to his rural Lenoir, North Carolina mobile home, 80 miles from Charlotte. Lopatka's husband Victor found the note his wife left for him and notified the police, who found six weeks of email conversations between Lopatka and Glass. In her email correspondence with Glass, Lopatka had explicitly asked Glass to torture her to death. Glass, interviewed later during his imprisonment, admitted to fulfilling Lopatka's torture fantasy, but also said that the death was an accident. As he recalled, "I don't know how much I pulled the rope ... I never wanted to kill her, but she ended up dead." This was corroborated by the autopsy performed by John Butts, the chief state medical examiner of North Carolina, who stated that Lopatka was accidentally strangled to death three days after her arrival in North Carolina. However, the police disagreed: their search warrant affidavits described the death as intentional, and that the emails proved it. North Carolina police staked out Glass's home for several days, but did not see Lopatka. On October 25, 1996, Judge Beverly T. Beal issued a search warrant on the home, and inside the house, investigators discovered items belonging to Lopatka. In addition, they also found drug and bondage equipment, child pornography magazines, a .357 Magnum pistol, and several computer disks, as well as trash and toys outside the trailer. A police officer then noticed a mound of soil 75 feet away from the home, before finding some bodyparts buried two and a half feet below. Glass was arrested at work following this discovery, charged with first-degree murder, and held without bond in the Caldwell County Jail. Glass also faced additional state and federal charges for the possession of child pornography. County investigator D. A. Brown said that Lopatka's body might have never been found had it been buried in the woods behind Glass's house. Glass pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and sexual exploitation charges on January 27, 2000, and was sentenced to 36–53 months in the Avery-Mitchell Correctional Institution. He was also sentenced to an additional 27 months for federal charges of second-degree minor exploitation, to be served consecutively. Glass was found dead of a heart attack in prison on February 20, 2002, one month before he was to finish his state sentence and begin his federal sentence. Influence The Lopatka case was reportedly the first where a murder suspect was put in custody by the police