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In the late 1990s & early 2000s, the internet was slowly becoming a part of everyday life, while most people were still figuring out what it was capable of. Social media, chat rooms & instant messaging opened up an entirely new way for people to communicate. Suddenly, you could be chatting with a person across the globe from a computer in your living room.
As parents were learning about the internet alongside their children, there was little understanding about the risks it presented & little awareness of just how easily somebody could pretend to be someone they weren’t. The term internet predator, cyberstalking or online grooming didn’t exist at this point.
Although children were told not to share their address or phone numbers, teenagers were spending hours talking privately with strangers while their parents had almost no way of knowing who was on the other side of that conversation.
In 2006, 14-year-old Carly Ryan fell in love with a lie when she began chatting with who she believed was an 18-year-old boy named Brandon Kane. He seemed to be exactly the kind of boy she would fall for. He was a teenage musician from Melbourne, Australia who liked the same things she did. He listened, understood & supported, gradually becoming one of the most trusted people in her world.
As time went on, Carly believed they were forming a genuine relationship, but Brandon didn’t actually exist. Her story came to a tragic head in February of 2007 when Carly told her mom that she was having a sleepover with a friend. After she left the safety of her Stirling, South Australia home, she sadly never came back.
Carly’s murder became one of Australia’s most disturbing early examples of the danger posed by online predators, exposing how powerful grooming can be when someone has the ability to patiently study a child from behind a screen.
Predators rarely start by scaring their victims, instead, they begin by listening, learning what their victim likes, what they’re insecure about & what makes them special. This is a long game that carries out until a stranger no longer feels like a stranger at all.
Carly Ryan was born on January 31, 1992. Moving forward to 2007, she was living in Stirling with her 36-year-old mom, Sonya, who was separated from her partner, as well as her 10-year-old brother. Stirling is a small town in South Australia about 15 minutes from Adelaide, not to be confused with the Stirling in Western Australia that’s a suburb of Perth.
According to Sonya, she & her daughter had a very open, close relationship that was almost a friend-like relationship.
Since early reports indicated that Carly was a member of the VampireFreaks website, a social platform that launched in 2004 for the emo, goth, industrial & alternative subcultures, many imagined her as a dark, moody, brooding teen. Although Carly liked the subculture’s clothing & music, according to her mom, her daughter was more likely to wrap you in a hug than turn away from you with a sneer.
She was a fun-loving, faithful friend who had a very accepting nature. It was this accepting nature as well as a near-death experience that left her vulnerable to the advances of a predator. Carly’s innocence was rattled when she nearly died in the intensive care unit of the hospital after she was given drinks by older teens & suffered alcohol poisoning.
On her release from the hospital, she vowed to never drink alcohol again. This was a decision that seemed to isolate her from her experimental friend group at Mitcham Girls School where she was a year 9 student.
Feeling lost & alone, Carly turned to the internet for connection, specifically the social networking website, MySpace, that was launched in 2003. MySpace was incredibly popular & even surpassed Google as the most visited site before Facebook became popular in 2007.
Sonya had been taking the steps to keep her daughter safe online; their computer was in the kitchen so her online activity could be monitored & her internet access was restricted & time-limited.
Despite these precautionary measures, when Sonya saw her daughter’s MySpace page a few months before her death, she was shocked. She indicated that after Carly’s hospitalization, her website changed dramatically, featuring images of dark art as well as risque, dark, sexual images.
Her profile picture was a three-part image of her chest, waist & legs. In an image that didn’t depict her face, she wore fishnet stockings as well as a bra. While her MySpace user name was synthetic slut, her email accounts included names such as trashwore13 & jesusisrapingmyshoe.
In 2006, when Carly was 14-years-old, she met an 18-year-old, Texas-born, Victorian-raised emo boy named Brandon Kane through a friend (some reports say he was 20-years-old). He was living in Melbourne, a little under eight hours southeast of where Carly lived in Stirling.
They began chatting through MySpace on a daily basis, connecting over their shared love of music. Slowly, but steadily, their friendship began to blossom into an online relationship. Sonya could see just how giddy, happy & light her daughter seemed, telling her how cute Brandon was & how much she liked him.
Throughout their 18-month long relationship, their communication evolved beyond MySpace messages & they occasionally chatted on the phone.
Initially, they spoke about very typical teenage interests, such as school & music. When Brandon began to open up a line of communication between Carly & his adopted father, Shane, an Army veteran turned security guard, Sonya began to worry.
Her chats with Shane made Carly’s friends very uncomfortable. When they spoke on the phone, Shane would ask inappropriate questions, like, if they were bisexual & enjoyed kissing other girls.
When they’d been communicating for over a year, Carly’s 15th birthday party that was set for January 26, 2007 began approaching. She was trying to convince her mom to allow her to invite Brandon, but Sonya felt uncomfortable with the idea. They actually got in a fight about it after she told Carly that she thought the idea was silly since not only did she not know Brandon, but he was older than her.
When Sonya finally agreed, Brandon declined Carly’s invitation, saying he was going to be overseas at the time. Although he couldn’t be there, he said that Shane could go in his place. Once again, Sonya was not on board, arguing that they didn’t know him & it seemed like a bad idea.
Carly assured her mom that he was Brandon’s dad, a security guard & they would all get along well. Sonya allowed him to come to the party & stay over in their guest room since he lived so far away. When he arrived, he wore a polo that was part of his security job uniform. He was a stocky guy in his late 40s with thinning hair, crooked teeth & he walked with a hunch. Carly told her mom that she thought he was gross.
During his stay, Shane took Carly to Rundle Mall in Adelaide where he secretly bought her $400 worth of corsets, accessories & dress-up costumes, claiming they were birthday gifts from Brandon. While Carly tried them on, he peered over the doors of the fitting room to watch her.
When he spent time with Carly & her friend Rhiannon during his visit, he tried to convince the girls to kiss while he watched. After Carly leaned in & Rhiannon pulled away, Carly got angry & walked off while Shane told her, maybe she wouldn’t have walked off if you had given her what she wanted.
During the actual birthday party, Shane got jealous when he saw Carly talking to other boys. He pulled out his phone & threatened to tell Brandon what was going on.
On the sixth day that Shane had been staying with them, Sonya was stunned when she went into her daughter’s bedroom & found Shane & Carly asleep in bed together, lying fully clothed on top of the covers. When he slipped into her room that night, whispering, I love you, I’ll never let anything happen to you, Carly immediately rejected his advances, saying he was old, fat & gross.
On finding him in Carly’s bed, Sonya demanded that he leave their house immediately & stay away from her daughter.
The next day, she asked Carly if he had touched her sexually in any way & Carly eventually admitted that he had unbuckled his pants, lifted up her shirt & felt her up.
At this point, Carly was still holding on to hope that her mom would talk things through with Shane so as to not disrupt her relationship with Brandon. Sonya was firm on the fact that she didn’t care. She sent an email to Shane, telling him that if he didn’t stay away, she would notify the police about what happened.
What Carly & Sonya sadly hadn’t known at the time was that Shane was actually Garry Newman, a 48-year-old divorced father of three who lived with his mother. Shane was only one of 200 fake identities that he utilized. He was a brutal, sadistic pedophile who liked extreme pornography in which young women wore schoolgirl outfits. He once even tried to rape his own 13-year-old daughter after giving her alcohol.
When he was preparing to travel to meet Carly for the first time for her birthday in January 2007, he was very confident that he would succeed in consummating his sexual obsession with the young girl. He told co-workers that he was planning on starting a new life in Adelaide, convinced that Carly would accept him in place of the Brandon fantasy.
Carly had not been his first victim as he’d also been communicating with a 14-year-old girl in Singapore under the alias Nash. When she rejected him by failing to attend their planned meeting, he told a friend that he would leave her looking like the packaged meat you get from Safeway. He told other online friends that she would pay for standing him up, saying that he planned to use a young guy to lure her out of her home.
He also pursued a 14-year-old girl in the United States in 2002 & 2003, but when he shifted their conversations in a sexual direction, she cut off contact with him. In these online exchanges, he referred to her as his princess or his wife.
In response to Sonya’s email, Shane/Garry Newman responded, saying that her emails were full of lies, telling her that she better have insurance against lawsuits because she would need it. He went on to write, I will go into court as a decorated SAS officer while you will go in as a child abusing b!tch.
After he left their home, although Carly no longer wanted a thing to do with Shane, she remained focused on finally meeting Brandon face-to-face.
When Garry Newman got back to Victoria, he initially told his oldest son that he wanted to go back to Adelaide on holiday with him. As time went on, he said that he needed his help to fix Carly up as well as other things that suggested he wanted to harm her.
Feeling shocked & upset, Newman’s son moved out of the house & left a note behind, trying to persuade his father to make the right choice.
Realizing he wasn’t going to get help from his older son, Newman turned his attention to his 17-year-old son, Stephen Newman, who was essentially a stranger to him. Stephen had spent much of his childhood in foster care & had been living with his dad for less than a month when he invited him to go to Adelaide.
Newman felt his son was the perfect person to portray Brandon in real life so he immediately got online as Brandon & began to put a date together to meet Carly. He urged her to keep their meeting a secret from her mom, saying that Shane would be there, but only because he was his ride.
A little less than a month after her birthday party, summer break had ended & Carly was back in school when she told her mom that she was going to spend the night at her friend’s house after school on Monday, February 19, 2007.
Since this was something Carly had done countless times before, Sonya never gave it a second thought. Carly hugged her mom four times before she left & as she turned the corner of their Adelaide Hills home, she told her mom that she loved her before walking out the back door.
Looking back, Sonya wonders if her daughter hugged her so fiercely that day because she knew she was betraying her trust.
It wasn’t until the next day, Tuesday, February 20, 2007 when Sonya began to worry. She got a phone call from a stranger who had found her daughter’s purse miles from where she should have been in a southern suburb of Adelaide. After she was unable to reach Carly, she felt her body flood with dread as she picked up the phone to report her daughter missing to the police.
Sonya was unaware that her daughter’s body had actually been found earlier that morning. When officers came to her house that afternoon to discuss the missing persons report, she found it odd when they continued to hang around rather than leave as she expected.
When a detective came inside with tears streaming down his face, she immediately thought that her daughter had gotten into an accident, never once considering that she’d been murdered.
At about 6 am that morning, a woman named Kim Griffith had gone out for her daily swim more than 80 km/50 miles south of Stirling in Horseshoe Bay in Port Elliot. As she walked along the water, she spotted what she initially thought was seaweed. When she got closer & realized that it was the body of a female floating face down in a shallow pool of water, she immediately ran back to the parking lot to call for help.
When she found a local fisherman in the parking lot named Ian Slade, she asked to dial 000 at the phone box. Since she wasn’t sure if the girl was dead or alive, she also asked him if he would help get her out of the water. As Ian pulled Carly’s body from the water, he sadly found no pulse, something paramedics confirmed as they reached the scene.
According to the forensic pathologist, the 15-year-old had been attacked from behind, pushed face-first into the sand based on the sand found in her lungs. Carly had a total of 19 lacerations to her face, neck & arms with 6-8 that were focused around her head & neck. They had been inflicted by fists or another blunt object. Because water was found in her lungs, she was still alive when her body was thrown into the ocean & her cause of death was drowning.
Experts concluded that she had died only about thirty minutes before Kim found her. She was covered from head to toe in sand while blood was present in the cuts & abrasions to her face. Carly had been dressed in a black tracksuit, a red & black bra, a leopard print tank top, suspenders & fishnet stockings.
Investigators found that her tracksuit pants were inside out while her underwear was tangled up in the suspenders she wore. Her bra was found worn correctly at the front, but only partially fastened at the back. This evidence suggests that she had been undressed & redressed before her death.
Horseshoe Bay is only a 10-minute drive from Victor Harbor, one of South Australia’s most popular seaside tourist towns, which allowed investigators to gather a slew of CCTV footage. The footage, which depicted Carly Ryan with two men, enabled them to track her movements before she was murdered.
They saw the trio at various locations, including the Crown Hotel, a fish & chip shop & then eating at a local Subway chain.
According to an employee at the fish & chip shop, when Newman asked him for a suggestion for a good place to have a drink, he told him Horseshoe Bay. He asked the same question to a cashier at Victor Harbor when he was buying cigarettes & was given the same answer.
Other witnesses who came forward helped police track the trio’s movements through the town. Although some were able to pick Stephen Newman out of a photo lineup, none were able to positively identify Garry. Each witness described Carly as goth or emo-looking.
Two key-witnesses told investigators that when they were walking along the cliffs of Lady Bay, a small inlet whose waters feed into Horseshoe Bay, they saw two men sitting by the water with a woman who had a gothic look. They also recalled seeing a powder-blue car with Victoria license plates parked on the cliffs with a security ID badge sitting on the dashboard.
Eleven days after Carly’s body was found, police found a powder-blue car outside of the house Newman shared with his mom on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula in Melbourne, the capital of Victoria, Australia. On the passenger-side dashboard, they saw a security ID badge.
When they raided the home, they found 48-year-old Garry Francis Newman, a man only known as Shane to the Ryan family. He was sitting at his computer, logged in as Brandon Kane, chatting with his next target, a 14-year-old girl from across the country Perth.
This man had been posing as Brandon Kane, one of his 200 personas, to groom Carly over the course of 18 months. He designed his profile to mimic her interests so he was able to catch her attention before gradually building her trust.
A year earlier, he began talking to one of Carly’s friends named Ashleigh, but when the conversation turned sexual, she stopped chatting with him. When he noticed a photo she posted of Carly, he shifted his focus to her.
Officers found a picture of Carly in Newman’s home with the words Adelaide slut written under it, as well as rest in peace. His security badge was fake, as was the company he supposedly worked for. Before meeting with Sonya, he’d sewn a fake company logo onto a polo shirt.
Police were stunned by the amount of resources, time & effort he’d put into his plan to seduce Carly as well as other underage girls. They discovered that after Sonya banned her daughter from speaking to either Shane or Brandon on the computer or phone, he would call her only when he knew Sonya was at work.
According to Newman’s oldest son, when he met up with his dad after he came back from Adelaide, he showed him his knuckles & asked if they looked bruised. He went on to say that he punched Carly in the face, that he’d killed her & had done the job. He elaborated that after he punched her, he threw her body into the water.
Both Garry Newman & his 17-year-old son Stephen were charged with murder & extradited to South Australia, where a court banned all publication of their identities.
Garry Newman immediately pointed the finger at Stephen, claiming he had been the sole creator & operator of the Brandon identity & the sole murderer of Carly.
During their three years in custody, he continued to place the blame on his son while asking his cellmates if they ever tried to put clothes on dead weight, a statement that would tie him to the way Carly’s clothing had been found.
After her death, media outlets scrutinized Carly’s MySpace page, specifically focusing on its gothic/emo vibe. The suggestion was that she had acted inappropriately online, posting risque images that inadvertently invited a predator’s attention. This shifted the blame from the killer to the victim.
Because of the suppression orders, Sonya had no choice but to continue suffering in silence while the truth of her daughter was concealed by ignorance & misunderstanding.
On October 20, 2009, 965 days after Carly was murdered, Garry & Stephen Newman finally stood trial. When Newman took the witness stand three months later in January 2010, he now insisted that neither he nor his son were killers. He also offered to plead guilty to the lesser charge of manslaughter, describing his relationship with Carly as strictly platonic, claiming he had acted as a step-dad to her.
He described himself as asexual, claiming that he has a low interest in sex in general. He went on to say that although his son had an internet relationship with Carly, neither of them murdered her. Despite the fact that arresting officers caught him chatting with a 14-year-old as Brandon, he claimed to have never used the name Brandon Kane, but admitted to posing as Shane.
Although he admitted to having an obsession with social networking websites, he denied ever touching Carly inappropriately or sexually. He blamed his 200 accounts on a years-long struggle with bipolar & obessive compulsive disorder that caused him to go off for no reason at stupid things.
He told the jury that now that he was properly medicated, he was a much better person than he once was & claimed that his 200 identities were research for a book he was writing about the internet & how websites can be manipulated by people.
Newman said that while Carly knew him as Shane, they were close friends despite the large age gap. He claimed to have always had a young outlook, often acting like he’s in his 20s which inadvertently connected him to much younger people.
Although he told arresting officers that Stepehn had created the Brandon profile, during the trial he admitted that he created the MySpace page for the Brandon identity under instructions from a friend in California.
Since investigators had solid CCTV footage that depicted him & his son with Carly one day before her body was found, he had no choice to admit that they had been with her. He claimed that he’d taken her & his son to Port Elliot for a party. He said that when they left, Cary had been alone on the beach & although she was pretty stoned, she was otherwise fine.
Over the next 6 ½ days, Stephen’s lawyer, Bill Boucat, as well as prosecutor Tim Preston each agreed that Newman’s testimony was nothing more than elaborate lies. Bill Boucat argued that there was no evidence connecting his client to the murder, calling it one-way traffic pointing to the father.
Newman’s own lawyer, Nick Vadasz, tried to withdraw from the case on two occasions due to irreconcilable differences with his client.
Jury members were told about the state of Carly’s clothing when her body was found & how it appeared that she had been re-dressed. Prosecutor Tim Preston asked jury members to consider the possibility that Carly Ryan had likely been sexually assaulted shortly before or during her fatal attack.
Meanwhile, defense attorney Valdez told the jury that there was a deep area of water at Port Elliot where Carly’s body had washed up, saying it was possible that she had walked into the water to wash herself off & had accidentally fallen into this area.
Stephen Newman never took the stand in his own defense.
By the end of the three month trial, Garry looked haggard as he sat shaking, his facial hair unruly, under suicide watch.
After 10 ½ hours of deliberation over the course of two days, the jury asked Justice Kelly if they could find one man guilty of murder, meaning Garry & the other of manslaughter, meaning Stephen.
After she told them they could, she went on to clarify that for Stephen to be guilty of murder, they had to be sure he either participated in the plot to kill Carly or encouraged the crime.
To be guilty of manslaughter, he must have participated in a plot to do harm to Carly that resulted in her death, or that he encouraged his father to harm her in a fatal way. Since he was never charged with the lesser offense of assisting an offender, they could not find him guilty of that.
While jury members found 50-year-old Garry Newman guilty of murder, Stephen Newman was acquitted. After spending three years in custody, he was returned to Victoria that night. Based on witnesses who saw Carly with two men, Stephen had been physically present at the scene, but the prosecution couldn’t prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he had actively participated in the murder.
Because of his acquittal, his suppression order would carry on indefinitely.
On March 13, 2010, Garry Newman was sentenced to life in prison with a 29 year non-parole period. After his sentencing, Justice Kelly ruled that his name & image could be officially published. She went on to say that Carly was a child that fell in love with the idea of the handsome, musically inclined & rather exotic Brandon Kane, while the real man was in fact an overweight, balding, middle aged pedophile with sex & murder on his mind.
After his acquittal, Stephen Newman went on to rape 13 girls under the age of 16 in Melbourne after targeting & stalking them. He was sentenced to only 35 months (less than 3 years) in prison which equated to a little under three months per victim.
Not only does his name remain officially suppressed, but the serial rapist is a free man who is living anonymously amongst the public of Melbourne.
Knowing that her daughter had been the first person in Australian history to be murdered by an online predator, Sonya Ryan somehow pulled herself out of the blackness with the purpose of educating teenagers about the dangers of being online. She hoped that by sharing her story, rather than crumbling under the grief that engulfed her, Sonya Ryan became fueled by the goal of preventing a repeat of what had happened to her daughter.
Even when she was shaking & vomiting before a public speaking event, she knew that if she didn’t find the courage deep inside, children & their parents would miss out on hearing the message. Talking about what happened to her daughter in the first three years was grueling since it forced her to revisit what happened to Carly & what she had lost.
In 2010, she created The Carly Ryan Foundation (CRF) with the purpose of not only bringing awareness to internet safety, but also making it harder for groomers to succeed.
The foundation also pioneered the creation of a child/parent safety app called Thread, which allows instantaneous communication, tracking & panic alerts. She’s spent over a decade & a half speaking to the community, parents, teachers & students while the foundation has now expanded into the U.S.
When Carly met the fictional character Brandon Kane on MySpace in 2006, she believed she had fallen in love with the 18-year-old. Throughout their 18-month relationship, the person she had been sharing her thoughts, feelings, hopes & dreams with had been a lie.
Since online predators who groom children online are cunning, patient & manipulative, what happened to Carly can happen to anyone. They slowly gain a child’s trust until they become one of the most important people in their world. Since the internet is part of our daily lives, far more so now with smart phones, it’s essential that young people learn how to navigate the web safely.
In June 2017, Carly’s Law became a reality, giving police the power to intervene sooner, to get DNA, seize technology & hopefully prevent crimes from happening. Prior to the law, police would watch predators online that they knew were preparing to cause harm, but they couldn’t step in until they acted. The law makes it illegal to lie to a child online & carries a ten-year maximum prison term for offenders.
In the wake of her daughter’s tragic murder, Sonya Ryan turned her story of pain, heartache & loss into a crusade to save other lives. Carly had been a young girl doing what so many other teens were doing in 2007, talking to people online, making connections & trusting that the person on the other side of the screen was who they claimed to be.
We all talk to our children about stranger danger, but we sometimes forget that our children can be at far greater risk within the comfort & safety of their own home.
Although nearly 20 years have gone by since Carly was taken from this world, the lesson from her story truly hasn’t changed. Grooming often looks completely harmless since a predator doesn’t introduce himself as such. Rather, he presents as a friend, someone who understands, connects & listens to them when they’re upset. Trust comes first, secrets next & before long, the boundaries slowly begin to shift outward.
Carly’s case is a reminder to parents that complete strangers can get through your front door via the internet. It’s important to talk to your children about grooming before there’s an issue, know where your children are spending time online, pay attention to privacy settings & keep the lines of communication open without the threat of punishment.
References:
- The Advertiser: Carly Ryan: A loving girl who fell prey to an online predator
- The Advertiser: True crime Australia: The 21st century murderer & the girl whose death changed the internet
- The Advertiser: Sonya Ryan & her fight for Carly’s Law
- The New Zealand Herald: Mother of murdered teen Carly Ryan still fighting online predators
- Medium: The MySpace Monster: The tragic murder of Australian teenager Carly Ryan
- The Sydney Morning Herald: Mother of murdered teen Carly Ryan still fighting online predators
- ABC News: Carly Ryan in bed with murder accused: mum
- ABC News: Teen’s killing ‘may have involved sex’, jury told`
- ABC News: Carly Ryan’s murderer revealed at last
- ABC News: Swimmer describes finding teen’s body
- Parliament of Australia
- Report: Criminal Code Amendment (Misrepresentation of Age to a Minor) Bill 2013
- The Carly Ryan Foundation
- Taylor & Francis: Journal of Australian Studies, volume 48, 2024. “Complete Strangers Can Get Through Your Front Door”: The Carly Ryan Murder, Teen Girls & the Internet in 2000s Australia
- Herald Sun: Carly Ryan found messily dressed & covered with sand, court told
