Crime

Read the rest of Slate’s coverage of the Sandy Hook school shooting.

On April 28, 1996, a gunman opened fire on tourists in a seaside resort in Port Arthur, Tasmania. By the time he was finished, he had killed 35 people and wounded 23 more. It was the worst mass murder in Australia’s history.

Twelve days later, Australia’s government did something remarkable. Led by newly elected conservative Prime Minister John Howard, it announced a bipartisan deal with state and local governments to enact sweeping gun-control measures. A decade and a half hence, the results of these policy changes are clear: They worked really, really well.

At the heart of the push was a massive buyback of more than 600,000 semi-automatic shotguns and rifles, or about one-fifth of all firearms in circulation in Australia. The country’s new gun laws prohibited private sales, required that all weapons be individually registered to their owners, and required that gun buyers present a “genuine reason” for needing each weapon at the time of the purchase. (Self-defense did not count.) In the wake of the tragedy, polls showed public support for these measures at upwards of 90 percent.

What happened next has been the subject of several academic studies. Violent crime and gun-related deaths did not come to an end in Australia, of course. But as the Washington Post’s Wonkblog pointed out in August, homicides by firearm plunged 59 percent between 1995 and 2006, with no corresponding increase in non-firearm-related homicides. The drop in suicides by gun was even steeper: 65 percent. Studies found a close correlation between the sharp declines and the gun buybacks. Robberies involving a firearm also dropped significantly. Meanwhile, home invasions did not increase, contrary to fears that firearm ownership is needed to deter such crimes. But here’s the most stunning statistic. In the decade before the Port Arthur massacre, there had been 11 mass shootings in the country. There hasn’t been a single one in Australia since.

There have been some contrarian studies about the decrease in gun violence in Australia, including a 2006 paper that argued the decline in gun-related homicides after Port Arthur was simply a continuation of trends already under way. But that paper’s methodology has been discredited, which is not surprising when you consider that its authors were affiliated with pro-gun groups. Other reports from gun advocates have similarly cherry-picked anecdotal evidence or presented outright fabrications in attempting to make the case that Australia’s more-restrictive laws didn’t work. Those are effectively refuted by findings from peer-reviewed papers, which note that the rate of decrease in gun-related deaths more than doubled following the gun buyback, and that states with the highest buyback rates showed the steepest declines. A 2011 Harvard summary of the research concluded that, at the time the laws were passed in 1996, “it would have been difficult to imagine more compelling future evidence of a beneficial effect.”

Whether the same policies would work as well in the United States—or whether similar legislation would have any chance of being passed here in the first place—is an open question. Howard, the conservative leader behind the Australian reforms, wrote an op-ed in an Australian paper after visiting the United States in the wake of the Aurora shootings. He came away convinced that America needed to change its gun laws, but lamented its lack of will to do so.

There is more to this than merely the lobbying strength of the National Rifle Association and the proximity of the November presidential election. It is hard to believe that their reaction would have been any different if the murders in Aurora had taken place immediately after the election of either Obama or Romney. So deeply embedded is the gun culture of the US, that millions of law-abiding, Americans truly believe that it is safer to own a gun, based on the chilling logic that because there are so many guns in circulation, one's own weapon is needed for self-protection. To put it another way, the situation is so far gone there can be no turning back.

That’s certainly how things looked after the Aurora shooting. But after Sandy Hook, with the nation shocked and groping for answers once again, I wonder if Americans are still so sure that we have nothing to learn from Australia’s example.

Read the rest of Slate’s coverage of the Sandy Hook school shooting.

NEWTOWN, CONN.—All afternoon they’ve been coming, up Riverside Road toward the turnoff for Sandy Hook School, bearing bouquets, signs, and other souvenirs of sorrow: lone mourners, large groups, fathers and sons in athletic gear, mothers and daughters in winter coats. For every local, there are at least two journalists, bearing tripods and cameras and long, thin reporters’ notebooks, here to document the tragedy so that the rest of us can experience it, too.

One day after a lone gunman shot and killed 26 people at Sandy Hook School, the people here are faced with the impossible challenge of having to process their grief while being watched by the entire world. Newtown and Sandy Hook are two of the prettiest towns I’ve ever seen. Now, they are choked with international observers, the roadsides lined with dead leaves, lone hubcaps, empty beer cans, satellite trucks, and caution tape.

Nobody here has any experience with this sort of thing, and they’re all processing it in different ways. In downtown Sandy Hook, merchants hang signs expressing solidarity and grief: “Pray for our victims town & country,” “Our love thoughts and prayers are with our community,” “Our hearts are broken our spirits are strong.” On a table outside Fun Kuts barber shop, a red Christmas bowl contains white slips of paper, inscribed in crayon with prayers written in a child’s unsteady hand: “God bless those whom were killed yesterday. All the lives lost gone God bless them. They are in a better place.” And, simply, “They are with the angels now.”

Some, understandably, are beginning to try and draw lessons from the tragedy. One man has driven here from Bridgeport, a gloomy city 20 miles away, and is lingering on the roadside, talking to any journalist who will listen. “If they could bring more attention to the urban areas, where people are being shot every day, maybe they could change something,” he says, emphatically. In the window of a dress shop called Sabrina Style, someone has posted an extended reflection on the shooting, closing with this:

If there’s anything we can learn from the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary it’s that we ALL need to slow down, simplify our lives, and take the time to appreciate our loved ones each and every moment. Life is short, fragile. If you don’t do it now, you may not get another chance.

Others are trying to render aid. A group of college students home for the holidays have started a group called Santas for Sandy Hook. They are fanning out around the town, wearing festive hats, collecting money that will go to the victims. The homemade signs explaining their efforts also contain a hopeful Twitter hashtag: #NewtownStrong.

But most people here seem to be settling for a silent tribute. At the Big Y supermarket, near St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church, the floral department is the first thing you see upon entrance, and the flowers are priced to move: seven stem-spray roses for $2.48; a buy-one-get-one-free rose garden bouquet; good prices on tulips and poinsettias. Even at 3 p.m, people keep trickling in. Two teenage girls, shivering, buy two Holiday Joy Bouquets. A man with close-cropped hair and a Fu Manchu moustache grabs a bunch of roses. An enormous guy in a thin black coat leaves with four bottles of Similac and a paper-wrapped bouquet. Almost half the shopping carts in the store contain some type of flowers.

Most of these, I’m guessing, will end up near the school, or outside a church, or at one of the myriad impromptu memorials lining the streets and sidewalks here. Some of these are big: a few steps from the school, a homeowner displays a large American flag and two sheets of plywood that carry a spray-painted message: BLESS THE FAMILIES. Some of them are small: 20 yards from where I park, a purple Blackberry Crisp scented candle burns beneath a bus stop.

On the corner of Dickenson Drive, across from the fire department, a white wooden post holds a plain sign reading “Sandy Hook School—1956—Visitors Welcome.” The base of the post is buried under countless flowers, candles, stuffed animals, cards, and hand-lettered signs. Six feet away, cordoned behind police tape, dozens of reporters and cameramen stand, ravenous for sound bites and B-roll, straining to contact everyone who comes to pay tribute. Several large signs read “No Media Beyond This Point.”

A blonde girl in a North Face fleece trudges up the road, flowers in hand, visibly straining to remain composed. Standing two feet away from her as she passes, I can hear her breathing. Walking back a few minutes later, having laid the flowers, she loses her resolve and cries to herself until she is embraced by another pilgrim.

When I was young, my parents found religion and traveled to Yugoslavia to visit a remote spot where the Virgin Mary was said to have appeared. The people today are, I think, making a similar sort of pilgrimage. Apparitions and massacres both come out of nowhere, like dispatches from a world that’s beyond our comprehension, their existence so momentous and irrational that they seem to demand from us items of sacrifice and tribute. It is dark now in Newtown, but they are still laying wreaths and flowers, just as they will for days and days, compelled to commemorate something they can hardly believe happened; to touch a terrible vastness they can’t begin to understand.

Read the rest of Slate’s coverage of the Sandy Hook school shooting.

NEWTOWN, CONN.—Outside Sandy Hook Wine and Liquors, walking distance from Sandy Hook Elementary, a sign that normally advertises beer specials is covered with white cardboard that bears the message “Say A Prayer.” It’s that kind of night in Newtown. This morning, 26 people were killed at the school by a lone gunman who later took his own life. Now, at 7 p.m., the road to the school is blocked and the media is here to watch the village mourn.

Numerous local churches are holding prayer vigils tonight. By the time I get to St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church, the pews are full and the crowd is spilling over to the lawn. Reporters and camera crews barricade the front door, trying to look inside, keeping actual mourners out. “I left the house at 6:30; thought I’d be early. Guess I was wrong,” says one man, exiting his car and marveling at the scene.

As about 20 priests and altar boys assemble outside the front of the church, signaling that the vigil is about to begin, I head to the back and sneak in through a back door. A political body man corners a tardy priest rushing into his vestments. “Can we use this to get the governor out of here?” he asks, indicating the narrow back hallway in which we’re all standing. “I don’t know. This is the first time I’ve ever been in this church,” says the priest.

On the altar, Gov. Dannel Malloy is trying, like everyone else tonight, to summon meaning out of tragedy. “Understand that a test is just that,” he notes. “That which we rise to and answer.” Once he finishes, Sen. Richard Blumenthal takes the microphone and introduces himself. “There’s a saying: a picture is worth 1,000 words,” he says. “This picture is worth … many more than 1,000 words.”

As the politicians speak, people keep knocking on the back door, and piling in, until there’s nowhere to stand. “You can’t get in. People are standing four deep against the walls,” one man advises a newcomer. They keep coming—very young children in blazers and ties; older children in Newtown Nighthawks sweatshirts; adults in their work clothing; senior citizens wearing crosses and pins—until you couldn’t get out if you wanted to. The mass begins with a hymn, “Be Not Afraid,” and it feels like there’s no group of people anywhere else in America who need that message right now than the several hundred people in this church.

The mass is very much on point, with readings from Paul and the Book of Revelations—the part about how good triumphs over evil and Death and Hades are thrown into a pool of fire. The sermon is plain and heartfelt, and occasionally, fleetingly, funny. “We have 20 new saints today. 20 new angels,” the priest says. “I don’t know about the six adults.” The room breaks out into laughter, but it doesn’t last; tears flow freely as the priests speaks of the day’s events and recounts some of the inane questions he’s fielded from the media. ‘“What was it like inside?’ What do you think it was like inside? ‘Were people crying?’ Of course people were crying. People’s guts were ripped out. ‘Were people OK?’ Of course they weren’t OK.”

And they’re not OK. Everyone is crying, including the priest delivering the homily, including me.

“I’m one of those priests who cries a lot,” he confides to the crowd. “I’ve been crying all day. I baptized some of these children. I had the opportunity to give them First Communion in a few weeks.”

That’s the part that gets me. I break down, and don’t really recover until the end of the sermon.

“Where do you turn on a day like this?” the priest says. “You turn to God, because where else can you go?” A small woman wearing a hospital nametag dabs her eyes.

The mass continues. There are more songs about how we shouldn’t be afraid. They close with “On Eagles’ Wings,” a hymn about how God will elevate the souls of the faithful departed. It’s traditionally sung at Catholic funerals, and the woman standing next to me emits an involuntary, shocked, “Oh, God.” As the congregation sings, her daughter, who can’t be more than 15, breaks down crying. “We’ll go in and say a prayer,” her mother says, touching her cheek. “When everybody else goes out, we’ll go in.”

Outside, the reporters pounce. Some fat dope in a camelhair coat tries to corral mourners into unnecessary interviews, but has no luck. “Can you tell me a little bit about the atmosphere inside?” a TV reporter asks a priest, and is met with a pause and a death stare. “Somber. Obviously,” he says.

TV’s Dr. Oz is here, for some reason, and while my first instinct is bemusement, my second is appreciation. As far as I can tell, Dr. Oz is doing the best job of any reporter here. He’s not asking stupid questions, or jostling to secure soundbites, or taking cruddy smartphone photographs of the makeshift memorials that are all over this town. He is offering empathy and gentle conversation to people who recognize him from television and seem to be genuinely comforted by his presence. “Just wanted to say hi!” an old woman tells him. Her husband, a gruff man in a fire department sweatshirt, was one of the first responders this morning; Dr. Oz listens to his story and responds with one of his own. “On 9/11, I was at the hospital,” he says. “You can’t do anything. That’s the worst part of it. You want to help …” The conversation ends with the old woman giving Dr. Oz some sort of cross or brooch that was on her jacket. “You can use this on your program,” she says.

I am writing this from a Dunkin Donuts, where, a few minutes ago, I saw Piers Morgan and some concealed-carry asshole on TV arguing at top volume about whether people should be allowed to bring guns into schools. There are a few other reporters here, but mostly it’s full of locals—kids in their late-teens or early-twenties, some in firefighters’ and EMT gear. Seven of them sit in front of the television, in chairs arranged in a semi-circle. One of them, in a blue hooded sweatshirt, crumples up a brown paper napkin and uses it to blot his tears.

Earlier this morning, a gunman opened fire at a Connecticut elementary school. According to the latest reports from the AP, an unnamed official says that 27 are dead, 18 of whom are children. The alleged shooter, said to be the father of one of the school’s students, is dead. If current reports hold up, this is one of the deadliest school attacks in American history, behind the 2007 Virginia Tech shootings, which claimed 32 lives, and the Bath School bombings in 1927, which killed 45 people.

Attacks like this one at elementary schools are exceedingly rare. Jessie Klein, author of the 2012 book The Bully Society: School Shootings and the Crisis of Bullying in America's Schools, has compiled extensive data on 191 shootings that took place in American schools between 1979 and 2011. Just 18 of the 191 shootings (around 9 percent) were at elementary schools. In those 191 total shootings, 95 percent of the perpetrators were male but only around 25 percent of the killers were adults. (The CDC also has data on school-associated homicides perpetrated between July 1999 and June 2006. Just 25 of the 116 killed—22 percent—in those shootings were elementary of middle school students.)

We don’t yet know much about the Newtown shooter, but history tells us he was likely very mentally disturbed.

In 1979, 16-year-old Brenda Spencer shot 11 people at a San Diego elementary school; when caught, she explained her crime with a terse “I don’t like Mondays.” In 1996, also on a Monday, 43-year-old Thomas Hamilton killed 17 people at Dunblane Primary School in Scotland; Hamilton, a notorious creep, had been suspected of making advances toward boys in his Scout troop. In 2006, a milk truck driver named Charles Roberts shot ten Amish girls at a one-room schoolhouse in Lancaster County, Penn. Before he died, he called his wife and admitted to being wracked by guilt over having molested two young girls 20 years ago. (The confused relatives later denied they had ever been molested.)

In 1988, a deranged woman named Laurie Dann entered the Hubbard Woods School in Winnetka, Ill., and shot six young children, killing one. I was in second grade at the time, attending a school 15 miles north of Hubbard Woods. The incident is one of my earliest, most-vivid memories—your first experience with horror tends to stick with you. Dann escaped from the school, and there was a period when her whereabouts were unknown. I was absolutely terrified that she was making her way up Sheridan Road in search of more victims. The news of her suicide later that day didn’t help. Even today, I’m still freaked out by her name.

Crime is Slate’s new crime blog. Like us on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter @slatecrime.

Name: Unnamed chesty Panamanian woman

Crime: Drug smuggling

Fatal mistake: Making it clear where she was hiding the drugs.

The circumstance: If you’ve ever been to Colombia, you know that departing passengers are subject to much scrutiny, as security agents are worried that travelers will be smuggling cocaine in their luggage, or on their person. The last time I was there, in 2011, I was patted down at least three times, and all I was carrying was counterfeit money. Trust me, these guys are serious.

On Wednesday, one suspicious passenger made it out of Colombia but caught the attention of Spanish officials when her flight landed in Barcelona. This voluptuous Panamanian woman was only offering “vague answers” about what she was doing in Europe. As CNN.com reports, it wasn’t long before the agents noticed something was amiss: “When a female officer patted down the woman, she found bloodied bandage material under the passenger's breasts. The gauze, the officer found, was covering incisions. And the breasts were hiding ‘a white foreign material.’ “

The suspect explained that her breast implants were still healing. Which is fair enough—I, for one, am always fidgety and nervous when I board a plane with a chest that is still bloody and oozing from augmentation surgery. What if I leak on my seatmate?

Anyway, this woman wasn’t lying. She had just received fresh breast implants. What she didn’t say, though, was that the implants were filled with cocaine—three pounds worth, to be precise. After transporting the woman to a hospital, doctors extracted two bag-shaped prostheses from her chest. She’s now in jail.

How she could’ve been a lot smarter: She could’ve waited for the implant scars to heal. Surreptitiousness is the name of the game when it comes to drug-running. Bloody bandages and prominent scarring will call attention to your stash. You might as well be wearing a full-chest tattoo reading “Double Ds mark the spot.”

How she could’ve been a little smarter: Started crying about how she was the victim of some inept “street doctor,” like that dude in Florida who was using cement to give people butt implants.

How she could’ve been a little dumber: “Why did I come to Barcelona? Let’s just say I was driven by something deep within my breast. Ha ha, there’s a riddle to keep you busy, you fools.” [laughs knowingly while tapping her breasts]

How she could’ve been a lot dumber: “We’ve all snorted cocaine off a woman’s breasts. Who wants to snort cocaine in a woman’s breasts?”

Ultimate Dumbness Ranking (UDR): If only her plan would’ve worked, we would’ve had to inaugurate the Smart Criminal of the Week feature just for her. Unfortunately, it didn’t, and everyone involved with this crime shares the blame. Attention, drug gangs: If you’re going to employ a buxom drug mule to carry cocaine, then don’t hire Edward Scissorhands to install the implants. Attention, drug mules: Don’t be vague to customs agents. “Oh, this and that” is not a good answer to “What are you doing in Barcelona?” 4 out of 10 for the nameless Panamanian drug courier.

Previous Dumb Criminals of the Week: The Guy Who Gave the Cops an Absolutely Terrible Fake Name, The Job Candidate Who Told the FBI about His Child Porn Stash

Crime is Slate’s new crime blog. Like us on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter @slatecrime.

On Monday afternoon, 31-year-old Brandon Woodard checked out of his room at a midtown Manhattan hotel, ambled down 58^th Street, and was promptly shot in the head. Surveillance tapes reveal the gunman had been waiting for Woodard, and shot him intentionally; afterwards, the assailant hopped into a waiting car and fled the scene. This raises a lot of questions: Was Woodard lured out of his hotel room to his death? Why was he shot in the first place? And why would an assassin ever strike in broad daylight?

“Reckless” barely begins to describe this shooting—it would’ve been only slightly more brazen if the killer would’ve announced his name and address over a bullhorn after taking the shot. Woodard was shot at 58^th and 7^th, and the NYPD suspects he was enticed there by design, as if the killers thought that was the perfect spot to murder someone.

It isn’t. 58^th and 7^th is right in the heart of midtown Manhattan, in an area crawling with pedestrians, tour buses, surveillance cameras, food bloggers, and other smartphone-equipped witnesses. There are few worse places to attempt a close-range execution. The spots I can think of off-hand: in the middle of Times Square, waiting in line to board Space Mountain, and at mid-field during the Super Bowl coin toss.

The gunman donned a hood before he shot Woodard, but otherwise did little to conceal his face, which is more-or-less visible in the surveillance video recorded at the scene. The getaway car headed south and then east, across Manhattan, a route that is almost guaranteed to be snarled with traffic. Perhaps I’m not thinking this through and there’s some hidden, genius insight that makes this crime a lot smarter than it first appears. But I really, really, really don’t think so. (If I’m missing something, let me know in the comments.)

And yet, the killer is still at large. Nobody tackled the gunman, or chased after his car, or beamed the license plate number to a cop’s smartphone. Instead, the getaway car just eased into traffic and headed toward the Midtown Tunnel, where the driver was later spotted paying a cash toll and disappearing into Queens.

The Woodard hit almost feels like an homage to the glory days of New York criminality—a time when, as I understand it, you couldn’t go three blocks without seeing a booby-trapped car explode in some poor sap’s face. In mid-20^th century New York, people got assassinated in public all the time. In 1957, the mobster Albert Anastasia was shot and killed in a barber shop on 56^th and 7th. In 1971, Mafia boss Joseph Colombo was shot in Columbus Circle during an Italian Unity Day rally. (He lingered as an invalid before finally dying in 1978.) In 1972, Joey Gallo was shot to death at Umberto’s in Little Italy, after a night on the town with Jerry Orbach. (Yes, that Jerry Orbach.)

Presumably there were other ways to get to these men—and to Woodard. The most obvious reason why people are killed in public is that someone or other—like, say, a vengeful Mafioso—wants to send the victim’s associates a very strong message. It’s not yet clear what sort of message the killers were trying to send to Woodard or his allies. But it’s probably safe to say the message has been received.

But the broad-daylight hit also sent a message to police. That message is, essentially, “Catch us if you can, suckers.” That’s a bad message to send to an enormous, technologically sophisticated police force, especially if your crime produced enough evidence to make it relatively easy to catch you. (The NYPD has already located the getaway car.) Cops don’t like being taunted, and shooting someone in the head in the middle of the day a block from where tourists rent horse-drawn carriages is a pretty good way to raise their ire. Even though they got away at the time, it’s only a matter of time before these guys get caught.

On Sunday, serial killer Israel Keyes was eulogized in a small funeral ceremony attended by his mother, four sisters, and a flamboyant evangelical preacher who, in his sermon, asserted that Keyes was now “in a place of eternal torment.” Keyes committed suicide on Dec. 2 in the Alaska jail where he was being held after his arrest for the abduction and murder of 18-year-old Samantha Koenig last February. The 34-year-old contractor had admitted to at least eight murders, and investigators suspect he was responsible for more. Now, police departments in the United States and Canada are combing their cold cases to see if Keyes might be linked to any of those crimes. 

The only other murder about which Keyes is known to have provided details is the 2011 killing of 60-something Vermont residents Bill and Lorraine Currier. In that exceptionally methodical crime, he flew from the West Coast to Chicago, rented a car, drove 1,000 miles to Vermont, murdered the Curriers after selecting them at random, and then disappeared. For the next year, Vermont police pursued a series of dead-end leads, while Keyes monitored coverage from afar.

Keyes is a horror-movie villain come to life: a killer who haunts remote areas in search of random prey, and who kills for no reason other than the fun of it. An Alaska Dispatch story last week noted that an expert on serial killing called Keyes “among the top three organizers, thinkers and planners he'd studied.” Indeed, aspiring stranglers would do well to study Keyes’ methods. He killed far away from home, in different police jurisdictions. He had no personal connection to his victims, and acted from no evident motives. During his trips, he would turn off his cell phone and pay with cash in order to avoid leaving a trail. He stashed “murder kits” around the country. (The one found in Alaska included a shovel and Drano, to accelerate the decomposition of a dead body.) He spaced out most of his murders, and left the scenes of the crimes soon after he was finished—after killing Samantha Koenig, he hid her body in a shed and took off on a two-week cruise.

Many serial killers—Son of Sam, BTK, Jeffrey Dahmer—stick to a particular region, often close to where they live. This cuts down on travel costs, but also makes it easier for investigators to discern patterns. Many killers also tend to target specific types of victims—young women, runaways, ladies of the evening—which can help investigators put together a psychological profile. But the differences in his known victims suggest that Keyes was the rare serial murderer who didn’t care who he killed.

Keyes shared some things with other serial killers. He said that he killed because it was fun, a sentiment with which many other murderers would certainly agree. Like other serial killers, he appears to have had a drinking problem. (“I've got to drink every day to forget these things. You don't understand what I've been through,” he told a sister-in-law days before he was caught.) And he mentioned that he was saddled with two different personalities.

That same Alaska Dispatch story I mentioned earlier noted that Keyes “felt a connection with serial killer Ted Bundy because Bundy led a double life, too.” At first glance, Bundy is the serial killer whom Keyes most closely resembles. Both men were intelligent, meticulous, and confident. Both spoke about the feeling of power and possession they felt over their victims. Bundy talked about how drinking lowered his inhibitions. For most people, alcohol makes it easier to talk in potentially awkward social situations. But Bundy’s inhibitions were different—as he explained it, drinking made it easier for him to kill.

Yet there are a lot of differences between these men, too. While Ted Bundy spread his killings around, this seems more to have been a function of Bundy living in many different places than any particular strategy to evade detection. And, unlike Keyes, Bundy targeted specific victims: young, attractive women, many of whom had long hair parted down the middle.

In the end, Bundy got sloppy, and Keyes got sloppy, too. A figure in a face mask and driving a white Ford Focus was caught on camera making a withdrawal from an ATM with Koenig’s card. Later, he was spotted in the same car and found with the ATM card. It was an anticlimactic close to a previously unrestrained serial-killing career, an ending that must have embarrassed him. That’s why it shouldn’t be surprising that Keyes cut his wrists and strangled himself to death. It was a way for him to reassert control one last time.

By now, you’ve probably read about Hannah Sabata, the Green Day-loving Nebraska teenager who stole a car and robbed a bank, bragged about it on YouTube, and was promptly arrested for her troubles. (If this is the first you're hearing of it, well, drop everything and watch this video.) As it turns out, Sabata’s not the first person to upload incriminating video for all the world’s law enforcement to see. The Internet, like the real world, is full of reckless and stupid people. Here are a few of them. (Unfortunately, all of the following videos have been removed from YouTube.)

1. Evan Emory

Tenacious D’s HBO series. Weird Al’s “Eat It” video. Allan Sherman’s sex tape. Everybody knows that making a video is the key to musical comedy stardom. So how did things go so wrong for Evan Emory? In 2011, the 21-year-old Michigan man posted to YouTube a cleverly edited video in which he appeared to be singing a sexually explicit song to a room full of first-graders. The tape made him famous, but probably not in the way he expected: Emory was accused of manufacturing child pornography. The charge was later reduced to “unlawful posting of an Internet message with aggravating circumstances,” and Emory was sentenced to 60 days in jail. Comedy: you either get it or you don’t.

2. Happy slapping

Say you’ve got an itch to go beat up some strangers. Would you A) Conceal your identity with sunglasses or a ski mask so you can get away scot-free, or B) film the whole thing and upload the incriminating evidence to YouTube? If “B” was your answer, well, then you’re probably one of the many teenagers who get their kicks from “happy slapping,” which involves punching random pedestrians, whooping and hollering for the camera, and then posting it all online. In 2009, the StarTribune reported on several happy slappers who had been terrorizing the Minneapolis/St. Paul area:

Edited and set to music, the video shows the group of what appear to be teenagers or young men taking turns saying, "Watch this," before knocking down victims and running away, laughing.

In the six-minute, 20-second video, entitled "Watch This T.V.," the perpetrators give full names and nicknames such as "Lil Stain," "Shark" and "Gun Play." Police wouldn't say whether they believe the full names are real, but they say they have identified the perpetrators and are trying to track them down.

Lil Stain, buddy, we’ve been through this. If you’re going to go tape yourself happy slapping, you can’t use your real nickname. Use a pseudonym. Call yourself “Big Stain” or something like that.

3. The great Taser caper

Though bad news tends to dominate the headlines, the world is full of random acts of kindness. Look at what happened to Paul Crowell, for instance. At 3 AM on New Year’s Day 2008, Crowell drove his car into a ditch. But did he spend the rest of the night stuck in the snow? No! A kindly policeman drove Crowell to a gas station so he could call for a ride.

How did Crowell pay it forward? By stealing a Taser out of the back of the police car, filming him and his father zapping each other with it, and posting the footage to YouTube. Though this must have seemed like a great idea at the time, it had its flaws: since the policeman knew Crowell’s name and address, it didn’t take long to arrest him. Crowell, who was already on probation, was sentenced to two years in prison. It just goes to show that roadside kindness is for suckers.

4. “Fire in the hole!”

It’s not bad enough that America’s fast-food jockeys have to deal with low wages, greasy workplaces, and brusque, squeaky-voiced managers. Now they’ve got YouTube pranksters to contend with. In 2008, some Florida teenagers decided to pull a fast one on Taco Bell employee Jessica Ceponis. As Keyonna Summers wrote for USA Today:

Ceponis handed a carload of teens their soft drinks. When she returned to the drive-through window to give them their change, they yelled, "Fire in the hole!" hurled a 32-oz. cup of soda and ice at Ceponis and sped off.

The teens posted a video of the incident on YouTube.com, alongside a number of other videos showing similar pranks. Today, the teens are scheduled to post another video on YouTube: an apology that shows them face down and handcuffed on the hood of a car.

Poetic justice, I guess. But if the judge really had wanted to make the punishment fit the crime, he or she would have made the teens eat every single item on the Taco Bell menu, including the Mexican pizza. Talk about fire in the hole!

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Thus ends my second week at Slate’s Crime blog, a week filled with domestic violence statistics, Truman Capote references, and inept pseudonyms. Thanks for your patronage and for your patience. Don’t hesitate to email me at justintrevett@fastmail.com with tips, questions, comments, or poison-pen letters. I’m a bit behind on my correspondence, but I promise I’ll catch up this weekend.

Crime is Slate’s new crime blog. Like us on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter @slatecrime.

Name: Frankie Portee

Crime: Assault and battery, resisting arrest.

Fatal mistake: Being really, really bad at pseudonyms.

Circumstances: On June 10, 2010, Portee was riding in the back of a car when it was pulled over by the police. Portee had multiple outstanding probation warrants, and was understandably concerned that the cops would find out about them. So he cleverly decided to identify himself with a fake name.

I’ll let Associate Justice Mark V. Green, who wrote the recent Massachusetts Appeals Court opinion affirming Portee’s conviction, take it from here:

Trooper Driscoll noticed that the defendant was not wearing a seat belt and asked the defendant his name and date of birth in order to cite him for a seat belt violation. The defendant gave the false name of “Daniel Atkins” and a birth date of January 28, 1983.

Trooper Driscoll ran the name “Daniel Atkins” though the computer in his cruiser, and learned that there was an active arrest warrant for a Daniel Atkins, who had a birth date indicating an age in approximately the same range as the date provided by the defendant. Atkins's physical description appeared to match the defendant.

Whoops. Driscoll returned to the car and started to question the increasingly confused and nervous Portee, who apparently had no idea that he’d given the name of a wanted man. He responded with what, at the time, must have seemed like the only reasonable option: pushing Driscoll to the ground and trying to run away. This scheme, too, went awry; Portee was subdued, arrested, and sentenced to four years in state prison. The real Daniel Atkins may still be at large.

How he could’ve been a lot smarter: Portee could’ve worn his seat belt. Better yet, he could’ve just dispensed with the car entirely and decided to ride a bicycle. Nothing bad ever happens to black guys on bicycles.

How he could’ve been a little smarter: Been ready with a better pseudonym. Something trustworthy, like “Joe Innocent.”

How he could’ve been a little dumber: “Hello, my name is Trooper Driscoll. No, wait, that’s your name. Ahh, I’m so drunk right now.”

How he could’ve been a lot dumber: “The name’s, uh, Ayman. That’s right. Ayman al-Zawahiri.” [brushes hands together in gesture of extreme confidence]

Ultimate Dumbness Ranking (UDR): I feel for Portee. This is more a case of bad luck than stupidity. But, as they say, luck is the residue of design. If you know you might be in a situation where you’ll have to give the police a fake name, you ought to be prepared with a pseudonym that you’re absolutely sure is clean. Scour the Internet for lists of centenarians or National Merit Scholars. Take control of your fake identity. 3 out of 10 for Portee.

Previous Dumb Criminals of the Week: The Job Candidate Who Told the FBI about His Child Porn Stash

Crime is Slate’s new crime blog. Like us on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter @slatecrime.

Truman Capote’s “nonfiction novel” In Cold Blood, published in 1966, told the story of Perry Smith and Dick Hickock, two murderous drifters who, in the course of a pathetically nonlucrative robbery, killed Herbert and Bonnie Clutter and two of their children on the family’s Kansas farm. The crime confounded investigators, both for its senselessness and viciousness. But they eventually linked the Clutter murders to Smith and Hickock, the latter of whom had heard from a prison acquaintance that Herbert had $10,000 in a safe in his office. The men were arrested at the tail end of 1959 and executed in 1965.

Now, the Guardian reports that authorities in Florida’s Sarasota County suspect Smith and Hickock may be guilty of another famous unsolved crime:

Kim McGath, a detective with the Sarasota County sheriff's office who has been working the cold case for four years, believes DNA evidence might show that the pair was responsible for the deaths of Cliff and Christine Walker and their children Jimmie, 3, and Debbie, 2.

In what McGath calls "the most plausible theory," Smith and Hickock, who had been on the run from authorities in Kansas for a month, and who were seen in Florida hustling for odd jobs in the week leading up to the 19 December murders, attacked the Walkers in their home after setting up a bogus deal to sell them a new car.

For decades, investigators believed the Walkers were killed by somebody who knew the family. There were only four items stolen from their house—a carton of cigarettes, a pocketknife, Cliff and Christine’s marriage certificate, and Christine’s high-school majorette uniform. To investigators, this seemed to indicate the culprit was fixated on Christine Walker and was perhaps even a secret lover. It would be a shocking twist if Smith and Hickock were the killers all along, one sure to delight true crime fans and Hollywood executives. (Coming to theaters in 2014: In Cold Blood 2: Colder and Bloodier.)

Certainly, the Walker case bears a few similarities to the Clutter murders. Both were families of four, two parents and two children. All eight victims were shot to death. Christine Walker was raped before she was shot; in In Cold Blood, Capote writes that Hickock attempted to rape 16-year-old Nancy Clutter before being stopped by Smith. When he was arrested, Hickock was carrying a knife resembling the one that had been stolen from Cliff Walker. Though polygraph tests cleared Smith and Hickock of the Walker murders at the time, those tests were later deemed unreliable.

Matthew Doig wrote a comprehensive series about the Walker case for the Sarasota Herald-Tribune in 2005 and has maintained an interest in the story. “This is one of those cases that gets under your skin,” he told me. Doig finds it plausible that Hickock and Smith were the culprits, citing witnesses who placed the two in the area at the time and numerous police errors that prematurely removed them from suspicion. “Basically, they were ruled out over faulty fingerprinting and a faulty lie-detector test,” he says.

Even so, the In Cold Blood connection is not entirely convincing. Yes, Cliff Walker had wanted to buy a car similar to the one Hickock and Smith had been driving. But it doesn’t necessarily follow that Walker had actually tried to buy Hickock and Smith’s car. Two hairs found at the crime scene match Smith and Hickock’s hair colors, but they also match millions of other people who have black and blond hair. Hickock and Smith were seen the day after the Walker murders with scratches and welts on their faces. But those marks prove nothing—they could have come from a different crime, or a fight, or a shaving accident.

McGath’s theory will ultimately be proved right or wrong based on the DNA evidence she gathers. She's preparing a brief that, she hopes, will allow her to exhume the suspects’ bodies. But it’s unclear whether technicians would even be able to extract any usable DNA from Smith and Hickock’s long-decayed corpses. DNA begins to degrade right around the moment of death, though the rate of decomposition can vary depending on lots of factors, including the location where the body is buried. Shannon McFarland of the Herald-Tribune writes that “viable DNA tends to last longer in bodies buried in arid areas with higher elevations, like Kansas.” But the manager of the cemetery in which the bodies are buried told the AP that “it's likely that only bones remain in the Kansas coffins.”

"There are so many reasons [why the DNA might not be extractable], and there is a possibility that we may not have a match," McGath told the Herald-Tribune. But no matter what science says, there’s some literary evidence that Smith and Hickock claimed responsibility for the crime, if only indirectly. In In Cold Blood, Capote writes about Smith reading a newspaper story about the Walker murders while he and Hickock were on the run. "Amazing!" Smith said to Hickock. "Know what I wouldn't be surprised? If this wasn't done by a lunatic. Some nut that read about what happened out in Kansas.”