10 Disturbing Details Surrounding Alexander Nathan Barter, Who Was Arrested For Trying To Kill And Cannibalize An Underage Girl

6 /10 Thanks, Officers

It has later been reported that, far from denying the crimes or being angry at having fallen into a trap, the criminal thanked the officers: he confessed all of the crimes of which he was accused and proceeded to say that he was thankful to the agents for “stopping him, because he couldn’t stop himself.”

The law enforcement officers immediately took him into custody to wait for his upcoming trial, held two years later, in 2020.

5 /10 A Good, Long Sentence

Barter received nothing less than a forty-year sentence at his trial, which will be followed by a lifetime supervised release after he is set free in 2060.

When he pleaded guilty to all the charges, Barter was granted permission to request to the court that the twenty-year-long sentences for both of his primary offenses were served concurrently.

Of course, the court later denied his request and placed the sentences to be done, making it a forty-year-long sentence in total.

4 /10 Morally Depraved And Appalling

The special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations in Houston, Mark Dawson, later stated: “In my 23-year-career in law enforcement, this is among the most morally depraved and appalling criminal conspiracies that I have come across. Without the quick and decisive actions of special… this disturbed predator would still be out there looking for potential victims to carry out his sick and demented fantasies.” This makes one wonder: how many are still out there?

3 /10 The Dark Web

To answer this, one needs only to look into where Barter tried to find a victim for his deprivation: the Dark Web.

Created from the remains of a U.S. Department of Defense project that was meant to create an anonymous space where U.S. espionage data could be shared between agents, it has later been turned into a semi-lawless, fringe space of the Internet.

Though used still, in many cases, individuals or organizations living in countries ruled by oppressive regimes that want to communicate with the world have also become a haven for crime.

Nearly half of the pages in the Dark Web are illegal, according to a study made by the research firm Terbium Labs in 2016.

2 /10 144,000

Only in the United Kingdom, for example, a 2019 report of the U.K.’s National Crime Agency shared by the British Newspaper The Telegraph estimated that there were over 144,000 pedophiles who used the Dark Web to find satisfaction for their sick minds, all of them being involved in illegal activities of varying degrees of evil.

In the United States, the Department of Justice has already warned of a “growing epidemic of child sexual exploitation and abuse” and addressed the Barter case as one example of this trend.

1 /10 Shadow Police

But the efforts of law enforcement agencies over the world continue unabashed.

In 2019, a year after Barter was detained, the combined police departments of the United Kingdom, the US, Germany, and South Korea contributed to the downfall of one of the largest child pornography marketplaces of the Dark Web, which led to the arrest of 337 suspects in 38 countries around the world.

The struggle continues for the ultimate goal of a world without new advertisements like the one that Alexander Nathan Barter placed online, the evening of that day of October 2018.