Chatting with the Enemy

Katherine Tarbox logged on to America Online looking for a friend. Instead, she met a pedophile

With her bubbly laugh and serene blue eyes, it's hard to imagine that anything terrible ever happened to Katherine Tarbox. "I wouldn't trade my life for anything," says the round-faced 18-year-old as she sweeps her wispy blond hair off her cheek and snuggles into the dark green living-room sofa in her home in New Canaan, Conn. Yet this is the same girl who, at the age of 14, found herself alone in a Texas hotel room with a 41-year-old pedophile she first met in an AOL chat room about six months earlier. As he groped her breast, she tried to pull...

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