TRAGIC last words of MySpace SUICIDE girls

[KiwiCoromandel]

A DAY before they went missing, someone posted a final, mysterious message on the website of 16-year-old friends Jodie Gater and Stephanie Gestier. Brief and chilling, it read: "RIP Jodie & Steph".

It was posted on April 14, either by one of the girls or someone who had access to the private website for "bitchy", the all-girl band to which the two teenagers belonged. On the site Jodie and Stephanie talked about their fascination with the brooding "emo" subculture. With roots in the goth movement, emo is short for "emotional" and is known for its angst-ridden music and moody introspection.

The Melbourne girls vanished the next day after telling their parents they were going shopping. Now police are investigating the final message, discovered after Jodie and Stephanie were found hanged from the same tree in a national park in the Dandenong Ranges, east of Melbourne, on Sunday.

But the girls' MySpace website records with tragic hindsight a spiral of depressive thoughts and seemingly suicidal poetry. In the months leading to the tragedy the teenagers had posted increasingly dismal messages on their site.

From last December to February Jodie posted three odes to suicide, the second one titled Suicide in the Night.

It reads: "It's over for me, I can't take it! I hear it over and over again, it feels like it always rains."

Another of her MySpace messages read: "Let Steph n me b free."

Stephanie's website profile reads: "i dont wanna know how many friends you have cuz i dont have any anymore [sic]."

One posting on the "bitchy" website, dated March 23, said a new song would come out soon but "jodie wont be in the song though due to unfortunate events!!"

The final message known to have been posted by Jodie was to her boyfriend, next to a picture of them kissing.

"I luv you sooo soo much Allan, Miss u heaps and heaps xoxoxo I will always remember u."

Last night Jodie's father warned parents to spend time with their children and to monitor their internet use. "Love the kids, give them a great big hug every now and then, and do family things with them," Robert Gater told the radio network Austereo.

"Don't let them get bottled up in a room that has a computer in it [so] that you don't see them for eight hours a day or something."

The girls' MySpace site was flooded yesterday with messages from their grieving friends. And Stephanie's mother, Judi, apparently logged on to the site in the early hours of yesterday.

"You had only just turned 16," her message read. "You were always such a quiet girl who spent time listening to music and surfing the internet. There is nothing that couldn't have been sorted out. You were my only child and can never be replaced. Bye bye, my little girl."

The mother's message said her husband had picked up Stephanie from the airport after she had been to visit her grandmother, before she went off with her friend.

"I heard later that she had been involved in a fight on a train with some other girls and had taken off with her friend, who said she was going to kill herself," she wrote.

An adolescent psychologist, Michael Carr-Gregg, warned that the girls' friends and peer group were at risk of harming themselves. "Their friends, their entire year level and kids at those schools in the area who are maybe struggling with personal issues; yes, they're at risk.

"These girls' deaths can act as a catalyst," Dr Carr-Gregg said.

At the Royal Children's Hospital, Melbourne, a professor of adolescent health, George Patton, said the internet intensified the risk of "suicide contagion", a phenomenon first recognised upon the 1774 publication of Goethe's novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, which featured a young man who killed himself over unrequited love. A spate of copycat suicides across Europe led to its banning in Germany, Italy and Denmark.

The often-repeated phenomenon was also seen in Japan in 1986 with the suicide of the pop star Yukiko Okada.

"It's a huge issue in Japan," Professor Patton said. "We haven't seen so much of it yet in Australia.

"The internet is a powerful new medium where marginalised young people at the risk of suicide who might not otherwise meet are able to come into contact. It's providing content such as graphic self-harm sites which are potentially very dangerous to a lot of these young people. I think we have a real problem."

Internet suicides remain rare, but the trend has increased dramatically since the first known case in Japan in 2000. Hundreds more have been reported in Asia, Europe, Australia and the US.

MySpace is the world's fifth largest website, with more than 50 million members, who use it to express their feelings, often under pseudonyms, and talk to other members. It has also become a grieving place for bereaved friends and relatives of people, with impromptu, collaborative obituaries often springing into existence within hours of a death.

When the South Australian teenager Carly Ryan died in February her MySpace site was flooded with messages from friends - many of them members of the same goth and emo subcultures as the two Melbourne girls who were found dead on Sunday.

Following Britain's first internet suicide pact in 2005, in which two strangers met online and died side by side, the British Government restricted access to chatrooms deemed risky.

The growing band of people who have posted suicide notes online - an act known colloquially as a MySpace suicide - has led to the US organisation Lifeline creating its own MySpace page.

Bands such as AFI and Dashboard Confessional have been associated with emo. The movement is often mocked by outsiders for the melodramatic introspection of its members.

Self-harm, a risk factor for suicide, has become common among adolescents, particularly girls in emo and goth cliques. Between one in 10 and one in 20 girls aged about 14 or 15 engaged in self-harm, Professor Patton said.

Dr Carr-Gregg said it was simplistic to blame suicide on the subcultures and their emphasis on alienation and loneliness.

"It's just one risk factor. There are key protection factors in between, such as friends, family, a sense of connectedness."

Both experts said it was important for parents to communicate with teenagers.

"Don't let them disappear behind this emotional firewall called MSN [the chat network]," Dr Carr-Gregg said.

Greg Holman, principal of the school the two girls attended, Upwey High in Melbourne, said the school was devastated and students were being offered counselling.

source:AP/Ben Cubby and Larissa Dubecki

image:farm1.static.flickr.com:SUICIDE tragedy on MYSPACE...