Maniac: The Bath School Disaster and the Birth of the Modern Mass Killer
By Harold Schechter

The crime:

In 1927 Andrew P. Kehoe blew up a primary school in Bath, Michigan. He also blew up his house and burned his wife’s body in ritualistic fashion after killing her with a blow to the head. Later, while rescuers were working at the school to try to find any survivors, he arrived at the scene and blew himself up in his truck, killing several more people. In total 45 people died, including 38 children.

The book:

A first-rate account of one of the less well-known atrocities in the annals of true crime. Indeed, the fact that it is so little known today is a point that Harold Schechter (a fellow I once referred to as “the dean of American true crime writing”) spends some time unpacking in his Introduction.

Why is it that some crimes grab and maintain a fierce hold on the public imagination when others, equally bloody or sensational, are almost immediately forgotten? “Horrific violence,” even approaching “the sublime of horror,” “isn’t enough to ensure that a crime will become an ongoing media sensation, let alone a permanent part of our cultural mythology.” There has to be more. It seems that “for a murder to really take hold of the communal imagination and exercise an enduring grip, something else is necessary.” But what?

It’s a point Schechter returns to at the end of the book when considering why the Bath bombing was only a “seven-day horror” pushed off the front page by Lindbergh’s trans-Atlantic flight and then “relegated to obscurity,” Shechter puts forward an intriguing thesis. In order to become a cultural touchstone a crime has to resonate with contemporary public fears. It has to be “a story with a particular meaning, speaking to an issue that was a source of growing social concern at the time.” So around the turn of the twentieth century poisoners were big news because in

a pre-FDA age, when people could never be certain of what they were putting into their mouths – when medicines were made of strychnine and arsenic, bakers preserved their dough with sulfur of copper, babies consumed “swill milk” from cows fed on distiller waste, and soldiers received rations of “embalmed beef” – the poisoner was the nightmarish symbol, the personified projection, of a pervasive cultural anxiety.

Just so, Leopold and Loeb became embodiments of a fear of immoral youth (and affluent decadence) in the 1920s, while the “family” of Charles Manson “became the living realization of Middle America’s worst nightmares about sex-and-drug-crazed hippies” in the 1960s. If anyone remembers the Snyder-Gray case today it’s probably for the famous shot of Ruth Snyder being electrocuted in 1928, but at the time it was big news for other reasons.

In an era of radical social change, [feminist scholars] argue, when young women were kicking over the traces of Victorian morality and breaking free of their traditional domestic roles, Ruth came to embody everything that a sizable portion of the population most hated and feared: the sexually emancipated, self-indulgent flapper, symbol of a modern society run amok. In short, for Jazz Age America, the Snyder-Gray case resonated with powerful social and psychological meanings, becoming, in the words of culture critic Ann Jones, the decade’s “most important morality play.”

Schechter doesn’t bring the point up here, but the same has been argued about horror films. In the 1950s we got giant ants, spiders, and people mutated by nuclear explosions. Post-Watergate we got conspiracy thrillers. In the 1980s during the AIDS crisis we got “venereal horror” and slasher films where promiscuous teenagers were slaughtered. Each generation summons its own demons.

Interest in the Bath school bombing tracks this same movement. Following the long ascendancy of serial killers as the kings of true crime, we’ve gradually lost interest in them. As Shechter points out, the revelation in 2018 of the crimes of Samuel Little, who may have killed more than 90 people over five decades, “barely made a dent in public awareness.” The era we’ve entered into, however, has brought the Bath bomber back into the collective consciousness. Andrew Kehoe was a mass (not serial) murderer, a suicide bomber, an anti-government terrorist, a school killer. References to the Bath school bombing would increasingly appear in the media, “cited as a grim harbinger of the wholesale slaughters besetting the nation” in the twenty-first century.

And Kehoe wanted to kill a lot more. Over 500 sticks of dynamite and pyrotol that he had planted remained unexploded, enough to destroy the entire school and everyone in it. Which leads me to a quick digression. We’re lucky that making bombs isn’t easy. It’s not widely known, but Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold made a pair of propane bombs that they stuck in duffel bags and set to go off in the Columbine cafeteria on the day they went on their shooting rampage. Their attack was planned primarily as a school bombing, after which they would shoot any survivors. But the bombs failed to detonate. That’s not too surprising, as they were both 17 years old with no experience in such matters, but even a skilled handyman like Bill Rothstein’s elaborate (probably too elaborate) collar bomb only detonated one of the two pipe bombs it contained. Kehoe was known as a highly skilled mechanic and trained electrician, but most of the explosives he’d planted in the Bath Consolidated school building failed to go off.

Overall then I’d rate this as not just a great read – punchy and lean, with little of the novelistic or autobiographical flourishes that have become so prevalent in the genre – but a book that has something important to say about our two-way relation to true crime reporting. Another reminder that when we look into the abyss, the abyss is looking back at us.

Noted in passing:

Kehoe married into an established and prosperous family that he soon found himself in conflict with. Just for starters, they held the mortgage on the farm where he lived. For me this recalled All That is Wicked by Kate Winkler Dawson and what happened when Edward Rulloff married into the Schutt family, a blessed event that led to disastrous results. Considering the matter a little more, I also thought of Blood & Ink and Edward Hall marrying an heiress.

There is a lesson here that fits with some of what I’ve observed over the course of my own life. “Hypergamy” is a word that gets tossed around a lot these days when discussing female relationship choices. Basically it just means mating up, and among some online communities it’s considered to be an iron law, driven by evolutionary psychology (women seeking a mate with resources adequate to provide for them and their children). While some may call it gold-digging, casting it in these terms just makes it seem natural. And in the real world you don’t see women being criticized for it except in the most egregious situations.

Male hypergamy, however, is traditionally seen as quite unnatural, and men who marry for money are almost always looked upon with distaste if not outright disgust. I think of the killer Chigurh’s startled reaction to the Texaco gas station owner telling him that the station and the home out back is his “wife’s father’s place” in the coin-toss scene from the movie No Country for Old Men. “You married into it?” Chigurh chokes in disbelief. The owner’s immediate loss of status is palpable, and his attempt to save face doesn’t fly with Chigurh for a second (“I don’t have a way to put it. That’s the way it is.”).

The fact that this is how society looks upon men who marry up no doubt gives a turn of the screw to the domestic situation here and in the other cases I mentioned. And I imagine this was especially so in the 1920s. I don’t think the fact that all these men had wives with money from “good” families drove them to murder, but at the same time it probably didn’t help them stay on an even keel.

Another connection to the Hall-Mills murder case that struck me was the public fetishizing of souvenirs. In that earlier case the poor crab apple tree the bodies had been discovered under was stripped bare by trophy hunters. In this case a local reporter complained of how disaster tourists came to the ruins of the schoolhouse and “whittled it away and carried away bricks until there’s nothing left to tear down.” But even more remarkable was “one particularly ghoulish sightseer” who, in the immediate aftermath of Kehoe blowing himself up in his car, “deftly snipped a section of intestine from the steering column, placing it carefully in a jar of apparent alcohol.”

Why? The existence of “murderabilia” has always mystified me. What do people even do with these trophies? Put them on display in their homes? I guess it’s just a fact that collectors will collect anything, and celebrity/fame/notoriety has the effect of touching any part of our mundane, material reality with some aura of arcane value. Even so, you’d think people would have some sense of shame.

Takeaways:

Kehoe left a “note” (a sign wired to a gate at his farm) saying “CRIMINALS ARE MADE, NOT BORN.” He apparently targeted the school because he didn’t like being taxed to support it. Americans really do hate anything to do with taxes. Always have, and probably always will.

True Crime Files

All That Is Wicked: A Gilded-Age Story of Murder and the Race to Decode the Criminal Mind
By Kate Winkler Dawson

The crime:

A drifter named Edward Rulloff landed in Upstate New York in the early 1840s, where he married into the prominent Schutt family. He didn’t get along with his wife or her family, and may have been responsible for killing his sister-in-law and her child. He then killed his own wife and child, though their bodies were never found. He was convicted only of kidnapping his wife and sent to prison, from which he escaped. In 1870 he shot and killed a guard when he robbed a dry goods store with a couple of other men (both of whom drowned while trying to escape). In 1871 he was hanged.

The book:

A nice bit of work, making a case for why Edward Rulloff, whose crimes were as ordinary as they were callous and cruel, is worth attending to. In short, Winkler Dawson sees him as “the first high-profile killer to inspire neuroscientists to dig deeper into the criminal mind.”

Rulloff’s brain is currently part of the Widler Brain Collection at Cornell University, not for being a prime example of a criminal type (since there doesn’t seem to be such a type) but for its immense size, which apparently puts it in the largest 1% on record, and possibly one of the largest ever. This in turn leads not only to a discussion of early debates on the physiology of a criminal mind, but also into the matter of criminal, or evil, “genius.” As the book kicks off we’re told that many of his contemporaries considered Rulloff to be “perhaps, the most intelligent killer in American history.” As we keep reading, however, that’s a judgment that gets qualified.

Was Rulloff a criminal genius? Not because of the size of his brain. I don’t think Einstein’s brain was found to be particularly large. As Winkler Dawson concludes, “we now know that brain size is no indication of intellect or morality, or of belonging to a privileged group with claims of superior intelligence – it’s the quality of the brain, not the quantity.”

Was Rulloff a genius only by reputation? He was at least in some ways an impressive autodidact with a thing for languages. I’m not sure that being able to understand a lot of different languages is any great sign of intelligence though, any more than being good at math is (as I’ve argued elsewhere). Furthermore, his claim to have discovered a key to understanding the origin of all human language was investigated by authorities at the time and found to be nonsense. Horace Greeley would call him “too curious an intellectual problem to be wasted on the gallows” and “one of the most industrious and devoted scholars our busy generation has given birth to.” But that doesn’t mean he was smart. The same goes for Mark Twain calling him (with tongue in cheek) “one of the most marvellous intellects that any age has produced.” Being a curious and marvellous intellect, as well as an industrious and devoted scholar, carefully avoids comment on his actual intelligence.

A criminal genius? Hardly. Our best guess is that he killed his wife in a fit of rage. He would be sent to the hangman for killing a night watchman during a miserably planned and badly bungled break-in. I don’t see any evidence for thinking him a mastermind. Winkler Dawson argues for his being a psychopath, but even here I think he’d have to be considered a low-functioning one. He certainly tried to charm people, for example, but few people seem to have been fooled. In fact, most anyone who got to know him seems to have been repelled by him. He did fool some people, some of the time, but mainly those who were weak and vulnerable.

We want so badly to believe there’s some link between intelligence, however eccentric, and crime – what’s apparently known in the academic literature as the Hannibal Lecter myth (I’ve included a cover image where the alternative title points to this). Rulloff was an early example of this sort of thinking, but he’s also someone who should have made experts question the connection. Rulloff certainly considered himself to be a genius, but in this he was only a typical narcissist (or, less professionally, an asshole). Ramp up one’s delusions of grandeur and sense of entitlement far enough and you get someone whose brakes are off.

This is a good read, with Winkler Dawson structuring the story around Rulloff sitting in his cell awaiting execution and being visited by various people (journalists, academics, medical men) while his story is teased out through flashbacks much like you’d imagine being done in a docudrama. The parallel to Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, however, with chapter headings taken from that work, left me scratching my head. I really didn’t see Rulloff as being anything like that kind of a divided personality.

In other ways too I found Rulloff himself to be a lot less compelling a figure than he was made out to be, but as an origin story for today’s “mindhunters” his case does have a lot of historical interest. In 1871 investigators didn’t have the same tools we do today – our big data, for example, and ability to look inside the brain – but they still made a lot of very perceptive observations of criminal behaviour, like the district attorney here who noted how “It is a well understood fact that there is a kind of indescribable fascination to a criminal about the place where he has committed a crime, and however far he may go away still he wants to come back.” They were doing the best they could just working from the general, observable facts of the cases they were working on, and for the most part they seem to have done pretty well.

Noted in passing:

Was this the Gilded Age? I think the Gilded Age is usually seen as starting sometime in the late 1870s with the end of Reconstruction, or in 1880 to take a convenient round date. I tend to be inclined towards giving it a later starting-off point, but some historians place its beginnings as early as the end of the Civil War in 1865. For what it may be worth, the label is taken from a novel written by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner titled The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, which was published in 1873. Given that Rulloff killed his wife and child in 1844 and was executed in 1871, I don’t think this really counts as a “Gilded-Age Story.” But it’s interesting that publishers seem to think that adding “Gilded Age” to a title is a real selling point. This is not the first time I’ve seen it invoked when I didn’t think it was appropriate.

At Rulloff’s final trial it was observed that among the many people attending “a great portion of them [were] women.” This leads Winkler Dawson to make the following observation:

For generations, women have been the dominant consumers of true crime; in current times, most readers, listeners, or viewers of these crime stories are female. Experts say many women hope to learn from the mistakes of victims, to absorb themselves in a world they never hope to enter. In some cases, they change their behavior based on that knowledge – they’re more skeptical of male suitors and more cautious about venturing out alone. This was certainly the case of mostly proper ladies in Binghamton in 1871.

A footnote expands on this further, linking it to the pathology of hybristophilia, where women develop a sexual interest in serial killers and other “bad boys.” Leaving that aside, what Winkler Dawson says about today’s audience for true crime, whether in the form of books or podcasts, is certainly true and I’m not aware of any full explanation for it.

Takeaways:

If your whole family is against you marrying someone, best give the matter further consideration. If they become even more insistent that you leave your spouse when the marriage goes south, you should admit you made a mistake and get out before things get any worse. Because they will.

True Crime Files

Dead in the Water: A True Story of Hijacking, Murder, and a Global Maritime Conspiracy
By Matthew Campbell and Kit Chellel

The crime:

In July 2011 the oil tanker Brillante Virtuoso was apparently hijacked by a gang of pirates in the Gulf of Aden. The pirates didn’t hold the ship or the crew for ransom but only set it on fire. It later turned out at trial that the owner had staged the pirate attack and scuttled the ship in order to claim the insurance. Along the way, a British investigator living in Aden was killed by a car bomb, which was probably a hit related to his early questioning of the ship owner’s shady business practices.

The book:

This is the sort of true crime book I really enjoy because in addition to telling an interesting story it also provides a lot of background that’s new to me. In their introduction, the authors set the scene by talking about how marine trade has gradually become more invisible:

as ever-larger vessels required ever-larger quays, and robotic cranes replaced longshoremen’s brawn, the ports moved away to obscure locales like Felixstowe and Port Elizabeth [today Gqeberha]. Eventually the sailors also receded from view – some made obsolete by automation, the rest pushed out by cheaper, less demanding workers from developing countries. Even more than power lines or sewer pipes, ships slipped into the background of modern life, not so much taken for granted as barely noticed at all. As consumers, we’ve never before had access to such a bounty of goods, and we’ve never had to think so little about how they come into our possession.

Assisting this slip into the unnoticed background of daily life has been another peculiarity of the shipping trade: the use of layers of shell companies concealing the ownership of individual vessels and the “flags of convenience” that allow vessels to avoid pesky labour, safety, and environmental regulations. As a result, if a ship sinks or the cargo and crew are lost it can be a Herculean task just sorting out who is responsible or liable. From its beginning

the entire modern shipping industry had been structured to interpose layer upon corporate layer between the men who profited from owning ships and those who labored on them. When something went wrong, if there was a fatal accident or the crew ran out of food, it was easy for shipowners to claim ignorance and diffuse responsibility.

As a result, cases of maritime insurance fraud are fascinating mixtures of high-seas skullduggery and white-collar shenanigans. The attack on the Brillante Virtuoso was just a crude and stupid affair, albeit quite grim for the poor Philippine crew. The insurance plot, on the other hand, was more sophisticated: designed to take advantage of the fact that the law doesn’t do a great job dealing with such problems. In fact, as with most white-collar crime the law is designed precisely to avoid having to deal with these matters. And the insurance industry in particular would rather just pay to make problems go away since losses can just get passed on to consumers anyway. That’s how insurance works. The house never loses. In fact, white-collar criminals don’t lose either. “The lesson: maritime fraud is profitable, and even if you are unlucky enough to get caught, you’re unlikely to be prosecuted.”

The bitter sting in the tail of this story is that the owner of the Brillante actually came out ahead by about $10 million. The “moral flexibility” of the insurance market would even see him still being able to buy insurance from Lloyd’s after the legal findings against him. It’s all just business. As for moral hazard, I guess if the sums are large enough that doesn’t matter anymore. This led me to a deeper reflection on not just morality but the whole question of corporate culture having its incentives not just a bit but entirely wrong. This is what led to the subprime mortgage crisis back in 2008, and I’m afraid it’s pervasive in all sectors of the economy now. We’re all in the money and enjoying cheap goods until the music stops and we’re left wondering “Who did this?’

The book itself is not quite a page-turner, but it’s pretty darn good. The focus is on the efforts of two investigators, Richard Veale and Michael Conner, and their battles not only against the Greek ship owner and his allies but the insurance company that hired them. Talk about a snake pit.

Noted in passing:

There’s a great interaction described between some of the insurers and Veale where the insurers are pushing back against the strength of the case.

Everything they’d learned so far was “circumstantial,” one of the attendees said. Incensed, Veale interrupted him.

“Throughout this I’ve heard you all talk about circumstantial evidence,” Veale said. “Do you actually know what that means?”

“That there’s no smoking gun,” the man replied.

“A smoking gun is the best example of circumstantial evidence,” Veale said, his voice rising with frustration. It could only be otherwise if someone had witnessed the weapon being fired. “Circumstantial evidence isn’t weaker evidence,” he continued. “DNA and fingerprints are circumstantial evidence.” None were proof, on their own, that a crime had been committed or by whom. They were building blocks, to be combined into the foundation of a persuasive case, one that Veale was confident would succeed if the insurers were willing to make it.

The exchange addresses the very common misconception that circumstantial is somehow less reliable and weaker than direct evidence. In fact, circumstantial evidence is often far stronger than direct evidence, as eyewitnesses can be very unreliable while physical evidence (such as DNA and fingerprints) is something you can take to the bank.

Takeaways:

“The shipping industry has the unique attribute of being utterly integrated with the world economy while existing apart from it, benefiting from its infrastructure while ignoring many of its rules. It’s sometimes said that the seas are lawless, and that’s true: far from shore, on a decrepit trawler or a juddering ore carrier, there are certainly no police, and often no consequences. But the most audacious crimes can occur where the maritime world intersects with the more orderly terrestrial one – enabled by the complexities of twenty-first-century finance and, perhaps most of all, the collective indifference of a global populace that wants what it wants, wants it now, and doesn’t want to know the human cost.”

True Crime Files

Slenderman: Online Obsession, Mental Illness, and the Violent Crime of Two Midwestern Girls
By Kathleen Hale

The crime:

Three Waukesha, Wisconsin girls — Morgan Geyser, Anissa Weier, and Payton Leutner – went into the woods on May 31, 2014. Geyser and Weier had planned beforehand to kill Leutner as a sacrifice to the Internet bogeyman Slenderman (or Slender Man). Geyser stabbed Leutner 19 times and then ran off with Weier. Leutner fortunately survived the attack. Geyser and Weier, who were both 12 years old at the time, were quickly apprehended and found not guilty by reason of insanity at trial.

The book:

This is a story that became a media sensation at the time, which rarely does anyone any good. A lot of the reporting was misleading. For example, Kathleen Hale mentions the false impression received by many (and I can raise my own hand here) that Leutner had been killed in the woods. Also, the focus of a lot of the coverage was on the idea that the girls had been corrupted in some way by the Internet. But there were shocking crimes like this long before the Internet, or even television, and as Hale convincingly argues Geyser in particular was already in a bad way before she ever met up with Weier and started visiting the Creepypasta site, source of the Slenderman mythos.

I doubt this will be a crime that has the staying power in the popular imagination as more celebrated cases involving children, like the Parker-Hulme murder (which the film Heavenly Creatures was based on), Mary Bell strangling two even smaller children in Newcastle, Robert Coombes killing his mother (the subject matter of Kate Summerscales’ The Wicked Boy), and the murder of James Bulger by Robert Thompson and Jon Venables. For purposes of comparison, Hulme and Parker were 15 and 16 respectively, Bell just turned 11, Coombes was 13, and Thompson and Venables were both 10. Now that they’ve played out, is there a lesson we can learn from those earlier crimes?

If you believe that the primary purpose of the justice system is rehabilitation, then crimes involving young people provide the most instructive test cases. Let’s face it, by the time you’re 30 or 40, you are what you are. I’d even say you’re mostly set well before that. But children can change, unless they’re truly bad by nature. So what does the evidence of those previous cases tell us? Julie Hulme went on to become the famous mystery writer Anne Perry and Pauline Parker started running a children’s riding school. Mary Bell, her identity still concealed, has apparently gone on to live an incident-free life. Robert Coombes moved to Australia and would serve with distinction in the First World War as a stretcher-bearer at Gallipoli before settling down to operate a market garden. Robert Thompson, considered by authorities to have been the dominant partner in the Bulger slaying, hasn’t re-offended since being released from a young offender’s institution in 2001. Only Jon Venables has turned out to be incorrigible, continuing to have several serious run-ins with the law relating to the possession of child pornography and disorderly conduct.

In other words, even the most violent and dangerous kids can get better. Slenderman foregrounds the question of what to do with two young offenders, one of whom (Geyser) was clearly suffering from some form of mental illness (Anissa Weier’s defence of folie à deux, on the other hand, didn’t fully convince me). To what extent are such individuals a risk to themselves and others if they get early release? How can they best be treated? There’s a lot of disagreement even among experts when it comes to matters like these, but the bottom line is that any way of dealing with the problem is going to take a lot of time and money, and the general public can’t be expected to feel particularly generous toward such types.

Hale, who has written a couple of YA novels, is a responsible reporter of the events, extending sympathy to everyone caught up in the tragic whirlpool of events. It’s heartbreaking to read her account of the assault and the events leading up to it. She doesn’t have to do anything to work up the pathos, and aside from a few minor and forgivable touches (like the victim’s blood staining the words “love,” “hope,” and “justice” on her t-shirt in a fading red) I didn’t think she was trying to tell the story slant. But what I found most interesting in her account was the shadow cast not by Slenderman but of what has become an American nightmare.

What I mean is the pervasive sense Hale gives of a nation not just in decline but almost in ruins. There’s the collapsing justice system that has seen underfunded mental health institutions and the prison-industrial complex being crudely bolted together in a merger made in hell. There’s Leutner’s parents struggling to pay her astronomical hospital bills and Geyser’s parents (and grandparents) cashing out their savings and going into debt to pay for her legal defence. And then there’s the book’s strange final vignette, which has the lead defence lawyer going for a jog by a river declared officially toxic due to poisonous water runoff from local paper mills and seeing a group of three men making a video of themselves having public sex. The lawyer has a hunch the three are opium addicts hooked on drugs dispensed by predatory pain clinics.

We are told, in passing, that Waukesha is “one of the most conservative counties in what was becoming an increasingly conservative state – one that by around twenty thousand votes would swing the 2016 election in Donald Trump’s favor.” So American carnage then, all the way.

Noted in passing:

The book spells Slenderman as all one word. Wikipedia designates him as Slender Man with Slenderman as an alternative spelling. Apparently he was described as “The Slender Man” in his first appearance online. It’s testimony to how completely the Internet has taken over our sense of orthography that I figured Slenderman must be right. We smush all our words together now as a matter of course. I wonder where this will eventually lead. Perhaps we’ll go back to the style of ancient times with whole pages of text unbroken by any spaces between words. Then, in some future renaissance, we’ll rediscover Carolingian minuscule . . .

The cover shows what seems to be a very upscale suburban street, with pretty houses and a big flag flying from a front porch. Is this Waukesha? In any event, Geyser and Weier were both condo kids, and not fancy condos either. I guess the publisher was trying to sell the idea that these were all-American girls, and that beneath the pristine surface of American life all sorts of evil is bubbling away, but I found it misleading.

In my notes on Obsessed by William Phelps I made some remarks on the decline of cursive handwriting. Whatever else one thinks of its loss, being able to write cursive can be a useful skill, especially when having to write quickly because you don’t have to lift your pen up from the paper as often. I think it would have helped the detective here who took down Anissa Weier’s confession in all-uppercase handwriting. I can’t imagine how awkward that must have been.

There’s one moment of black humour that I loved. At one point the budding psycho Anissa is described as taking “a field trip with her FLIGHT class to talk to her third grade ‘buddy’ about the difference between right and wrong.” And it gets better:

In FLIGHT (facilitating learning through integration, guidance, high expectations, and technology), she [Anissa] was studying PBI (positive behavior intervention), helping younger students at the nearby elementary school make good decisions and stay out of trouble. Earlier that year, Anissa had confided in another girl in FLIGHT that she had found a way to become a proxy [a murderous disciple] of Slenderman, saying, “You have to kill one of your friends.” The other girl, identified in court by her initials, K. N., would later testify, “And when I looked at her like ‘What are you talking about?’ She was like, ‘Don’t worry, it’s not you – and I was kind of like, confused? But I didn’t think she actually was like, gonna do it because she didn’t seem like that kind of person.”

I could add this to the list of background evidence of a nation in decline. Oh, the horror of what grade school has become. The horror.

Takeaways:

Hale makes a strong case for the importance of understanding and being sympathetic toward mental health issues. My own advice, however, is this: Unless you’re a professional you should stay away from these people. Interaction with them should be limited to steering them toward someone who can help.

True Crime Files