Cybercrime has taken a particularly grotesque twist, with the case of a Fayette County woman facing charges for soliciting men online to rape another woman.
WPXI-TV has reported Tracie Grimm would haunt Yahoo chat rooms, assuming the identity of her intended 58-year-old victim with the handle CocaineKitty2003. Authorities said Grimm would ask men to go to the victim’s home, and rape her the moment she opened the door.
The intended victim never opened the door when several of the men actually did go to the home, learning the hard way that the woman in question wasn’t the woman they met online, WPXI said. The intended victim is also believed to have received over 100 telephone calls from around the United States.
Grimm, 29, is in Fayette County prison on $50,000 bond, charged with criminal solicitation to commit rape, reckless endangerment, identity theft, stalking, and two counts of criminal use of a communication facility, WPXI said.
An intensive investigation through Yahoo and a local Internet service provider led to Grimm, according to Pittsburgh television station WTAE, which said the men in question had no idea they were going to the home of a woman other than Grimm, with whom they chatted.
This is not the first time Grimm has met with trouble from the law over her relationship with the woman in question, whom Grimm is said to have known for 10 years. A Pittsburgh newspaper reported Grimm was arrested in 2000 on charges of disorderly conduct, “defiant” trespass, and harassment, pleading guilty that summer and receiving a year’s probation.
But the actual motivation for Grimm’s campaign of harassment, including the astonishing attempt to have Net chat partners rape the woman, remains a mystery to investigators thus far. "She is absolutely obsessed with the victim,” a Pennsylvania state trooper told reporters. “I don't know why," he said.
