A Louisiana man (bottom image) was sentenced to one year in federal prison for using an underage relative to lure a Texas A&M University professor into a sexually explicit online relationship that led to blackmail, and ended when the educator leapt to his death from atop a campus parking garage.
Daniel Timothy Duplaisir, 38, had demanded in insulting, obscenity-laced tirades that James Aune (top image), chairman of the school's Communications Department, pay him $5,000 to cover the cost of therapy for a supposedly transgender teenage relative.
"If I do not hear from you, I swear to God Almighty that police, your place of employment, students all over the Internet - all of them - will be able to see your conversations, texts and the pictures you sent," Duplaisir said in one of several threatening messages as he sought payment from the professor.
But in a final act on Jan. 8, 2013, at 10:29 a.m. - less than three hours before Duplaisir was to go public - the 59-year-old professor promised justice.
"Killing myself now. And U will be prosecuted for blackmail," he said in a final message to Duplaisir.
Aune left his office and walked to a six-story garage.
Before Duplaisir was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Lynn N. Hughes at the federal courthouse in downtown Houston, Aune's widow gave an emotional statement in which she said no prison sentence could be long enough.
Miriam Aune said that she, along with her two sons who have autism, have been served a sentence of living the rest of their lives without Aune.
But she said she still had mercy for Duplaisir.
"I truly wanted to hate him, I tried very hard to hate him," Miriam Aune said of Duplaisir. "How much sadness there must be in this man's life ... how much anger there must be in his heart."
Miriam Aune said her husband confessed to her a week before he killed himself, and that she found it absurd that a man who was academically so brilliant could have so few street smarts that he was reeled in for a blackmail scam by a father who was supposedly outraged, but would take $5,000 to go away.
"The day he told me the story I laughed," she said. "If this was a plot on 'Law & Order'," you would kick the television. It was just unbelievable."
She now wishes she had somehow helped him come up with the rest of the money Duplaisir demanded, but that given the expense of caring for their sons, there wasn't any money left to give.
She conceded that there was a side to the man she had loved for decades that she did not know, and that she doubts she will ever again be able to trust anyone.
Aune struggled with alcoholism, she said, and had been forever changed by a bout with prostate cancer.
Much of the evidence that police used to track down Duplaisir came from the phone Aune had with him, as well as from his office computer.
Duplaisir's underage relative later told authorities that Duplaisir took nude photographs and videos of her, and that the two of them created an online profile that was used to send the images to various men.
Duplaisir would later contact them and say he was an outraged relative and that they owed him money to pay for therapy.
Aune never met her in person, and most of the communication that Aune had with her appears to have actually been with Duplaisir, according to court documents.
Duplaisir had begged for mercy in at least two letters to Hughes.
"Please do the right thing for everybody and put me in a mental hospital so I can begin long-term care," he wrote. "I need help to stop being so twisted up and lost in my own mind."
Before announcing punishment, Hughes noted that Duplaisir was not charged with causing the professor's death, but extortion.
"Mr. Duplaisir did not intend the death of his victim and he is not charged with that," Hughes said. "What you did do is wrong," he said. "It is not just illegal, it is a really bad idea."
Aune's widow later said that she wished Duplaisir had gotten the two-year maximum sentence.
"The reason I wanted two years is it is going to take a long time to teach him empathy because he doesn't have any," she said. "He can't feel for other people."
