@FOUND SOUL,
Interesting :- This could have been Elliot in any event, had he, had scored.
THEY stagger through the door of the modern high-rise apartment, the club music still ringing in their ears.
They’re drunk on booze and dance moves. He guides her into the living room, past the kitchen, the white leather couch, the modern dining setting, the art on the walls.
They’re checked by two cameras on the way through. The first kicked in when the front door swung open, following their progress into the unit.
BALCONY PLUNGE: Victim’s last moments caught on tape
The second follows them through the living area.
Perhaps they go out onto the balcony for a drink. Sometimes he does that with the girls he brings home.
Or maybe they go straight to the bedroom.
She’s not up to his usual standards. But she was well-endowed and girls had been rejecting his advances all night.
Besides, tonight was a milestone.
She was his 100th. Later, he would write down her name and the date.
He left her sleeping in his bed when they were done. He took his phone – a big-screened tablet with a live feed to his surveillance cameras - and stretched out on the couch.
``Ask a guy who just reached 100 girls slept with and is kinda depressed anything,’’ he wrote on bodybuilding.com under his well-worn screen name ``GT’’.
``Went out to clubs tonight with a few mates and got shot down by most hot girls.
``Really put a hole in my confidence. Eventually figured I’d get the 100th out of the way by dropping my standards.
``I’m lying on the living room couch typing this while she is asleep in my room. I can’t sleep until she is gone.’’
He’d kept track of all of them. Dates, names. The motion detection cameras. Call recording on his phone. Sometimes he’d hit the button on the voice recording app on his phone and leave it on as he cruised the clubs.
If he had too much to drink, he’d listen back to remind himself what had happened.
It was 2012 when Gable Tostee went online to claim his 100th conquest. A very different Gable from two years earlier. That Gable was a friendless hermit, outliving the shame of an incident that saw he and two schoolmates splashed across newspapers.
``I don’t even really bother getting numbers anymore, I’m too lazy,’’ he wrote from his couch.
But life hadn’t turned out quite the way he’d expected. What
had changed, one forum user asked, to make him go from a life of solitude to bringing home a different girl each night?
``Not much except for my circumstances,’’ he replied.
``This is one of the things that gets me down. I imagined myself being different but I’m not sure I really am.’’
Gable was still a teenager when, in 2004, he and two of his mates got caught up in a business venture that would eventually come crashing down.
An autistic savant with severe obsessive compulsive disorder, Gable had always been shy at school. He’d made a few close friends,
He lost his friends. He retreated from society. He went to work with his father in property development and investment pursuits where his only contact was with people years older.
It was that year that he signed up to bodybuilding.com and began posting in its forums.
He spent a bit of time in the gym and began using the forum to ask for advice on dieting, protein and carbohydrate intakes.
Nobody knew who he was. He could ask anything. He asked about religion, gave his opinions on films, politics and where the world would be in 100 years.
``I don’t understand `faith’,’’ he wrote in 2005.
On another post about dreams, he wrote: ``
A few times I’ve dreamed that there is a new highly infectious disease killing off everyone in the world and I’m constantly trying to run from it.’’
For years he lived like this, tucked away at his computer.
And then, in 2010, he ran into an old friend at a restaurant.
He’d been one of Gable’s best friends before everything went wrong. The friend had been genuinely excited to see him.
``When I asked him what other friends were up to I realised how much things had changed and how much I have missed out on socially over the last half a decade,’’ he told his online community.
``The problem is that I don’t really know where to start, I feel like someone who has been teleported into the future.’’
It was the beginning of his new life, a life like any other 20-something on the Gold Coast. Mates, nights out. Girls.
Five days later he was back online.
``We went out last night and met these two girls,’’ he wrote.
``We were both dancing, kissing, talking for an hour with them, mine seemed pretty into me, wanted to meet again, hugged her goodbye outside and said I’d call her.
``They were on holidays and are leaving today.
``I called earlier but it was an answering machine so I texted her and haven’t had a reply.
``Should I call again, perhaps off a private number?’’
She’d said she wanted to see him again, he explained. But now she wasn’t returning his call. He agonised over it.
``Do you think it’s possible to close the deal in the same night with ANY girl if you’re good enough?’’ he asked.
A few days later he did just that.
It was a Friday night and he’d started talking to her at the bar. She was on holidays. Partying on the Glitter Strip in the height of summer.
He followed the advice of his forum pals. Be direct. Be more aggressive. It worked. He took her back to his car - and then back to his place when the heat drove them indoors.
The next night he met a different girl. He tried to take her home too. She gave him her number instead. He called and texted.
``I hope this isn’t a repeat of last time,’’ he wrote.
The weekends out continued. More phone numbers. More rejections.
``Is it normal to get screwed around like this? What’s the best way to deal with it?’’ he wrote.
On Australia Day eve he approached around 20 girls before one kissed him. Phone number. Rejection.
Three weeks after taking a girl back to his car, he found another willing candidate. They’d danced for a while before he suggested she follow him back to his place. She thought that was a good idea.
``It was important for me to get the second one out of the way so I knew the first wasn’t some kind of fluke,’’ Gable wrote.
His posts about girls became prolific. He discussed techniques, strategies. He weighed up what might have gone wrong and tried to improve on it the next time.
By December, he was a different person.
``Ask a guy who slept with 50 different girls in 2010 anything. Go!’’ he wrote.
By 2010, the tally was 100.
``I’m somewhat obsessed with recording everything,’’ he wrote when bragging of the milestone.
``I have motion detection cameras in my house, call recording on my phone, and sometimes even leave my phone on record in my pocket for nights out in case I forget what happens.’’
He’d put the cameras in after someone stole his keys, he explained. He’d even caught a woman taking his wallet on her way out.
By 2013, he’d heard about a new method of finding girls. Tinder.
``Is this real? Has anyone met girls off this?’’ he wrote.
He signed up.
By the following February the dating app was keeping him busy. He’d organised for a girl to come over and they went for a walk to get some dinner. They ate and talked. And then they kissed.
He’d taken her into his bedroom. He’d wanted to take things further but she resisted. He tried again but she told him she was leaving. He couldn’t understand.
``What the hell do you want from a guy?’’ he messaged her after she’d left.
``You can’t blame me for trying. Or lead me on then say all I wanted was sex.
``Was it all for your own validation? Make you feel special? Free meal maybe?’’
``I spent more in petrol than u spent on my cheap dinner you stupid f***,’’ she wrote back.
But he was not dissuaded. He kept working his game.
On August 7, he took out his phone and flicked through Tinder profiles belonging to girls within range of his Surfers apartment.
He liked the look of one. Rrie Wright – a 26-year-old New Zealand girl in Queensland for a wedding.
She was beautiful. Brown hair. Big eyes.
He said hi. She agreed to come over. Hours later she was dead.
