In 2005, a bored middle-aged man sat down at his family computer, opened a teen chat room,

and decided to become someone else. With the new screen name and a few quick lies, he turned

himself into the kind of guy he'd always wished he was, young, heroic, irresistible.

And on the other side of the screen, a small town teenage girl seemed to fall for him instantly.

The photos were flawless, the late-night messages got more intense, and soon, the line between who he was and who he pretended to be started to disappear.

What none of them knew was that this online fling was quietly dragging them into a new reality.

No one in the chat room could have imagined when they first typed high.

In today's episode of the Scarecast, we're unpacking one of the internet's earliest and most

twisted tales of catfishing, obsession, and betrayal, a story that proves that you never really

know who's on the other side of the screen.

In May 2005, 46-year-old Thomas Montgomery, born June 3rd, 1959, and raised in the quiet

Buffalo suburb of Clarence, New York, logged into a pogo.com teen chat room using the screen

name, Marine Sniper, and he reinvented himself as Tommy, an 18-year-old red-haired muscular Marine awaiting deployment to Iraq.

Thomas had actually served in the Marines for about six years in the late 1970s and early 1980s,

but U.S. Marine records obtained by ABC News 2020 show showed that although he qualified as a sharpshooter,

he never trained as a sniper and never actually saw combat, having a very generic military

career with no special tales to share.

He also left the military with the drinking problem, although he reportedly quit cold turkey

when he became a family man.

By 2005, Thomas' 16-year marriage to his wife, Cindy, was crumbling.

His job at Dinerbrade as a machinist, where he operated machines to produce metal parts was slowly sucking the life

out of him, and he claimed to find it easier to talk to random people online than his own wife.

...