A brief and chilling message was posted to a website and it read: "
RIP Jodie & Steph" just one day before the two Australian girls disappeared. One week later, they were found dead, hanging together from the same tree.
Just one day before 16-year-old friends Jodie Gater and Stephanie Gestier went missing, someone posted a final, mysterious message on their website. The message was brief and very chilling and it read: "
RIP Jodie & Steph". It was also reported that Jodie had written, on her MySpace web page: "
let Steph and me b free".
The message was posted on April 14. No one knows who posted it but it could have been by either of the girls. If not them, it had to be someone who had access to the private website for "bitchy" who was an all-girl band that the two teenagers belonged.
On the site Jodie and Stephanie talked about their fascination with the brooding "emo" subculture. With roots in the goth movement, emo is short for "emotional" and is known for its angst-ridden music and moody introspection.
The next day, the Melbourne girls told their parents that they were going shopping and then, they disappeared. Exactly one week after the girls vanished, Jodie and Stephanie were found hanged from the same tree in a national park in the Dandenong Ranges, east of Melbourne.
The girls' MySpace website records tragic spiral of depressive thoughts and what seems to be suicidal poetry. In the months leading up to their suicide, the teenagers posted message after message that were increasingly gloomy.
From last December to February Jodie posted three odes to suicide, the second one titled Suicide in the Night. It reads as follows: "It's over for me, I can't take it! I hear it over and over again, it feels like it always rains."
Stephanie's MySpace profile says: "
i dont wanna know how many friends you have cuz i dont have any anymore [sic]."
An ominous posting on the "bitchy" website that was dated March 23, says that a new song would be coming out soon but
"jodie wont be in the song though due to unfortunate events!!"
The final message known to have been posted by Jodie was to her boyfriend, next to a picture of them kissing. "I luv you sooo soo much Allan, Miss u heaps and heaps xoxoxo I will always remember u."
Last night Jodie's father warned parents to spend time with their children and to monitor their internet use. "Love the kids, give them a great big hug every now and then, and do family things with them," Robert Gater told the radio network Austereo. "Don't let them get bottled up in a room that has a computer in it [so] that you don't see them for eight hours a day or something."
Grieving friends flooded the girls' MySpace site with messages and it appears that Stephanie's mother, Judi, logged on to the site in the early hours of the morning after the girls bodies were found.
"
You had only just turned 16," her message read. "You were always such a quiet girl who spent time listening to music and surfing the internet. There is nothing that couldn't have been sorted out. You were my only child and can never be replaced. Bye bye, my little girl."
Stephanie's mother said in her message that the day that the girls disappeared, her husband had picked up her up from the airport after Stephanie had been to visit her grandmother. After they got home, she went off with Jodie.
"
I heard later that she had been involved in a fight on a train with some other girls and had taken off with her friend, who said she was going to kill herself," she wrote.
An adolescent psychologist, Michael Carr-Gregg, feels that the girls' friends and peer group were at a much higher risk of harming themselves now. "
Their friends, their entire year level and kids at those schools in the area who are maybe struggling with personal issues; yes, they're at risk. These girls' deaths can act as a catalyst," Dr Carr-Gregg said.
George Patton is a professor of adolescent health at the Royal Children's Hospital, Melbourne. He agrees that the internet can intensify the risk of "
suicide contagion", which is a phenomenon that was first recognised in 1774 when Goethe's novel "The Sorrows of Young Werther" was published. The book featured a young man who killed himself over unrequited love. After it was published, there was a flurry of copycat suicides across Europe that led to the book being banned in Germany, Italy and Denmark.
This phenomenon is often-repeated has was also seen in Japan after the 1986 suicide of pop star Yukiko Okada. "
It's a huge issue in Japan," Professor Patton said. "We haven't seen so much of it yet in Australia. The internet is a powerful new medium where marginalised young people at the risk of suicide who might not otherwise meet are able to come into contact. It's providing content such as graphic self-harm sites which are potentially very dangerous to a lot of these young people. I think we have a real problem."
Internet suicides are still rare occurrences, however there is a dramatic increase in the trend since the first case reported in Japan in the year 2000. Hundreds more have been reported in Asia, Europe, Australia and the US.
MySpace is the world's fifth largest website, with more than 50 million members, who use it to express their feelings, often under pseudonyms, and talk to other members. It has also become a grieving place for bereaved friends and relatives of people, with impromptu, collaborative obituaries often springing into existence within hours of a death.
Dr Carr-Gregg said that it was too easy to blame suicides on a specific subculture and their emphasis on alienation and loneliness. "
It's just one risk factor. There are key protection factors in between, such as friends, family, a sense of connectedness."
Both experts said it was important for parents to communicate with teenagers.
"
Don't let them disappear behind this emotional firewall called MSN [the chat network]," Dr Carr-Gregg said.
Upwey High's principal, Greg Holman says that the school that the two girls attended in Melbourne was devastated and students were being offered counselling.
