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Subscribe to RSSA man has been arrested in Kentucky and accused of strapping a fake bomb around the neck of an 18-year-old woman in Australia. NBC's Sara James reports.
By Pete Williams, NBC News justice correspondent
An e-mail address launched police in Sydney, Australia, on a hunt for clues that ended Monday in a suburb of Louisville, Kentucky, where the FBI arrested a man accused of placing a fake bomb around the neck of an Australian teenager studying for a school exam, according to newly released court documents.
Paul Douglas Peters, 50, of Sydney appeared in a Kentucky federal courtroom Tuesday to face charges in connection with the terrifying ordeal of 18-year-old Madeleine Pulver. She waited 10 hours for police to remove what she was told was a bomb -- chained to her neck by an intruder who broke into her family's house Aug. 3 in a wealthy suburb of Sydney.
Australian police say the young woman was studying in her bedroom when a man wearing a mask walked into her room carrying a baseball bat. He forced a black box against her throat and locked it to her neck with a chain, telling her not to move, they say.
Attached to the chain was a note whose contents police revealed Tuesday. "Powerful new technology plastic explosives are located inside the small black combination case delivered to you. The case is booby trapped. It can ONLY be opened safely, if you follow the instructions and comply with its terms and conditions," it said.
She telephoned her parents, who notified police. After X-raying the box several times and conducting other tests, bomb technicians determined it was harmless and removed it.
Australian police describe the bizarre incident as an attempt to extort money from the girl's father, an executive of an Internet firm.
"Paul Douglas Peters was formerly employed by a company with which the victim's family has links," the police said.
Court documents give the following account of what led police to arrest Peters at the home of his ex-wife in a Lexington suburb, 9,300 miles from Sydney.
The note attached to the fake bomb contained an e-mail address that Australian investigators discovered had been accessed from a public library a few hours after the hoax device was attached to the girl's neck. Surveillance video showed that a man matching a description given by the victim drove to the library in a Range Rover SUV. Its license number was not visible in the video, but police determined the vehicle was made between 1996 and 2001.
Rob Griffith / AP
Belinda Pulver looks at her husband, William, as he makes a statement regarding the arrest of a 50-year-old man, in Sydney, Australia, on Tuesday.
Investigators then checked the records for all Range Rovers registered in the area that were made during those model years and obtained drivers license photos associated with the vehicles. They compared the pictures to the images of the man captured by the library surveillance cameras.
"From these inquiries, the police located Paul Douglas Peters," the court documents said. Investigators also determined that the e-mail address was created at the Chicago airport on May 30. Travel records showed that Peters was at the airport that day, Australian police said.
After discovering that Peters left Sydney five days after the hoax incident, Australian police notified the FBI that he flew to Chicago then on to Louisville. Federal officials say he was arrested there Monday without incident at the home of his ex-wife. She was not thought to be involved in the crime, investigators said.
"He does have family connections" in the United States, according to Luke Moore, an Australian police official who was in Kentucky for the arrest.
"We believe he's been employed in a number of areas and in a number of countries around the world," Moore said.
An FBI SWAT team swooped into an address in Kentcuky and nabbed suspect, Paul Peters for strapping a fake bomb to a teenage girl in Australia earlier this month. ITN's Marc Mallett reports.
The court documents also gave new details of the young woman's terrifying experience. After chaining the box to her neck, the man said, "Count to 200. I'll be back. If you move, I can see you. I'll be right here."
"Extremely frightened," the documents say, she "sat there for a short time thinking that the man was stealing property from the house. After a few minutes, she yelled out but got no response."
She then sent a text message to her mother and later telephoned her father, asking them both to summon the police.
The young woman was initially "crying and hysterical, but after a time, she became more reasonable and settled and gave the police the note," the court documents said.
Investigators also disclosed the e-mail address contained in the note : dirkstraun1840@gmail.com. Dirk Straun is the name of a character in a novel by James Clavell, "Tai-Pan," about a businessman's attempt to destroy a competitor during the 1840s.
Reuters / Tim Wimborne
A policeman wearing protective equipment walks near a house where bomb squad officers freed an 18-year-old girl from a fake bomb chained to her neck in the exclusive Sydney suburb of Mosman on Aug 3.
Leave a Comment:
idiot, left an email address in the note? wtf?
Well if he doesn't leave contact information, how can he get the extortion money?
Incredible sleuthing. I give the police force a lot of credit for this!
Well probably everything else has been said about this case by the other commenters. Whether they have said it correctly or not is another matter. So I guess I can say, "This Paul Peters sure looks old to be only 50!" I can say that because I am older than him and I don't look as old as he does. I wonder what made him age so fast?!
I agree, I'll be 50 in a few months and I was shocked. He looks like someone in his mid to late 60"s.
I'm 63 and I don't look that old.....lol
He probably thought there was no way to trace it back to him, since he used a fake name, accessed from a public computer, and created the account from another country.
He was wrong.
Welcome to the Information Age.
Same way they caught the BTK killer - he actually asked the police if they could trace him through a word doc... they said No.
They lied. ;)
If he used a random public PC to ACCESS the email (along with creating it at a public with fake details) and didn't remain there too long ( < 5 mins ) there is no way for them to get him (with his email).
so you've never heard of going to the internet providor or checking with the domain's owner to see when the account was used?
Unless, of course, the public place where you access the internet has CAMERAS.
LOL you'd have to be an idiot to not check for cameras. Ah well, I guess criminals aren't the brightest bunch.
Obviously they did. So, this is another conspiracy? Hmm?
Are you an Internet expert?
He should have got away with it... airports don't have CAMERAS!!
....oh wait.
It almost seems like it would be a good business, to let people try to do sneaky things without committing a crime, and then hire investigators to see if they could get away with it. We'd all love to figure out if we outsmart those chasing us, without actually doing something illegal.
Having said that, this guy was not only ignorant of modern tracking capabilities, what a cruel thing to do to a teenage girl and her family--simply out of greed/jealousy. Deserves a good chunk of time to think about what he's done.
My heart goes out to the girl. What she must have thought would happen to her! How terrifying.
I am so glad they caught this pr!ck.
wow. a revenge-drive turned-joke. she's lucky it wasn't that jigsaw criminal from that movie i can't remember, with his high standards on non-morality on this puppet society, and repercussions out of decisions and whatnot...
That's the "Saw" franchise.
*blink*
*blink again*
....
Nope still have no clue what you just said.
LOL i was talking about the jigsaw guy, not the two-bit sad excuse of a stalker from the article...
Strap a real bomb around this a**holes neck and tell him to count to 2 million. No water, no food, tell him he can't move so he has to piss himself. Hey---fairs fair.
Did you even read the article? They tracked him down with very important clues outside of his email account.
So was he in Louisville or Lexington? I don't think either is a suburb of the other.
As someone who lives in Louisville but grew up in Lexington it's hard to image how even the laziest of journalists could use two cities interchangeably. This guy was caught in the small town of Buckner, KY which is close to Louisville, although I think it's a stretch to call it a suburb of Louisville. They clearly goofed in mentioning Lexington as this is a completely different city about an hour's drive from Louisville and probably another half hour to Buckner.
I read in an earlier article he was arrested in La Grange, KY.
Jeff - this is MSNBC. It's not so hard to imagine how the journalist interchanged the two cities because they hire fifth graders on summer break to write the stories. Seriously, I haven't read a single MSNBC article for months that didn't have major editing and/or reporting errors.
What an idiot. All he had to do was go wardriving until he found an unsecured access point, made sure there were no cameras came back at night to use the AP, configured his browser to use TOR which would completely obfuscate his source IP, configured his browser to use a Russian proxy since Russia could care less who kidnapped who in Australia, and signed up for a Chinese email provider, since China's not too friendly to American or Australian interests either.
No American or Aussie subpoena would have gotten those mail provider logs, even if they did it would have just shown the nearest TOR node, if the node happened to be an American IP (highly unlikely), a search warrant of the unlucky TOR node owner's house or ISP logs would have revealed nothing more than a Russian proxy IP. If somehow the Russians turned over their proxy logs (even less likely) then it still would have only been traced back to the next unlucky schmuck's house that left their wireless access point unsecure.
Fortunately I'm not a criminal, but this idiot obviously didn't even study IT 101.
Rather than go to all the trouble of becoming an IT expert before committing the crime, he simply could have not left an email address in the note.
Also, when you can care less, it means you care some. The correct phrase is Russia COULDN'T care less.
Thanks a bunch for telling every other a$$hole out there how to do it.
did you actually just tell stupid criminals how to send e-mails without getting traced? Think.
LMAO, Barry!! Your post is the greatest reply to the STUPIDEST COMMENT EVER!!
Good news is, the truly stupid criminals that would WANT to do this, won't have 2 licks of understanding what it is you just typed out and will skip over all that "nonsense".
It's nice to know that at least a few things are constant in this world.
@ Barry, the idiot thought he was going to get money for this, how else would he have communicated with them? Call them up?
And for the rest, do you really think burying your head in the sand makes it untrue? A 5 sec Google search would tell any aspiring crook how to properly hide their email information, I'm just pointing out how stupid this one was. Like I said, this is IT 101. I could have gotten into the really fun stuff that they don't teach you in IT 101 that would have sent both countries off on wild goose chases for years, but fortunately the moron wasn't that bright.
And if you are an aspiring criminal and perform every step I listed in my original post, unless you perform a step I did not list, there is still one other known method they can use to find you. But at least it will take about 6 months, and millions of dollars, not 2wks and a few subpoenas.
Just download the wrong song on Frostwire and see how invisible you are.
Total Technology Moron - do you honestly believe that the authorities in Australia and the FBI wouldn't have IT experts much more sophisticated and better trained than you who could track this guy down?
former employee of the fathers internet firm.
does say too much about the firm, if that is all the smarter his workers are. or maybe thats why he is a former employee.
not the sharpest cheese on the cracker...
For what he put that girl through they should lock him up and throw away the key.
Did they say he was at his ex wife or with his sister or is she both. Her name wasn't Betty Sue was it. Cause one of my cousins married his sister and that may have been them. I know it wasn't my other cousin cause I married her.
Sorry I forgot about the bomb. I could have told them it was a fake cause we all played that game when we was kids. Wasn't none of us smart enough to make them work though.
According to this article, the court documents said:
The young woman was initially "crying and hysterical, but after a time, she became more reasonable and settled and gave the police the note."
OK.... a strange man enters a teenaged girl's bedroom wearing a mask, wielding a baseball bat, and chains and locks a box around her neck that he tells her is a bomb. Crying hysterically seems perfectly REASONABLE to me!
I thought I was the only one that caught that.
previous photo of the girl in an earlier news release was better than the photo here.
The current photo is probably a more realistic image of the girl because it is a candid shot. The earlier photo was obviously a glamour photo in which experts dressed and posed her because the women in the two photos don't even look the same person.
I always laugh at shows like CSI when they find a carpet fiber or paint chip from some exotic car. I'll bet this guy thought he looked cool driving a Range Rover. Now he probably wishes he had driven a Toyota or Hyundai.
@Lorraine 1412654:
You shouldn't refer to this jerk as a prick. A prick serves a few useful purposes, and he doesn't serve any!
Let's do his mom
Awesome police work.
Peters = Bernie Madoff II !!
.
The name of the James Clavell's character is Struan not Straun. Regardlerss of what the actual email address was, this is either a gross typo that flew under the radar or the author of the article couldn't be bothered to use Google.
boom baby for peters
apparently another nut in the peter family lol
i love it when the police use their intelligence
booya to the police good job
keith biodrowski
Arrogant idiot.
He thought he was so smart in his preparation and execution of this crime. I would have loved to see his face when the police arrested him.
"Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall."
That is great police work. Perhaps they should visit San Diego and teach the police there how someone can not tie themselves up (especially a woman) and throw herself off a balcony with a rope affixed to her neck. And call it suicide. After all, that case does involve the death of a child; millionaire parents, and a dead girlfriend.
Maybe the author of the article just 'could' care less...
My heart goes out to the teen and I hope she is alright long term. I do find it troubling that the FBI arrested a man in the U.S with charges for a crime committed in Austrailia. It would seem they should have detained him for extradition but not charged him in the U.S. I guess I didn't know Austrailia was the 51st state.