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if-you-fan-a-fire · 1 year ago

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"TWO CONVICTS WERE JOINTLY PUT ON TRIAL," Kingston Whig-Standard. June 23, 1933. Page 3. ---- Teetzel and Morison Were Accused of Taking Part in Riot ---- On the resumption of the trial on Thursday afternoon of convicts of the Kingston Penitentiary charged with rioting and with doing damage to penitentiary property. Convicts Alexander Manson and Norman Teetzel appeared before His Honor Judge J. E. Madden Thursday afternoon and before being charged Teetzel through the Court requested counsel, while Manson asked that Convict Sam Behan be allowed to assist him in his defence. Court was held up for sometime while counsel was being procured for Teetzel and Behan was being sent for to aid Manson in his defence. Harry A. McNeill appeared as defending counsel for Teetzel. Meanwhile, officers of the penitentiary brought Behan from Portsmouth.

Manson and Teetzel were charged with being riotously and tumultuously assembled and with causing damage to penitentiary property.

The jury was empanelled for the case and Manson and Teetzel pleaded "not guilty." The Crown, Col. Keiller MacKay, outlined the case to the jury.

Guard Godwin The first witness called was Guard William Godwin, who repeated much the same evidence as he has given at previous convict trials.

Questioned by Manson, Godwin said he did not see him in the shop dome nor did he see him doing any damage.

Guard James Kenny was the second witness of the afternoon and in answer to Col. MacKay described the occurrences of the afternoon of October 17th in the mail bag department.

Cross-examined by Manson. Kenny said that he did not seee Manaon on the 17th of October.

"Did the men have any recreation on the 17 of October?" asked Manson.

"About half of them did." replied Kenny.

"Have the men any emotional outlet?" "What do you mean?" "Baseball, horse-shoe pitching or other games?"

"Decidedly not."

Manson started to question Kenny on prison regulations but was stopped by the judge.

Guard Boucher Guard Boucher in evidence said he saw Manson and Teetzel on the afternoon of October 17, Manson in the tin and paint department and Teetzel in the printing department. Witness said that there was a wall between the two shops and a wooden door leading from the tin and paint department to the printing department and entrance to the tin and paint department was from the shop dome. On the afternoon of October 17 the door of the tin and paint department was locked. That day there were 37 convicts in all in the tin and paint and printing departments. On that day a convict, Joliffe by name, at three o'clock gave a yell, got a club and started to go out the door. "I tried to stop Joliffe," Boucher said, "and he threatened me. Just then Manson came running up and he had club. He also threatened me and said he would brain me. Just then Teetzel came running up with a roller and being intimidated. I stepped aside. Manson pounded on the door and went back to the shop and Joffekept pounding the door and called for a crowbar. The door was broken open and Manson and Teetzel went to the shop dome." Witness said he did not see Teetzel again on that day, but saw Manson again and spoke to him near the mail bag department, after the convicts were released from there. Witness described what was going on in the shop domn where the convicts were rioting and were very noisy. "Did you see Teetzel go out of the shop?" "He disappeared. I didn't actually see him go but he went." "How did you identify Teetzel?" "By his number and later by a photograph." Cross-examined by Manson, Boucher was asked to identify several numbers given by Manson. Boucher could not remember then and stated that he could not remember nine months back as to numbers. "Do you know 2116?" asked Manson. "No," replied Boucher. "Who is 2116?" "I don't know." "Are you aware 2116 is my number?" "I don't remember." "Were you carrying anything on that day?" "Yes, I had a broom handle in my hand." "Did you carry that stick all afternoon." "Yes, I had it all day." "Did you have it at three o'clock?" "Yes." "Did you see me with anything in my hand?" "Yes, you had a club." "Did I have it raised?" "Yes." "Did I attempt to strike you?" "Yes - you said you would brain me." "Were you were brandishing your stick?" "No, I used it for restoring order." "It is it in the rules to tap a stick to restore order?" "No." "Did I threaten you?" "Yes." "Did I strike you?" "No." "Did I shove you?" "No." "Did you hear me say to get away from me?" "No. I heard you make a statement that you would brain me." "Were you waving your stick at me?" "No." "Did not an inmate advise you to conceal yourself because the stone shed gang would square themselves for what happened on October 13 for the stone shed." "No." This concluded the evidence for the day, court adjourning at 4:00 p.m.until 10 o'clock this morning.

Friday Session Counselled by Convict Sammie Behan and H. A. McNeill, local solicitor, Convicts Alexander Manson and Alexander Teetzel, continued to conduct their own defense this morning. The Convicts stand jointly indicted on a charge of participating in the prison riot.

Guard O' Earle described his version of the riot. "Did you try to stop the men?" Guard Earle said that Manson was the convict who had ordered him to go to the mail-bag department with the other convicts. Manson then left the shop only to return a minute later and repeat the command.

"You are sure is was Manson?" asked Col. Mackay. "Absolutely." "Did I speak to you respectfully?"asked Manson. "Well, you ordered me to join the other guards." Witness maintained that he was "ordered" by Manson despite the latter's strong attempt to upset the evidence. Admitting that Teetzel was merely mingling with the crowd and "doing nothing rash" when he saw him was the testimony given by Guard R. A. Caughey. He stated that he only knew Teetzel and not Manson. Matthew Walsh and H. Henderson gave evidence but neither said they had seen the accused men. "I submit that there is no necessity of presenting evidence for the defense, Your Honor," said Mr. McNeil. "That's your responsibility," said the Judge.

Convict Archie Hyatt was the first defense witness called. He stated that he had seen Teetzel all day and that the latter had taken no active part in the riot. He stated that every time he saw Teetzel the accused was merely talking to other convicts.

Cross-examined by Col. MacKay witness said he did not think it was against the rules and regulations of the prison to leave his work at one end of the shop and walk to the other end. He clung to this statement in spite of the Crown's efforts to laugh it to scorn. Witness maintained that he had done it before.

Convict Harold Moore testified that he had seen Teetzel come out of the shop with a wooden roller in his hand. Witness identified a roller which was exhibited in court. He stated that Teetzel worked in the book-binding department and that the roller was part of the equipment there. "What did he do with the roller?" asked Mr. McNeill. "Nothing, he threw it down." Convict Alfred Kurtinitis stated that his reason for joining in th edisturbance was that he wanted to see what was going on. "Excitement is pretty rare around the prison and you felt you couldln't afford to miss any?" asked the Crown. "You're right." Kurtinitis raised a laugh when he admitted that there was enough work to do in the prison, for him at least. He said he didn't like work.

Kurtinitis, a Lithuanian, admitted that he had been placed in jail in his first day in Canada. Witness said that to his knowledge the accused had not taken an active part in the demonstration. Teetzel When Teetzel took the stand on his behalf he claimed that he had never left the shop where he was working. He admitted that he had gone as far as the door when the outbreak started but he returned to the shop. He said he was surprised to find that he still had in his hand a toiler with which he had been working. He immediately laid it down.

'You have a bad record, haven't you?' asked Col. MacKay. "Not so bad,' interposed His Honor. This evidence concluded the case for Teetzel. Manson will take the stand in his own defense this afternoon.

#kingston ontario #kingston penitentiary #prison riot #words from the inside #1933 prisoner trials #1932 kp riot #great depression in canada #crime and punishment in canada #history of crime and punishment in canada #destruction of property #riotous assembly #prisoner testimony

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buzzdixonwriter · 4 years ago

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“I Don’t Think That Memes What You Think It Memes…”

There’s a trope being pushed currently by alt-reich supremacists that likens convicted murderer Derek Chauvin with the executed soldiers in Stanley Kubricks’s classic 1957 WWI movie, Paths Of Glory.

Great movie, BTW; go watch it.

First, a quick encapsulation of the film:

An incompetent general orders his battalion to make a suicidal assault across no-man’s land

The battalion, pinned down by murderous fire, can’t leave their trenches

The general orders his own artillery to fire on his own troops to drive them forward

His own artillery refuses

When the attack fails, the general orders soldiers be selected at random from the battalion and executed for cowardice in an attempt to frighten the battalion into following his incompetent orders

The general is brought down by his own incompetence, but too late to save the sacrificial soldiers

The alt-reich supremacist argument goes like this: “They” are sacrificing Derek Chauvin because “they” are afraid Black Lives Matter protestors will riot if they don’t.

Oh, really…?

Was Derek Chauvin told to charge The Wild Bunch, guns blazing?

No?

Did Derek Chauvin yank George Floyd -- who at the time was handcuffed and sitting inside a police car with the door closed -- out of said police car then kneel on Mr. Floyd’s neck for nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds with his hands in his pockets and a smirk on his face while his fellow officers, an Emergency Medical Technician, bystanders, and Mr. Floyd himself said he was putting Mr. Floyd’s life in danger?

Yes?

Well, then it seems like there’s a big difference between someone refusing to follow through on a stupid order that’s likely to result in them getting killed and someone who callously and indifferently chokes a human being to death despite pleas for mercy, doesn’t it?

This is literally why Colin Kaepernick knelt in protest: African-Americans are repeatedly discriminated against by law enforcement and courts, stopped / detained / arrested / charged / tried / convicted / sentenced more harshly than white Americans for the exact same crimes and offenses.

The Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

The Constitution Of The United States Of America: "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

The Pledge Of Allegiance: "I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

The alt-reich supremacists argue Chauvin did not receive a fair trial.

Really? How so?

Was Chauvin:

informed of the charges against him?

informed of his Constitutional rights?

allowed to have a lawyer defend him?

presented with all the evidence against him?

allowed to confront his accusers in an open court?

allowed to challenge evidence, testimony, and witnesses in court?

allowed to present his version of what happened in court?

tried by a jury of twelve U.S. citizens selected at random that his own defense team could challenge or approve?

Yes?

How many of points 1 – 8 did Mr. Floyd receive at Chauvin’s hand…or knee?

The alt-reich supremacists accuse Black Lives Matter of staging violent protests in response to Mr. Floyd’s murder. While some violence and property damage was caused by BLM marchers, far and away the bulk of the violence and vandalism was committed by alt-reich supremacists acting as agents provocateurs.

There’s nothing new to this, of course.

The Nazis did it back in the bad old days, infiltrating peaceful protests and demonstrations to stir up riots so they could then blame the original demonstrators and use that as justification to oppress them.

(This is the point in our discussion where alt-reich supremacists will start shouting “Godwin’s law! Godwin’s law!” to which I reply with this direct quote from Mike Godwin himself: “By all means, compare these shitheads to Nazis. Again and again. I'm with you.”)

The alt-reich supremacists fail to understand that a fair trial does not mean one where the defendant is guaranteed a chance to walk free.

A fair trials guarantees a defendant a chance to explain things from their point of view and, if they or their lawyers can make a compelling enough counter-argument, then they may prevail.

Nobody told the twelve impartial jurors at Chauvin’s trial how to vote, nor threatened them with harm if they failed to convict.

Prosecutors hate to go to court unless they feel they have an overwhelming chance of proving their case.

A lot of the time, the evidence and testimony leaves absolutely no doubt about the defendant’s guilt and culpability.

Chauvin got as fair a trial as Charles Manson got (admittedly, Manson had the better, more cognizant closing argument.)

All it would take would be one single juror with a reasonable doubt to deadlock the jury and win Chauvin a new trial.

The evidence and testimony led the jury to think Chauvin was guilty.

Video showing a murderer kneeling nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds on their victim’s neck will do that.

Hey, know who else thought Chauvin was guilty?

Chauvin himself.

He acknowledged guilt by offering to plea bargain to the least of the three charges in exchange for being let off the hook on the two more serious charges.

(This offer to plea bargain was not introduced in court as it might prejudice jurors against Chauvin and that wouldn’t have been fair, would it?)

No, it’s crystal clear by their invocation of Kubrick’s Paths Of Glory that the alt-reich supremacists consider Chauvin to be innocent of deliberately murdering an African-American.

(It’s a pity Kubrick is no longer with us because one can easily imagine him reaming out these assholes with an M-60 chamber brush for daring to link his work with their bigotry.)

Kaepernick and Black Lives Matter protest against the view that police officers are entitled to ignore the law and abuse the civil rights of suspects just because those suspects are black or brown or fly the rainbow flag.

Chauvin was neither falsely nor unfairly convicted of murdering George Floyd.

If he didn’t want to be convicted of murder, perhaps he should have considered not murdering Mr. Floyd.

#George Floyd #murder of George Floyd #killer cop #Derek Chauvin #alt-reich #alt-reich supremacists #white supremacy #bigotry #racism #morals #ethics #liberty #justice

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bhadpodcast · 5 years ago

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My Doom is Master Plan

https://princeescaluswords.tumblr.com/post/188087630625/my-doom-is-master-plan

https://camelotpark.tumblr.com/post/188088244878/my-doom-is-master-plan

Claude PEW Frollo:

You know… I’ve just lost it. I have hit the bottom of the fandom barrel and I’ve stopped bouncing back. We’ve reached ‘fire everything’ levels of exasperation.

Sometimes, when I read some egregious piece of rancid garbage I step back and I say to myself – “What are you trying to accomplish by taking them on?” And frequently, I’ve pulled myself back, but you know what…

Seven Years. It’s been seven years, and people are still acting like Scott having a fail-safe in place to defeat Gerard, which was only triggered when Gerard forced Scott to make Derek bite him is on the same moral plane as the Manson Murders.

This morning I read a story where an author, wearing a Stiles’ mask, said that Scott did not actually poison Gerard to protect his mother or to save Derek, he did it because of his ego and his desire to keep his hands cleans – that a sixteen-year-old boy should have used a gun or ripped out Gerard’s throat with his claws in a preemptive strike, and that by not doing it preemptively was corruption and ‘boundary crossing.’

Boundary crossing. From a sterek shipper. Priceless.

There’s more and I haven’t really touched either, but they both read the same: I can’t get what I want so I adopt a new form of Godwin’s law and call everyone a racist who doesn’t agree with me.

Now Scott forced Derek to bite Gerard to save him? Sure sistren. Hey antis, don’t forget that half the things y’all argue about are things you made up yourself!

Scott was wrong, and admitted that he didn’t care directly after. Point blank, end of story, periodt. Let him have it, I don’t see why that’s so hard. Because maybe if they’d accept Scott’s flaws they would see the actual way we accept the flaws of Derek, Stiles and Peter (and here’s a hint, it’s never anything the antis claim it is).

As long as they keep trying that tired, inaccurate race card (while being the most racist they can be, btw) I’m going to keep side-eying and doing what I want. Periodt.

@thisdiscontentedwinter @stickykeys633 @athenadark @fandomslash

#submission #posey problems #teen wofl #teen wolf #links #PEW #nix nyxie

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tabloidtoc · 5 years ago

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Life & Style, October 14

Cover: Single Katie Holmes starting over at age 40

Page 2: Photo Flash -- Helen Mirren arrives at the premiere of Catherine the Great

Page 4: Contents

Page 6: The Top 10 Emmys Looks -- Emilia Clarke, Kerry Washington, Michelle Williams, Sophie Turner, Kendall Jenner

Page 7: Mandy Moore, Rachel Brosnahan, Julia Garner, Kim Kardashian, Indya Moore

Page 8: Twinning -- Lisa Rinna vs. Kate Beckinsale, Kristine Froseth vs. Kirsten Dunst

Page 10: Felicity Huffman life behind bars

Page 11: Jon Gosselin is prepared to go to court for full custody of his kids with Kate Gosselin, Throwback -- Reese Witherspoon, Biggest Spenders of the Week -- Kendrick Lamar, Travis Scott, Kylie Jenner, Rihanna, Demi Moore

Page 12: Gwen Stefani leaving The Voice, Camila Cabello’s new nose, Quiz -- whose baby is it -- Mario Lopez, Amy Schumer, Hilary Duff, Jessica Simpson, Ryan Lochte, Nicole Polizzi

Page 13: 5 things you didn’t know about The Bachelor Pete Weber

Page 14: Bradley Cooper moves in with his mom, Shaquille O’Neal is a good tipper, VIP Style -- Jon Hamm and Taraji P. Henson, Michael Jordan and Spike Lee, Bill Hader, Christian Siriano, Heidi Klum and Tom Kaulitz, Sandra Oh, John Legend and Jamie-Lynn Sigler and Erin and Sara Foster

Page 16: The Week in Photos -- Justin Timberlake playing golf

Page 18: Nick Viall, Amanda Seyfried, Madelaine Petsch

Page 20: Miley Cyrus at the iHeartRadio Music Festival, Jon Hamm on a Vespa, Lucy Hale and her dog Elvis

Page 22: Hannah Godwin and Maria Menounos, Marilyn Manson and Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Elizabeth Banks and Charlie’s Angels Ella Balinska and Kristen Stewart and Naomi Scott on Jimmy Kimmel

Page 26: Stars Behaving Badly -- Chrissy Teigen and John Legend and Zach Galifianakis, Kelly Dodd and Emily Simpson and Gina Kirschenheiter, Bella Hadid

Page 28: Say What?! Kylie Jenner on dust in a cup, Jake Gyllenhaal on sweat, Cara Delevingne on being attracted to men, Reese Witherspoon on teaching son Deacon to drive, Jennifer Lopez on avoiding supermarkets

Page 32: Jenna Dewan wedding and a baby, Teresa Giudice is not joining husband Joe Giudice in Italy

Page 33: Mandy Moore trying to save her marriage by going on tour with husband Taylor Goldsmith

Page 34: Cover Story -- Katie Holmes is dating again

Page 36: Jessica Simpson dropped 100 lbs

Page 38: Why Mila Kunis is standing by Ashton Kutcher amid bombshell claims made by his ex Demi Moore in her new tell-all

Page 40: Prince Harry and Duchess Meghan Markle get an image makeover in South Africa

Page 42: Who Lives Here? Alicia Keys

Page 44: Entertainment

Page 45: Star Review -- Amanda Stanton, As Seen On-Screen -- Meghan Trainor wore Kenneth Cole’s Riley 85 Simple Booties in black on the Today show

Page 46: Fashion -- cardigans get sexy -- Bella Hadid, Kaia Gerber, Gigi Hadid

Page 48: Beauty -- Fall fragrance -- Dakota Johnson

Page 52: Diva or Down-to Earth -- Busy Philipps, Jamie Chung and dog Ewok, Jonathan Van Ness and Tan France

Page 54: Social Stars Posts of the Week -- Kanye West and Kim Kardashian and kids North and Saint and Chicago in Wyoming, Heidi Klum and her new dog, Lea Michele, Charlize Theron and Nicole Kidman and Margot Robbie

Page 56: Horoscope -- Libra Bella Hadid, They’re Not Together But They Should Be -- Pisces Trevor Noah and Sagittarius Katie Holmes

Page 58: Made Ya Look -- Hilary Duff and Matthew Koma with kids Luca and Banks

Page 60: What I’m Into -- Niecy Nash

#tabloid #katie holmes #suri cruise #jamie foxx #tom cruise #prince harry

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segasister · 4 years ago

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Based on your conversation with dudes107, this anon here think you and several others seem to care more about keeping up your social justice bonafides than acknowledging the very real problems with certain things people say that are inherently vitriolic and violent no matter who or what they're aimed. These are the kinds of loopholes that even the ABUSERS you recognize like LILIAN VALERIE PEET (NOT ORCHARD, SHE STOLE THAT NAME FROM HER EX) will use to escape getting the boot as they deserve.

So does that mean that the atrocious actions of the people mentioned in said conversation no longer matter? That the terrible things they did should just be forgotten about just because they’re dead and gone? Lemme ask you the following:

Were you weeping on the day that Charles Manson died?

Did you shed tears for Mark Salling after his passing?

Did your heart go to the loved ones of Jeffrey Epstein when his death was announced?

Osama bin Laden?

Saddam Hussein?

Any other piece of human bile who committed atrocities on any scale?

If you answered yes to any of the above, then you don’t understand either. What these people did was completely awful, violent or otherwise. It would feel wrong to mourn them in any capacity, unless you knew them personally, because that would be an insult to the many people they’ve hurt. Is celebrating their deaths too far? Possibly, but I would most definitely feel disgusted with myself if I did the opposite.

If you answered no, then why are we here? I didn’t respond the way I did out of obligations of social justice, but because I hate seeing anyone defending terrible people just because they’re safe in their graves, i.e. the very real problems that they themselves caused. Something bad doesn’t have to happen to you specifically, or to anyone in your inner circle, in order for it to be a problem; but then again, I’m hoping you already knew that.

You notice I never brought him up, because that’d fall under Godwin’s Law, but there are still people who mourn his passing over seventy-five years later, and yet claim to not support him or his ideals. And some of those same people would chastise others for being happy that he’s gone and can no longer hurt anybody else.

That’s what I got from them: they’d use death, including their own father’s (which feels incredibly scummy, by the way), as a means to yell at people who don’t respond, “morally correct,” to that death, something that would fall under the, “social justice bonafides,” that you brought up. They read as someone who would tolerate intolerance because that would be tolerant of them, and not tolerating intolerance wouldn’t be tolerant of them.

I myself used to be Centrist and realized just how awful I was because I’d do the same thing they’re doing now: for example, say that it was wrong to celebrate someone dying just because. Now? I realize that some double standards need to be in place. You have to be intolerant intolerance because otherwise, nothing good would be tolerated. I remember being conflicted over a college question because, in allowing Natives to wear their headdresses to graduation, I’d also allow certain other people who I will not name to wear any insignia representing their movement, even though they’re not one and the same.

And that’s another issue with being a Centrist: equating things that can’t be equated. Of course a YouTube critic with a minor following who is also a serial abuser is not going to have the same weight as a radio host with a large following who influenced said following into being terrible people. Both are bad. Condemning one does not mean condoning the other. Alternatively, you don’t have to hate Trump but like Biden; you can very well hate both of them equally. Ironically, moving further left made me realize this (I’d argue that I was always left-leaning, and only claimed to be Centrist to appeal to my right-leaning family, but I digress).

So in conclusion, I know very well what I was talking about in my discussion with them. Is it wrong to say certain things about certain people, yes. However, certain other people deserve that vitriol, because an actual celebrity is not the same as someone like you or me. Do you understand that much? Anything I need to clarify?

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chiseler · 8 years ago

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DEATH LIVE: A Brief History of Snuff Culture, 1900-2017

“I love it. Suicides, assassinations, mad bombers, Mafia hitmen, automobile smash-ups: "The Death Hour." A great Sunday night show for the whole family. It'd wipe that fuckin' Disney right off the air.”

—Max Schumacher: Network (1976)

On Sunday April 16th in Cleveland Ohio, Steve Stephens shot and killed a random stranger named Robert Godwin. Godwin, a grandfather, was on his way home from an Easter celebration when Stephens approached him on the sidewalk and, after a few brief words, shot him in the head. Stephens filmed the murder on his smart phone and live streamed it on his FaceBook page. The video instantly went viral. Along with triggering a nationwide manhunt, the online post led to an explosion of shock, outrage and chest thumping over what we had become as a culture.

The Stephens case was only the latest in what was becoming the nation’s hottest new trend, with people live streaming assaults, murders, rapes, suicides and accidental deaths on popular social media sites. Pundits everywhere were trying to make sense of it. Why were people suddenly posting all these horrific things, and why were so many millions scrambling to see them? Yes, well, pundits do a lot of head scratching like that, considering so few of them seem to have the slightest working knowledge of American cultural history.

Without pausing to ponder the fairly obvious impulses behind the species’ millennia-old morbid fascination with violent death, let’s just back up a ways and try to focus a bit.

Recall that bloodsport spectacles in the Roman Coliseum were more popular than soccer is today. Recall also that throughout Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, public autopsies were considered not only educational, but a form of high popular entertainment. Real images of real death have been part of American pop culture for a very long time now. At the turn of the 20th century, stereographic images of beheadings and torture were among the most popular photos sold by Underwood & Underwood. When Topsy the elephant was electrocuted on the Coney Island boardwalk in 1903, Thomas Edison, who supplied the electrodes and electricity, also dispatched a film crew to record the event for posterity. During Prohibition, newspapers around Chicago were never exactly hesitant to splash bloody pictures of gangland violence across the covers of the early edition. When Ruth Snyder and her lover were electrocuted in Sing Sing in January of 1928, an enterprising reporter strapped a camera to his ankle, and the resulting shot of Snyder mid-execution graced the cover of the next day’s New York Daily News. It became one of the paper’s best selling issues up to that point.

Where would we be without Abraham Zapruder’s footage of JFK’s exploding head, or that live televised broadcast of Jack Ruby assassinating Lee Harvey Oswald? During the Vietnam War, television audiences grew accustomed to seeing images of not only dead soldiers, children, and self-immolating monks, but also seeing journalists getting shot on camera in the middle of live broadcasts from the front. In January of 1987, R. Budd Dwyer became an underground superstar after blowing his brains out on live TV, the footage traded among collectors of weird and morbid videos for decades afterward. And that’s just a few random highlights.

The news is one thing, popular entertainment’s another. We are a bloodthirsty lot, and by mid-century real images of real death began infiltrating assorted, often under-appreciated cinematic subgenres.

As explained in Bret Wood’s 2003 documentary Hell’s Highway, in the mid-‘50s Ohio-based amateur photographer and cop groupie Richard Wayman began snapping pictures of fatal car accidents. Although he always insisted it was because he was obsessed with driver safety, you do have to wonder what really motivated the curious hobby. After sharing some of the grisly shots with officers of the local highway patrol, they encouraged him to take more. Soon teaming up with Phyllis Vaughn, her sister Dottie, and a local reporter who was already covering auto wrecks, Wayman and the small crew began spending their nights trolling the highways and backroads in search of twisted metal and mangled flesh, cameras at the ready. They turned the collective photographic mayhem into a slide show that played county fairs around Ohio. Hosted by actual highway patrolmen, the sincerely earnest intent behind the slideshow was to confront viewers with horrific and real images of deadly car wrecks in order to shock them into being safer drivers.

At the suggestion of the state highway patrol’s chief officer, Wayman and his team switched out still cameras for movie cameras and began gathering footage (complete with sound) of deadly car accidents, often arriving on the scene before the ambulances. Now along with images of the twisted and bleeding corpses, the films also captured the anguished shrieks of the merely injured and maimed.

In a stroke of genius, in 1959 Wayman’s Highway Safety Foundation, as it had been dubbed, edited the footage together, added some narration, some recreations and back stories, and released Signal 30. Shockingly brutal for its time, the hour-long film was shown to teenage driver’s ed students throughout the state. They soon followed their debut with other equally graphic highway safety films like Mechanized Death and Wheels of Tragedy. In time the films became a standard part of driver’s education classes across the country.

Although driver safety films aimed specifically at teenagers had been around since the 1930s, no one had ever seen anything as stark and grim as Wayman’s before. The films, with their lingering shots of bodies thrown through windshields, pinioned behind the steering wheel or spread out all over the pavement, were far more shocking in their levels of violence than anything Hollywood would dare show for another decade. Whether they actually saved any young lives is unclear, but they became the stuff of urban legend. Generation after generation passed along stories, some exaggerated to be sure, about all the spilled guts and splattered brains onscreen, as well as the audience reaction. My sister, who took drivers ed in the mid-‘70s, couldn’t wait to get home after class to tell me about the gross film they saw that day. My reaction, and the reaction of millions of other younger siblings hearing similar stories, was not horror. No, we couldn’t wait to take driver’s ed so we could see these films ourselves. Unfortunately, the mood of the country had started to shift, and by the end of the ‘70s fidgety and righteous parental and civic groups thought it best to shield youngsters from violent images for their own good. So along with editing all the slapstick out of Looney Tunes, thanks to humorless do-gooders cautionary and bloody highway safety films disappeared from driver’s ed classrooms. The focus shifted away from the agonizing human tragedy to the science and technology of car safety features. Instead of brains smeared on a dashboard, we got lots and lots of footage of crash test dummies. I suspect the lives of very few teenage drivers were saved as a result, but I can tell you how deeply gypped many of us felt with the loss of this rite of passage.

In 1962, Italian filmmakers Paolo Cavara and Gualtiero Jacopetti decided to make a new kind of documentary. Sending small film crews around the world, from Africa and India to Malaysia, the Amazon, and Vegas, they collected footage of strange customs, rituals and eating habits from all the shadowy corners of the globe. Some of the footage was banal (a staggering drunk in Germany), while more tended toward the disturbing and grotesque, like the scenes shot inside a slaughterhouse. Then they invented a few strange customs and rituals of their own and shot those, editing them in with the real footage. The travelogue of the odd and quirky was accompanied by a breezy, wide-eyed explanatory narration and an incongruously lush score. The resulting film, Mondo Cane, turned out to be hugely popular, winning an Oscar for Best Song (“More”) and spawning an entire subgenre of extreme documentaries known collectively as mondo films.

The trick of course when it came to the follow-ups and copycats was to outdo the original, pushing the limits of onscreen violence, sex, and the grotesque under the guise of anthropology. It was something Cavara and Jacopetti realized themselves. They not only increased the percentage of invented footage for mondo Cane 2 a few years later, they also included more footage of animals slaughter, as well as footage of public executions and the above-mentioned Buddhist monk setting himself ablaze to protest the war in Vietnam. The onscreen death toll only increased with their later documentaries like Africa Addio, an unflinching chronicle of the bloody and genocidal civil war in central Africa. Meanwhile, copycat filmmakers amped up the onscreen violence, gore and sex (both real and created) in films like Shocking Asia, Shocking Africa, Mondo Magic and dozens of others. Eventually, however, events in the world as reported on the nightly news left the mondo films looking a little prurient, maybe, but little more than quaint time capsules.

Like so many other grindhouse filmmakers at that moment in history, in 1971 Michael and Roberta Findlay decided to join the mad rush to exploit the Tate-LaBianca murders. To that end they flew down to Argentina and made a quickie no budget splatter film called Slaughter, about a young actress who travels to South America to shoot a movie and crosses paths with a Manson-like guru who leads a cult of murderous, drug-addled hippies. The film was picked up by producer-distributor Allan Shackleton, who let it sit on the shelf for the next few years.

Around this time, and following Manson it was almost to be expected, a new urban legend began making the rounds claiming there was a dark and sinister subset of the porn world involving films that featured actual people (almost exclusively young women) being tortured and killed on camera. The loops, inevitably produced in South America it was claimed, were then sold for thousands of dollars to degenerate collectors in America and Europe. There was no hard evidence that any of these so-called “snuff films” actually existed, but few seemed to have any trouble believing they did.

Never being one to let a potential marketing gimmick go to waste, Shackleton pulled the Findlay’s film off the shelf, shot a quick new scene in a shaky, abrupt verite style, tacked it onto the end and released the film in 1976 under the new title Snuff.

That final scene, which purported to be real footage of a woman being killed and disemboweled by the crew of the original film, fooled precious few who actually bothered seeing the movie, but it didn’t matter. Although Shackleton’s initial marketing scheme involved sending fake protest groups to picket theaters where Snuff was being screened, they soon became unnecessary. Once word spread about what the film claimed to be, legitimate women’s groups began picketing theaters themselves, the supposed shocking depravity on display in New York and LA grindhouses was decried by numerous major news outlets, and several prominent types began writing outraged editorials about Snuff. In response to the public outrage, New York District Attorney Robert Morganthau launched an investigation. It didn’t take long for him to announce the film was a fake, which anyone who’d seen it could have told him. Awful, awful film, but you had to sit through the hole thing to see those three minutes at the end. As a result of all the publicity, the curiously morbid lined up to see it, and the film made a lot of money.

(A year before Snuff was released, a similar rumor began circulating about the final sequence in Pasolini’s Salo, which was much more graphic and much more realistic than anything Shackleton could have whipped up, but given it was an arty film, no one much cared.)

Even after Snuff’s veracity was publicly debunked by multiple sources, the legend that snuff films were a real phenomenom persisted, and not surprisingly Hollywood loved the idea. In Paul Shrader’s 1979 film Hardcore, George C. Scott plays a father trying to track down his missing daughter, whom he learns has been lured into the porn business. As part of his investigation, he pays several hundred dollars to sit in a cramped basement with half a dozen perverts who’ve likewise paid a lot of money for the privilege of seeing a silent, b/w 8 millimeter short of a woman in a bondage mask getting shot in the head. Two decades later and, to be honest, a decade outdated by that point, Joel Schumacher directed 8mm, in which Nicholas Cage plays a private detective hired to determine whether or not an 8mm snuff film is authentic or not. As in hardcore, in this case it is.

A year after Snuff was released, documentary filmmaker John Alan Schwartz, who up to that point had mostly worked on gentle, family-friendly projects, was approached by a Japanese producer who hired him to make a documentary about death. More specifically, the producer wanted him to make a film that was far more extreme than anything anyone had seen before, with real images of real people dying.

Schwartz (who directed the film under the pseudonym Conan LeCilaire ) made the rounds of local TV news outlets, buying up rolls of raw footage of fires, car wrecks and crime scenes. Most of the footage was far too gruesome to be shown on TV news broadcasts, so he and his editor began piecing the bloodiest bits together into a feature they were calling Faces of Death.

When the Japanese producer was shown a rough cut, he told Schwartz he wanted “more death.” He also wanted a full back story for each segment. Since no back stories were available for most of the footage they’d obtained, Schwartz and his team returned to the tried and true mondo formula, not only inventing back stories, shooting new scenes, and adding extra gore effects to the existing footage, but also making up a number of sequences out of whole cloth (like the flesh-eating cult, the ritual beheading, the alligator attack, and the notorious monkey brain sequence). He also brought in actor/director Michael Carr to play the film’s host and narrator, “Dr. Francis B. Gröss,” who leads the audience on his own far-reaching investigation into the realities of death.

Looking at the film today, the gaffed scenes are fairly obvious, and the film as a whole seems as tame and quaint and silly as Mondo Cane. It also features one of the most godawful movie theme songs ever recorded. But when it hit the grindhouses in 1978, as requested, it was quite unlike anything audiences had seen up to that point, and they were anxious to believe without question everything they were seeing was real.

The film did well in its limited theatrical run, but with the home video revolution of the early ‘80s, it became a phenomenon. I was working at a small video store in Wisconsin at the time. The store mostly catered to the trailer park next door, and while seventy percent of our business was porn, I can easily say Faces of Death and its many sequels made up another fifteen to twenty percent of our rentals.

Faces of Death also sparked a renaissance of straight-to-video mondo films, most of which simply adopted the FoD model by stringing together bits of news footage far too graphic for TV. Traces of Death, for instance, included the Budd Dwyer suicide, while too Hot for TV closed with footage of a woman being struck by a speeding train. Death Scenes, hosted by the Church of Satan’s Anton LaVey and based on the Feral House book of the same name, was a montage of archival police photographs of murder scenes, suicides and executions.

While modern young and cynical viewers tend to sneer at the original Faces of Death’s clumsiness, seeing it at best as, again, a time capsule from a more innocent era, many who saw the film back in the early ‘80s insist to this day that everything we’re shown is absolutely authentic.

Almost two decades before fake “found footage” movies would become yet another popular subgenre following The Blair Witch Project, director Ruggero Deodato would find himself oddly echoing Snuff’s saga with his 1980 splatter film Cannibal Holocaust.

The Italian production concerned a professor who travels to a remote region of South America in search of three young documentary filmmakers. As the story goes, the trio had flown down there months earlier to shoot a film about primitive tribes, then vanished. Although he does not find the kids, he does find several canisters of film, the contents of which make up the bulk of Cannibal Holocaust’s run time.

The supposedly found footage reveals the trio raping, killing and mutilating several natives and countless animals just for fun before being beheaded, disemboweled and eaten themselves as the cameras rolled. It’s a wildly, even wondrously nihilistic feature few viewers can stomach.

The difference between Deodato’s film and Snuff is that the images in the former are deeply disturbing and much more realistic. The film’s publicity campaign insisted the footage was authentic, and Deodato even ordered the three principal actors to go into hiding to help keep the rumors alive. Those claims, combined with the fact the effects were so convincing, prompted Italian authorities to launch an investigation. Deodato was forced to produce the still very much alive actors and admit publicly it was just another cannibal movie.

It’s worth noting here that although all the human deaths onscreen were achieved with clever special effects and makeup, all the animal deaths are real, which I find far more deeply disturbing.

With the sudden availability of camcorders in the early ‘80s, I remember thinking that only then did the possibility of genuine snuff films become a distinct reality, at least on the scale that had always been rumored. Super 8 and, lord help us, 16 millimeter cameras were expensive, clunky and complicated. Plus there was the question of getting the film processed after you shot it. Animal porn was one thing, but torture and murder? What, you’re just going to drop it off at the Fotomat and pick it up Tuesday? With these new camcorders everything was easy as pie. All you had to do was point and hit the button, and when you were done just pop out the tape and throw it in the VCR and there you go, with no meddling middleman sticking his nose in your business. It was an idea that wasn’t lost on director John McNaughton. Perhaps the most disturbing sequence of his 1986 feature Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer finds Henry and his partner Otis using a stolen camcorder to film the murder of a family. Later we see Otis watching the tape over and over again. Sure enough, throughout the ’90s and early 2000s, there were several cases of psychopaths who held victims hostage for weeks, even months, raping, torturing and eventually killing them, videotaping all the sordid goings-on for their personal video library.

Which brings us to the point, and up to the present. If you’re watching it on a screen of whatever sort, no matter how desperately you want it to be real, it’s simply just another show. This has never been truer than today.

While writing a weekly crime blotter back in 2005 as the Internet, smart phones and social media sites were gelling into a singularity, I was amazed at the number of cases I was reporting in which people were not only filming themselves committing crimes, but immediately posting the footage on FaceBook or some similar site. Criminals, despite what the movies like to tell us, tend not to be the brightest bulbs. Still, this public self-incrimination just seemed ludicrously stupid.

The more I thought about it, though, the more it made perfect sense, In fact it was inevitable.

The unchecked expansion of state-sponsored surveillance following the collapse of the WTC had become redundant. What’s the use of installing cameras on every corner when you’ve already thrust iPhones into the hands of nearly every last person on the planet, appealing to their insatiable egos by subconsciously indoctrinating them to film everything they do and post it online? Again, we have that distance through the intervening screen, it’s all just another show, and they’re the star. It doesn’t matter if they film themselves eating at Burger King, visiting the EPCOT Center, or raping a retarded boy. It’s all the same thing.

Snuff culture has been with us over a century, but only now has it come into its own, announcing itself as the dominant art form of the 21st century. It goes far beyond the likes of Steve Stephens shooting a stranger in the face on camera or a couple teenagers live streaming their own suicides.

Who needs an actor with a turban and a sword lopping off a dummy’s head in Faces of Death when, for awhile there anyway, Jihadi John was posting the real thing on Youtube every week? What does it say when one of the first porn subgenres to gain widespread popularity in the Internet Age were “crush videos”—fetish films in which women in high heels stomped kittens, hamsters, and other small animals to death on camera? When someone falls onto the tracks in a crowded subway station, only rarely will someone hop down to help, but it’s inevitable everyone else on the platform will whip out their phones to film the splatter when the train roars into the station. When a British soldier was hacked to death and nearly decapitated by two angry Muslims on a busy London street a few years ago, none of the hundreds of witnesses tried to intervene, but they all made a point of filming the murder, even allowing the blood-soaked attackers to pause and recite a carefully prepared speech for the cameras after the fact.

William Holden’s character in Network was dead to rights, save for one small detail, The Death Hour isn’t just on Sunday nights. Every hour of every day now, footage of some new atrocity is going viral: another cop shooting another unarmed kid in the back, a tornado obliterating a small Midwestern town, people leaping to their deaths to escape a high-rise fire, a tractor trailer slamming into a packed school bus, a fresh pile of Syrian corpses, another gang rape, another shopkeeper stabbed, another mass shooting in a mall or middle school. We wring our hands and feign outrage, but we have to pause a moment to wipe the drool or semen away first. We can’t get enough. Steve Stephens and those teen suicides were merely a couple of the later episodes. Pretend to be shocked and grossed all you want by it, snuff culture is simply our culture, and always has been.

by Jim Knipfel

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