THE ONLINE PREDATOR
delaide was the scene for the world’s first ever murder by an online predator, and again the case shot the city into international headlines for all the wrong reasons. It started in 2006 when 14-yearold Carly Ryan thought she had met her dream boyfriend
‘WE DIDN’T KNOW WHAT THE INTERNET WAS CAPABLE OF. NO-ONE WAS PREPARED FOR IT’
Amusician from Melbourne.
Over the next 18 months Carly fell for this boy who was in fact the creation of 50-year old paedophile Garry Newman.‘we didn’t know what the internet was capable of,’ Sean says. ‘Nobody thought an internet chatroom could be a murder weapon. No-one was prepared for it.’
Newman, however, had a very clear plan. Meeting up with Carly, he tried to seduce her as Brandon’s father ‘Shane’ and when she rejected his advances he vowed to ‘fix up’ Carly. In February 2007 Newman lured Carly to a remote spot in South Australia. There he beat her, held her face in the sand, suffocating her and then threw her into the water to drown.
Eleven days after her death police pounced on Newman, finding him chatting online to another teenager in Perth. He had 200 different online personas.
‘The question I’ve always had is how many girls that age had an online boyfriend who disappeared [when Newman was taken into custody]’ Sean asks. ‘We know he’d done it twice before and he was preparing for a fourth time.’
Newman was jailed for life and Carly’s mum, Sonya continues to campaign for internet safety.
‘Hero is the one word I have to describe Sonya,’ Sean says. ‘To take the greatest trauma a parent can experience and use it as motivation to protect other children is heroic. She is one of the most incredible people I have had the fortune to get to know.’