The video is called 1 Lunatic 1 Ice Pick and you can't find it anymore on bestgore.com, the Canadian website that hosted it last week, before the Luka Rocco Magnotta story became global.
What you will find on the website, based out of Edmonton, is depravity, pure and simple. It is a horror movie of creative ways human beings can hurt themselves and each other. The website is a clearing house for people who find that kind of content... at a loss for the right adjective here... interesting? fascinating? titillating? fun? cool?
Regardless, Mark Marek, the site operator, and the people who visit the site should have the right in a free and open society to enjoy gory material and depictions of violent acts, so long as they aren't perpetrating the violent acts against others. The rest of society has the right to look away.
On the surface, Marek and others with similar fixations travel through a shadowy legal and moral world but the distinction between what is depraved and what is criminal is clear and certain.
If these videos or photos feature crimes being committed (real people really hurting other real people), a moral and legal line has been crossed. While they are under no obligation to put themselves at risk to stop a violent crime they are witnessing, they must report the crime to police as soon as it is safe for them to do so or become an accessory to the crime. If they stopped to take pictures or video, they must share with police the images they captured as evidence of that crime. To not do so is to impede a criminal investigation.
Marek's crime is not obscenity for putting the video on his website because the content of 1 Lunatic 1 Ice Pick is not much worse than what can be found in the Saw or Hostel movies. It's the context - the fact that the video involves the real murder and mutilation of a human being - that makes the video truly horrible, but it's still not obscene.
There is video of Robert Dziekanski's death that was aired publicly. The fact that there was no blood, no mutilation or sexual assault doesn't mean it's any less worse because the deadly outcome was still the same. What happens in the Dziekanski video is horrible but it is not obscene, either.
What Marek should be investigated for is whether he was an accessory to murder and whether he impeded a criminal investigation. More mundane, yes, but no less serious. Marek was so focused on sharing the content of 1 Lunatic 1 Ice Pick with the fans of his website that he likely never stopped to think he might be in the possession of evidence that could make him complicit to a murder.
Not knowing the law is no defence in court and most reasonable individuals who would have come in the possession of such a video would have immediately turned it over to police, not showed it off to their online friends.
In that light, the horrible crimes Magnotta is alleged to have committed are not the actions of insanity, they are the work of a psychopath. In short, psychopaths aren't insane.
Think through what has happened, regardless of whether Magnotta did them or not.
A killer videotapes himself torturing and killing another man, then makes sure the video becomes public.
The killer cuts the body into pieces and sends body parts to the major political parties on one side of the country and to two schools on the other side of the country before fleeing to Europe.
These are not the actions of a man ashamed of himself or his actions. This is what a logical man does if he wants to be famous and he wants the entire world to know who he is and what he's done. This is far more wickedly imaginative (and sane) than walking into a shopping mall with a gun, flying an airplane into a building or quietly killing scores of people over a period of months or years.
The randomness of sending body parts to Vancouver (and the false alarm in Montreal yesterday) means everyone, everywhere, for months or years to come, will think of this crime and this killer every time a suspicious package with an odd smell shows up.
That's not just fame, that's enduring notoriety. The killer thought up this plan and executed it to perfection, right down to his capture in a major world city.
That's what true depravity - and true obscenity - really looks like.
