FBI Encryption Expert May Have Found Confession.
APBnews.com, Dec. 20, 2000
GREAT FALLS, Mont. (APBnews.com) -- On Christmas Day four years ago, Nathaniel Bar-Jonah visited his neighbors for dinner, carrying with him a plate of spaghetti with a peculiar tasting sauce chock full of an unfamiliar kind of meat, authorities said.
Bar-Jonah, a convicted pedophile and dangerous sexual predator from Massachusetts who had concealed his past from his neighbors in Great Falls, convinced his dinner companions that they were eating venison that he had hunted himself, said Cascade County prosecutor Brant Light.
But authorities now believe the truth was far more horrible. They suspect that the meal Bar-Jonah served was actually the flesh of a young boy whom he sexually assaulted, killed and then butchered and cooked, Light said. They believe he may have baked the boy's remains into pies and stews and served it to friends and neighbors on more than one occasion, authorities said.
CHARGED WITH MURDER
Now, after spending a year behind bars on unrelated charges, Bar-Jonah has been charged with murder in the death of 8-year-old Zachary Ramsay, who vanished while walking to school in 1996. The boy's body has never been found, Light said.
But an FBI encryption expert, who stumbled across a coded message among Bar-Jonah's papers earlier this year, found what authorities now believe was a kind of confession of cannibalism, Light said.
According to court documents, the carefully encoded messages contained graphic phrases, including "Lunch is Served on the Patio with Roasted Child," "Roasted Kid," and "Little Boy Stew."
In other writings, the 44-year-old Bar-Jonah, formerly known as David Brown, exalted the virtues of his favorite meal, "gay blade," Light said, a chilling statement that has led authorities to suspect that Zachary may not have been the first of Bar-Jonah's victims to meet a violent end -- or to have been consumed by his killer.
"This could just be the tip of the iceberg," Light said.
INVESTIGATORS FOUND BONES
Investigators say they are all but certain that Bar-Jonah has killed more than once. While excavating beneath the dirt floor of his basement last summer, investigators found the bones of another boy, still unidentified, but believed to have been between 9 and 14 years old when he died.
Authorities have still not determined how, or precisely when, the boy died, and Bar-Jonah has not yet been charged in connection with the boy's remains, Light said. But authorities say privately they are convinced that he was slain and fear that he, too, was eaten.
STRANGE MAN IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD
Authorities in this wide-open section of Montana first learned that Bar-Jonah might be a monster in 1999, three years after Zachary had disappeared, Light said.
Parents at a local elementary school had complained about a strange man lurking in the neighborhood in the mornings when they dropped their children off at school, authorities said.
Police approached the man and found that he was carrying a badge and a police jacket -- all apparently calculated to make him look like a police officer -- and, most frightening of all, a stun gun capable of rendering young boys unconscious, according to court documents.
It turned out that police had stumbled across a dangerous sexual predator who was using his favorite ploy, posing as a police officer to intimidate his victims, authorities said.
It was a technique that Bar-Jonah had been using for more than 20 years. In his home state of Massachusetts, Bar-Jonah had been convicted three times since 1976 of sexually assaulting and kidnapping young boys, and in each case he masqueraded as a police officer, court records show.
FANTASIES OF CANNIBALISM
Before he was released from a Massachusetts prison in 1991, authorities declared him a dangerous and repetitive sex offender. In a horrifying preview of his violent urges, a case worker and a psychiatrist in Massachusetts each wrote more than a decade ago that Bar-Jonah had fantasies of cannibalism and had once wondered aloud to his case worker about what human flesh would taste like, according to court papers.
But word of that designation, and the warning that should have accompanied it, never found its way to Montana, where Bar-Jonah had moved in 1991, reportedly to be close to his mother and brother.
Almost immediately after his arrival, Bar-Jonah allegedly began surrounding himself with children. He held garage sales at his home, specializing in the kinds of toys and games that young boys would find attractive. He became active in a local church group.
He began to again pose as a police officer to lure young victims, almost always targeting young black or Native American boys because he allegedly believed that they and their families would be less likely to report his activities to the real authorities, Light said.
BOY HUNG BY NECK
Not long after his arrest in 1999 for posing as a police officer, investigators got their first glimpse of how dangerous Bar-Jonah might be, Light said.
Encouraged by media reports, a young Native American boy came forward to report that he and two of his friends had been lured to Bar-Jonah's home, where he had been assaulted, hanged him by the neck until he was barely conscious and masturbated by Bar-Jonah, authorities said. Bar-Jonah is scheduled to go on trial for that assault next month.
The depravity of that alleged crime, the fact that the boys, like Zachary, were minorities, and the discovery of records describing in detail Bar-Jonah's criminal history prompted investigators to search for a link between Bar-Jonah and the missing boy, court records show.
PROSECUTORS GATHER EVIDENCE
Authorities have since found witnesses who place Bar-Jonah in the area where Zachary was last seen at about the time he disappeared.
Authorities acknowledge that it will be tough to prove that Bar-Jonah butchered and served the young boy's body. They say there is little physical evidence beyond the encrypted messages he wrote to himself and the recollections of his neighbors.
But authorities say they are convinced that they have enough evidence to convict Bar-Jonah, and prosecutors are reviewing the case to determine whether they will seek the death penalty, Light said.
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Seamus McGraw is an APBnews.com senior writer