962 or thereabouts. If anyone out there shares this hallucination memory, please let me know...

ETA Okay, I think the song I can remember is called "You Can Dance," from the musical Young Abe Lincoln, ca. 1961. I wish I could find a video of it, but that's almost certainly asking too much of the fates. Thanks, all who weighed in (particularly elissaann. Alas, although it only had 20+ performances, Not Since Carrie is silent on the subject.