Agent 47695 The Manchester Teen Who Incited A Murder

0:00 A teenage boy in Greater Manchester starts getting messages from a woman who says she works for British intelligence. She types everything in capital letters, and she has very big plans for him. She also has this odd habit of spelling the word maybe as "MYBYE". Keep that in mind because it's about to solve an attempted murder. Mark is a teenager in Greater Manchester, and by every account he's a pretty ordinary kid.

1:15 Mark started spending time early in 2003 in an online chat room built for Manchester teenagers. Mark meets a girl in that chat room named Rachel. Every time Mark tries to meet her in person, the plan for some reason falls through.

1:56 He's also pretty withdrawn, and he'll disappear into his bedroom for days at a time. John and Mark start hanging out, like in real life. Then a new name starts showing up in the chat room, a guy called Kevin, who calls himself a stalker. Kevin says he has kidnapped Rachel, and he says he'll rape and kill her unless Mark performs a sexual act on his webcam. Mark is so terrified for this girl he does exactly what Kevin tells him to do. Rachel gets released, supposedly, and then she drifts out of the chat room. You can't really blame a scared kid for believing it. Meanwhile, this chat room is eating into Mark's whole life.

2:38 Mark gets up to around 12 hours a day online, and he still has that part time job. And then Janet arrives. Janet Dobinson says that she works for British intelligence, and she's a married woman in her 40s. And she tells Mark that the whole reason that she's hanging out in a Manchester teen chat room is to recruit him into MI5. Janet types absolutely everything in capital letters. And if you've ever had a boomer and two forward you a chain email in 2003, you know the energy. Janet reads like she's shouting at him from across the parking lot. And she has this other strange habit too. Janet spells the word maybe as "MY-BYE".

3:22 Janet starts giving Mark loyalty tests. She tells him John's life is in danger, because John knows the code to a secret safe at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean that only a few countries know about. That code is in John's head supposedly, and it makes him the most important person in Britain, which is why Mark has to get him out of school. Mark tells John's school that John has a dentist appointment, and it works. It's 2003, and a teenager says the word "Denist" and the door is swing open. This is well before you have to give them two forms of ID and a blood sample to check your kid out of school. The safety of the nation now hangs on a fake trip to the dentist, and the woman running the operation still hasn't found her caps lock key.

4:09 Some of Janet's tests are sexual and humiliating, and Mark does every single one of them, because by now he's in love with her. He also gets a code name. He's agent 47695. Janet gives him an abort code in case a mission gets called off. The abort code is 6969. The prosecutor told the court the whole thing played out like an internet soap opera, with every character in storyline more fantastic than the last. And then the storyline turns. Janet tells Mark that John has a brain tumor, and he has about a week to live. Janet says John needs to be put out of his misery, and if Mark won't do it, she'll lose her job and the country will be in danger.

4:55 And all of this is landing on a kid who a few months earlier was just chatting with a girl named Rachel. But he's not being asked to do it for free. His reward is enormous. Mark has promised 500,000 pounds. He's promised a gun and a meeting with the prime minister. He's promised a relationship with Janet. The married 40-something elite spy that he's fallen for. If you're a teenager in love with a spy, that list… I guess it sounds reasonable and real? I don't know, maybe I'm more skeptical. Janet asks Mark if he could stab someone. Mark says he hasn't really thought about it. Janet tells him to think, please. Mark says, "Okay."

5:36 The final order comes through on the night of June 28th. Janet warns him to avoid the CCTV cameras. She tells him to wait 20 minutes before he calls for help. She promises she'll turn up, disguised as a detective, and make sure that he does not get arrested. Mark gets a hold of a kitchen knife the next day. Then he walks with John into an alley behind a row of shops in Al Trincham. Mark stabs John twice in the chest and the stomach. Nobody sends the abort code, which in case you forgot is 6969. Some accounts say Mark waited the full 20 minutes Janet asked for, and others say he called much sooner.

6:17 I don't know which version is true, but the police did get called just before 8 that night. Mark tells them a hooded stranger stabbed his friend for no reason, and then he ran off. He describes this made-up attacker in such a precise detail that detectives believe him and they start hunting for this man that does not exist. Janet, of course, never shows up in her detective disguise. She never shows up at all. One of the wounds pierces John's kidney and tears into his liver. Doctors remove his gallbladder. He's critically ill in the hospital for a week, but he does survive. And they never mention this brain tumor that he apparently has. Police appeal for witnesses and they pull the CCTV footage from around the area.

7:00 A few days later they watch the footage from the entrance to the alley, and only two people ever walk in. Just Mark and John. They show Mark the footage, and he breaks. He admits that he did it, and then he tells them the truth about Janet and MI5. This sees the computers. There are about 58,000 lines of chat. That's a lot of reading. It takes a while to break it all down, and the analyst on the case told Vanity Fair that if you printed it all out, the stack would reach about 46,000 feet. Somebody at Greater Manchester Police had to read every line of it, including the teenage chatter about football and clothes, and girls, and whatever else they talk about.

7:42 And at first they thought they were hunting down a grown man, a predator hiding behind Janet. And then the analyst spots it. Janet spells maybe as M-Y-B-Y-E. John spells it that way too. Every character Mark trusted in that chat room was John. John built the whole thing. He built it so that Mark would kill him. Every caps lock letter that Janet ever typed came out of John's bedroom. The abort code was his to send. He never sent it. Mark could barely believe how gullible he had been. So why would a 14-year-old do this?

8:22 John's barrister told the court that it grew out of infatuation. He said John wasn't sure whether he was gay or straight, and that he'd fallen in love with his new friend. The court also heard that John was depressed. He'd fallen out with his friends at school, and things were hard at home. The court heard the plot described as an extraordinary suicide attempt. One theory, and it's only a theory, is that John believed Mark could never love him back, and this was the only ending that he could picture, and building a whole world of spies and stalkers let him stay close to Mark right up until the end. Nobody knows exactly what was going on in his head. Mark pleads guilty to attempted murder.

9:04 John pleads guilty to inciting his own murder and to perverting the course of justice. The prosecutor said that he wasn't aware of any other case in the world where somebody incited another person to murder them, and he called the case a stark warning about the internet. The judge said skilled writers of fiction would struggle to dream up a plot like this. Both boys walk out of court free, because the judge decided these weren't normal circumstances. Mark gets a two-year supervision order. John gets three years of supervision. John is banned from chat rooms, and he can only go online with an adult watching. The judge orders the boys to never contact each other ever again.

9:44 Both men are now pushing 40 years old, and there's been no public reporting of any new trouble. You can stand behind either them in a check outline and never even know it. And the whole impossible thing came apart because of the way that some lonely kid spelled "maybe." But for listening to 10-minute murder, bingeable true crime stories. Hello, I'm Joe, I'm the host, and here's an email, subject something I appreciate. Hey, Joe, I don't think people realize how much work goes into making something sound effortless. I've worked in media before, and I can tell when somebody has put thought into the pacing, writing, and editing.

10:30 Your show has that feeling. Anyway, from one media person to another, I appreciate the work. Chris and Columbia, Missouri. Chris, thank you for listening, thank you for the email, and you're right. I do try to make this sound like it is effortless, and it is 100% not effortless. More so today, though, unrelated to the writing, and the editing, and the pacing, and etc. The things that you just said, it's my voice. And if you're an OG listener, you know I go through this about two times a year, where I just sound like if a grizzly bear could talk. It's usually at the beginning of spring and the beginning of fall. And here we are, we're doing it again.

11:11 And the frustrating part is, I feel mostly fine. Like when it first started, I didn't feel that great, but now I feel completely fine other than just being stuffy and sounding like I chewed glass for breakfast. But usually it'll last, you know, like a week or so, and then it'll disappear, and then pop back up, in about six months. Alright, if you're a new listener to this podcast, make sure you do me one huge favor. And that is to subscribe where you're listening right now. If you're an OG listener, been listening for a while, I want you to do me a huge favor. That is, today, or this week sometime, tell at least one friend or family member about this podcast. I don't give you homework very often, but I'm doing that today.

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