The "Cannibal Cop," was found guilty of conspiring to kidnap, torture and eat women today. For those who haven't been following the case, a policeman who frequented online fantasy Cannibal sites was accused of actual conspiracy to commit those fantasies. There is little evidence of actual intent to commit the deeds; it would appear that he was convicted simply because people were horrified by his sexual fantasies.

The parallel to the situation of the EA and its story archive and chat rooms are obvious. I have seen no previous discussion of the case here, despite the possible effects it could have on us. Our story archive clearly has stories that would horrify the vanilla population, and there is a real possibility of entrapment in the chat room.

For those unfamiliar with the case I reprint an article from todays Slate. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_ ... as_been_co nvicted_of_a_crime_he.single.html

This morning, Gilberto Valle, the "cannibal cop" of the New York Police Department, was found guilty of a conspiracy to kidnap his wife, his college friend, and two other women, and then to rape, torture, and eat them. It took the jurors 16 hours to reach their verdict. Valle will be sentenced in June, and could get life in prison.

What exactly did the cannibal cop do? Here's one thing: Last May, five months before the 28-year-old police officer was arrested by the FBI, Valle met up with a friend online. The friend suggested via instant message that they work together on a story. "OK, sounds fun," Valle said. They began to craft a tale about a restaurant that cooks and serves human flesh. (They'd met on a site called Dark Fetish Net, a sort of Facebook for perverts.) The imaginary business would need a boss, the friend proposed, perhaps a German woman named Serena. "Yeah," typed Valle, "I love women who help with the cooking." They chatted back and forth like this, trading notions for their project. "Nicely done, flowing very well," said the friend before signing off.

In July, Valle had another chat with a different online friend—a man called "Moody Blues." Their conversation flowed very well. Moody Blues, a male nurse who lives in England, pretended to be a connoisseur of cannibalism: He said he'd eaten lots of women and offered up his favorite recipes. Valle responded that he'd been working on a document called "Abducting and Cooking Kimberly: A Blueprint," and promised to send it over. That Word file had a photo of his real-life friend from college, Kimberly Sauer, and a list of supplies that he would need to carry out a crime. It also gave a set of made-up details about the victim: a fictitious last name, date of birth, alma mater, and hometown.

Then he and Moody Blues agreed to cook and eat Kimberly together over Labor Day, at Valle's secluded place "up in the mountains," a spot accessible via "lots of winding roads." Valle lived in an apartment building in Queens. Moody Blues never left his home in England. September came and went, and neither said a word about their killers' getaway.

Now the jury has decided that Valle's chat with Moody Blues, and several others he conducted, weren't phony stories like the one about the restaurant, but murderous plots they meant to carry out. That is to say, the jurors believed that three facts about the case had been proved beyond a reasonable doubt: First, that a genuine conspiracy existed; second, that Valle joined that conspiracy with the intent of participating in it; and third, that at least one member of the conspiracy did something substantive to carry out the crime.

On its face the verdict doesn't make much sense. Even if Valle and his friends had really meant to kill someone, then what did they do to make it happen? The government said that Valle conducted recon and surveillance. He traveled down to visit Kimberly in July, and drove past her workplace; later, they shared a meal. But Kimberly herself suggested where and when to meet for brunch. And if Valle was really on a murderous mission, why'd he bring along his wife and baby?

The government also claimed that Valle had done practical, strategic research for his crimes. He'd looked up recipes for chloroform, and downloaded photos of his victims to an "organized filing system" on his computer. He even went so far as to alphabetize the list of 0 women, and then he used that list to choose his targets.

But Valle's online records could just as well be evidence of masturbation, or research for his short stories. In covering this trial for Slate, I've looked up some horrendous things myself—my browser's cache is now a stinking pit of filth. (For the record, I'm not planning to eat anyone.) As for Valle's sophisticated record-keeping, it turns out he used the Finder app in Mac OS X. Yes, he'd alphabetized his files, but he might as well have arranged them by "Date modified" or "Size."

Then there was the second charge, that Valle used a computer in his squad car to enter names into a law enforcement database. But the cannibal cop never looked up his supposed victims while he was allegedly conspiring to kill them. (He's been convicted of looking up a high-school friend named Maureen instead. According to the government, Valle fantasized about eating Maureen but did not really intend to do so.) Even if Valle had looked up Kimberly in 2012, what would he have learned? He already knew where she lived and where she worked. He could have killed her either way.

From one perspective—from my perspective—what Valle said was horrific and disturbing, but what he did was not so ominous at all. For the jurors, though, Valle's thoughts tainted his actions. They believed his online chats were real, and that means they thought he meant to roast a woman on a spit stabbed through her womb. If you start from there, then I get how everything that came after might look like a step along the way to unspeakable violence. A weekend trip to Maryland to hang out with your college friends could be construed as a prelude to a murder.

It seems as though the jury bought into elements 1 and 2, that Valle joined a genuine conspiracy to kidnap, kill, and eat his friends. With that in place, the final leap was easy: He searched their names online, and he went to where they lived. These were real-world acts, in furtherance of his cannibal plot. Gilberto Valle should go to prison.

"His goose is cooked," proclaimed the New York Daily News. Other geese are in the fryer, too. In February, police arrested Moody Blues—real name: Dale Bolinger—in a suburb of Kent, England. Investigators dug up his backyard, presumably looking for the gnawed-on bones of children. "None of this is real," he protested. "It's all fantasy. I'm an idiot." Michael Van Hise, the New Jersey man who offered Valle $4,000 in exchange for a kidnapped sex slave, and whose wife calls him "a big teddy bear," has also been taken into custody. These three men have never met. They never exchanged money. They never knew each other's names. Yet now all three of them are implicated in the same fantasy conspiracy, to abduct and kill Gilberto Valle's wife and friends.

Dark Fetish Net, the social networking site where the cannibal cop met Bolinger and Van Hise, carries a boldface message on its home page: "Please also remember that THIS PLACE IS ABOUT FANTASIES ONLY, so play safe!" Valle's personal profile, where he went by the handle "GirlMeatHunter," had another version of the same: "I love to push the envelope," he wrote, "but no matter what I say it's all fantasy." In many of his chats he issued the same important caveat.

For a few brief chats in 2012, though, Valle abandoned this disclaimer. He indulged a darker fantasy of what it might be like to plan and do these things for real. He met other cannibal fetishists who liked to push the envelope, and they goaded each other on. No one followed through and no one got hurt, but that glimmer of possibility is what turned them on the most. Saying that they'd kill a girl got these people off. Saying that they'd kill a girl might also put them all in prison.

Transward

Thanks for posting this. What is fantasy and what is reality is hard enough for people to tell apart at the best of times. It is very easy for the uninitiated to think what is written on a fantasy site is somehow real.

Near my hometown in Saskatchewan there was a case where one disturbed little boy's cry for attention led to the wrongful conviction of people running a daycare, and even charges of Satanism, and cannibalism. The police thought it was real. The courts thought it was real, and juries thought it was real. Only problem... It was all made up, and only existed in one little boy's mind. It was eventually exposed as a hoax, but not before lives were ruined, and a community was nearly damaged beyond all repair.

Here on the EA stories sometimes get graphic and realistic. I can well imagine what some people must think of us. This story is a reminder that there is a reason the fiction archive is now behind a login screen. If you don't know what to expect you could be sorely shocked, and might even think some of it is real. That could be very bad for us. All it would take is one busybody with too much time on his or her hands, or some prosecutor looking to make their name with a sensational case. That there is no actual evidence of any wrongdoing would be inconsequential to the possible headlines.

Juries will convict based on nothing more than their own personal comfort level. If you make them uncomfortable enough they will throw the book at anyone. Because they are disgusted, it just MUST be illegal, and must be punished.

It is also a reminder as to why we no longer publish snuff stories or cannibalism stories. There is just too much risk there.

This is very much a warning to us all.

To add to the information here, Sexual Abuse: A Journal of Research and Treatment supports an on-line blog that covers all aspects of crimes of a sexual nature. The most recent post is by Dr. Michael Seto, probably the world’s expert on pedophilia – its origins and its treatment. I’ve also included both of the comments that have been made so far on the blog. The first is by Dr. Paul Joannides, a psychiatrist who has written an encyclopedia of sexuality, Guide to Getting it On, that is a frequently used textbook in college courses. I do not recognize the second commentator, but he is quite articulate. I expect that the blog will attract more comments, so it is worth checking it occasionally at the web address below. There are also links to current articles in the journal on the site.

Crossing the Line:

Distinguishing Fantasy and Intent In Sexual Crimes

Michael C. Seto, Ph.D.

Director of Forensic Rehabilitation Research, Royal Ottawa Health Care Group

Author of the forthcoming book, Internet Sex Offenders (June 2013, American Psychological Association)

FROM: Sexual Abuse: A Journal of Research and Treatment

11 March 2013

Gilberto Valle (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/26/nyreg ... ml?hp&_r=3&), a New York City police officer, is currently on trial for plotting to kidnap, torture, rape, kill and cannibalize women, including his wife and some of her friends. This case has drawn a great deal of media and public attention for its disturbing details, and for shining some light into the shadows of the Internet, where extreme websites are available for almost every conceivable sexual variation, including cannibalism, necrophilia, and sadism.

A key aspect of this case are computer records of Mr. Valle’s chats with others about how he would carry out his alleged plans, and a charge that he illegally accessed a law enforcement database to gain information about one of the women. Does this digital evidence indicate Mr. Valle was plotting to commit these crimes, as the prosecution has claimed, or is it evidence that Mr. Valle was expressing his sexual fantasies online, with no intention of carrying them out, as his defense has argued?

There has long been interest in the connection between fantasy and behavior in forensic and legal arenas. This has been a central question in my research and clinical work over the past 20 years. The question usually is prompted by behavior rather than fantasy: Someone commits a sexual crime – molests a child, rapes a woman – and he (the perpetrator is usually male) is arrested, prosecuted, and convicted. Psychologists or other mental health professionals are then asked to try to understand what his motivations were: Is he a pedophile, sexually attracted to young children, and acting upon that attraction? Is he sexually aroused by sexual violence? What are his sexual fantasies, and how might that translate to crimes he might commit in the future (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20658813)?

Pre-Internet, mental health evaluators had to infer the contents of someone’s sexual fantasies because our understanding was constrained by a simple fact: Only the perpetrator really knew what was in his mind, and he might not tell us the truth, for very understandable reasons given the legal consequences. (Who would choose to admit to atypical sexual fantasies when facing years in prison?) The Internet has changed this, so that we can now gain valuable insight into someone’s sexual fantasies and desires by examining the pornography he views online, the websites he visits, and the content of his emails, instant messages, and message board posts. Even if he denies it, evidence of persistent and repeated access to particular kinds of pornography and sexual content is indicative of his sexual interests. For example, one study (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?te ... +blanchard) my colleagues and I completed suggested a majority of men convicted of child pornography offenses would meet diagnostic criteria for pedophilia; yet we found in another study (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?te ... babchishin) that many of these men have never sexually molested children in the past (based on criminal history and their self-report).

What then distinguishes those who express their fantasies online only, and those who also act on those fantasies in the physical world? What is the likelihood that someone will act on these sexual fantasies? Our ongoing research (http://www.atsa.com/sites/default/files ... 09Seto.pdf) suggests child pornography offenders who act on their sexual interests and fantasies differ from those who do not by younger age, impulsive personality, callousness, and substance abuse. Another recent study (http://sax.sagepub.com/content/23/1/72.abstract) suggested that offenders who sexually approach minors online can be distinguished into “fantasy-driven” and “contact-driven” offenders. Fantasy-driven solicitation offenders spent more time online and engaged in more protracted interactions with minors. Their main interest was sexual gratification while online, including sexually explicit chats, masturbation in front of a webcam, and exchange of pornography. The contact-driven solicitation offenders, in contrast, spent less time interacting online; their main interest was in finding minors who would be interested in meeting them in real life.

We know that some sex offenders engage in “practice” behavior, such as following children or women before they commit a sexual assault, or exposing themselves to child or female victims over a period of months or even years before committing hands-on offenses. As I discussed with Rachel Aviv, the author of a recent New Yorker piece (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013 ... _fact_aviv) on sexual offending, the clinical and legal challenge is determining when someone is expressing their fantasies online, and when someone is preparing to act. I was involved in a similar case (http://www.yorkregion.com/news-story/14 ... -offender/) where the offender had accessed child pornography and written violent, sexually explicit stories about how he planned to abduct, rape and kill his friend’s young daughter. There was physical evidence to suggest he was making the transition from fantasy to action, though he vehemently denied any intentions to act.

The same dilemmas in differentiating individuals and forecasting the future are faced in other situations involving online evidence: When is someone simply expressing his frustrations with other students and/or teachers at his school on social media, and how can we tell if he is actually working himself up to committing a mass shooting? When is someone expressing his outrage at perceived American slights in online chat rooms, and how can we tell if he is instead preparing to commit a terrorist act?

There is science to guide these determinations, but our ability to predict future behavior is imperfect. There are risk factors we can look for in clinical interviews and careful review of files – including personality traits, criminal history, and sexual history – but they are noisy correlates, and no factor is definitive: Many young, impulsive, callous, and substance-abusing men break the law, but they are very unlikely to commit sexually motivated homicides, which are fortunately quite rare. This is the central problem of criminal profiling (http://www6.carleton.ca/fprc/people/craig-bennell): What is the truly distinctive feature or set of features that can help investigators find the right suspect? The same noise-to-signal problem is faced in counter-terrorism efforts, in trying to identify the truly risky individuals from the chatterers.

Decisions can be informed by scientific knowledge, but we cannot clearly and confidently mark the line between expressing fantasies online and action in the physical world: Our scientifically based opinions about risk are expressed in probabilities, not certainties. Moreover, the Internet has created a new psychological space where sexual fantasy (usually private) can be expressed in a public domain, and where the distinction between expressing fantasy and expressing intention is even further blurred. Hanging over this confusing psychological space are the serious costs for making a mistake in either direction: Incarcerating someone for “thought crimes”, no matter how heinous or abhorrent; or not intervening before something truly terrible happens.

2 comments:

Paul Joannides March 12, 2013 at 11:18 PM (http://sajrt.blogspot.com/2013/03/a-gue ... 7663371795 38259509)

Thanks, Michael, for a very thoughtful and insightful post. I wonder if having more information (eg a computer trail) makes it any easier than it used to be to decide what to do in these difficult cases. Does knowing more make you feel any more certain, or is it the same tortuous process that I remember it being before the Internet?

Anonymous March 13, 2013 at 3:12 AM (http://sajrt.blogspot.com/2013/03/a-gue ... 2938722016 686014)

Emotions prefigure actions, the act being the behaviour that resolves the arousal state. For most men (and others) frustrated sexual arousal can be resolved through masturbation, which is a way of externalizing and reifying the psychological intangibles that disturb equilibrium. The act of grasping the penis in itself lends security as it gives substance to the intangible. Considering the object of desire in all it's aspects, exploring the possible, probing the unknown, these are much more than double entendres, they're essential steps to psychic health.

However, men experiencing sexual or romantic attraction to children are not just denied scope to act, they're denied the freedom to feel and to process their feelings in fantasy. Faced with dilemmas in how to act and how to feel, they urgently need a positive culture of paedophilia, with authentic values, in which to consider, explore and probe.

This culture needs to be a safe but robust (even ribald) framework in which to rehearse appropriate responses to forbidden desires. In fact such a framework has existed for centuries but has come under attack in recent decades, during which paedophilia has been equated with sexual abuse and representations of paedophilia have been equated with child pornography.

So, to distinguish offenders from non-offenders, start by giving non-offenders a voice and protecting their culture of benign paedophilia from attack by bigots and puritans. It is not a predictor of child abuse, it's a vaccine against it.

 –––sean

http://www.sajrt.blogspot.ca/2013/03/a- ... -seto.html