Never trust a mature student, they’re either trying to have sex with impressionable art school girls, crying about their failed marriages in the college bar, asking earnest questions that require long answers right at the end of a lecture or murdering prostitutes in homage to the 19th century criminals they’re studying on their criminology Phd.
Stephen Griffiths is an example of the last type of mature student in that list, and he’s made it so the second instalment of our semi-regular news feature “Crazy Killer News” has followed so quickly from the last.
Can you believe he stood up in court and said his name was the Crossbow Cannibal? There’s so many examples through history of people saying how lame it is to make up your own nickname that it would appear trite and boring if I drew any more attention to him doing it than that. But what a loser, amirite? Has it even been proved he ate anyone? I smell a rat (maybe he ate a rat? OMG he ate a rat! What a dork).
His whole demeanour is that of a dork though. From what I can gather from the press, there’s probably two or three guys like him in every provincial town in our drab little country. Have you seen pictures of him? He’s what the Americans call a mall goth, and what we usually just call a crap goth, because mall culture isn’t as prevalent over here.
When I first saw him I thought: that’s a guy with a lot of dvd boxsets, some butterfly knives from France and an Xbox Live account. Dude was in a Godsmack hoodie, and he had his short back and sides all gelled into some weird spiky thing, and he had his shirt off under the hoodie. His whole look screamed ‘awkward around people my own age’. He’s got a really bad case of arrested development, but that’s the nature of staying in a small town your whole life- I’d probably still be moshing to Pantera played through the speakers of a Ford Cortina parked near a rec ground if I hadn’t met people from London when I was 16. He’s 40 years old, which seems pretty old, even for a crap goth, but I remember 30 year olds in Marilyn Manson hoodies taking advantage of my drunkest female friends at provincial rock clubs in 2000, so I guess he’s just one of them ten years later.
Part of the joy of the press vilifying lunatics these days is that they can get hold of things like their Amazon and social networking profiles, so you get a really rounded view of what they were like, and Stuart’s selections and interests confirmed everything I had hoped. His Amazon wishlist included a dvd boxset called Notorious Killers- what, this thing? A Biography Channel hack job? That’s hardly a snuff movie, is it? It’s not even Faces Of Death. This guy is shaping up to be a lightweight.
His Myspace was even better (but it sure got taken down quick, and Mydeathspace.com doesn’t seem to operate like it used to), the Guardian captured a decent amount of it though:
Using the pseudonym Ven Pariah and username Ven99, Griffiths posted a number of statements. “Humanity is not merely a biological condition,” he wrote. “It is also a state of mind. On that basis I am a pseudo human at best. A demon at worst.”
Hands up anyone who wrote almost this exact same sentence when they were 14? I know I did. This guy’s had 26 years of being an angry teen. It goes on:
He also quoted the Bible, Ezekiel 25:17: “The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides.”
Oh no, he quoted the Bible! Wait, what? I know people at the Guardian don’t believe in letting their kids watch tv, but I didn’t realise they extended it to not letting themselves watch really fucking famous and oft quoted films from 16 years ago. It’s Samuel L Jackson’s big scene from Pulp Fiction you muesli-eating fucks! I’d expect this kind of wilful ignorance to make a story more exciting from the redtops, but aren’t you guys sposed to be smart and culturally aware?
He’s into the idea of the outsider, but his idea of the outsider is the same as Hollyoaks’, because he was too stupid to further his misanthropic cultural interests any deeper than a boxset on killers, a quote from a film everyone already quoted from, a band that is more associated with jocks than goths in America and having some gross pets (he was into lizards and took them for walks on leads – yawn). He was on Trisha once for a show about having a fat girlfriend, what crap goth doesn’t have a fat girlfriend? He had his hair all slicked back on the show, he was on that Neo tip that guys who know about ‘gaming engines’ are often on.
Of course this guy had crossbows, he probably had about 10000 airsoft guns and a really expensive Samurai sword, and we know he was on a lot of online forums (man, do losers love online forums), I bet he knows an obscure martial art that only nerds do (what parkour is to skateboarding, his martial art will be to karate) and plays Final Fantasy on the Wii. What a fucking loser.
That’s it really, he’s a stupid dummy who took his childish interests too far, he did some terrible things, but I bet what motivated him wasn’t pure evil, but the same thing that motivates teenagers to kill cats or desecrate graveyards: boredom and stupidity. He’s just had 26 years to build that boredom and stupidity up into something truly awful. So, it’s retarded when the press write how ‘chilling’ it was when he called himself the Crossbow Cannibal, because it wasn’t, he just wanted it to be. In reality it was just some shy nerd in the dock trying to psyche people out. They should have just rolled their eyes, said ‘this guy watches a lot of Manga’, and made fun of him for being such a dork.
(In other crazy killer news, Foxy Knoxy cut her hair… I reckon she doesn’t look as good without it)