Oregon man had been soliciting suicides for years, police say

PORTLAND — An Oregon man, who was arrested after he allegedly tried to set up a mass suicide on Valentine's Day, had been urging women to kill themselves for at least five years, officials say.

Combing through old chat-room records, investigators said they found that Gerald Krein, 26, had been enticing women across North America to commit suicide as far back as 2000, said Klamath County Sheriff Tim Evinger.

"The common theme is that these were women who were vulnerable, who were depressed. He invited them to engage in certain sexual acts with him — and then they were to hang themselves naked from a beam in his house," the sheriff said. "He was indicating in these chat groups to these women that he had a beam and that it would hold multiple people."

Krein was arrested Wednesday at his mother's mobile home in Klamath Falls in Southern Oregon. He faces charges of solicitation to commit murder, but prosecutors are expected to increase the charge to attempted manslaughter today, Evinger said.

Detectives learned of the alleged Valentine's Day plan from a woman in Ontario, Canada, who said she saw the message in a Yahoo chat room that had the words "Suicide Ideology" in the title. The chat-room participants reportedly planned to log in on Valentine's Day and commit suicide while keeping in touch over the Internet.

The woman said she became alarmed and tipped off police after reading that one of the other chat-room participants intended to kill her two children before taking her own life.

So far, investigators have tracked down four women: the woman who first came forward in Canada and three others, living in Oregon, Missouri, Virginia.

"In the Missouri and Virginia case, he was inviting them to bring their children with them," Evinger said. "It would have been four children total."

Evinger said the Valentine's Day suicide was intended to be executed over the Internet as a group but that others were intended to be one-on-one experiences.

"He had a Web cam," Evinger said.

The sheriff said he would not be surprised if someone had killed themselves as a result of Krein.

If so, the charge could increase to manslaughter instead of attempted manslaughter, Evinger said.

Chat-room records indicate that Krein solicited suicides in Texas in 2000 and that he was soliciting suicides in 2003 from his home in Sacramento, Calif., Evinger said. He had been living in his mother's mobile home for a short while. His home in Oregon before that had beams, the sheriff said.

"As our computer specialists have been going through mail groups and old chat rooms and old postings and looking at some things that are in the public domain out there, it became clear that he has a history of doing this," Evinger said.