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First Person Ever is Charged with Internet Stalking

Posted on: Friday, 23 April 2004, 06:00 CDT

SEATTLE (AP) -- A South Carolina man arrested on an Internet stalking charge has pleaded innocent in U.S. District Court.

Robert James Murphy, 38, of Columbia, S.C., would not comment after leaving the courtroom with his lawyer Thursday. He remained free on $50,000 bond.

Murphy was arrested earlier this month and charged with 26 counts of using his computer "to annoy, abuse, threaten and harass" Joelle Ligon, 35, of Seattle, who saw him in court for the first time in 13 years.

"He didn't give me any eye contact," Ligon said after the brief hearing.

"He has been a faceless entity to me," she said. "I wanted to see him, and I wanted him to know that I was looking at him."

The government retained the right to randomly search Murphy's computer pending trial, which was tentatively scheduled for July 6. If convicted, he could face as much as two years in prison for each count.

Murphy is the first person to face charges under a federal law, adopted in 1997, that equates sending obscene e-mail to making obscene telephone calls. The charge covers e-mail in the 11 months ending last April.

"The assaults (Ligon) suffered are no less real" because they were committed electronically, assistant U.S. attorney Kathryn A. Warma said.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Kathryn Warma and FBI Agent Marie Gilliam teamed up to make what appears to be the first use of a 1997 amendment to federal telecommunications law outlawing cyberharassment.

"There is no precedent for it, as far as I know," Warma said.

Ligon said she started dating Murphy in Salt Lake City when she was 15. They broke up 13 years ago when she was 22.

Investigators believe Murphy began sending obscene and sexually explicit messages and pictures to Ligon and her co-workers in 1998, tracking her from his computer as she moved from state to state and job to job.

Ligon said she deleted and ignored the messages for four years, then began saving them as evidence and approached police, eventually gaining the help of the FBI, U.S. attorney's office and King County prosecutors.

Her efforts also led to enactment of a state ban on cyberstalking that was signed into law by Gov. Gary Locke last month.

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