Girl Scout Robber Stefanie Woods: Sociopath? Or Helpless Victim Of The Terrible Disease Of Painkiller Addiciton?

Stefanie Woods is a photogenic 18-year-old whose crime spree has captivated idyllic Palm Beach. If Law & Order taught me anything it's that she's also a sociopath. But see if you think I'm giving humanity too much credit: it all started when Woods, a part-time model, started chatting up a nine-year-old Girl Scout selling cookies outside a Wynn Dixie. Then she had a friend grab the kid's envelope of $168 and ran back to her car. (This crime was convicted as petty theft and has been referred to in media reports as a "ripoff" but I am pretty sure there are states in which you'd call it "robbery," especially if her name had been so curiously spelled by a non-Caucasian parent, but whatevs.) Okay, then she came back to the same grocery store, and bragged about what she'd pulled off. Then she gave the finger to news cameras. She declared her lack of remorse before a camera. More »

Megan Meier: Just Your Average, Small Dog-Loving, Depressed, Bipolar, A.D.D. Suburban Babi

The New Yorker becomes the latest media outlet to reexamine the Megan Meier suicide this week, and despite this topic not exactly being underexposed, it's a thoughtful, texture-rich story about a girl who sounds so insanely normal you sorta wonder how the fuck you would go about raising yourself as a teenager. (Ooooh, answer: stealing your kids' mood-altering meds, duh.) Not innately insecure/nerdy/un-self-confident, Megan was a daddy's-little-tomboy (she fished, threw frogs, etc.) who had a sassy attitude tempered by a very kind streak — "for years she had served as the self-appointed guardian of a blind boy at her school, leading him through the hallways between classes." But her angst over her chunky legs began in kindergarten, and by middle school she was taking Celexa, Concerta and Geodon (a bipolar disorder drug.) More »

The Suicide That Proved We Are Still A Nation Capable Of "Shock"

In the 13 days since we first heard word of the case of Lori Drew, the mother whose Myspace hoax drove 13-year-old Megan Meier to suicide, pretty much every major news outlet seems to have covered — including Doctor Drew himself, who appeared pretty disgusted by the whole thing on Monday night's Anderson Cooper 360. Today the New York Times weighed in, and it quickly shot to the top of the newspaper's Most Emailed list. The story itself hasn't gotten much more complicated since — Megan had been fighting with her formerly close friend; she switched schools and cut off the friendship; the friend's mother set up a fake MySpace account under the guise of a cute boy named Josh and went to work befriending Megan only to suddenly de-friend her with random assertions that she was a "shitty person" without whom the world would be a better place; it all checks out; it all ended up being in a police-penned account Lori Drew herself gave an officer. What has changed since the world learned about the story, according to the Riverfront Times, are the lives of Curt and Lori Drew: More »

The Megan Meier Police Report: There Are (Almost) No Words

The Smoking Gun has finally unearthed the Megan Meier police report, which is to say, it unearthed the police report filed by one Lori Drew, in response to the "hostility" and "tension" she felt in her suburban St. Louis community after Meier, her 13-year neighbor, hung herself in the closet in despair over having lost the affections of a 16-year-old suitor on MySpace and everyone found out that the 16-year old was actually an elaborate hoax cooked up by Lori Drew to fuck with her. The record states: "Drew wished the current tension in the neighborhood be documented in case any of her property is damaged." Even though it's a police report, you can tell from the way it's worded that reporting officer Edwin Lutz is thinking, "Lady, you have got to be smoking something to come complaining to me." More »

"Megan Died Never Knowing This Young Man Didn't Exist"

The story of Megan Meier, the 13-year-old who killed herself after being abruptly dissed by a MySpace suitor who turned out to be the sick creation of her ex-friend's mother, has hit the national news circuit full-force. Friday's Anderson Cooper 360 brought us footage of her MySpace profile — "Wait for the one who turns to his friends and says, 'that's her'," reads the headline — and above the parents tell Matt Lauer how it all happened on Today. The story also made GMA and The Morning Show, but no one as yet has named the mom who masterminded the sadistic hoax on TV — though above Megan's mom says the woman "asked me to stop" after the initial newspaper story ran last week, because pretty much everyone in town knows who they are. (You can even make out their names on a police report shown on the CNN clip.) "I flick 'em off whenever I see 'em," the Meiers' next-door neighbor tells the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. More »

Are The Parents Who MySpace-Tormented Megan Meier Into Killing Herself Ready To Atone? Um...

This is Megan Meier, who is now dead. She hung herself at age thirteen after the parents of one of her former classmates used MySpace to create a character named Josh Evans, who spent a few months flirting with her before abruptly turning on her and calling her a "slut" and a "bad person" etc. etc. And while we generally try to do this job without actually performing what might be termed "fact checking" — you know, because sometimes actually talking to people makes them harder to villify! — we felt compelled, in this case, to attempt to call Curt and Lori Drew, the Missouri couple fingered by internet sleuths as the perpetrator of the torment. Not surprisingly, the phone rang and rang. More »

If You Can Handle A Really Depressing Teen Suicide Story Right Now...

These people are Tina and Ron Meier of Dardenne Prairie, Missouri. If you hadn't heard of them yet, they used to have a daughter named Megan. Megan was thirteen, awkward and overweight, though everything had been picking up since she'd lost 25 pounds and met "Josh," a sixteen-year-old by on MySpace. Josh was hot, and friendly, and told Megan she was pretty without asking for her number or her measurements or anything sleazy like that, so Ron and Tina allowed their daughter to add him as her friend. And all was well, until right around Megan's fourteenth birthday she got a message from "Josh" saying he'd heard she was a not a good person. Then one day, Megan spent the whole day frantically alternating between posting MySpace messages and running around the house sobbing. Tina and Ron didn't know what was going on until Megan ran upstairs to her bedroom, and fifteen minutes later, Tina followed. Turned out she knew how to hang herself. More »