The video triggered a frenzy of online detective work, as animal lovers around the world joined forces on social media to work out who the homicidal sadist was. The amateur sleuths were eventually sent an online tip which led them to identify Luka Magnotta, who by this time had used the power of social media to carefully conjure up a kind of A-list, alternative version of himself.
A mysterious fan page on YouTube featured video montages of his photos. A poster on a Flickr page asked if it was true that Luka and River Phoenix were cousins. Rumours swirled that Luka had dated celebrities. It later turned out that Magnotta himself was posting all these gushing messages, using dozens of false aliases online.
The animal lovers were flabbergasted by all this bizarre online buzz relating to their prime suspect. Having seen that Magnotta had previously worked in the adult industry, some of the Magnotta-hunters came up with a flamboyant sting operation to snare their man.
They even managed to get Ron Jeremy on board for a while, before the porn legend got cold feet and backed out. Magnotta continued to evade capture, and more horrific videos were eventually posted — including one showing a kitten being fed to a python. Then, in , Magnotta did what many of his hunters always feared. He escalated from animals to humans. Magnotta followed his usual MO, setting up the killing as a ritual for the camera.
Instead, they stayed at the club because Phoenix wanted to play music with the club's band. In the end, Phoenix took too many drugs — a lethal combination of cocaine and heroin. I didn't see anyone doing drugs, but he was high in a way that made me feel uncomfortable," Mathis told The Guardian. Phoenix was pushed out of the club for getting into a fight, and then he dropped to the ground and died on the sidewalk shortly after, Mathis recalls.
The figure leans over the man and touches his blindfold. The video cuts. The dark figure is now straddling the man. Seconds later, the figure gets up, and the bound man shifts slightly. The video cuts at the one-minute mark, returning to the man, now with a black sheet over his head. Ten seconds later, the dark figure reemerges, holding an icepick in a clenched fist. He got out of bed and opened the link on his computer so that he could view the video on a bigger screen. He watched as the dark figure began dissecting the man, cutting off his head and arm.
Green, referred to here by his online alias, logged onto the private Facebook group that he and a few other intrepid citizen sleuths had launched in an attempt to catch the man behind a video titled 1 boy 2 kittens. Posted a year and a half earlier, that video showed a figure in a dark green hoodie suffocating two tabby kittens using a vacuum and plastic bag.
The group, along with others online, had spent thousands of hours trying to track down a man, Luka Magnotta, who they believed was responsible for the video. They were close to catching him twice — but found themselves always one step behind him. They begged the authorities for help, reminding them that serial killers — from Jeffrey Dahmer to Edmund Kemper — began their reigns of terror by torturing and killing animals.
Now, watching the video, Green believed his warnings had come to pass. Alerted by Green, hundreds of amateur detectives sat transfixed in front of their computers, watching the hooded figure play with the decapitated head, simulate sex with the torso and masturbate himself with a severed arm.
Some were attempting to positively identify the dark figure, others trying to see if the body was fake. Eighteen months earlier, on the evening of December 21st, , Ryan Boyle had been surfing the web in his wood-paneled home office in Maryland. The Army veteran, who had made a civilian transition into working on aviation electronics for the Navy, was toggling between YouTube and the funny pictures thread on 4chan. As he was scrolling, he encountered a still image of a video called 1 boy 2 kittens.
In the background of the horrifying clip, people were speaking in a foreign language. It sounded like Russian. Anonymous Vs.
It hit me in a really personal place and I just wanted to see this guy pay. She had been following an animal mutilation case on 4chan and become intrigued at how users were able to identify a Texas Goth girl responsible for posting photos featuring the decapitation of a dog.
In Sydney, Australia, a year-old accountant originally from the Ukraine using the alias Nicee Punk, had become intrigued with the search. I am low on the emotions. John Green saw 1 boy 2 kittens on 4chan.
He was familiar with pet torture videos, having followed the case of Dusty, a cat who was terrorized on video by a teenage boy later identified as an eighth grader from Oklahoma.
Green joined the group on December 23rd. Christy, a year-old a mother and business owner from Texas, joined and solved one mystery — she was the one who made the original plea on 4chan. At the time, Christy ran the gore site ohlookaforum, which was the top search result for a snuff video called 3 Guys, 1 Hammer. A user named babymaggie11 had embedded a YouTube video for 1 boy 2 kittens.
This crew of avengers began tossing around theories. The bedspread was decorated with an image of a wolf — where was it sold? The voices in the background — was it actually Russian? The electrical outlets — were they European or North American? They pursued any visual clue that might help them identify the figure in the green hoodie.
The concept of the online sleuth is gaining momentum. From Susan Galbreath, a Kentucky housewife who became obsessed with the murder of local woman Jessica Currin, and began collecting clues and eventually getting a tip on a MySpace page to catch her killers, to blogger Alexandria Goddard grabbing screen captures of tweets in the aftermath of the Steubenville rape, the Internet is a breeding ground for budding Sherlocks.
The sleuths can tell them things, but they will get nothing in return. The latter is a problem that the Vaccumer Kitten Killer investigators would face, but at this early point in their search, they had not reached out to law enforcement.
The vacuum was identified as a Kenmore Canister Vacuum, Yellow Like, the size of the bed — are twin beds the same in Russia as they are in America?
It was a fun but frustrating time. It was exciting. But after thousands of man-hours, the group was no closer to finding out the identity of the figure in the dark-green hooded sweatshirt. At the same time in Hollywood, Sia Barbi, one-half of the Barbi Twins, sister models who gained fame in after posing in Playboy , was receiving e-mails directing her to the 1 boy 2 kittens video.
A longtime animal advocate, Barbi, along with twin sister Shane , had recently lobbied online for the Animal Crush Video Prohibition Act, which sought to ban sexual fetish videos featuring people, mostly women, crushing small vertebrate animals with high heels or bare feet.
She informed the group that she had media connections that could help spread the word. Panzarella is one of the leaders of Rescue Ink, a collection of hard-nosed bikers who fight against animal abuse on Long Island, New York. The group had received national attention from their reality show on the National Geographic channel, which followed the tattooed bad boys as they confronted animal abusers throughout New York. Panzarella says his team analyzed the video, and the group tossed out speculations that it might have come from Europe.
Users had begun posting links to Facebook profiles of people they thought looked like the kitten killer. The posts pointing to Facebook profiles of innocent people were being deleted as fast as possible by Boyle and the other admins.
In an attempt to get some clarity amidst the disorder, Boyle started a second, smaller Facebook group calling it Useful Individuals and invited the users from the main Vaccumer Kitten Killer group who he thought had the best skills — hackers, investigators, filmmakers, artists — to help identify the figure in the green hoodie.
Coupled with the clue which Baudi discovered — that at minute. They discovered that someone had posted to 4chan a photo of a person lying on a bed holding two kittens in his hands. The face was pixelated, but the image looked to be a still photo taken in the same room as the video — wolf bedspread and all.
Artists in the group tried enhancing the image, sketching out what the face might look like. The group worked through the New Year, and by January 8th, , many believed they had found the kitten killer.
A member had found the profile of a Facebook user calling himself Jamsey Cramsalot Inhisass. Jamsey had posted a video to his Facebook page of a cat in a cage being set on fire — and the photos on his profile were of a teenage boy with similar facial features to the blurry green figure in the green hoodie. Was this the killer? Along with the Barbi Twins, he came up with a plan to bring Jamsey out in the open.
Panzarella enlisted a member of Rescue Ink who was a grade school teacher — and a female body builder. The woman began a Facebook dialogue with Jamsey, attempting to appeal to his narcissist ego and reveal himself. After some back and forth, Jamsey admitted to the female bodybuilder that he was, in fact, the hooded figure in the 1 boy 2 kittens video. Case solved. Rescue Ink thought they had their man. But members of the Vaccumer Kitten Killer group wanted proof.
The Vaccumer Kitten Killer admins were skeptical that this was not their man — but the focus on Jamsey Cramsalot Inhisass had a welcome side effect: Less than a day after the group publicly identified Jamsey as the culprit behind 1 boy 2 kittens , Nicee Punk received a Facebook message from a user named Beverly Kent. And suddenly you got a name. You could put a name to the face. Nicee forwarded the message to the admins of the group. And hundreds of photos. Luka on a beach.
Luka in a sports car. Luke in a limo. In a hot tub. Under the Eiffel Tower. His hairstyles would vary, but his chiseled jaw, high cheekbones and bright blue eyes remained the same. A twink James Dean. Often shirtless.
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