Paging Bryan Alexander: Dahlia Lithwick has a piece up at Slate and the Washington Post about murderers who blog.
The article is interesting when it uses the web presences of some recent killers as a window on their personalities; patricidal school shooter Alvaro Castillo, for example, listed among the people he’d like to meet one day Tom Hanks, Michael Moore, and John Hinckley Jr. It’s much more dubious when it asserts that networking sites like MySpace or Facebook make criminals’ jobs easier (funny, they seem to have managed just fine before), or that the people killers interact with online via these services are no more real to them than characters in a video-game shoot-’em-up. That may be true, but that’s because, to a violent sociopath, all people are no more real than characters in a video-game shoot-’em-up. In terms of both their development as killers and their view of their victims, the chicken/egg question is an easy one to answer: As the sine qua non of crimebloggers, Steve Huff, once said of wannabe mass murderer Kimveer Gill, “Of course, since he was probably a psychopath and therefore by definition a narcissist, he had to have an online presence.”