STATEN ISLAND — A notorious internet troll who lives on Staten Island has been indicted after harassing his fourth-grade pen pal for decades and threatening her and her children, federal prosecutors said.
Jason Christopher Hughes, 46, of St. George, was hit with a five-count indictment after he sent numerous messages to two people referencing occultism, cannibalism and even describing the step-by-step mutilation of a person, according to court documents.
An agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation linked Hughes — who has posted a play-by-play of his harassment of people on several web pages, including at least one on Tumblr — to the threats of two women, the New York Daily News first reported. He was arrested last month.
In March 2015, Hughes sent about 23 emails to his old pen pal, who became a school teacher, under the name "Raymond Johnson," prosecutors said. He quoted from "Paradise Lost" and wrote he was going to do something "very terrible," authorities said.
"Consider yourself very, very lucky indeed that I don't dare bring Darkness right to your classroom or front door," Hughes wrote in one email, according to court records.
"See I don't like children. I actually hate them. I laugh when one of them is abducted or fall under a train or is eaten by wild dogs."
Later that year, Hughes started to send threatening emails to a woman who interacted on social media with another person Hughes stalked online, according to court records.
Hughes, still under the name Johnson, sent the woman a message Sept. 19, 2015 titled "How to Make Your Own Pet Owl" which detailed the mutilation of a person.
DNAinfo on Tuesday talked to another woman targeted by one of his websites but who is not mentioned in the court documents.
"It's been a nightmare," said the woman, who did not want her name used for this story. "It was just psycho, I never actually met him. He told me he was a werewolf and a two-time Scorpio."
Hughes started to stalk her in 2003 after she commented on one of his Livejournal posts, she said.
He sent emails trying to start a relationship then began stalking her when she turned him down. He got her fired from jobs by sending notes to her boss claiming that she was stalking him.
The woman, who does not live in NYC but whose home location is being withheld for her safety, said she went to her local police officers — who simply told her to stay off the internet.
The woman said she and a few of his other victims banded together to hire private investigators, lawyers and even tried to get on television hoping to put an end to the years long harassment from Hughes.
"There's no support for people going through this," she said. "I'm scared. It's our worst nightmare if he doesn't go to jail after this."
According to court documents, Hughes encountered his first victim in the late 1970s when they became pen pals while they were both in fourth grade. He sent hundreds of letters detailing his rough home life and the girl wrote back with support, according to court documents.
His letters became "increasingly dark and threatening over a period of years" and she tried to break off their relationship, prosecutors said.
But he persisted, following her in the 1980s and 1990s and even showing up at the victim's college dormitory when she was a freshman. After that, Hughes started to threaten kill the woman and her family, prosecutors said.
When she later married, Hughes started sending letters to her in-laws and she eventually moved overseas to try to escape him, prosecutors said.
The letters finally stopped but Hughes found her email address on a school website and continued to harass her, prosecutors said.
Throughout the years, Hughes has used other aliases including Michael Rudra Nath and Luis Manuel Arsupial, applying for passports for both of them. He also has several websites dedicated to tracking his harassment of people.
Authorities did not say how long Hughes has lived in Staten Island. Court documents indicate he earlier lived in Texas and Montana.
