The King of Hearts is missing. His status on his MySpace profile says he was "tired of waiting."Roger Lee Dillon, a 22-year-old resident of Youngstown, Ohio, and his 24-year-old girlfriend Nicole N. Boyd have not been seen since it was discovered on November 27 that more than $7 million was missing from Dillon's place of employment, AT Systems International in Liberty, OH. Dillon's vehicle, a purple pickup truck, was found late Thursday, but he, his girl and the $7.4 million are still in the wind.
The FBI says that neither Dillon nor his girlfriend are considered fugitives. Possibly armed and dangerous, and information leading to their whereabouts is worth $100,000.00 to Dillon's (no doubt former) employer, but... they're
not fugitives.
Alarms that could only be disabled by employees were off when the money was taken, as was video surveillance, but still --
neither Dillon nor
Nicole Boyd are fugitives, at the moment.
An FBI Agent spoke to Fox News about the case, and indicated that the Feds were indeed reviewing
Dillon's MySpace profile for clues about the crime.
Could clues be found in Roger Dillon's "About Me" statement?
I am not for this world; I enjoy every moment for what it is and not what it could be. I find great amusement in consequences for my actions. I don't care what you think about it. Understanding it is not as important as enjoying it. Nothing makes me truly angry, there is no more room in this world for true anger. Nothing makes me truly sad, there are people out there who have a much better reason to be sad, I don't insult them by pretending I have it bad. True happiness is going for it, to hell with what society says. I am always striving now, though in secret and only one person knows; but she'll keep our secret. I am in love, I have always been. I wake up every morning with a smile, till I realize that I have to go to work. I am not you, I could never be. I am not for this world, this world is for me.
Well... yeah, maybe. The "she'll keep our secret" statement is rather hard to ignore. As are the final three sentences, beginning with "I wake up every morning with a smile, till I realize I have to go to work..."
Then there is the silly online quiz result Roger chose to post below his blurb quoted above. The quiz asked, "which deadly sin do you represent?" Roger's was "Greed."
Quizzes like that reveal nothing about a person's internal workings. When posted on a profile, they sometimes reveal conscious intent. Such quizzes are usually a few generic questions long, and anyone with a reasonable amount of intuition can skew the results towards what they want. Roger's quiz result could have been posted as a consciously chosen message. A bit of a middle finger to the world. If he indeed had something to do with all that missing money, that is.
In
the article about this robbery posted on FoxNews.com, FBI Agent Scott Wilson was quoted in reference to Dillon's MySpace: "We're certainly looking at some of the comments on that MySpace page to see if we can develop further leads from that..."
Comments left by others for Roger Dillon do, at first blush, look strange. All the comments from Nicole Boyd are odd, consisting sometimes of bizarre little cartoons that come from a so-called "emo" collection. They are funny in an Edward Gorey-ish way, but strange choices considering what Roger Dillon said on his profile about "emo" music. Dillon wrote that he liked "Anything you can throw at me really. Jazz, hiphop, trance, and rock are what I listen to with regularity," but, "I do my best to hate emo and it's entire subculture..."
Then there were comments left by other friends. Particularly cryptic comments from a friend named Jared to Roger might raise suspicion. A quote from one left by Jared on September 25 this year might set digital tongues on a true crime message board a-wagging:
Hey: the operation we discussed last week is a go. I know you hate me but alas, there is no recourse. Not lightly do I make this decision. So I imagine I can give you the mental materials necessary and you can make it happen next Friday, sound good?
I can imagine the questions -- an abortive plot to rob Roger's employer as early as September? Is Jared in custody right now?
No. Probably not.
Jared and Roger, and most of their MySpace friends, were into the role-playing game
Dungeons and Dragons. Roger said as much on his profile in his "General Interests":
Life and all things in it. I enjoy Dnd and always appreciate the chance to slay my friends in some Halo, or any other game which involves moderate-obscene amounts of violence.
At one point, Jared ran a MySpace Group (a message board hosted by MySpace) for an ongoing session among the friends titled "
White Gate Campaign." On October 1 he posted a message titled "
Farewell my dear storytellers," in which he said, "So if you didn't know, you should by now, that Roger is taking over the game. He'll be taking it in a new and exciting direction and I'm sure you'll all love it. All 4 of you..."
This may have been Roger Dillon's idea of a "new and exciting direction" -- "
Golden Muses." He'd originally called it "
Love of Death Campaign," but apparently had a change of heart.
A look at most of Dillon's posts on "Golden Muses" might be indecipherable to someone with no knowledge of D & D, but you could still tell that he'd done a lot of work, put a lot of thought into the endeavor.
All of Dillon's posts still on the board were made in November -- on the 15th, several on the 17th, and one on the 20th. His first
short bulletin posted on the 15th was potentially interesting because it mentioned a date -- emphasis has been added:
Okee, sat nov 24, 3pm-3pm, 21st lvl start.
240k gold. more for good backstories posted on here
world is new acadia,10 months after Vol's ascension into divinity.
Any character you wanna play is fine, just be aware of no faction or gestalt...
It seems a little odd that Dillon might be committed enough to his game and his friends playing the game with him to run a 12-hour session just 3 days before allegedly stealing more than 7 million dollars.
It's the sort of seemingly inconsequential thing that actually could raise some big questions.
If Roger Dillon and Nicole Boyd had a plan for the 27th and afterwards, were they just keeping up appearances until then?
If Dillon and Ms. Boyd are innocent of wrongdoing (like the FBI said, they are
not fugitives) then what did Dillon confront at work that day, and how did Nicole become involved? Reports indicate she didn't work at the same place.
Another post by Dillon to the same group could feed into the true crime/cyber-sleuthing enthusiast's tendency to make connections sometimes where none actually exist. We attribute genius qualities to criminals who are actually pretty shallow and stupid, much of the time. Dillon's "Afterstory" for his new campaign might read like an allegory, if you look at it just so. This passage, for example, could easily be interpreted as some sort of subconscious reference to Dillon and his girlfriend (redacted for length):
Calypso[, a] shadeling of little known origin [...] was the creator of an entirely new school of magic, Mimicry [...] In order to grant this girl the power to destroy the threat she was given the locations of the most ancient of Acadian artifacts, the Golden Muses. These four golden spheres, when gathered would grant one wish, no matter how powerful to the bearer, so the legends claimed.
Only one known mortal was ever known to use them; a shadeling rake known as Shadelo. A former lover of Hexis and rival to her lover Dav, he desired the power to win her over to himself, and thought the best way to do this was to murder his rival. [...]
so he spent three years gathering the information and tracking down these orbs and slaying thier gaurdians. His wish, to be the most powerful mortal alive...
In spite of that "most powerful mortal alive" bit (money = power) Dillon's story was probably exactly what it looked like, though -- just a framework for the next D & D campaign.
That's the trickiest part about "cyber-sleuthing" anything. Knowing when your imagination has taken over "the story" and wandered away from what you actually see in front of you.
Roger Dillon was 22, working at a low-end job, from the sound of it. He was a reasonably smart guy who had his D & D and his girlfriend, but otherwise, it seems like there wasn't much more for him out there. Did he see golden sunlight and a fantasy of leisurely freedom being locked away in those safes at work one too many times? Or were the circumstances surrounding his disappearance much more complicated, still unfathomable to anyone on the outside looking in?
If he and Nicole took the money and ran with it, did they have a plan, or are they even now trying to find a safe place to land? A place where they can sit on a bed stuffed with money and watch the surf come in?
Chances are, the answer will come sooner rather than later. And then for Roger -- and maybe Nicole -- the fantasy dragons will be gone. There will only be the echo of the dungeon.
UPDATE, 11/30/07It's official --
Roger Lee Dillon and
Nicole Boyd are fugitives, now. From the FBI:
Nicole Boyd and Roger Lee Dillon are wanted for their alleged involvement in the theft of approximately $7 million in cash and checks from an armored carrier facility in Liberty, Ohio, on November 26, 2007. Dillon was an employee of the business at the time of the robbery and has not shown up for work since the robbery. On November 30, 2007, a federal arrest warrant was issued by the United States District Court, Northern District of Ohio, after Boyd was charged with aiding and abetting the commission of bank larceny...
Roger and Nicole will never earn all the
experience points they'd need to dodge federal prison if they are caught with the missing money in their hands.
UPDATE, 12/01/07Now that he and his girlfriend
have been arrested, Roger Lee Dillon may not be too amused with the consequences of his actions. A quote from the AP:
Roger Lee Dillon, 22, and his girlfriend, Nicole N. Boyd, 24, were arrested early Saturday morning outside Beckley [West Virginia], FBI Special Agent Scott Wilson said.
Agents recovered "a large sum of money" at the time of the arrests, Wilson said. The FBI planned to hold a news conference on Monday, Wilson said...
Sources:
FBI;
FoxNews.com;
The AP.
