[claps]
Are you ready?
Yeah?
[keyboard clacking]
[Deanna] The Internet is boundless.
You know, it's the Wild West, right?
There's the happy places
where you look at cute little babies and wonderful, beautiful playfulness,
and cute pictures of your kids going to school.
But more than anything,
people love cats. They love them.
And then there's another part of the Internet
that is a free-for-all.
The seedy underbelly.
You can post porn, violence,
somebody getting pushed down stairs, religious statues being defamed,
cruelty to the elderly,
a street fight, bum fights,
defamatory images of the Statue of Liberty,
and nobody gives a crap.
Nobody's gonna bat an eye.
But in this seedy underbelly, there's an unwritten rule.
Now, it's unwritten, but it's understood.
Rule zero.
And rule zero is "don't fuck with cats."
Good evening. We begin tonight with developing
and sinister news,
where police are investigating two mysterious packages.
[intense string music playing]
[man] I've been a police officer for over 23 years,
and it's the first time I've seen something like this.
[news anchor] A twisted story that keeps twisting...
A receptionist opened the blood-soaked box
and found a severed foot.
[reporter 1] What they saw, they described as something out of a horror film.
[reporter 2] This is somebody who is able to execute
a very, very well laid-out plan.
[news anchor] I mean, it plays out like a slasher movie.
[reporter 1] He was clearly someone who wanted this bizarre form of notoriety.
And he actually put things on the Internet.
[news anchor] What did you see in that video?
There was moments that aren't even speakable.
This man does not have a lot of friends. Not many who have surfaced, anyway.
[newscaster in French] Public enemy number one.
[reporter 3] How hard is it going to be to track him down?
How dangerous is this man?
How careful should people be right across the globe?
[reporter 2] Well, he is a master of disguise. He likes to...
[newscaster in Mandarin] ...possibly disguised as a woman.
Interpol issued a worldwide arrest warrant for first-degree murder.
[news anchor] Tonight there are accusations
that online evidence of a twisted mind was ignored by police.
[reporter 4] And he even posted these horrific videos
of him allegedly torturing and killing cats.
[Deanna] Okay, so I'll tell you how all this began.
["Like It Or Not" by Willa J playing]
Vegas, to me, is not gambling and drinking
and hookers and blow.
It's not, "What stays in Vegas," you know, kind of thing.
I live here.
So, Vegas is work.
My name is Deanna Thompson,
and I am a data analyst for a large casino here in Las Vegas.
I'm responsible for all the technology in the gaming industry.
Anything to do with slot machines, table games,
I have a hand in it.
[machine bell ringing]
I would say I'm textbook definition of a computer nerd.
Like, textbook.
♪ Watch me show you what I'm made of ♪
[Deanna] So, I'll come home from work
and spend some time with the dogs, and then, uh...
[song stops]
[computer booting up]
You know, get on my computers and hit the Internet.
[keyboard clacking]
[Deanna] "Baudi Moovan" is my alter ego that I use online
to hide my identity.
And "Body Movin'" is a song from the Beastie Boys.
- [interviewer] How's it go? - I'm not gonna sing it.
- Go on. - No.
It's... No, dude. I can't sing it.
Shut up.
[both chuckling]
I'm not gonna sing it.
You can play it. Get the rights.
I'm not gonna, uh-uh.
[song playing]
♪ Body movin', body movin' A1 sound and the sound's so soothing ♪
♪ Body movin' ♪
[Deanna] I can be anybody I want online.
I could make the world a better place.
I could be funny.
You know, I could be really smart.
I could be a princess.
♪ Tell me party people Is that so wrong? ♪
♪ The ship is docking, interlockin' ♪
I could be anybody I want online.
♪ Body movin', body movin' A1 sound and the sound's so soothing ♪
- [song stops] - [loud blaring]
[crickets chirping]
[Deanna] So at the end of 2010, my relationship was coming to,
you know, a pretty drastic end,
and I was pretty fucked-up about it in the head.
I just wanted to sink myself into something
that would take my mind off of it.
I could kind of not deal with this bullshit in my life.
[chimes]
And so, I was on Facebook one day,
and I found a post
a lot of people had been feverishly posting
about a video that was online.
I thought...
"Let's go look at this."
[mouse clicks]
["Happy Xmas (War Is Over)" by John and Yoko playing on video]
♪ So this is Christmas ♪
♪ And what have you done? ♪
You know, I'm thinking, "Oh, this is a cute video,
you know. What's this?"
♪ Another year over ♪
♪ And a new one just begun ♪
And, um...
I've never seen the video...
uh, full-on.
I've never seen the whole thing. I've watched bits and pieces,
but I've never seen the whole video.
So, here we go.
- [clicks] - [on computer] ♪ So this is Christmas ♪
♪ I hope you have fun ♪
[Deanna] You see the person with, like, a green, teal hoodie on,
and it's up over his head.
It's hiding a lot of his face,
but you can see, like, fringy, banged hair,
and he's putting them into one of those vacuum-seal bags.
They suck all the air out.
Um... [clears throat]
The frame just changed to, uh...
- [plastic crinkling] - [man laughing]
he's attaching a vacuum hose to the area of the bag
where the vacuum hose would, you know, kind of seal into.
One of the kittens sort of...
playfully tries to get out of the bag, and he, you know...
That's fucking heartbreaking, dude.
[vacuum whirring loudly]
[interviewer] Do you want to stop?
Just for a minute.
I fucking hate this shit, dude.
So sad.
Certainly, I'm emotional. I mean, I love, I love cats.
I love them.
So when I watched this video,
I was, like, "Dude, this is, like, bullshit."
There's prices to pay. There's consequences for your actions.
So, I wasn't the only one that was totally outraged by this video.
The comments under the video were,
"I can't believe this motherfucker's doing this,"
and, "Who the fuck is this guy?"
"Fuck this guy."
You know, "Who is this bastard?" "Let's kill him."
It was outrage. Just boom, boom, boom, boom.
"Oh, my God. You're gonna go to jail."
And I'm thinking to myself, "What the fuck is this?"
Yeah, this is an emotional thing, for sure.
You're angry, I get it.
But who the fuck are you gonna call?
Okay, what police department are you gonna call?
You don't know where this happened. You know, this person could live in...
you know, Siberia for all I know.
We don't have jurisdiction, so it's just noise.
But in the comments, there was a Facebook link,
and I clicked it, and it took me to a Facebook group...
And it looked to me like it was focused on trying to find...
who was in this video.
In the group, I did observe one...
persona who was sticking to facts,
wasn't getting emotional,
and that was John Green.
[claps]
[clears throat]
I'm ready.
[keyboard clacking]
What type of individual would think,
"I'm going to take a vacuum-sealed bag and place two kittens in it"?
- ♪ And so this is Christmas ♪ - [vacuum whirring]
[John] So the video was posted by a profile called "uonlywish500."
And he had made a comment that said,
"All haters can suck my huge dick, LOL."
And... it was a very interesting comment to make.
Um, I don't know why you would tell people to do that to you.
And when I clicked on the profile,
I noticed that they had also liked a video for the movie...
Catch Me If You Can.
You're gonna get caught. It's like Vegas. The house always wins.
[John] Leonardo DiCaprio plays a counterfeit con man,
and an FBI agent goes around trying to track him down
across the country to catch him.
Which, to me, I took as a big, "Hey, you're never gonna catch me.
Ha-ha-ha. Fuck you."
[John] That was a message he was sending.
"I'm throwing down the gauntlet.
I dare you.
I challenge you to try and find out who I am."
I was like, "Oh, okay, this person wants to play a game of cat and mouse,
and I'm up for that."
[Deanna] This Facebook group,
they decided to actually find who this person was.
So I felt super empowered by just watching all this happen.
But they were focusing on the person, which I thought was totally fucking weird
because you can't find a person,
but you can find objects in the room
that would tell you where this person is.
It looks like a very small, cramped room.
I mean, you're talking like maybe eight feet by ten feet wide.
But for me, there's a lot of information in there.
You see a door, a bed...
a table...
You see a door handle,
a light socket, electrical receptacles.
And those are things that we know can point to, like,
maybe a specific area of the world.
Wall sockets in England are different than they are in California.
We picked apart...
every little thing in that room.
Then I created a schematic, or diagram, of the layout of the room...
so everybody understood what each thing was.
[Deanna] The wolf bedspread.
This wolf bedspread was hideous...
and it was super unique.
Some of the wolf blankets out there, you got two wolves howling at the moon
or, you know, something cheesy.
This one was just a wolf head.
And it was sold on eBay,
made by a company in North America.
It only had one buyer,
and we couldn't see who that buyer was.
But shipped internationally.
Didn't help us at all.
He could have been anywhere on the planet.
[men laughing and talking indistinctly on video]
[John] You hear some voices in the background.
You start realizing, like,
"Oh, there's somebody else in the room, but you don't see him on camera."
And they're kind of giggling and talking.
And we didn't know what language it was.
[man laughing and talking indistinctly]
I mean, it sounded...
Eastern Bloc, but, you know, I'm not a language expert.
[men laughing and talking indistinctly]
[Deanna] So, there was a group member, Nicee Punk.
She was born in the Ukraine,
and she recognized it immediately. It was Russian.
[man laughing and talking indistinctly]
Oh! Maybe it's possible he's located in Russia.
[indistinct laughter and talking]
[Deanna] If you close your eyes and just listen...
[man talking indistinctly on earphones]
...there's a lot of things that you can pick up.
It's kind of staticky. It's a little staticky.
And they're chatting, laughing, and they're making a lot of noise.
[man laughing and talking indistinctly]
And then all of a sudden, it stops.
And they, like, disappear.
Okay? It just...
Almost like they left the room without making a sound.
But you can kind of hear a click.
[man laughing and talking indistinctly]
[click]
[snaps]
Click. It stops.
- [men talking indistinctly] - [click]
Fuck. This is a recording.
God damn it.
We actually found out it was a Russian sitcom,
and we actually found the episode.
- [man speaking Russian] - [laughs]
[John] And at that point, we're like, "Wait a minute.
This person is playing games with us.
He's trying to mislead us."
We spent weeks on this Russian bullshit.
I spent...
16 hours looking at fucking doorknobs from Lithuania.
[John] I wasn't gonna stop until I found him.
I made a promise I was gonna track him down.
I'm still gonna do it.
All of a sudden...
another video appears.
["Imagine" by John Lennon playing on video]
♪ It isn't hard to do ♪
[Deanna] And it's the same bloody room.
♪ To kill or die for ♪
And he's playing with the cats who are now deceased.
Definitely after the act.
♪ Imagine all the people ♪
Along with the video, he also released a couple pictures.
And the group also get...
a link.
But from an obvious fake profile.
It's what we call a "sock puppet" account.
They're usually very easy to recognize.
It's usually, like, a super generic name,
with a super generic profile picture.
They will post something...
and then delete that account.
So, I clicked on the link.
And there, in all of his glory,
was a picture of the guy holding the cats,
but he had blurred his face out.
This was so important
because it gave us some insight into who he was.
Maybe he wants to be chased a little bit.
It's almost like he was saying, "What the fuck? Are you guys stupid?
I'm gonna throw you this bone and see how you gnaw on it
for a little while."
But the second thing it showed us was that he was following the investigation.
He had infiltrated the group.
Okay, so this is one account that he's using.
What other accounts is he using?
[John] For me, because I had used an alias,
and I didn't put any of my personal information,
I wasn't necessarily concerned for my own safety.
But for some of my other group members,
they had some serious concerns for their own safety.
[Deanna] Certainly, we were, like, disturbed that he released another video
and started playing with these dead cats and shit,
but the good part about it was that we had more evidence now.
We had more objects to look at in the room,
that would help narrow our search to a specific area of the world.
We were fired up.
So, there's frames in the video that you don't really get to see it
in the movie that much 'cause it's so fast,
but when there's an image of it, it stands out.
So we dumped all the video frames to images
so that we could start looking at this fucking room.
Tens of thousands of frames that it had.
Holy shit, that's a pack of cigarettes.
That pack of cigarettes was totally new. And if you know anything about cigarettes,
they're different everywhere.
You know, cigarettes in a certain area of the world might be, like, long,
and skinny, and all 20 of them are in this long, skinny box.
You know, some cigarettes are usually, you know, a rectangle.
And they have different verbiage required by law
'cause cigarettes can kill you, right?
It had the surgeon general warning on these cigarettes.
The surgeon general is the United States.
So I knew they were North American cigarettes.
This was a huge piece of evidence. Now, it doesn't necessarily mean
that the person didn't buy a pack of cigarettes
and then hop on a plane to Paris,
or, you know, Berlin,
but I knew they were North American cigarettes.
[mouse clicking]
[Deanna] But then, "Holy shit, that's a yellow vacuum cleaner."
First thing, "yellow vacuum."
Okay, there's tons of them.
One thing that I learned in all of this is that there's an Internet forum
for everything out there.
Are you into vacuums? There's gonna be an Internet forum for it.
So, I found this vacuum cleaner repair forum.
Thousands of people post, "I've got this tube. I'll send it to you."
You know, "I've got this hose. I can send it to you."
So, I posted to this vacuum forum, "Hey, guys..."
They identified it immediately.
The Kenmore Canister cleaner,
the Aspiradora model, 7-21-26-08-2.
"Awesome. Guys, thank you so much.
You've been so great to me. I can't appreciate it enough."
"Oh, you're welcome, sweetheart. Hey, and just so you know,
that's only sold in North America."
So, this is it.
So, whoever made this fucking video,
whoever this guy was,
we knew that we could start looking
in Mexico,
the United States,
or Canada.
But just when you think shit can't get crazier,
it does.
[keyboard clacking]
[tires screeching]
[announcer] In New York City,
one group of former street guys formed a rescue organization
like no other...
[kitten mews]
...by saving animals.
You pick on the animals because they don't fight back!
[announcer] Rescue Ink.
♪ We've got your back ♪
[interviewer] What is the approach of Rescue Ink?
[chuckling]
Rescue Ink. You want the clean version, or you want the real version?
Uh, Rescue Ink is an in-your-face approach to animal abuse, neglect.
We do whatever is necessary, within the means of the law,
to rescue animals out of bad situations.
[interviewer] What do you mean?
Well... you gotta let your imagination run.
I don't want to get indicted on that on camera. [chuckles]
[keyboard clacking]
[vacuum whirring on video]
When I first watched the video, and I saw the air coming out of the bag,
and I saw the life going out of the kittens' eyes, you know,
it's something that, you know... It's... it...
You... It made me so anxious to do something.
Like, I wanted to try to, you know, like, go in the screen
and try to do something,
but there's, you know, that helpless feeling you have?
It was horrendous. It was horrendous.
So I called my sister
because my sister's a psychologist, and she studied criminal profiling.
She said, "This person is doing this for shock value.
This person is a person that needs a lot of attention.
This isn't the first time, it's not gonna be the last time,
and this is gonna get progressively worse."
They practice on animals,
and when they can't feed that sickness inside,
or they can't get that excitement anymore, they move on to something else
they deem to be helpless,
which is usually a small woman, a child, or an elderly person.
These are the things.
The telltale sign...
of somebody that's gonna become a serial killer,
somebody that needs to be stopped immediately.
[chimes]
We had a humongous Internet presence on Facebook, on Twitter.
We had literally 100,000 people.
We were getting eight, nine million hits a month.
So, I, you know, got my computer, I went on,
I made a poster with a reward on it for $5,000.
On one hand, it was like, "Okay, cool. This is finally getting some attention."
And on the other hand, it was like...
[sighs] Fuck.
[Deanna] People went nuts.
This is every Internet nerd's dream, right?
It's an explosion of people...
now joining this group.
Everybody started coming on there. Now you had...
detectives, private detectives, guys claiming to be private detectives,
guys claiming to be Superman, whatever.
We have CGI rendering kind of experts.
[Joe Panz] This point in time, there's tens of thousands of people
looking to find this guy.
Many of them just started posting profiles...
from anywhere on the planet.
There was a tidal wave of leads that were coming in.
"This guy has, you know, fringy kind of hair."
"This guy's tall and lanky."
"Oh, I think it's this person. Oh, no, it might be this person."
"This dude's wearing a hoodie."
We're like dogs chasing shiny cars
all over the place trying to find this guy.
It was chaos...
on the tenth power.
[chimes]
[Joe Panz] One day, we had one lead come in.
Someone posted something on Facebook that got a lot of attention.
So, it was this guy, Jamsey Cramsalot Inhisass.
I don't know how he came up with this frigging name, but...
The main thing about this one guy...
is that, on his page,
he posted a video of a kitten being burned alive in a cage.
[kitten meowing on video]
So, right there, we were like,
"Okay, this very well could be the guy."
And his profile picture resembled the guy in the video.
[Deanna] Jamsey Cramsalot Inhisass...
was very similar looking to the perpetrator of the video.
It really stood out.
It, you know...
It looked like maybe this could be something.
My sister knows me when I get upset. I'm getting very upset.
She's like, "You gotta calm down."
She goes, "Listen.
This type of person craves attention.
What would happen if we just ask the guy if he did it?"
I said, "Wow, that's a good idea."
So, we're just trying to reel him in nice and easy.
But eventually, it worked.
A confession.
"Yes, I kill kittens, laugh out loud."
You know, "And there's nothing you can do about it."
Cramsalot did it.
This is the right person. We got him.
The announcement that the admins made were fireworks.
I'm not kidding you. It was a picture of fireworks.
[exploding noises]
[Deanna] But they still didn't know where he was.
So they start looking at his friends online
because that would give them a location.
And they found a town called Windhoek in Namibia...
I can't pronounce it, in Southern Africa.
[suspenseful music playing]
[Deanna] The admins of the group and Rescue Ink
had really all come together and said,
"Hey, guys. We found him. This is the kitten killer. We got it."
John Green and I were sitting there and kind of going...
"What?"
It didn't make any sense
because everything pointed to North America.
I mean, everything. We had the cigarettes,
we had the wolf blanket, we had the vacuum.
And you're telling me that some guy
in a country I can't even pronounce...
"Got it"? I don't understand. How did you get there?
So we start looking, "Okay, well, who's the guy in the picture?"
[John] What you can do is just take
the Jamsey Cramsalot Inhisass Facebook profile,
do a reverse image search,
and it'll show you where that image has been posted before.
And from there, we were able to find the website
that the picture was actually posted to initially.
But it was kind of a male...
pornography website.
So we're scrolling through all these pictures...
you know, next, next, next, and boom.
We find a picture of...
the one that Jamsey's using without the Santa hat.
So we knew that Jamsey had appropriated that image
and added a Santa hat...
for his profile picture.
So we knew, "Fuck, this isn't the kitten killer."
So we approached the Facebook group and said, "Hey, you know,
it can't be the killer. Like, this cannot be him."
And they dug their heels in.
"Nope, this is the guy. This is it.
We're gonna get this guy."
[scoffs] We were dumbfounded.
Absolutely dumbfounded.
They wanted to be right.
And this Facebook group lynched him.
People are out for blood, you know, when this kind of thing happens.
Emotions can get the better of you.
Your inner fire is just... argh!
[John] Not long after this, Jamsey...
had actually taken his own life.
Somebody had made the discovery of the real person's identity.
His name was Edward Jordan.
[Joe] Jamsey turned out not to be the guy we were looking for.
You know...
he was an Internet troll that wanted to be like a copycat
that put up a video
that made everybody think he was the guy.
[Deanna] We found out months later that Edward Jordan had been dealing
with major depression.
Spent a lot of time online dealing with that
and avoiding the depression, and I know all about that.
I've done it myself.
Nobody knows, and I'm not certainly saying that he killed himself
because of this witch hunt against him.
But you do have to be careful
because you don't know who's on the other end of the computer...
and what kind of mental problems they might have.
[Joe] When you're looking for somebody like the kitten killer,
you gotta fight against losing yourself.
What happens is you start
to turn into the very thing that you're trying to fight.
You don't want to become like these people, vicious.
You don't want to become the monster.
[chimes]
And then all of a sudden, out of nowhere,
some of our group members receive a message.
And this is another sock puppet account.
We don't know who it is.
And the message said,
uh, you know,
"The person you're looking for, his name is Luka Magnotta."
And, you know, we're like, "Who the fuck is Luka Magnotta?"
"Luka Magnotta? That sounds like a fake porn star name.
This can't be real.
Like, this is another, you know... Somebody's fucking with us.
Of course, what you gonna do?
"Luka Magnotta," hit Enter.
And, oh, my God, it just, like... He just...
There... I don't know how to explain my reaction to what the results were.
["True Faith" by New Order playing]
There's just hundreds and hundreds of search results.
[Deanna] One of the results was a YouTube video
set to New Order's "True Faith,"
and it was just like a slide show...
♪ I feel so extraordinary ♪
...of this guy posing.
♪ Something's got a hold on me ♪
And I'm looking through them, and I'm going, "What is this?"
And I'm reading about this person who lives this...
jet-setting lifestyle.
[Deanna] There were pictures of him in Bermuda.
There were pictures of him in, I think, Sweden.
The Red Square in Russia,
Eiffel Tower,
the Trevi Fountain in Rome, Miami.
I couldn't believe how many pictures there were of this person.
We found hundreds and hundreds of fan sites.
And a lot of the comments said really flattering things about him.
There were story after story after story about Luka online.
There were stories about him being a model,
Luka Magnotta was a long-lost cousin of River Phoenix.
I mean, we were blown away by this.
There were stories that he was dating Madonna.
I mean, I was just like, "What the...?"
At this point,
I'm starting to be like, "Dude."
Okay, I've never heard of this guy, and he's dating Madonna?
He had, like, the floppy, brown hair.
He had a very similar bone structure to the profile.
But given the group's history of accusing the wrong people,
I was very hesitant to start ringing the alarm bells
and start talking to the group publicly about who this person was yet.
[John] And so, we created this private, secret, hidden Facebook group
and asked some people that we trust to join it.
[Deanna] They were reliable, they were smart,
they were pragmatic. And it was called "Luka_Intel."
But the problem that we ran into was that we still didn't know where he was.
We had pictures of him all over the world.
But we don't know where he's at today.
But we eventually found a video of an audition tape
that he had made three years prior
for a reality TV show about male models.
Hi, my name is Luka.
Magnotta's my last name, M-A-G-N-O-T-T-A.
[man 1] Hi, Luka, how are you today?
Good, how are you?
[Deanna] But it definitely sounded like he was from North America.
Okay. Ding.
[man 1] Can you take off your shirt right away?
All right, definitely.
[man 2] When his voice was lower, yours went lower.
[men laughing]
I have a very deep voice. A lot of people tell me that, actually.
[John] So here was...
a piece of information we had found
that identified the person as being in Canada.
[woman] So, how do you get your voice so deep?
How do I get my voice so deep? Practice makes perfect, right?
He had his jacket over him, and he was standing like this,
and... "Hi, my name is Luka,"
you know, doing his thing. And he's very, very vain.
A lot of people tell me
I'm really devastatingly good-looking, so...
[man 2] I think he looks good. I'm going to give him a yes.
[Deanna] But you do start to think,
you know, "Could this be somebody who really films himself...
putting cats into a vacuum bag
and sucking air out until they suffocate?"
[man 1] I think you got potential,
but I'm gonna ask you to come back next year to the competition.
- Okay. All right. - All right?
- [woman] It's a tiebreaker. - [laughs nervously]
Well, it's up to you.
[Deanna] You start to really try to put yourself
in that frame of mind and say,
"Could I be a normal person, myself, Deanna,
and then one day just be a person that kills cats?"
And as you're watching this seemingly normal dude,
your mind... It's hard to go there.
[woman] I just don't think he's beefy enough for COVERGuy.
I can gain muscle. Everybody can do it.
You know, I can gain muscle, I can work out.
I'm very determined,
and every goal that I've put my mind to, I've surpassed.
[Deanna] When I'm watching it, I'm like,
"Nah, this can't be the same guy. This can't be the same guy."
But then I got a message from John Green,
and the message said...
"You can't always take photos as the truth."
Looking at photos of this Luka person,
you start noticing a pattern in them.
You start noticing, like, "Well, wait a minute.
that face doesn't appear to match with that body."
[Deanna] And they were off. They were clearly off.
His skin tone didn't match his body.
[John] You start noticing lines
and things where they'd been edited or didn't line up correctly.
[Deanna] A lot of bad pixelation through the neck.
[John] There's a wedding photo.
And there's this post talking about how he just married this girl in Russia.
And one of our group members found the original photo.
[Deanna] So whoever had posted these pictures,
had taken Luka Magnotta's head
and put them
on random people that he found on the Internet...
to make it look...
like he was out there having a grand old time.
And over time, when you look at 20, 30, 40 of these fan sites,
the comments...
They're all different accounts,
but they all say the same thing.
They were all different usernames,
but it was the same verbiage, the same phrasing,
the same style of writing.
And you start wondering, "Okay...
is this all from the same person?"
It started to really look like all these fan sites
that were created for Luka as "dedication websites"
all seem to be created by Luka himself.
So now I'm thinking, I don't know if everything that's out there
about him is fake.
But we eventually found an article written in the Toronto Sun,
which is kind of like a tabloidy kind of gossipy rag,
um, by a guy named Joe Warmington.
[Warmington] In 2007, three years before all this happened,
I was on my way home from work,
when I was listening to a popular radio program.
[man] Joe Warmington, take one.
[Warmington] And all I heard was this frantic voice
that was calling in to this radio show.
And what he was upset about was the fact that, he said,
on the Internet, people were linking him romantically
with Karla Homolka.
Now, if you say the name "Karla Homolka" here in Canada,
that will get the hair on the back of your neck standing up...
because she is the most hated woman in Canada.
She is the wife of a serial killer, Paul Bernardo.
They're known as the Ken and Barbie killers.
She was involved in the murders of three young girls, all 14,
and one of them was her sister.
And they had made a deal with her, for immunity,
to testify against her husband.
Later, video showed that she was very much involved in this.
In fact, she led it, and some of these murders were her idea.
And this caller was very frantic.
And I'm thinking, "Who is this?" And then finally, he said his name.
Luka Magnotta.
I reached out through an e-mail,
and, out of nowhere, I get a call from this guy saying,
"Hello, it's Luka Magnotta."
I said it would be good to meet in person, and he had offered to meet me somewhere.
I can't remember where.
But I just thought, "You know what?
It might be better if he'd meet us at the Sun newsroom,"
which he agreed to.
Knowing what I know now, that was the right decision.
I remember sitting there,
and in walks Luka Magnotta.
And my mouth opened and my jaw dropped to the floor
because this guy looked like Paul Bernardo.
My modeling career has gone downhill these days, to be honest with you.
And it's all because of this whole rumor of you dating Karla Homolka?
[Luka] The rumor's destroyed my life, basically, and...
I want to set the record straight
that me and her have absolutely no connection.
He was very emphatic about the fact that his life was spinning out of control,
and it was not only costing him work, but it was,
you know, a real threat to his life.
I've been receiving death threats.
My address is posted. That's why I had to move.
I'm about to have a nervous breakdown here.
My reputation's completely ruined.
I go in to see casting directors, I go in to see agents...
They know who I am.
You know, it's all over everywhere.
Whoever's doing this, please stop.
[Warmington] And it's all because of this whole rumor of you
dating Karla Homolka.
That's it.
[Deanna] After I watched the video that was attached to the article...
I've been receiving death threats...
I started to believe that he used his sock puppet accounts
to start creating these rumors himself.
Like, why would you want to associate with a serial killer?
Me and her have absolutely no connection.
For fame. One hundred percent.
Remember rule zero:
don't fuck with cats.
It really started to make me think his motivation behind doing it
was the attention and the fame that he knew he would get from it.
And he got it.
[vacuum whirring]
[Deanna] The problem was that this was three years prior
to the cat killing videos.
We still didn't know where he was.
He could have been anywhere on the planet.
So where do we start looking?
So we went through every picture that we could.
Thousands and thousands of photos
because we knew he would have fucked up at least one of them.
That he would leave a digital footprint.
So sometimes, when you take a picture,
there's digital information
stored in the picture.
And it's called "EXIF data."
You know the model of the camera that took the photo,
the date the photo was taken,
the GPS location of the photo...
You can take a photo and upload it to a website
that will show you all the EXIF data.
So that's exactly what we did.
[chimes]
[Deanna] And then, boom, it's got GPS coordinates on it.
And it was me, this time,
and I'm like, "Holy shit."
I took a screenshot of it, sent it to John Green.
The photo in question has Luka sitting on a beautiful chaise lounge.
It looks to be a fancy department store.
And automatically, on the EXIF site, it gives you a map,
and it puts a pinpoint.
And it took me to the Toronto Eaton Shopping Centre.
Toronto, Canada.
[Deanna] But the date the picture was taken was absolutely key.
October 25, 2010.
So, at the end of October 25th, he's in Toronto,
and then the kitten killer video happens in November.
So we were, like, freaking out, "Oh, my God, he's in Toronto."
We thought he might be in Canada,
but now we fucking know he's there. He's there, he's there, he's there.
[John] So, I do what I do best.
I'm gonna find his actual address.
I found a picture of Luka,
and he's standing on a balcony. It's like the third or fourth floor
of, like, an apartment or a condo.
But what I really noticed was
at the corner of the intersection was a gas station.
And the gas station was called Petro-Canada.
So the first thing I do is I jump on Google Maps.
And literally, there's hundreds of Petro-Canada gas stations.
But I start cross-referencing things, and I remembered
Luka made this blog post talking about how the paparazzi was harassing him.
They were trying to take his picture outside his condo in Etobicoke, Canada.
Etobicoke. That's interesting. Where's that?
Etobicoke is a suburb outside of Toronto.
I wonder how many Petro-Canadas there are in Etobicoke.
Six.
Well, this is gonna be easy.
So I literally start clicking on each of the six Petro-Canada gas stations.
When I click on it, I go to the Street View.
And I look at it, and I go, "Nope. That's not it."
Number two, Street View.
"Nope, that's not it." Number three, click.
Oh.
That looks exactly like the Petro-Canada gas station
that I see in the photo of Luka, and guess what?
That large gray cement apartment building is directly behind it.
So then I take my cursor, and I click on it,
and I rotate the Street View 180 degrees.
And I'm looking directly at the apartment
that Luka's seen in in the photo.
304 Mill Street.
So now...
I've got this fucker.
So now, we think it's time to go to the authorities.
So I reach out to the Toronto Police Department.
And they were like, "What is this about? Videos on the Internet?"
It took me a while to convince them that what I'm saying is true.
And they actually went out there and knocked on the door.
A person answered,
and they verified, yes,
a person by the name of Luka Magnotta had been living there,
but he had since moved on to Russia.
So here again, this so-called jet-setting lifestyle person
is once again somewhere in "Russia."
You start thinking, "Okay. This is never gonna be solved."
Nothing is gonna happen.
This was all pointless.
[Deanna] A couple weeks went by,
and then, you know, a few months had started going by, and...
We sort of lost that ferocity that we had
because we didn't really have anything new to look at.
He didn't release any more videos. He didn't release any more images.
And so, interest in the group kind of dwindled.
People kind of started disappearing.
The group numbers went from, like, 15,000 maybe down to 8,000.
[chimes]
[John] All of a sudden,
one video pops up.
[mouse clicks]
♪ I waited all my life to play But I still can't find a way ♪
["Break the Chain" by Lupe Fiasco playing on video]
♪ But if I work it one more day ♪
And it was,
to this day, probably one of the worst videos I've ever seen.
♪ See I feel it in my bones That I'm sittin' on a throne ♪
♪ Like a killer with a chrome When I spit another poem ♪
♪ Shed a whole lot of light On a little bit of home ♪
♪ I waited all my life to play ♪
This desperation in this cat's...
face that... It's hard to describe.
It's... it's haunting.
And then you see the cat being lowered into the water
and the person holding the cat underwater until it drowns.
So then, later that day,
another video appears, and we're like, "What the fuck?"
My first reaction was, "Okay. This is number two."
Kind of like the feeling,
this is not the same, but kind of like the feeling when 9/11 happened,
and the second plane hit the building.
I was like, "Okay, what's next? We're under attack."
["Little Drummer Boy" playing faintly on video]
[John] In the background, you hear the music from "Little Drummer Boy."
[Deanna] When I saw the Santa hat, I immediately thought of Jamsey.
It really was like a "fuck you" to us.
Then you realize that there's a huge python snake
under the pillows of the bed.
And, you know, the python is doing what the python is gonna do.
The python is gonna eat the cat.
When this happened...
...the group came alive again.
And we all kind of woke up from our slumber...
and paid him attention again.
But when I saw the username that uploaded the video,
I knew immediately what it was.
Lesley Ann Downey was a victim of...
Ian Brady and Myra Hindley.
And they killed five children in Manchester, England.
It was called "the Moors murders."
I learned a lot about it 'cause I was a huge Smiths fan,
and they wrote a song about it.
[keyboard clacking]
[suspenseful music playing]
[Deanna] This is now the second indication
that Luka's got a fascination with serial killers.
So, it was kind of... Well, it was not "kind of."
It was very alarming.
[John] The release of these two new videos...
also brought with them some press attention.
The Sun newspaper in London, England, runs a story called
"Catch the Sicko Who Fed a Kitten to a Python."
[Deanna] A British journalist from The Sun, Alex West,
gets a message from another sock puppet account.
[John] It says,
"The person you're looking for is currently in London, England,
and his name is Luka Magnotta,
and he's staying at the The Fusilier Inn."
Alex West decides he's gonna go to the The Fusilier Inn
to try and meet this person.
But Alex is secretly recording.
[faint rustling on tape recording]
[Alex on tape] He could be a fucking loon and try to stab us or something.
We've got to be a bit careful.
Luka! Can I have a quick word?
I'm a journalist from The Sun newspaper.
[Luka] You're not filming me, are you?
No, no. What are you doing in London now?
[Luka] Because of the harassment.
- [Alex] What harassment? - [Luka] I'm getting death threats.
[Alex] Saying what?
[Luka] Anything you can imagine. They're going to kill me...
- Why? - [Luka] Because of these stories.
[Alex] But a lot of people are saying that this chap...
is responsible for killing the kittens in the YouTube videos.
This is you in the picture here?
- [Luka] No, it's not. - [Alex] It certainly looks like you.
- [Luka] It's not me. - [Alex] That isn't you?
[Luka] No.
[Luka] People are really good with Photoshop these days aren't they?
[Alex laughs]
[Luka] People have framed me, isn't that obvious?
[Alex] Why would anybody do that?
Have they got a vendetta against you?
[Luka] Many people do.
- [Alex] What for? - [Luka] We won't get into that.
[Alex] Okay, we're not really getting very far.
We'll have to leave it at that, I think. I mean...
[Luka] Yes, I think we do. Thank you. Have a wonderful day.
- [Alex] Thank you. - [door closes]
[John] Soon after,
Alex West receives an e-mail.
[Deanna] John Kilbride was another victim of the Moors murders.
"It's so fun watching people work so hard gathering all the evidence
and then not being able to name me or catch me.
You see, I always win.
I always hold the trump card, and I will continue to make more movies.
Next time you hear from me, it will be in a movie I'm producing
that will have some humans, not just pussies."
That's the alarming part.
Moving from "pussies" to people.
[Deanna] Scotland Yard could not help us.
We didn't have lawful jurisdiction.
So I started really panicking
because here I am,
who nobody listens to,
but I know this was another stepping-stone to fame,
this ladder that he was building.
[John] Something bad is about to happen.
I remember somebody in our group saying, "He's gonna kill somebody."
[Deanna] And one day...
[chimes]
...another sock puppet account posted a message to the group,
but the message said,
"BAUDI MOOVIN 99."
And one of our group members ran across a video
that this sock puppet account had clicked "like" on.
And I had a little bit of a warning before I clicked on it.
You know, "Hey, Deanna, brace yourself.
This is a little frightening, Deanna, I don't want you to,
you know, to worry too much, but... go ahead and click this video."
[classical music playing on video]
[Deanna] And there was a home movie of the casino I work at.
[mouse clicks]
[Deanna] It was terrifying.
He's no longer just behind a computer.
This was real.
So, you know, this starts off as a puzzle that I think I'm gonna solve
in maybe two days.
Get rid of some scum, and now here we are.
A potential killer...
uh, might be after me.
I was legitimately concerned...
that Luka would come into the office with, like, a knife.
Or that he would somehow break into my car and be in my back seat.
It was just paranoia beyond rationale.
The things that were running through my mind was,
"Fuck, I gotta tell my boss.
Is he in danger now? Have I put him at risk?"
You know, I was really scared.
I, uh...
Having to go to my boss and tell them what I had been doing online, and...
um, you know, even though it's a good thing that I've been doing it,
it's still...
mortifying. I mean,
can you imagine...
having this really high-tech job, with these very professional people,
and having to go to them and tell them that you go home
and fucking look online for a cat killer.
Like, it's absolutely mortifying.
[John] I'm in bed sleeping.
And the phone vibrates, telling me I've got a Facebook message.
I pick up my phone, and I look at it, and it says, "Hey,
um, there's this video I just came across,
and I think you might want to look at it.
I think it's that guy Luka you've been looking for."
So it's got my attention,
and I'm thinking, "Oh, great. Another cat killing video."
I click on the link,
I press play and the video starts.
And I'm like, "What the fuck?"
We fucking told them he was gonna kill somebody.
And nobody believed us.