Oh, I don't know, so they can be on You Tube?
or they want to be like Paris, Lindsey or Britney?
Seriously, in a capital murder trial I presided in a few years back the defendant had videotaped himself looking into the medicine cabinet mirror and bragging about the murders committed. He received the death penalty from the jury.
Why do so many criminals want to be video stars?
BY RICHARD B. WOODWARD
BY RICHARD B. WOODWARD
The Wall Street Journal
"Peeping Tom," the chilly 1959 movie by Michael Powell, concerns a young psychopath who uses a 16mm movie camera to film his victims while he is killing them. The close-ups of terror that cross the faces of the women as he impales them on a spike attached to his tripod are for him a source of curiosity and pleasure.
Widely reviled on its release--and credited with destroying the commercial career of Powell, a venerable English director ("The Red Shoes")--the work was rediscovered by Martin Scorsese and other cinéastes in the 1970s. They argued against its earlier detractors, noting that in its exploration of the dynamics between movie images and violence, criminality and voyeurism, the film was shockingly ahead of its time.
A casual reading of the news illustrates just how prescient "Peeping Tom" has turned out to be. There was the recent arrest in Nevada of Chester Stiles, who allegedly filmed himself raping a three-year-old girl. This sensational item overlapped with the capture in Thailand of Christopher Paul Neil, a Canadian schoolteacher accused of posting on the Internet images of himself having sex with a series of children. Neither would in all likelihood have been jailed so quickly had they not photographed themselves performing these atrocities. Both Pekka-Eric Auvinen, who shot eight people in a Finnish high school on Nov. 7, and Cho Seung Hui, murderer of 32 at Virginia Tech this April, made confessional videos for broadcast or posting online--so called massacre manifestos--designed to outlive their suicides.
A partial list of others happy or compelled to document their own crimes in recent years would include the young arsonist in California who took pictures of himself against the background of the infernos he set. Or the Canadian joy-riders who cruised around Vancouver at night, shooting frightened pedestrians with paint-ball guns while recording themselves whooping it up during these escapades. Or Sean Gillespie, a neo-Nazi who videotaped himself in 2004 firebombing an Oklahoma City synagogue as part of his racist promotional package. Or the three teenagers arrested last year in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., for clubbing with baseball bats three homeless men, one of them to death, events the boys commemorated by making a video.
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