January/February 1997 Events

Date

Incident

Wednesday, January 1, 1997 Dick Coward posted a message to atl.general from blanca.lavaca.com advertising Hillyard's new home page at http://www.afn.org/~afn30721. Fingering afn30721@afn.org showed that it was another of Hillyard's accounts and that his email was forwarded to hillyard@vaca.net. The news server blanca.lavaca.com was owned by vaca.net, so it wasn't exactly a surprise. The page was a very obvious attempt by Hillyard to present himself as a fine, upstanding citizen, claiming to be "very active with" various volunteer organizations, and an officer of most of them. The page was so full of verifiable lies that the details require another page.

Hillyard gave away his true nature and intent by hiding the words "Cynthia Smathers is a Sicko, a bitch, and a very unstable individual!" in a text at the bottom of the page. Hiding words in a tag set to display in the same color as the page background is a well-known trick to get whatever text is in the tags to show up in the various web search engines--so anyone searching for information about me would instead find this page from Hillyard. (You can see the "hidden" text on his page by using the "view source" function of your browser).

By Thursday, January 2, 1997 several people pointed out the hidden text in atl.general. Hillyard first removed that text, then took the site down by Monday, January 6.
Wednesday, January 8, 1997 Hillyard was finally arraigned. He pled not guilty and requested a jury trial. The trial was originally scheduled for March, but kept getting postponed due to old cases clogging up the judge's calendar.
Wednesday and Thursday, January 29-30, 1997 Hillyard spams more newsgroups from j3com.net and worldnet.
Sunday, February 16, 1997 Hillyard spams more newsgroups from his applied.net account. One of these messages showed "avstlc.applied.net" in the headers - Hillyard's employer was AVS. This account might be related to his employer in some way.
Sunday, February 23, 1997 Hillyard popped up in atl.general again, using the name "Jerry Lisler" and posting from a free account at j3com.net. Hillyard had been spamming from j3com.net in January, and in April further evidence proved it was one of Hillyard's aliases.
Monday, February 24, 1997 Hillyard spams more newsgroups from his WorldNet account.

 

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