Freddy Sykes

Freddy Sykes is a solitary Ho-Ho-Kus resident whom Eric Wu selects as a victim through online deception. The same name Wu uses to cultivate Sykes’s interest also becomes part of the ruse that brings Wu to his door; after Wu attacks him and leaves him gagged in a bathtub, Charlaine Swain’s intervention keeps him alive.

Identity and Circumstances

Sykes is forty-eight and works for a storefront tax-filing company in Waldwick, New Jersey. His parents are dead, he has no siblings, and he inherited the Ho-Ho-Kus house after caring for his mother. She had died two years earlier. According to the personal details Sykes shared online, caring for her had left him little time for a relationship.

His online photograph offers a sharply ordinary portrait: a headshot showing a heavyset man with thin, shoe-polish-black hair in a comb-over, and a smile that appears strained. The description does not make him exceptional; it emphasizes how little his neighbors notice him. The young families on his block pay him scant attention, and his house resembles the others nearby.

How Wu Selects Him

Wu searches online dating sites for people with few ties to others. Sykes fits the pattern: he has no close family nearby, no siblings, and, in Wu’s assessment, little to connect him to a protective social circle. His home is also only three miles from the Lawson residence, making him geographically useful to Wu.

For three weeks, Sykes has been corresponding with Al Singer, a fictional fifty-six-year-old retired executive presented as a widower interested in travel, fine dining, and sports. Wu constructs the persona to seem plausible rather than conspicuously attractive, using a photograph taken from a YMCA online catalogue. The correspondence is not incidental to the crime: Wu uses the trust built through it to make Sykes more receptive to contact in person.

The house’s layout compounds Sykes’s vulnerability. Its attached garage opens electronically, letting someone enter or leave in a car without being seen. Wu watches the garage, waits ten minutes, and then rings the doorbell. A familiar-seeming approach has been prepared against a setting that offers privacy but little visible oversight.

Attack and Rescue

Wu later finds Sykes still in the bathtub, with a gag in his mouth and his eyes closed. Unsure whether Sykes is dead, Wu assumes no one else is in the house and that nobody has come to help. The scene turns on the difference between Wu’s expectation of isolation and the intervention that has, in fact, given Sykes a chance to live.

A police officer tells Charlaine Swain that Sykes will survive because of her; without her, he might have remained in the tub for hours longer. Sykes’s survival is therefore not simply the result of Wu’s miscalculation. It depends on someone nearby recognizing the danger and acting before the delay becomes fatal.

The Al Singer Deception

When Charlaine asks about Al Singer, Sykes first jolts and denies knowing anyone by that name, then says he opened the door out of curiosity. The name, however, has a more complicated history than a single false delivery identity: Sykes had also signed up for a bisexual dating service and corresponded regularly with a man named Al Singer. An investigator’s review of his computer confirms that the online relationship was real as an exchange, even though the suitor was Wu’s invented persona.

That overlap makes Sykes’s case a small but revealing example of Wu’s method. Al Singer is at once a fabricated person in Sykes’s online life and a name associated with Wu’s approach at the door. Sykes’s initial denial and the later confirmation of the correspondence leave the personal and criminal meanings of the alias entangled: the deception works precisely because it has already acquired a foothold in an apparently private relationship.