Posted by I have already written about Luka Magnotta in this article about real snuff films that ended up online. But Luka Rocco Magnotta certainly deserves an article of his own.
1 boy 2 kittens
Luka Magnotta (born Eric Clinton Kirk Newman, legally changed to Luka in 2006) is infamous for killing a young man, but it all began with a video in which he appears with two kittens. In the video, posted on YouTube at the time, Luka films two kittens. He puts them in a vacuum storage bag and sucks the air out with a vacuum cleaner, suffocating them.
The internet was furious, but tracking down the author of the video, whose face never clearly appears, seemed impossible. A group of animal lovers who had seen the video decided to try to identify him. They created a Facebook group and began looking for details in the video: a blanket, a packet of cigarettes, the brand of the vacuum cleaner… anything could help.
Meanwhile Luka posted two more videos in which the poor victims were cats, killed in different ways: one was drowned, while two others were fed to a snake. The Facebook task force kept investigating until, after several false alarms, it arrived at the name Luka Magnotta.
Searching the name online, he seemed to be a celebrity: a model, world travel, flirtations with international stars and dozens of fan groups. The truth soon emerged: Luka Magnotta was a fantasist who would do anything to draw attention to himself, even spreading false rumours about himself. What mattered to him was that his name became famous, whether for good or bad reasons; fame was all that counted.
1 Lunatic 1 Ice Pick
The Facebook group of animal lovers incredibly managed to find out where Luka was, in Toronto, Canada, and alerted the police. Officers went to the address but were told Luka Magnotta had moved, and the investigation ended there. Meanwhile Luka warned a journalist by email that next time he would not kill cats, but a human being.
And so it was. On 24 May 2012 he lured a 33-year-old, Jun Lin, via Craigslist, saying he wanted to make an amateur video for personal use. Jun decided to meet Luka, not knowing he was going to his death. Once at Luka’s home, Jun was drugged, tied to the bed and then killed with several stab wounds. After killing Jun, Luka beheaded the body and cut off the legs and arms. Then he put the torso in a suitcase, found days later by a passer-by, and sent a foot and a hand to the offices of Canada’s two main political parties.
Luka filmed the murder and posted it online. It was removed shortly afterwards, but by then the video had spread across the web. So began a manhunt. The Facebook group that had already been on Luka’s trail tried again to contact the police, in vain. The animal lovers were contacted by the police, who asked them to send all the information they had gathered on Luka, when by then it was already too late. Luka was arrested in Berlin, where he had fled, on 4 June 2012.
Luka Magnotta today
In December 2014 a jury found him guilty of first-degree murder. He is currently held at Port-Cartier Prison, in Quebec, Canada, serving a life sentence with no possibility of parole for 25 years.
If the police had taken the Facebook group’s information seriously, could a murder have been avoided? Even though at the time it was a case of animal cruelty, shouldn’t the police have intervened anyway? They settled for knocking on the door and accepting the answer that “he had moved”, giving a mentally disturbed person the chance to kill a human being, just as he had threatened to do.
I recommend the documentary “Don’t F**k with Cats”, recently released on Netflix, which I watched in one go in a single day.
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