Woman indicted in MySpace hoax suicide

Lori Drew and others created the fake MySpace persona of a 16-year-old boy to woo neighbor Megan Meier for several weeks, then abruptly ended the relationship and said the world would be better off without her

Meier's 2006 suicide by hanging, just hours after she read those final messages, made worldwide headlines and prompted calls for social networking sites like MySpace to crack down on cyber-bullying.

Several hours after the final message, Meier, who had argued with her mother over the relationship, hanged herself in the closet of her bedroom in a St. Louis suburb, still unaware that "Josh" did not exist.

Drew family was shunned by members of the community, targeted for abuse on the Internet and their small advertising business was vandalized

Drew, who faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in federal prison if she is convicted on all of the charges, was expected to surrender to authorities in Missouri.