Digital video with audio here.
Corroboration from London's Guardian newspaper here.
Scores:
NumberOne
5 substance, 3 style. 'Neatly done, a worthy target.'
NumberTwo
5 substance, 3 style. No comment made.
NumberFour
5 substance, 4 style. 'Often, paradoxically, kills are more difficult at night.'
NumberFive
5 substance, 2 style. 'Its okay. Not real memorable.'
View archive of previous entries
'Aw, shit,' I said aloud, when I was finished. I felt sick.
I didn't want to read any more but I had to see one more thing. I saved the Current Log file and went to the archives. Fifty-two more entries, dating back to May 1996, when NumberOne initiated the whole thing. NumberTwo had joined in July 1996. NumberThree had shown up in 1998 — he was Southern Africa's The Bull. NumberFive was a recent recruit, less than a year on The Bull.
And NumberFour, Morgan Jackson, had began his career with this:
Entry #: 28
Points awarded: 27
Entered by: NumberFour
Entry date: 9 July 1998
Kill date: 15 June 1998
Kill location: Limbe, Cameroon
Victim specifications: Laura Mason, British traveler
Kill description: Ambushed on the beach at night, eviscerated.
Media files and URLs:
Photographs here and here.
Corroboration from various British papers here, here and here.
Scores:
NumberOne
5 substance, 4 style. 'Well done. Welcome. An impressive debut.'
NumberTwo
5 substance, 4 style. 'Central Africa? You've got more guts than me. (sorry).'
NumberThree
5 substance, 4 style. 'Bienvenue. I wish you a prosperous career.'
I didn't want to look at the photographs, but I did. Laura on the beach. I'd seen her there, but it was far more horrific seeing this picture now than it was discovering her then. My hands shook so badly I couldn't shut down the window and I had to stab at the computer's OFF button instead. I was making grunting noises with every breath. I felt as if someone had kicked me hard in the stomach.
The Bull was a fucking game. And Morgan was only one of five.
Chapter 21 Demon Princes
I didn't know what to do. I wanted to call Talena and talk to her. At the same time I didn't want to talk to anyone, didn't want to ever have any contact with that repugnant animal called homo sapiens ever again. Move to Tibet and find a cave in the Himalaya and sit there forever. That was what I really wanted.
I went out to get a very late breakfast. I got to the Pork Store half an hour before it closed. Best breakfast in the city but that day it might as well have been cardboard. I must have looked like hell, and I was muttering to myself, and the waitress gave me a wide berth and rushed to give me the check. I must have looked pretty weird and disturbing even for the Upper Haight, and that's saying something.
The food helped me pull myself together. I went back to my apartment and turned the computer back on and went back to The Bull. Forcing myself to be analytical, investigative. To save every speck of data I could find on the site and then hunt through it to find out whatever I could.
The bulletin board was only available to qualified users. I didn't try to register or add an entry. That left me with just the FAQ and the logs. I read through every single entry, starting in chronological order, making notes in a Notepad file as I went through.
NumberOne was responsible for 13 entries. NumberTwo was responsible for 21, but hadn't made an entry in the last six months. NumberThree had done 10. NumberFour, Morgan, was responsible for seven. NumberFive had six entries, all Thai prostitutes.
The total number of reported deaths was 57, although several entries, particularly from NumberTwo, were considered questionable and got few if any substance points. Fifty-seven murders. These five madmen had killed fifty-seven people over the last five years, and it looked like I was the first person to discover them.
They had begun by killing locals. For the first couple of years they went to Third World countries and murdered poor helpless poverty-stricken natives. The majority of victims were still locals. But in the last couple of years they had moved to killing travelers in a big way. Partly for style points and partly because they were easier to corroborate. NumberTwo, in particular, lamented how difficult it was to get outside media to verify that you had murdered some street kid in Calcutta. But travelers were still a minority, a mere eighteen of the 57 victims were citizens of First World countries.
I tried to extrapolate personalities from comments. NumberOne, presumably the original Bull, that Usenet 'Taurus,' was patronizing, full of himself, and used flowery words. NumberThree was much the same. NumberTwo didn't make comments very often, and when he did, used slang. NumberFour, Morgan, stuck to commenting on the difficulty of each entry. NumberFive appeared to be the odd one out, a sexual sadist who didn't have the command of the language that the others did, who often seemed a little defensive and didn't get along with the others. I got the sense they regretted that they had recruited him.
Details of the appropriate recruitment technique were restricted to qualified users only. I wondered how it worked. Had any of these five ever met face-to-face? I doubted it. At least not until they were very confident in one another. Far too dangerous. So what was this technique? How did you safely bring a new member to The Bull?
I guessed it worked the same day online child-porn rings worked. As repulsive as The Bull, but far more common if the newspapers were any guide. Your target market consists of the people hunting in the deepest, darkest, ickiest, most disturbing corners of the Net, the most loathsome hardcore porn sites, most unspeakable Usenet rape fantasies, the sick underworld of faked snuff films and elaborately documented torture fiction. They looked for users who contributed — anonymously, of course — to these sites. I guessed they wanted people who seemed homicidally fucked up but in a cold controlled way, although it looked like they had misjudged with NumberFive at least. Then they talked to them on an anonymous IRC chat line or a secure instant messaging connection, talked to them regularly until they thought they knew and understood the potential recruit, and if they passed muster, then they popped the question — invited the recruit to join The Bull.
That IRC fragment I'd dug up, that must have been from one of those recruiting sessions, there must have been someone else online that NumberTwo and NumberThree were talking to. Maybe it was Morgan Jackson.
I went back to the site and looked at it more carefully, doing a technical analysis. It was a Microsoft FrontPage/ASP-powered site; the. asp filenames and HTML source for the pages confirmed that. The media files were stored on the site, but the links to corroborating data were URLs to the newspaper or other sites in question.
It was the work of a developer who knew a lot less than he thought he did. A semicompetent ASP programmer who thought that he understood how the Web worked and he had guaranteed security and anonymity on his site. Very wrong. First of all, he had neglected to warn his users to wipe the cookie files on client machines. Second, he was using an unencrypted login. Third, they had that simple 'taurus' username/password combination
