News

Telephone Terrorist

He duped SWAT teams into raiding more than 100 homes nationwide.

By Rebecca Meiser 

Midnight, June 12, 2006. A 911 dispatcher in northern Texas receives an urgent call.

A man calling himself James Proulx says he just killed his family. He has more hostages and is carrying a loaded AK-47. If police don't want anyone else to die, they need to hand over $50,000 and arrange transportation across the Mexican border.

Proulx hangs up the phone.

Lieutenant Mike Gaudet tracks down the address of the call — a trailer home in rural Alvarado owned by James Proulx.

Officers from the surrounding vicinities rush to the scene. The lights in Proulx's home are off, and the place looks peaceful. But that means nothing, Gaudet knows. Proulx could be hiding. Or already dead. Anything is possible.

SWAT officers, looking like beetles in their bulky bulletproof vests, wake the neighbors and shepherd them to a high-school gym.

Negotiators throw a phone through an open window. Hello, James, a mediator says in a calm, steady voice. This is the police and we want to talk.

Outside, the SWAT team officers have their guns drawn, the silence leaving them edgy.

Finally, a man's voice echoes over the phone. He sounds befuddled and scared. He doesn't know why police are here. Only he and his wife are home. He agrees to come out slowly, hands in the air.

The man who emerges is old, tired, and wearing his undershirt. His eyes struggle to adjust to the light. "Why are you here?" he keeps asking. "What's going on?" He's confused, then angry, as he's shoved like a misbehaving dog into the back of a squad car.

The SWAT team storms the house, guns drawn, where they find . . .

Nothing. No blood. No bodies. No guns. Only Proulx's wife, trembling in the cold Texas air.

Gaudet slams his foot down in disgust.

That night, the only real victim is the town of Alvarado, which sent its entire police force to the Proulx home. "We took all our resources, all of our people out to a place they didn't need to be," Gaudet says. "God forbid something should have happened somewhere else. We were all here."

Meanwhile, in five states around the country, six social recluses gather on a phone chat line to congratulate themselves on another perfect hoax.

Stuart Rosoff often felt that life had granted him a raw hand, that God had delivered a deck without any kings or aces. So he spent most of his life feeling the world owed him reparations.

He was now 32, perpetually unemployed, living with his girlfriend and their young son. When he ran out of money, which was often, he'd appeal to his parents for help.

But Mom and Dad couldn't save Rosoff from himself. In 1999, he was driving through Brecksville with his girlfriend, Katherine Whisler, when police lights flashed. He was doing 80 in a 35-mph zone.

Instead of stopping, he took police on a high-speed car chase through residential neighborhoods. It ended with Rosoff's car slamming into a utility pole. Whisler was taken to the hospital with massive injuries.

Rosoff fled, he would claim, because he thought that police were hijackers in disguise. But in pastoral Brecksville, this is not an assumption easily made or an excuse easily believed. Judge Eileen Gallagher certainly wasn't convinced. She sentenced him to three years in prison.

But a man who struggled even in a world without bars wasn't suited to a cell. Rosoff sent dozens of letters to Gallagher, pleading for leniency. "I am taking auto mechanics class in prison, I am staying out of trouble," he wrote from prison. "I have no tickets and never been to the hole . . . I am going to get a job as an interior painter if I were released. I would also like to take some accounting classes at Cuyahoga Community College . . . I am very remorseful. Please give me a chance."

When he got no response, he tried again: "I have paid my court costs in full. I have the ability to make it on the outside, and follow all the rules of probation down to the letter. I have a positive attitude . . . I blame nobody but myself for having to go to prison. I request that a hearing be set up for a motion to be let out early on probation."

But when Gallagher didn't write back, Rosoff began to blame with a vengeance. His later letters seem as if he's stabbing the paper with his pencil, the words slanted and scrawled angrily across the page.

"I am a very decent human being that has been degraded to some kind of animal, having to be locked up, and around these people who are the lowest forms of human life to walk on this earth," he wrote in 2002. "I have been robbed in here, when I wrote you and told you did you celebrate that with detectives? I am suffering here if that makes you happy your honor."

When Rosoff was finally released that year, his plans of becoming a painter, a mechanic, an accountant disintegrated. He was estranged from Whisler, and the courts, worried about his temper, restricted access to his son. His parents, big names in Cleveland's Jewish community, broke off communication. Rosoff spent his nights on other people's couches.

It was at this time that he was introduced to phone chat lines. Much like internet chat rooms, they're places where people from across the globe can mingle. They tend to attract the lonely, the bored, those who struggle to blend into the face-to-face world. Here, you can be anyone, adopting whatever persona suits you. Rosoff became "Michael Knight." And he would soon become the most feared man on the phone line.

In the 1990s, chat lines began advertising their services in the back pages of periodicals like TV Guide and Scene. "Lonely?" the ads would ask. "Call this number and chat for free!" Sometimes services were local. Others required a long-distance call.

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