When Dimitrelos, Levy, and Fauver had amassed sufficient evidence of the stalker's online activity, they acquired a subpoena from New Mexico District Court requesting that Comcast release details on the subscriber behind the residential IP address in Albuquerque. Comcast reported that the address belonged to Devon Townsend.

Dimitrelos tracked down her MySpace page, which revealed her to be a 27-year-old single mother of an infant son. She lived with her own mom in Albuquerque and was a self-described "computer nerd" who liked grilled-cheese sandwiches, hated applesauce, and took pride in being a parent. "I enjoy watching my son grow, knowing that whatever I do impacts him," she wrote. Dimitrelos couldn't believe that this was the stalker.

By this point, Fauver's DOE contact, special agent Matt Goward, had convinced Sandia officials to send him a copy of her hard drive. Townsend was employed at Sandia as a computer technologist, assisting the engineers and researchers at the facility.

"This case is unbelievable," Dimitrelos thought. Townsend had Q-level security clearance, which allows nonmilitary personnel to access atomic or nuclear materials. It was equivalent to the clearance level that Dimitrelos himself had when he was protecting presidents. And yet she was spending seven hours a day at Sandia logging in and out of strangers' email accounts.

Dimitrelos wondered how Townsend pulled this off. He assumed the Feds monitored the computer activity of people in nuclear research labs. But, as he learned after reading up on Sandia, the lab had recently experienced another security scandal.

In 2004, Shawn Carpenter, a network-intrusion-detection analyst at Sandia, discovered an attack on the lab's computers (later linked in news reports to a Chinese hacking group called Titan Rain) and began back- hacking to uncover the problem. Carpenter informed the Army Research Lab and worked with them to help ID the hackers, for which he claims Sandia fired him. He sued for wrongful discharge. According to court documents, he claims he was told by Sandia's head of counter intelligence, a retired CIA officer, "If you worked for me, I would decapitate you!" (On February 13 of this year, a New Mexico jury awarded $4.3 million to Carpenter. A Sandia spokesperson announced that they were "disappointed" by the verdict and planned to appeal it.)

Dimitrelos was incredulous. "Here's a person trying to do the right thing," he says, "and he was stifled internally." The Carpenter case suggested to him that Sandia officials might not be fully helpful in his investigation. And that wasn't all that concerned him. Through one of his DOE contacts, Fauver learned that Townsend's mother was also employed at Sandia. She worked directly under Norm Jarvis, the head of security. Whether or not Townsend's mother knew of her daughter's alleged crimes, Dimitrelos was hesitant to work directly with Sandia's security department. For all he knew, the mother would inform her daughter of the investigation, and Devon Townsend would try to cover her tracks.

Luckily, Dimitrelos found Gus Tyler Smith, a sympathetic agent in the Technology Crimes Section at DOE headquarters in DC. They hit it off — Dimitrelos called him Big Gus, and he was Little Gus. Big Gus got clearance for Levy and Little Gus to visit the lab and agreed to meet them there. Dimitrelos was convinced that they had to move fast. "Let's pack our bags," he told Levy. "We're going to Sandia."

The Benningtons had no idea that investigators were closing in on the person who was wrecking their lives. Around this time, Chester got an email from Informant_for_U. "Hey," it read, "I felt that you probably need this for tomorrow." He opened the attachment and gasped. It was a day sheet, the detailed schedule for a music video he would be filming the next day. The stalker knew more about his life than he did.

On November 14, Dimitrelos and Levy arrived in Albuquerque. They were there to get a formal confession from Devon Townsend. As the lead investigator on the case, Dimitrelos would conduct the interview that would later be used by the US attorney's office. Big Gus and a man who never revealed his identity met them at the gate and followed them as they walked through the federal bunkers and wound down the hallways. The layout was unnerving: It was a one-story building with an elevator going down. Devon Townsend worked in a cramped pod of cubicles with several other people. Her workstation was easy to spot — there was a sticker behind the monitor with the name of her favorite band. But she wasn't around. Her manager went to fetch her, typing a security code to unlock a heavy door. She arrived a few moments later, a Native American with a round face, long dark hair, glasses, and a Linkin Park hoodie. Dimitrelos introduced himself as a retired Secret Service agent. "Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?" he said. They walked her to a small concrete DOE building across the street, loosening her up with small talk along the way. "You look fit," Dimitrelos said. "Do you work out?" Levy and Dimitrelos sat down to interview Townsend. Big Gus did not take part, but DOE agent Goward was there, floating in and out of the room. Levy read Townsend her rights and had her sign the Secret Service's Warning and Consent to Speak form 1737B. Then Dimitrelos got down to business. "Do you know the band Linkin Park?" he asked Townsend. "Yeah, I know them," she replied. "I'm wearing their jacket." "You finish these sentences for me," he told her as he began to repeat a passage from one of the messages the Benningtons had received. After all these months, he'd memorized it. Dimitrelos recited from an email in which the stalker had taunted Chester and Talinda about trying to change their passwords. "You finally got smart and decided to change your password. What does — " " — Japan mean?" said Townsend, completing the sentence from her own email. "OK," Dimitrelos continued. "On November 9, you sent an article about — " " — cyberstalking," she said. There'd be no throwing chairs through the wall to elicit this confession. Townsend coolly told her tale. The stalking started after she saw Chester's email address inadvertently CC'd in a mass mailing to promote a tattoo parlor he owned in Tempe. Using Chester's birthday and zip code to access his Mac.com account, she started guessing passwords until she found the right one: his middle name, Charlie. Townsend suddenly had access to all of her idol's messages. Soon she had Talinda's Yahoo address, too, and after guessing the password, she reset it. From there, her infiltration was a feat of feverish social engineering. As Townsend pored through the Benningtons' email, she began cataloging every detail of their lives: friends, Social Security numbers, photos, plans. Getting Chester's cell phone data was a snap: All she'd needed was his wireless number, his zip code, and the last four digits of his Social Security number to register his Verizon account online and get complete access to records of his calls. Even Townsend herself seemed astonished at how easy it was. When she opened the Verizon account, the user ID she chose was "ohshititworked." Why did you do all this? Dimitrelos asked. In flat tones, Townsend told him that she was bored. Her job at Sandia took about half an hour a day, and she was looking to pass the time. Dimitrelos pressed for more from Townsend, trying to get a sense of her feelings about her victims. Townsend told him she loved Linkin Park, particularly Chester. She said she wanted to be "part of what he is." In some of her emails, Townsend had told the Benningtons that she was trying to shield them from any bad information or emails that may be coming their way. It was classic stalker behavior — introducing duress, then pretending to relieve it in an attempt to appear useful. She finally told Dimitrelos that she knew what she was doing was wrong, but she couldn't stop. Levy and Dimitrelos drew up a confession. Townsend signed it, and they witnessed it. They made her promise not to have further contact with the Benningtons. Then she was free to go. Fauver filed a complaint on November 20 that relied on information from the interview, and Townsend was jailed that day. She was released the next, but soon afterward Sandia placed her on leave, and eventually she was fired. As Dimitrelos and Levy were interviewing Townsend, Fauver and a dozen officials from the DOE, the Secret Service, and the US Defense Criminal Investigative Service (a division of the DOD) arrived at Townsend's house with a warrant from a federal judge for the district of New Mexico. Inside, they found a shrine to Linkin Park: posters, a montage of photos, a paper plate signed by Chester, and a Linkin Park poster over her son's crib. When officials confiscated Townsend's hard drive, they found thousands of the Benningtons' emails, a detailed log of their friends and family, and more than 700 of their private photos. They also found one of Townsend's personal photos, taken backstage at a concert Chester gave in Arizona. She'd learned about the event through the Benningtons' emails, then monitored their voicemail to figure out where they would be at certain times. The picture showed Townsend standing proudly next to Chester. Later that day, Chester's cell phone buzzed. "I'm sorry for doing what I did to you guys," Townsend text-messaged. "Please accept my apology." It was her last communication to the Benningtons. When Dimitrelos called later to announce she'd been caught, Chester felt physically ill. "It sparks the sort of anger you don't normally experience," Chester told me wearily as he sat in the recording studio in March. The lights were low. Paintings of Buddhas adorned the walls. The band had just finished recording its new album, Minutes to Midnight, which was due to hit shelves May 15. But Chester wasn't celebrating. He'd lost a year of his life to a stalker, and he was still feeling wounded. "I don't go out and pick fights," he said. "But when you find out some total stranger has personal pictures of your kids in the bath, has phone numbers of your parents and close friends and every business associate, listens to every voicemail you've had for the last year, intercepts every email you've written or received ... it fuels my desire to make sure this kind of action is viewed as criminal." The scary part is that it could have been much worse. Townsend might have emptied their bank accounts, disseminated their Social Security numbers, or exploited the information to harm their children. Townsend's attorney Ray Twohig declined to comment to Wired, saying only that "the case is proceeding." But at Townsend's detention hearing he conceded, "We have an invasion of privacy here by a fan that goes beyond what most of us are familiar with. This is not someone hiding in the dressing room of a rock star; it goes further than that." At the detention hearing, Townsend was placed under house arrest and forbidden to use a computer, cell phone, game console, or anything else that could connect to the Internet. A call to her residence was answered by a man who also refused to comment. Townsend is facing a range of possible charges, including interception of electronic communications, unlawful access to stored communications, fraud and related activity connected with information, fraud and related activity in connection with computers, and unauthorized trafficking of sound and video recordings. The DOJ will not comment on an ongoing case. Dimitrelos says there should be consequences for Sandia as well. "The US attorney wanted to get me on a gag order," he says. "I told him to suck it." Dimitrelos believes that Sandia's ignorance of Townsend's activity speaks poorly of the lab's security. Fauver concurs, saying, "It causes me great concern that there would be people inside Sandia able to use a network that was not being closely monitored." Sandia downplays the potential for other people to do what Townsend did. "The employee has discovered a vulnerability in the system, and we've addressed that issue," Sandia spokesperson Michael Padilla says. He stresses that her computer was not in a secured area and adds, "She had a lot of free time, apparently." The National Nuclear Security Administration, the DOE agency that oversees Sandia, issued a statement to Wired, reading in part: "Multiple layers of stringent security controls were in place at the time the incident occurred and the security of Sandia's network was never compromised. Although the Laboratory is planning to improve Internet monitoring capabilities for outbound connections, no policy changes have been required as a result of the incident. The only completely effective way to prevent abuse of Internet access is to deny it entirely, and that is not a viable option for a research and development laboratory." Meanwhile, Chester Bennington is grappling with the headaches that increased security brings. His passwords are now long strings of random letters and numbers that he changes frequently. "I keep a list for every different thing, and it drives me out of my fucking mind," he says. "I want to go back." Back to Charlie.