Film planned on tragic Internet love triangle
Crew begins taping for homicide story
The case of an Internet love triangle that ended in the slaying of a 22- year-old Lockport man outside the Clarence company where he worked two years ago is being made into a documentary.
A Hollywood film crew spent a couple of days here last week taping locations in the Buffalo Niagara region.
Brian M. Barrett was fatally shot in the parking lot of Dynabrade Corp. on Sheridan Drive late on the night of Sept. 15, 2006. Thomas Montgomery, another Dynabrade worker, is serving a 20-year prison term for his guilty plea to a manslaughter charge, which he is now appealing.
Montgomery, the 50-year-old divorced father of two teenagers, was having a cyber relationship with a woman from West Virginia, who was using her 18-year-old daughter’s Internet page profile to disguise her true identity.
Montgomery was also hiding his true identity, describing himself as a young man home from military service in Iraq. He had apparently bragged about the relationship at work, and Barrett e-mailed the out-of- state woman — in reality, Mary Sheiler, a 50-year-old West Virginia mother.
“It’s a compelling story that hasn’t yet been thoroughly told,” said Barbara Schroeder, director of Answers Productions Co. in Los Angeles. “Here you have three people living in a fantasy world online. They never meet, yet one ends up dead, one is in prison, and the woman who orchestrated the whole drama faces no charges.”
Schroeder says she has secured an exclusive five-hour interview with Montgomery and has also interviewed Sheiler’s daughter, who was the unwitting focus of the case.
Sheiler, according to Schroeder, lured Montgomery and Barrett into salacious chat room conversations by pretending to be her daughter.
“She sent the men real pictures of her own daughter to lure them. Montgomery became jealous of his Dynabrade co-worker when he found out that both of them were communicating with the woman they thought was the teen,” Schroeder said.
The focus of the documentary is to make a case for new laws that might be needed for this new technology, according to Schroeder.
“Lots of people lie on the Internet,” she said, “but for someone to die over this? Total tragedy.”
