INTERNET LURES SEXUAL PREDATORS, EXPERTS SAY.

Byline: Associated Press 

Why would a woman agree to meet a man who graphically told her how he planned to sexually torture and kill her?

That they had already exchanged nearly 100 electronic messages via the Internet may have something to do with it, experts on cyberspace communication said Wednesday.

The anonymous, intimate nature of Internet exchanges naturally attracts a wide variety of people - including sexual predators looking for victims.

``There's something about the way communication on the Net works that fosters a sense of intimacy, security, connection. You really feel you know the person,'' said Dr. Alvin Cooper, director of the San Jose Marital and Sexuality Centre in California and the author of a column on sexuality distributed on the World Wide Web.

``Sexual predators who know these sites are going to pull in people with specific sex interests,'' Cooper said. ``You don't have any sense of whether the person has any contact with reality or is really totally out there.''

Sharon Lopatka, 35, began corresponding with Robert Glass after the two met on a sexually oriented chat room on the Internet. Earlier this month, she agreed to meet him in North Carolina, even though he had said in one of his e-mail messages that he planned to kill her.

Glass, 45, told investigators Lopatka died accidentally when he gradually tightened a rope around her neck as they were having intercourse, The Lenoir, N.C., News-Topic reported Wednesday.

Glass was charged with murder last week after Lopatka's body was found in a shallow grave behind his mobile home.

North Carolina authorities also confirmed that e-mail messages retrieved from Lopatka's computer indicated that she had previously used the Internet to try to hire someone else to kill her, but that person refused to comply.

Lopatka may have suffered from sexual masochism, said Fred Berlin, founder of the Johns Hopkins Sexual Disorder Clinic.

``We're not sure what causes it, but certainly in my clinical experience, all the women who are having these masochist cravings were themselves abused sexually during childhood,'' said Berlin. ``The feelings of sexual excitement can become confused with abuse.''

The Internet, he said, merely provided a tragically convenient forum for her to meet someone looking to sexually abuse another person.

``People will disclose some pretty intimate things on e-mail and feel safe about that, and it can progress to a point where normal defenses are down,'' said Bonnie Raindrop, co-owner of Doubleclick Publications, an on-line publishing firm where Lopatka maintained three World Wide Web pages for a business she ran from her home.

Whether Lopatka was abused a child and what her motivation was for agreeing to meet Glass remain a mystery. Attempts to reach her husband at the couple's home in Hampstead, 25 miles northwest of Baltimore, were unsuccessful.