Couple admit to sex scam
NICHOLE MONROE BELL Staff Writer Charlotte Observer

FORT MILL, S.C. - The plan was unconventional yet simple: Girlfriend will have sex for money, and boyfriend will hide in the closet to make sure she doesn't get hurt.

But, prosecutors say, Joseph Dunlap and Brenda Jane Smith didn't leave it at that.

Over about six months, the Fort Mill couple's simple plan evolved into an elaborate scam in which they blackmailed married men who were straying from their spouses, Assistant Solicitor Willy Thompson said.

The couple scammed as many as 40 men, racking up between $800 and $1,000 from each of the victims, who hailed from four states, Thompson said.

Dunlap, 36, pleaded guilty this week to blackmail, conspiracy and kidnapping in the case. Smith, 31, pleaded guilty to attempted armed robbery, blackmail and kidnapping. They are scheduled to be sentenced next week. The two are in jail awaiting sentencing. Their lawyers could not be reached for comment Thursday.

Smith told prosecutors the caper began several months ago. Smith, a former factory worker, met the men over phone chat lines. They'd strike a deal, the customers would pay in advance and then show up at the couple's Fort Mill home to complete the transaction.

At first, Dunlap hid in the bedroom closet to make sure none of the customers got violent. That's how it worked for a while. But then they had a thought.

What if they could keep the dough and skip the sex?

Because the men were paying in advance, 5-foot-10, 270-pound Dunlap could burst out of the closet and scare them off before the men got what they came for, Thompson said.

It worked. Then another brainstorm.

The couple figured out they could get even more money if they blackmailed the married men. Single men who couldn't be blackmailed were threatened with a beating, Thompson said.

He said Smith lured some men with the promise of free sex, then she and Dunlap extorted money from them once they got in the bedroom.

"He'd come out with a bat and a knife, then they'd take pictures of the men naked," Thompson said. "They kept a whole (record) book on this thing."

Thompson said the book contains about 40 names, along with such notations as "big spender" and "Charlotte lawyer." One man even arranged a blackmail payment plan of $200 a month for five months, Thompson said.

Dunlap and Smith also recorded driver's license information, home phone numbers, spouse names and car descriptions of their victims. All the pictures and information would be used to expose the men if they didn't cooperate, he said. The men were from as close as Rock Hill, and as far away as Virginia and Georgia.

Fort Mill police Detective Bryan Zachary said officers initially became aware of the case in early May when they received a phone call from someone who saw a bat-wielding man chasing another man down the street near the couple's home. When questioned by police, Dunlap and Smith said nothing had happened and there were no charges filed.

Police caught up with Dunlap and Smith later that month, when the couple took a man to a Fort Mill bank to withdraw money, Zachary said. The man passed a note to the teller asking for help, and Fort Mill police responded.

The man told officers he was being blackmailed. The officers, who recognized the couple from the baseball bat incident, didn't doubt the man's story, Zachary said. They arrested the couple in the bank parking lot.

Dunlap pleaded guilty Tuesday during the second day of his trial. In return for the plea, prosecutors dropped armed robbery and a weapons charge against him. He faces up to 45 years in prison.

Smith had previously pleaded guilty and was planning to testify against Dunlap, in exchange for a possible lighter sentence. Smith faces up to 35 years in prison.

'Stupidity' author caught soliciting minor online
By Antigone Barton, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

LANTANA -- James F. Welles wrote the book on stupidity -- two, in fact -- and then he proved he knew what he was talking about, police say.

The 61-year-old author of The Story of Stupidity and Understanding Stupidity had written extensively about the dumb moves people make, so when he made a date with a 15-year-old girl he met over the Internet, he tried to be cautious.

"We can't be lovey-dovey in public," the stupidity expert explained to his new young friend. "Bottom line, I'm committing a crime."

She could call him "Dad" when they met at a Denny's in Lantana, said Welles, who also has a Ph.D in biology. Then they could go to his car and have sex, he suggested -- but backed away from that plan when he realized his windows were not tinted enough to ensure privacy.

In any case, the date fell apart Friday evening when he was greeted at Denny's by two uniformed police officers.

For the last three weeks the author had been corresponding, in increasingly explicit terms, not with a teenage girl but with a 40-year-old male detective, going slightly gray at the temples, sitting in an office at the Lantana Police Department.

The relationship began in an Internet chat room, Detective Todd Dwyer said Thursday.

Dwyer, who has arrested six other men since April on charges of soliciting children for sex through the Internet, isn't sure which chat room it was -- he goes to a lot of different ones: " 'I love older men,' 'men and boys,' " he tosses off, "special interests."

Soon Dwyer, who had logged on as a teenage girl, got an instant message from Welles, who asked for a description.

"I was just average, 5-foot 4-inches, about 118 pounds," the detective said. "I didn't make myself a knockout or anything like that."

"He went on to say he would like to meet me to coach me in tennis, tutor me in biology or give me singing lessons," Dwyer wrote in his arrest report. "Welles gradually worked his way from coach/tutor to a boyfriend/girlfriend relationship." But, Dwyer noted, Welles, who has a condo in Pompano Beach, remained concerned "about how we would be seen in public."

On the other hand, Welles figured out a bright side to their supposed age difference: They would escape notice because no one would believe the two could be attracted to each other.

It took about three weeks to get to the point he was willing to commit a crime, Dwyer said.

In the meantime, he bragged to his new friend about his work, directing Dwyer to www.stupidity.com, which touts his The Story of Stupidity, subtitled A History of Western Idiocy From The Days of Greece To The Moment You Saw This Book. A link on that Web site takes a visitor to the table of contents for the book. Chapters include Greek Stupidity, Roman Stupidity, Medieval Stupidity, Stupidity Reborn, Stupidity Reformed, Reasonable Stupidity, Enlightened Stupidity, Industrial Stupidity and The Age of Arrogance.

"Unfortunately," a passage in that last chapter ponders, "the arrogance inherent in this 'We can do anything' attitude came to characterize the general stupidity of our age and contributed to the monumental problems we have created for ourselves."

Still, Welles continued to fret over how he and his new acquaintance would behave in public when they met, the detective said.

It was Dwyer who suggested he could simply pose as "Dad."

"That's a great plan!" he said Welles responded.

Welles was spotted speeding more than 80 miles an hour, zig-zagging through traffic on I-95 to his date Friday evening, according to the arrest report.

Instead, he wound up at the Lantana police station, where he gave a taped statement to police, saying he knew it was wrong to have sex with a minor, but that was what he had hoped to do. He likes girls under 18, he told police.

"He was always aware this could be a set up," Dwyer said. Welles, who had concluded in his 1988 book that "stupidity is a necessary evil," worried in his Internet messages about "the state of Florida looming in the background."

"Yep," Dwyer agreed, it did seem kind of stupid for him to go ahead with the plan, anyway. "He just has no common sense, I guess."

Or, as Welles put it, in the epilogue to The Story of Stupidity: "... our schemas define the way we perceive and interact with our environment while preventing us from learning more about it and ourselves."