—That’s a very interesting thing to say.
—I’m an interesting guy.
—Can I ask you some more questions?
—If you must.
—I am fully aware of what you are capable of. But what I’d like to do is get a bit more insight into you.
—Oh, really? Do you want to see if I was raped as a kid? Bullied? That sort of thing? That would fit your agenda, wouldn’t it?
—I don’t have an agenda. I want to know more about the … What is it, the thing that you do?
—You mean enlightening people online. OK…
—How did it … I mean how did you start? I’m just asking for a little bit of history. Like you say, who else am I going to get on the show? So this is your moment, why not take it?
—Oh, that’s easy. I started out of boredom really. Remember bad dial-up internet in the nineties? There. I started going into chat rooms – you remember those, right? Full of stupid children. Anonymous, no real security. I just used to mess with people for sport. Like hunting. I’d start out by logging in with a girl’s name. If you did that, you’d get a shitload of messages from lonely old perverts. ‘ASL?’ – remember that? I always said I was seventeen, something like that. I used to string them along until, inevitably, they’d ask to ‘cyber’, which back then meant badly spelled sexual fantasies. I used to wait till they’d told me they’d come and then tell them I was a guy. It was hilarious. They used to get so angry, so upset. Those were my first trophies. So, it was either that or just ‘pwning n00bs’ as the kids used to say – picking a target and going for them. Pretty soon I had loads of trophies. I had people who looked up to me on there, who emulated me. But I was always the best. It wasn’t even difficult to be good at it. You just needed a bit of something about you. Most people online actually don’t have that. I found that I could use this influence on other people, start waking people up.
—You spent a lot of time online in your formative years?
—Yeah. Yeah, I did. I was smart enough to see that the internet was a massive fucking thing, that it would begin consuming people’s lives. Does that make me a social retard like them? No. Look at kids today – look at their fucking parents. How many times do you see little Jimmy shouting, ‘Play with me, Mum. Play with me, Dad.’ And what are Mum and Dad doing? Staring at their phones. You know what message that sends? Do you have any idea? That message is that this – this Facebook post, this tweet, this careful way I’m sculpting myself online; this precise fucking picture of a happy family I’m painting to get one up on my other parent followers – all of this, little Jimmy, is more important than you. So what happens? What happens to little Jimmy? Mum and Dad don’t want to play, so they shove a tablet or a phone in front of little Jimmy and it becomes a pseudo-parent. Do you think that a fucking tablet can stand in for parental love? What sort of a kid does that turn out? Just today, this very morning, I passed a woman walking along, pushing a buggy – one kid in there, the other one she had by the hand; he couldn’t keep up with her. He was stumbling, tripping. And you know what she was doing? You guessed it – staring at her phone. I saw him drop his toy – some sort of teddy or something. Mum didn’t even see it, and they just carried on. The kid’s face – he was destroyed, utterly destroyed. And she’s just pulling him along, no doubt posting shit about what a good fucking mother she is on Facebook.
I watched for a bit. I watched the kid. He went from upset and crying to a sort of … blankness, like he knew that nothing or no one was going to come to his aid. He must have only been about three. That kid’s growing up messed-up. Angry. I can guarantee it.
—Do you have children? You sound old enough.
—Let me think about that for a second. Oh yeah, none of your fucking business.
—Fine. It’s just either you had a terrible time as a kid, or you have kids yourself. That’s how it sounds.
—We’re talking about terrible parents whose kids grow up numb, blank. Not mine.
—All of this, it makes me think of attachment theory – of Harlow’s monkey experiments. Was that what it was like for you? Taunting defenceless animals to earn your ‘trophies’?
—Maybe you’re not as stupid as I thought. A-level psychology at least. There was a similar experiment; have you heard of the ‘still-face’ study? That was Edward Tronick in the seventies. Basically, within three minutes of a mother not moving her face, not responding to her baby, the baby starts getting distressed. Three fucking minutes! I think that’s very fucking relevant these days, don’t you? Mum or Dad staring at their phone – that’s a blank face. Even at kids’ concerts, football matches, that sort of thing. Imagine looking up to see if Mum or Dad is watching you and all you see is a phone; how’s that encouragement? You should do anything for your fucking kids, anything. No matter what. You should protect them by whatever means.
I’ll summarise the ‘monkey experiments’ I mention for you. Harry Harlow, a psychologist studying attachment theory, conducted experiments on rhesus monkeys in the 1950s, taking them from their mothers at birth and placing them in a cage with only a food-dispensing wire mesh figure. The effects of this were horrific, leaving the monkeys psychologically and developmentally damaged. When the wire-mesh ‘mothers’ were coated in terry cloth but did not supply food, the monkeys clung to them and cuddled them, particularly when they were frightened, suggesting the need for affection was deeper than the need for food.
Tronick’s ‘still-face’ experiment is used these days to test degrees of attachment in infants. What I am interested in is why the troll seems to be so agitated, so knowledgeable about such things.
—You know quite a bit about this subject.
—It’s called not being a fucking moron. Next.
—It makes me wonder if your mission, as it were – your whole motivation for this … this ‘waking up’ of people by trolling them – comes from somewhere personal.
—You’ve tried this angle. It didn’t work. Put it this way: vegans are pretty easy to troll – throw an ‘mmm, bacon’ gif up after some video about the meat industry then sit back and watch the butthurt in all its glory. Does that mean I have some unresolved issue about animals?
—I don’t know, do you?
—This is getting tiresome.
—Where would you like to go then?
—Well, you asked where this came from; you asked where it started, so I’ve told you. So after my first successes, I started trolling forums. The best ones were mums’ groups, ‘concerned parents’, that sort of thing. It was fun for a while, until they kicked me off.
—Wow. Big of you.
—In your words, Scott, those years were formative. I had followers by then. I’d realised how simple it was to exert influence. We swamped those Skexxixx forums – filled them will all sorts of nonsense. People believed it though; those blind idiots fell for it hook, line and sinker. All I was trying to do was show them how simple-minded they were, how easily led.
—Is that the point then? Change? You want to make people be … what? More aware?
—Are you happy with the way the world is? Would you want it this way for your kids?
—My opinion doesn’t matter right now…
—To be fair, that’s true.
I have searched and found particular examples of Mr Troll’s early work that google has archived, and he’s right, it’s pretty juvenile stuff. But there’s a lot of it and reading for long enough, you can see why people flock to him. He’s certainly a little more intelligent, a little more charismatic than the others. I get the feeling he’s older than he makes out. Yet, as you have seen, it does make me think about the BEKs – Arla’s black-eyed kids. Was this something cooked up by our troll on the Skexxixx message boards? It’s impossible to tell. I’ve heard of other people being terrorised in similar ways to how she claims she was throughout her life. I also think about Skexxixx. I wonder if one of these ‘mobs’ was sent after him? For now, I let Mr Troll carry on.
—You won’t
believe me, but at the heart of it, I was trying to help people, make the world better for the next generation. But it was futile. No one wanted hope, they all wanted to be ‘broken’ somehow. All of them desperate to be more fucked-up than the others. Pathetic.
Now that all the kids are off Facebook, it’s a lot more fun on there. Facebook is now a mass grave for old profiles, with elderly relatives who’ve only just discovered the site is all shouting about politics. And no one’s listening … except us. We’re doing something about it.
—And Twitter?
—Twitter’s good for celebrities – the ones that run their own accounts. You can tell who they are because they’re so fucking vain they end up constantly searching their own names. I remember in the early days tweeting that I’d like to kill [celebrity name bleeped out] and he retweeted me. I hadn’t even tagged him so he must have been searching for his own name. When I pointed this out, he deleted the tweet and blocked me, the fucking sap. They’re so fucking precious about their image, their PR, it’s infuriating. I mean they usually just block you, but when we mobbed Skexxixx, he went down like a fucking torpedoed battleship! That even made the news!
—I guess I’m still wondering why you make so much effort. Aren’t there better things to do with your time? You sound like an intelligent person. All this seems beneath you.
—It teaches people a lesson, wakes them up. They’ll laugh and then they’ll think. Skexxixx certainly did. Look at him now, exposed and broken as the sad sack he now is. Now more and more will wake up to the fact that being depressed, being ill, isn’t cool.
—Sending vigilante paedophile hunters to someone’s house is more than a prank. It’s just … for me there’s more to it than just a laugh. That’s not just words on a screen. That’s not awakening anyone.
—They didn’t kill him though, did they? He did it himself. Ask yourself why.
—Because being publicly accused of something like that to millions of people online would have ruined his life?
—The thing is, he didn’t matter. A friendless, lonely old man. He gave himself as a sacrifice for the greater good.
—Jesus Christ.
—Not quite.
—Another question then.
—Fire away.
—Why Arla Macleod?
—Arla Macleod killed her family with a hammer in 2014. That wasn’t me either. Arla Macleod was a spoiled, whining brat who killed her family, for fuck’s sake. She should have been publicly crucified, yet she became a sort of sick hero, the face of a broken generation. She was fed and washed and medicated up to her fucking eyeballs, and you’re saying the most important thing is my online behaviour? Arla Macleod deserved to rot for what she did. But instead a whole group of idiots aspired to be like her.
—I’m calling bullshit. You’re not that stupid.
—Call what you want. And you’re right, I’m not stupid. You have no idea what my position allows me to do. I can work where I like, with whom I like. It’s called an education, a reputation – it opens doors. If I decide I want … access … to somewhere, to someone I can get it. No problem…
I’ve been interviewing people for long enough to note changes in the voice and pauses when things touch nerves, when something grinds an emotional gear. Maybe it’s just me but with the mention of Arla Macleod, the troll’s voice speeds up just ever so slightly. His arrogance is tempered by a little ember of sourness. I know, though, that if I piss him off he’ll vanish back under his rock at the dark bottom of the internet, so I am careful around this subject.
—So next question, then: Why have you and your … associates been hassling me ever since I started this series about the Macleod Massacre?
—Are you really that stupid? None of this has anything to do with Arla Macleod. It’s all about you. The fact that you took on this case shoved you into the spotlight, moved you into our sights as it were. You’re turning over stones that are better left alone. The thing is, Scott, you accuse me of rabble-rousing, but there are people you’ve mentioned on your podcast who have lives, careers – they’ve moved on, away from all that. But you’re bringing it all up again. So aren’t you exactly the same as me in the end?
—What do you get? What’s your pay-off? Is it cash? I’ve heard that there’s big money in trolling.
—Maybe so. Maybe it’s more than money…
—Like what?
—Like influence. I’ve been trying to explain this to you this whole time. The more that people see what we’re capable of, the more people will listen to us. It’s about waking the world up. You’re providing me with a platform and that simply spreads my influence. It’s not just me. I am just the commander. We are legion.
And there follows an interminable diatribe about ‘awakening’ people, about the narcissism of the millennial generation, et cetera, et cetera.
However, I have a theory that sounds almost as conspiratorial. The troll’s had his say – lots of say – so I want to have mine.
There was something I noticed while editing this interview. In fact I noticed it while it was going on, and you may have too. While my troll likes to pontificate on the stupidity of people generally, he has a particular vitriol reserved for parents and anyone who, in his eyes, promotes mental illness. Now, I’m no detective, no psychiatrist – pop psychology is about my level and is a criticism often levelled at my show. However, I’ve covered plenty of killers and I’ve read a lot of books so I know that there has to be a driving force, a reason behind doing what my troll is doing. It’s more than just ‘fun’. In particular I feel this whole idea of ‘awakening’ the world is a cheap concealer. It has to be.
So for what it’s worth, here’s my theory…
No. Actually, I’m going to let you hear how I described my theory during my interview with Mr Troll. See what you think.
—So, let’s get this straight – your whole reason for contacting me was to get on this show and help build your media presence, correct? To perhaps recruit? Although why you chose me is a mystery. I’m small fry in terms of true-crime podcasting. But that follows your MO, I suppose: pick on the smaller people?
—Correct. Yes, it must be hard to swallow, but you matter very little in all this.
—And what happens if I decide to not add the audio of this interview at all to the podcast and instead turn you over to the police?
—We’ve been through this.
—I want you to say it again.
—Oh, for the recording? OK. So if the last episode of this series doesn’t go out by the date I’ve specified, or you somehow manage to reveal my identity, then I have it on good authority you are to be doxxed. For the record, I don’t want this to happen; I have not asked for it to happen; and if I find out who wants to commit such an act, I will beg them to stop.
—Bullshit. You know fine well who—
—I have shown you a screen grab from someone online who has your full name, address, place of work and family details on it.
—What if I say do it? Go on, doxx me.
—Then you’d be very stupid indeed. I’ve seen what happens to people who’ve been doxxed. You don’t want that, Scott. Especially not you. Because you don’t just deal in true crime – you talk to people involved; you create ripples. Remember the last series? It was a good one but I know as well as you do that there are people out there who’d love to know where you live. Or where your family live. Don’t be stupid.
—Fine. Can I ask you something else?
—You can. But try and make it interesting this time.
—Will you answer me honestly? Remember you get to decide which bits of this I broadcast.
—Like I said. You can ask.
—OK. So the Macleod Massacre – you knew that it’s a controversial case that would thrust me into the limelight, but you also knew that Arla Macleod would speak to me. Why do you think she did?
—I have no idea. And FYI, I didn’t know she would. That just made it more convenient.
—Here’s
what I think. I think you had access to Arla. I think you reached out to her and didn’t get what you wanted – whatever twisted thing that was. I believe you helped her make contact with me. I think you planned this for a long time. This wasn’t as opportunistic as you make out.
—Think what you like.
—I also think that you’re responsible for her suicide.
—Oooh – big words, cowboy. How do you get there?
—It doesn’t matter.
—Tell me.
—No.
—Tell me or I’ll … You know what’ll happen.
—Have you ever met Arla Macleod in person?
—Why does that matter?
—Because I think I know why she killed her family.
—Yes. So do I. So does everyone: she was fucked up and spoiled and ultimately deserved to rot in jail. She got off lightly. I know how much you want it to be something else. And I know how much your ego was swollen by her request to talk to you.
—Yes. I believe that too, to a degree. But I also think that something else happened. I believe that someone knew Arla Macleod online from the Skexxixx message boards, they knew enough about her to exert influence over her. I believe that, after she killed her family, someone believed the notoriety and internet fame she received was unjustified. I believe that someone wanted her dead. I believe that person was you. And I believe you did it to hide something. I think you understood that her death would overshadow the terrible thing that happened to Arla Macleod on holiday. I believe that you had something to do with it.
—And where’s your evidence?
—It’s a theory.
—It’s a good one. Imagine being a mother, a father, and knowing what happened to your daughter and doing nothing about it – or blaming her for it. The question it begs is whether they deserved it? Imagine being a parent and not bothering to protect your daughter. Imagine being a sister and caring so much about what people thought of you, about your outward appearance, that you’d manipulate your own parents and shift their attention onto yourself, for your own ends. Maybe they deserved to die too? Maybe Arla was a bullet through the Macleods’ rotten hearts?
Hydra Page 26
