Slender Man Mayhem & Las Vegas Killings

The world appears to have become more unbalanced than usual.

There has been mayhem incarnate since May 31, 2014, when two 12-year-old southeastern Wisconsin girls stabbed a 12-year-old friend nearly to death in the woods to please Slender Man. Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier, 12-year-old girls in Waukesha, Wisconsin, held down and stabbed that friend 19 times, trying to commit murder to become "proxies" (acolytes) of the Slender Man. 

Since then, it has come out that another Slender Man attack happened right before this incident:

An Ohio woman, who was recently attacked by 13-year-old daughter with a knife, said she believes he daughter was inspired by internet horror meme Slenderman.
The woman, who asked to not be identified, told WLWT that she made the connection after seeing reports of the two 12-year-old Wisconsin girls who attempted to stab their friend to death, hoping to make the fictional Slenderman appear.
“I came home one night from work and she was in the kitchen waiting for me and she was wearing a mask — a white mask,” the woman said. “She had her hood up and had her hands covered with her sleeves and the mask.”
“She was someone else during that attack,” the mother added. Source.

Pictured above, Anissa Weier, on the left, dresses like The Joker from The Dark Knight. On the left, Jerad Miller plays The Joker, and his wife, Amanda, portrays Harley Quinn.

After the Slender Man attempted murder, the floodgates from Hell seemed to open.

On June 4th, Justin Bourque, dressed in paramilitary gear, armed heavily, terrorized Moncton, New Brunswick, killing 3 Mounties and others. 

On June 5th, Aaron Ybarra, wearing a black, hooded sweatshirt, skater sneakers and jeans, shoot three, killing one, at Seattle Pacific University. 

On June 6th, D-Day, Dennis Marx, wearing paramilitary gear, including a gas mask (like The Dark Knight Rise's Bane) and a bulletproof vest, armed with explosives and an assault rifle, undertook a "frontal assault" on a Georgia courthouse, shooting a sheriff's deputy in the leg.

"The dawn of a new day. May all of our coming sacrifices be worth it," Jerad Miller wrote in a Facebook post on June 7, a day before the Las Vegas killings.

Dawn? Aurora. That is a powerful word to use.

Then on June 8th, Jerad and Amanda Miller opened fire, pointblank, on two policeman eating at a pizza parlor, killing them. Taking their badges and guns, going to a Wal-Mart where they killed a man*, the pair went to the back of the store and took their own lives.

The bizarre couple, who committed the Las Vegas killings, lived at an apartment at the Oak Tree Apartments, on Bruce Street, near Fremont Street, in downtown Las Vegas. 

Photo of Jerad Miller: Provided by the Tippecanoe County Jail, Lafayette, Indiana.

The Millers married Sept. 22, 2012, and lived in the 1200 block of Weaver Street in Lafayette [Indiana]. They also were evicted from an apartment in the 1500 block of Greenbush St., according to court records.
A Facebook photo posted by Amanda, whose maiden name is Woodruff, on Jan. 4, indicated they were leaving Lafayette. Source.

The pair having previously lived in Lafayette, Indiana, therefore also links to the Fayette Factor.

The name Jerad Miller, of course, reminds many of Jared Loughner.

James Holmes.

A police search of the Millers' apartment began shortly before 9 p.m. June 8, 2014, at that location. White supremacy material was apparently found, including swastikas. What other weirdness was there?

See also: Photo of Las Vegas Killers: Jokers and Cop-Hating Idiots?

What was learned from the couple's neighbors is that the Millers wanted to cause a Columbine-type situation, and lived in a world involving, yes, Slender Man, The Joker, and other evil fantasy figures.

Krista Koch, who lives near the apartment that was searched, told [KTNV] Action News the apartment was occupied by the couple who is accused of shooting two Las Vegas police officers and another person on Sunday morning.
According to Koch, the couple would often talk about killing police officers and were very anti-government.

 Slender Man: Art by Andy Finkle.

The neighbor also told Action News the man would often dress up as the "Joker" and "Slender Man" and the woman would dress up as "Harley Quinn."

 Harley Quinn: Art by Comic Vine.

In addition, Koch says that the neighbor told her that they were going "underground" before carrying out an attack. Koch identified the man as "Jared" and told Channel 13 that she just thought the couple was "crazy" and did not realize their intentions were serious.

 From Amanda Miller's Facebook page.

The "Joker" is a comic book super villain, who is portrayed as a criminal mastermind. He was the arch enemy of "Batman." James [Eagen] Holmes, the man who shot and killed 12 people at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, dressed up as the "Joker" during that shooting.
"Slender Man" has most recently been associated with the stabbing of a 12-year-old girl by her 12-year-old friends in Wisconsin. The girls allegedly stabbed the girl because they wanted to meet the fictional character made popular by the website Creepypasta.com.
"Harley Quinn" is also a fictional character in the "Batman" comic book series. She is the girlfriend of the "Joker." - KTNV

*Name Game

The Clark County Coroner's Office on June 9th, identified the armed bystander who tried to return fire, killed at Wal-Mart as Joseph Robert Wilcox, 31, of Las Vegas. The Wilcox surname is of early medieval English origin. It derives from the elements "Will," a short form of William, with the addition of the hypocoristic suffix "cock or cockes," meaning "son of," and later transposed to "cox." William was the Norman form of the personal name Wilhem composed of the Germanic elements "wil," meaning "will or desire," and "helm," meaning "protection" (Source).

Jerad is an English name, the meaning being "rules by the spear."
Amanda is a Latin name meaning "having to be loved," "deserving to be loved," or, simply, "worthy of love."
Miller means "a person who owns or works in a grain mill."  

Amanda's maiden name was Woodruff, of Anglo-Saxon origin, which can be either a topographical name for someone who lived on a patch or land thickly grown with woodruff, deriving from the Olde English pre 7th Century "wudurofe" meaning "woodruff," or, it may be a nickname for one who used woodruff as a perfume because of its strongly scented leaves.


For two different points of view on the killers, see Andrew West Griffin's "I will be doing something," and Michael Hoffman's "Demon-possessed 'Joker' cop killers strike in Las Vegas."

Several h/ts to Cory, SMiles, Theo, Enki, Robert, and others who wish to not be identified. 

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Victor Hugo, The Joker, and Joker Copycats

February 26, 2013 is Victor Hugo's birthday. He would have been 211 years old.

The Oscars presented a large singing production of Les Misérables actors, from the movie based on the musical inspired by Hugo's popular 1862 novel. Perhaps it would be worthy of noting, on Hugo's birthday, that his writings are the source of some intriguing synchrocinematic moments.

For example, few realize that Victor Hugo is the inspiration for the Joker, make famous in recent years by the late Heather Ledger's character Joker in The Dark Knight.

The link is due to The Man Who Laughs (also published under the original working title By Order of the King), a novel by Victor Hugo, first published in April 1869.

Hugo's Romantic novel The Man Who Laughs places its narrative in 17th century England, where the relationships between the bourgeoisie and aristocracy are complicated by continual distancing from the lower class. Hugo's protagonist, Gwynplaine (a physically transgressive figure, something of a monster) transgresses these societal spheres by being reinstated from the lower class into the aristocracy—a movement which enabled Hugo to critique construction of social identity based upon class status.

The main character Gwynplaine in Hugo's The Man Who Laughs, whose face was disfigured into a laughing mask as a child, falls in love with a blind girl named Dea.

The 1928 film (including the anachronistic Ferris wheel) The Man Who Laughs serves as important link to the modern representations, a direct precursor of the Joker.

In 1940, comic book artist Jerry Robinson used Gwynplaine's lanky physique and grotesque grin as the visual inspiration for the Joker, Batman's archenemy. There the similarity ends, however; Gwynplaine is an embittered hero, while the Joker is a psychopathic criminal.

In the 1970s, Bob Kane acknowledged the inspiration for the Joker, and it was later explicitly referenced in the graphic novel, Batman: The Man Who Laughs. Comic book artist Brian Bolland said that watching The Man Who Laughs was one of his inspirations for drawing the graphic novel Batman: The Killing Joke (1988). In the 2003 "Wild Cards" episode of the Justice League animated series, The Joker infiltrated a TV station by using the alias "Gwynplaine Entertainment". (Other copycats, see here.)

All of the recent Jokers trace back to Victor Hugo.

Also, according to a French blog, a David Fincher movie has a shared fate of his Se7en character played by actress Gwyneth Paltrow (whose first name resembles Hugo’s Gwynplaine, and was often slated as a Catwoman candidate), eerily echoes the not-so-happy ending of Blanche, the secret daughter of Verdi's Rigoletto (also inspired by Hugo). Source.

 For more, see also here.

James Ellroy, in his novel the Black Dahlia, published in 1987, specifically mentions Victor Hugo in regards to the facial mutilation on Beth Short's mouth (cut to form a gruesome grin). She did have this facial mutilation, as autopsy photos show. (More on the Black Dahlia and Frank Lloyd Wright, see here.)

Meanwhile, over in the Netherlands, there is news of the trial of a Joker copycat killer.

There is little denying that the 2009 Dendermonde Joker is a Heath Ledger/Joker copycat from the 2008 film The Dark Knight. (The "Dendermonde case" is code for the 2009 event involving the daycare nursery killer, Kim de Gelder, the Dendermonde Joker. I've web logged several entries about the subject, for example, here, here, here, here, here, and here.) Now for an update.

An artist's impression of Kim De Gelder on the first day of his trial at Gent's courthouse on February 22, 2013. A nursery killer disguised as Batman villain The Joker told a court he was left "no choice" but to stab to death two toddlers and their caregiver at a Belgian creche -- despite saying he knew murder was wrong. Source.

De Gelder is charged with killing the two infants and their 54-year-old carer in an attack on the Fable Land nursery in the town of Dendermonde in January 2009, as well as the attempted murder of 22 others at the creche -- including 16 babies and toddlers. De Gelder is further charged with murdering an elderly woman in a separate attack a week earlier.

Just after the release of cult 2008 Batman movie The Dark Knight, De Gelder entered the nursery with his hair dyed red and his face painted white with black around his eyes -- like the film's villain The Joker, as played by the late Australian actor Heath Ledger.

In the Aurora shooting, on July 20, 2012, James Holmes (dressed as the Joker wearing Bane-like protective wear) stands accused of killing 12 people and wounding 58 in a cinema screening of The Dark Knight Rises.

Please also see Joker Copycats, 2008-2012, and the immediate Aurora Copycats, which included some Joker Copycats.

Thanks to Theo Paijmans for the Victor Hugo-Black Dahlia info.

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Phoenix Shooting: 3 Dead & the Other James Holmes

Phoenix police confirmed that Steve Singer died from his injuries in the shooting. Singer owned Fusion Contact Centers, LLC, a local call center business.

The Aurora shooting suspect is named James Holmes.

But there is another James Holmes.

For several months before the July 20, 2012 theater event, a Phoenix police officer played the sync in his several media appearances. 

His name game name is James Holmes.

I wrote the paragraph above on December 22, 2012, and put it away in a draft on this blog. It seemed unnecessary to bring attention to this man, doing his duty, just because he happened to share two parts of the name of the Aurora suspect. 

"They're all around the high schools, and don't think that it's just south and west, because it's happening up north," Phoenix police Officer James Holmes 

said about teen fight clubs in June 2012 .

On January 30, 2013, events conspired to bring Officer James Holmes to the fore of another mass shooting. One person was dead and 70-year-old William Arthur Harmon III was declared the suspect. The person bringing this information to the media? James Holmes.

Phoenix Police Media Relations Officer James Holmes is shown on the scene of another local crime event over two years ago.

Today, headlines shouted out, "Six people injured in Phoenix, Arizona mass shooting."

The shooting occurred around 10:30 a.m. MST (12:30 p.m. EST) at an office building in Phoenix, Arizona. Police believe that the shooter is a white male in his 60s, who was seen fleeing the scene in a white SUV.... After being questioned by reporters, Officer James Holmes said the shooter appears to have been working alone and that the reason behind the attack remains unknown. Source.

In a breaking report, Yahoo News posted this early:

Phoenix Police spokesman James Holmes said the people who were shot were taken from the scene to a local hospital, and there was no immediate word on their condition.

Changing their story later to delete Holmes' first name entirely, and leaving this awful reference, it appeared in their later article:

Police said they were searching for a white man in his sixties with gray hair. "Some say he left the building in a vehicle, and some say that he was still inside, so that's kind of where we are at," police spokesman Holmes said.

The gunfire occurred at an office complex on 16th Street north of Glendale Avenue.

The Arizona Republic reported that Mark Hummels, a partner with Osborn Maledon and president of the Phoenix chapter of the Federal Bar Association, is among the wounded. He was shot after leaving a mediation session, and was reported to have a strong pulse after surgery.

2nd Victim Dies: Mark Hummels (Source: omlaw.com)

+++++
UPDATE:

Mark Hummels, the attorney gravely wounded in a downtown office shooting Wednesday, died Thursday night after being taken off life support, according to his colleagues at the law firm of Osborn Maledon.

Hummels, 43, was one of three people police said were shot by Arthur Douglas Harmon, 70, apparently over a long-running financial dispute.

Steven Singer, 48, a call-center company CEO, died from his wounds Wednesday; Harmon’s body was found Thursday in Mesa, dead from an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound; a third victim shot in the hand, Nicole Hampton, 32, is expected to be released from hospital Friday.

Doctors declared Hummels to be brain-dead as a result of his injuries, according to the Arizona Republic on February 1, 2013.



+++

Steve Martos, also of the Phoenix Police Department, said officers staged outside a home in the area of 14600 block of North 28th Street in Phoenix in connection to the shooting. Police have said they believe the home is connected in some way to the office shooting.

The timing was another one of those "coincidences," for the Phoenix shooting was mentioned during today's first day of congressional hearings about gun violence by victims from the Tuscon, Arizona shooting. Mark Kelly (a twin), the former shuttle astronaut and husband of former Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, told the Senate panel that there had been "what seems to be a shooting with multiple victims with multiple shots fired."

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Season of Suicides: Of Phoenix, Fox and Paradoxes

On September 27, 2001, the Zug massacre "happened." In Zug, Switzerland, Friedrich Leibacher shot 18 citizens, killing 14 and then took his own life. Eleven years later, during the same week, things didn't look much better on the evening news.

Phoenix. 

Fox. 

Suicides.

Signs. 

Balaclava.

Lewis.

Scientology.

Anarchy.

Aurora.

James Holmes.

James Holmes.

Phoenix.

The live Fox News broadcast of the suicidal end of a car chase on September 28, 2012, perhaps was to be expected. In an autumn of atrocities following a summer of the gun, should we have seen this coming?

TVNewser carried the beginning of this news at 3:48 PM, with these words:

A man committed suicide live on Fox News a few minutes ago. FNC had been carrying a car chase in the Phoenix area and when the suspect pulled over, he ran down a dirt road, then stopped, put a gun to his head, and fell to the ground. No other national networks were carrying the chase.

Wall-to-wall coverage of car chases in California, for years, with some mainstreaming of them nationally, has always toyed with the possible tragic end of the scenarios. Car chases are a result of the copycat effect, and the danger is that televised suicide copycats could follow too.

The last two days have been especially violent, bizarre, and suicidal/parasuicidal.

On September 27, 2012, at the Stillwater (Oklahoma) Junior High School, there was the suicide of Cade Poulos, who had dressed like Two Face/Harvey Dent from The Dark Knight and the Batman comics. 

Then in the afternoon, at 4:35 PM Thursday, at Accent Signage Systems in the Bryn Mawr neighborhood in Minneapolis, Minnesota, an employee who was fired a few hours earlier, killed 5 [revised] people and then took his own life.

July 2012 photo shows Andrew Engeldinger. Photo: Bill Klotz.

Andrew J. Engeldinger ( = Warrior Angel Striker), 36, killed the company’s owner Reuven Rahamim, Accent’s Director of Operations John Souter, production manager Eric Rivers, and two others whose identities have not been released. Three others were hospitalized, two critically. (Update on September 29th: Death toll has risen to six; one other individual was identified, Keith Basinski, a UPS driver.)

The company is revolutionary, and the founder Reuven Rahamim (above) actually was profiled as the "Mad Scientist of Signs."

Earlier on Thursday September 27, 2012, a tragedy visited New Fairfield, Connecticut: 

A small Connecticut town was sent reeling in grief and confusion Friday after a popular fifth-grade teacher shot and killed a knife-wielding prowler in a black ski mask, only to discover it was his 15-year-old son.
No immediate charges were brought against the father, Jeffrey Giuliano, in the slaying of his son, Tyler, who was gunned down in his aunt’s driveway next door to his own home around 1 a.m. Thursday.
“It’s something out of a Hollywood script,” said John Hodge, the first selectman, or top elected official, in the town of nearly 14,000 people about 50 miles from New York city. He said he couldn’t recall another killing in his eight years on the job. (See rest of article here.)

Thursday's and Friday's incidents followed the bizarre falling (suicidal) death of Sons of Anarchy star Johnny Lewis:

Johnny Lewis' gruesome demise left many questions unanswered when the Sons of Anarchy star plummeted to his death Wednesday after allegedly killing his 81-year-old landlady.
But as more information continues to surface about Lewis—his criminal past, his custody battle over his young daughter—one particular revelation sheds an intriguing light on the troubled star: his deep ties to Scientology.
A Church of Scientology source exclusively tells E! News that the actor's father, Michael Lewis, was a high-level Scientologist and that the star was "born into the church."

Johnny Lewis, July 2010. Photo: Jerry Avenaim.

Jonathan Kendrick "Johnny" Lewis (October 29, 1983 – September 26, 2012), also credited as Johnny K. Lewis, was an American actor, best known for playing Kip "Half-Sack" Epps in the first two seasons of the FX original series Sons of Anarchy. Lewis also appeared in supporting roles in the films Underclassman, Alien vs. Predator: Requiem and The Runaways. Lewis jumped from a roof into the driveway at a home in the Los Feliz area of Los Angeles, California.

We began in Phoenix (and are reminded of the "flashlight bombs" in May in Phoenix too); we shall end in Phoenix, with a developing news story:

Most of the people who saw a masked teenager wearing a sheet and armed with a grenade launcher told authorities they assumed the weapon was a fake as he pointed it at passing cars in northwest Phoenix, according to 911 calls released Thursday [September 27, 2012].
All of the callers calmly told 911 operators that a "small man" or a "kid" was pointing what looked like a bazooka, torpedo, rocket launcher, grenade launcher or a "long gun with a point at the end" at passing cars on July 28.
"I assume it's a fake. I hope so," one man told a 911 operator. "I think you guys should check it out."
"I don't know if it's real or not, but it's kind of bizarre," another male caller said. "He's wearing a dress with a torpedo on his shoulder and pointing it left and right."
"He had it pointed at me," another man said. "I got kind of freaked out."
A Phoenix man has been accused of filming his 16-year-old nephew to see how fast police would react to a mock terrorist act.
Michael D. Turley, 39, was arrested Monday [September 24, 2012], nearly two months after the bizarre film was posted to Google Inc.'s YouTube site.
In the film, the narrator whom police identified as Turley, said he wanted to see how long it took authorities to respond. The introduction to the video mentions the July 20 movie theater shooting in Aurora, Colo., that killed 12.
"Given this event, I wanted to run a little test here in Phoenix, Arizona," Turley said on the film in a disguised voice. "I want to find out how safe I really am, and I want to know the response time of the Phoenix police department."
The police response took just over three minutes from the first call, and a helicopter and SWAT team was dispatched as backup, according to Phoenix police spokesman James Holmes.
The YouTube clip showed the teen marching back and forth at an intersection with the camouflage-colored rocket-propelled grenade launcher on his shoulder. He was wearing a light-blue bedsheet and black head covering with black pants and black sneakers. The 911 callers' descriptions varied, with some saying it was a shawl, gown or dress.
"It looks like there's another kid with him videotaping him," one man told the operator. "They probably think it's funny. It's not really funny."
The first officer found Turley and the teen standing in Turley's driveway. The officer calmly told the boy to put down the weapon and Turley to put down the camera. Holmes said Turley told the officer they were just filming a movie, and the officer took down their names and left. (See rest of article, here).

Colorado = red. Aurora = dawn. Suspect shooter James Eagan (= fiery) Holmes.
Arizona = arid zone, small oak. Phoenix = fire bird. Police spokesman James Holmes.
Amazing.

The Phoenix has long been presented as a symbol of rebirth, immortality, and renewal. Is it also a symbol of the copycat effect, repeating patterns, and behavior contagion?

It has a 500 to 1000 year life-cycle, near the end of which it builds itself a nest of twigs that then ignites; both nest and bird burn fiercely and are reduced to ashes, from which a new, young Phoenix or Phoenix egg arises, reborn anew to live again.... The Phoenix's ability to be reborn from its own ashes implies that it is immortal, though in some stories the new Phoenix is merely the offspring of the older one....In the course of the colonization of Northern America a number of cities have received the name of Phoenix or have been associated with its symbolism. Phoenix, the capital of Arizona, was so named as it was built on the ruins of the Hohokam civilization that had existed on the site centuries before. The Phoenix became the official symbol of Atlanta, Georgia in 1888 because it was "reborn" from the ashes after it was burned down in the American Civil War. ~ Wikipedia

Two other cities that use the Phoenix as their symbol: Detroit, Michigan and Portland, Maine (where I have lived since 1983).

Locations associated with the "Phoenix" symbolism are said to have had "new dawns" (auroras) occur after terrible fires destroyed large parts of their cities.

Thanks DJ, SM, MB, AWG, AM, CS, and others.

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Ten Predictions: Ten Hits

by Loren Coleman ©2012

We live in capricious, contrary, and careless times. Moments of unpredictability, therefore, are best balanced by creating a foundation of predictability and predictions.

This week, at the end of an interview with British journalist Thomas McGrath, the last question I was asked was to name three or four "predictions" that I had made, which, as the writer characterized, might be considered "especially accurate."

Global predictions are often wrong, needless to say.

In general, I don't think of myself as foreseeing the future. Making predictions is a tricky thing to do, anyway. After all, look at a few bad predictions some people have recorded:

"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." -- Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977.

"The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys." -- Sir William Preece, chief engineer of the British Post Office, 1876.

"This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us." -- Western Union internal memo, 1876.

In contrast to those types of incorrect "projections," you have a televised cartoon program that screened between 1962 and 1963, which correctly forecast "futuristic technologies that exist today," as Matt Houghton wrote in his "6 Current Technologies The Jetsons Predicted."

Houghton noted in that piece, for example, the Video Chat,

The Jetsons was quite early in their predictions, as well as rather persistent. Video chat is used frequently in every episode I watched. Clearly, with webcams and Skype, as well as the iPhone 4′s new FaceTime, this has quite clearly come true. 

The way I conceptualize it, I have routinely noted some of my social science (vs technology) insights that have become transformed into "predictions," based upon my reading of "patterns."

Being a futurist, I was intrigued by this journalist's request and the resulting exercise. Developing a list to point to would be instructive, historically interesting, and helpful in illustrating what I do. So, I came up with a list of ten predictions, which I shall share completely with you.

The list may seem banal, being framed from Bigfoot to baseball, with many examples of violence in between. But they all are keyed to feelings I had that something was on the horizon that needed to be shared. There are other areas I decided to not explore, such as my writings on self-immolations, which are also predictable, and often result in great social change, as happened with the Arab Spring, see here and here. With the significance of what is going on this summer, in the wake of Aurora, I knew I wanted those kinds of events to be the core of what I examined.

So, here then is my list of ten examples of my "predictions" - in historical order, from most recent back to 1989 - which, in relative terms, have been "hits."

1. August 20, 2012; Highway 93, Montana; Randy Lee Tenley incident. - Prediction, earlier on August 20, 2012.

Apparently, I make predictions all the time, without even knowing it. Sometimes they are about shootings, red dawns, Jupiter, and other events, due to perceptions that literally come into my head and get typed out onto the screen of this computer. Let me give you a minor but intriguing illustration.

Recently, correspondent Guy Edwards (who writes a popular hominology blog, Bigfoot Lunch Club, and also enjoys my twilight language writings) pointed out my serious "masks" reference at the end of a somewhat humorous posting.

I included an image paired, on purpose, with a mismatched graphic novel quote, reproduced here:

"Congress is pushing through some new bill that's gonna outlaw masks. 

Our days are numbered. Till then it's like you always say, 

we're society's only protection." 

~ Edward Blake, Watchmen, 2009.

Edwards then left this comment at the TL site: "The Edward Blake/Watchmen quote about masks paired with the Guy Fawkes masks from V for Vendetta, another great graphic novel, is either serendipitous, a form of synchronicity or just plain clever."

To which I felt compelled to privately send him a thank you email, and let flow this reply/explanation to Edwards on Sunday, August 26, 2012, at 6:43 PM Eastern time: "Totally my creative streak. It all made sense. Harmonic and all of that. I look to it being a prediction too. I expect some kind of masked event next week, for some reason."

Guy Edwards wrote me back on Thursday, August 30, 2012: "You're getting spooky Loren. Does the Randy Lee Tenley tragedy count as a 'Masked event' you were predicting in the last email? I was hesitant to attribute the Guillie suit to your mask premonition, especially since you had used masks in a vigilante sense. But I have always felt that Next Media Animation has always been able to seemingly accidentally tap the Pop Culture Zeitgeist. Even the stuff they do that gets lost in translation seems to be non-accidental."

What was being highlighted was the incident that happened late on Sunday evening, August 26th.  Randy Lee Tenley, 44, of Kalispell, Montana, reportedly was wearing a Ghillie suit, dressed up as a Bigfoot, trying to create a popular cultural hoax, got hit, and got killed on Montana's Highway 93. Tenley was struck by two innocent teenage girls in two separate cars, who were unable to avoid Tenley. The death sent shockwaves throughout the cryptozoology and related research communities, because it was the first time that a hoax had ended so tragically. Most people had thought someone in a Bigfoot costume would first be killed in a forest faking event by being shot, not struck on a road.

The Tenley incident happened on Sunday, August 26, 2012, at about 10:30 pm Mountain time (7:30 pm Eastern). I had written this writer that same night with my "masked event prediction" at 6:43 pm Eastern (9:43 pm Mountain).

Coincidence, haphazard remark, prediction? We best know our own works, sometimes, by how others internalize them.

2. August 5, 2012; Oak Creek, Wisconsin, Sikh Temple; Wade Michael Page kills 6 + self; plus other copycats. Prediction, July 23, 2012.

I said people should watch for copycats, in the wake of Aurora. The copycats, in general, did occur. But something bigger and more specific took place.

"In The Copycat Effect, the patterns I found in suicide clusters and school shootings happened over and over again in other kinds of mass shootings. In their most basic blueprint, the copycats take place exactly one week, two weeks, one month, and one year after a massively media-discussed incident of violence. The Aurora red dawn event is the first mass media incident in recent years. Wall-to-wall coverage has occurred, and copycats will happen. The correlation is direct," I wrote on July 23, 2012.

The Sikh Temple attack happened almost exactly two weeks after Aurora, fitting a pattern I saw long ago, and wrote about in my 2003 book.

3. July 20, 2012; Aurora, Colorado, Century 16 theater; allegedly James Eagan Holmes kills 12. Prediction, July 19, 2012.

It is rather well-documented by now that I predicted the Aurora event a day before it happened, and tied it directly to the opening of The Dark Knight Rises.

On July 19th, I wrote we all should expect something dramatic and perhaps deadly linked to the release of The Dark Knight Rises. I said, more specifically:

Now that the date of the release of The Dark Knight Rises and this visual Bane is upon us, let's look at the fact the film is opening on July 20, 2012. 7.20.2012. 20.7.2012.
What are the significant memorable themes associated with past July 20ths? There are two major motifs that leap forth from history: space and assassinations. 

[Then I looked at a short history of events associated with the date.] 

***
Will any events take place on July 20, 2012, of any import?
Dates of movie releases have had strange links.
The day of neo-Nazi Breivik's massacre in Norway (July 22, 2011) was the day of the release of the film Captain America (July 22, 2011), with the first scene taking place in Norway, to the sound of Nazis' rapid fire machine gunning. A bizarre coincidence, to say the least.

I've detailed these facts here (which has the source prediction blog quotes and citations), and then put this in context, biographically.

The British journalist asked me, "what time exactly on the nineteenth did you post that Aurora prediction."

The posting was time-coded on this blog, when the final edit was published:

7/19/12 9:36 AM

Eastern Daylight Time

4. Post-July 2008; Post-The Dark Knight release; Joker copycats.

Kim De Gelder, Dendermonde Joker, 2009, Fabeltjesland ("Fairytaleland"), Belgium.

In general, I wrote about and projected that Joker copycats would occur in the wake of the release 2008's of The Dark Knight. The deadly copycats of The Joker have been rather constant from 2009 through 2012, from the Dendermonde Joker, through James Holmes of Aurora, Colorado, infamy, to the most recent minor former resident of Aurora Park, Florida.

James Holmes, "I Am The Joker," 2012, Aurora, Colorado.

"I don't believe in coincidence." 

~ Batman, Justice League, 

"Starcrossed," 2004.

5. February 14, 2008; NIU, DeKalb, Illinois, Steven Phillip Kazmierczak kills 5 + self. Prediction, February 9, 2008.

On February 9, 2008, I wrote (see here and here):
"If we have learned anything from the recent past, awareness of the shifting patterns are often instructive in predicting the near future. Look for major surprises in school shootings and similar mass rampages..."

The Valentine's Day Northern Illinois University shooting happened five days later. It is the fifth-deadliest university shooting in United States history.

6. April 16, 2007; Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia; Seung-Hui Cho kills 32 + self. Prediction, October 3, 2006.

During the fall of 2006, in emails to Canadian media, I shared some specifics pointing to the coming scope and date of the Virginia Tech massacre:

In that article, I was quoted as noting the psychological process that these shooters appear to be 'competing for the highest body count.' Sadly, we've seen that come true today [on April 16, 2007].
Also, the news item from last fall [2006] noted: 'He says that while the Pennsylvania shootings may not be the last in this cluster, the copycat crimes will likely slow down as we near winter. He says spring, and the anniversary of Columbine [April 20th], could be enough to spark another cycle of tragedy.'
Again, my prediction of a reigniting of the school shooting wildfire during this very week was revealed today [on April 16, 2007].

The Virginia Tech event is the deadliest shooting incident by a single gunman in U.S. history and one of the deadliest in the world.

7. September 27 (Platte Canyon High School, Bailey, Colorado), September 29 (Weston High School, Cazenovia, Wisconsin), October 6 (Old Order Amish one-room school, Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania), 2006, series. - Prediction, September 18, 2006.

In the wake of the Montreal's Dawson College shooting, I predicted there would be a wave of school shootings. My predictive email of September 18, 2006, was noted by the CTV/Canadian media, and is archived here.

8. March 21, 2005; Red Lake, Minnesota, Jeffrey Weise kills 9 + self. Prediction, March 18, 2005.

Jeff Weise

I predicted on March 18, 2005 that we all needed to watch for a school shooting of some import in 2005, from March 20th through April 20th, probably involving a Neo-Nazi, as per The Copycat Effect. 

It happened almost immediately as soon as this time frame began, on March 21, 2005, when Native, Satanist and Neo-Nazi 16-year-old Jeff Weise killed his grandfather (a Sergeant with the Red Lake Police Department) and his grandfather's girlfriend. He then drove his grandfather's police vehicle to Red Lake Senior High School, where he shot and killed seven people on the school campus, consisting of five students, one teacher and an unarmed security guard, and wounded five others. In the end, Weise also killed himself with the police-issued shotgun he'd stolen from his grandfather. Red Lake is the second deadliest massacre at a U.S. high school, only behind the Columbine High School massacre.

Widespread media credit was given to me for predicting this incident. Of course, no one who read my prediction was in any position to prevent what happened at Red Lake, so the media recognition carried with it an emptiness, unless people pay attention to the next time. (See more documentation on this prediction, here, here, and here.)

9. Post-April 20, 1999; Post-Columbine copycats. Prediction, April 1999.

Working as a youth suicide and school violence prevention consultant for the State of Maine, I had been predicting (from 1996-1999) that the ramifications of the copycat effect from school shootings were being greatly underestimated. After the Littleton, Colorado shootings at Columbine High School, on April 20, 1999, I predicted there would be a wave of school incidents occurring in the wake of Columbine. One fatality did take place a week after Columbine, at the W.R. Myers High School in Taber, Alberta, and 450 copycat incidents happened across the USA in the month after the Columbine school shooting.  I have continued to document the Columbine copycats into 2012.

10. Major League Baseball player suicides, Summer 1989. Prediction, October 4, 1988.

The Copycat Effect, pages 208, 212-216:

In 1987-88, I undertook a study of baseball player suicides, which led to a
significant statistical prediction. At the time, I was a project director and
principal investigator of a three-year quarter-million dollar federal project
on suicides at the University of Southern Maine. And having had a passionate
interest in baseball all my life, I wondered if the databases that existed for
ballplayers could provide any clues, in terms of stories or statistics, which
might inform the trends and patterns in baseball players’ suicides and suicide
clustering.
…[After a decade of no Major League Baseball players dying by suicide, I saw the likelihood of that changing was going to be immediately upon us.]
At the end of the baseball season in 1988, I predicted that, as the decade ended, a major league baseball player would die by suicide. I wrote a letter dated October 4, 1988, to then commissioner Peter Ueberroth and every team owner noting that a baseball player suicide was statistically likely in 1989 or 1990, and asking that a study be undertaken to see if a retirement counseling program for ballplayers would be justified.
As Sports Illustrated detailed in the July 31, 1989 issue (pp. 7):
“Sadly, Coleman's prediction came true last week. On July 18, at his home in
Anaheim, Calif., former All-Star relief pitcher Donnie Moore drew a gun, shot and critically wounded his wife, Tonya, with whom police say he had been arguing, and then shot and killed himself. Moore, 35, had been released on June 12 by the Kansas City Royals' minor league affiliate in Omaha. Friends say that Moore was haunted by memories of the two-strike, two-out, ninth-inning home run he gave up to Dave Henderson of the Boston Red Sox while pitching for the Angels in Game 5 of the 1986 American League Championship Series. If Moore had retired Henderson, California would have won the series four games to one. Instead, Boston won Game 5 in extra innings and then triumphed in Games 6 and 7 to advance to the World Series against the Mets.”
In 2001 ESPN Classics noted that Moore had told reporters in 1988, "I'll think about that [pitch] until the day I die."
My earlier findings showed Moore's death fit the typical pattern for baseball player suicides. Moore, like half the players who took their lives, had used a gun. He was, like more than half of baseball player suicide victims, between his late 20s and late 40s. And like 15% of the victims, he died within two years after their major league careers had ended. Moore's final big league season was 1988. But perhaps most notable of all, Moore, as with all pitchers before him in the 20th century who had killed themselves, was a right-handed pitcher. Curiously, teammates had given Moore the nickname “Lefty” because he seemed perhaps a little unpredictable, just as the mythic left-handed pitcher is said to be. One wonders if it is the left-handed pitchers’ flexible style that produces an acceptable coping mechanism for their stresses and serves as a protective factor against suicides.
While the media tend to always discuss the Moore suicide, it was only one of many in 1989. It was only after Moore’s suicide that we learned that three other Major Leaguers and one college player had killed themselves earlier that year. Dan Haycock, 19, a sophomore pitcher for Virginia's James Madison University's baseball team shot himself on February 12, 1989. He had been charged with drunk driving at 2:00 a.m. the morning of his death. His body was found near home plate with the 12-gauge shotgun he had used. He had left a note. On April 5th, the day after the Pittsburgh Pirates opening day, Carlos Bernier, an outfielder for the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1953, hung himself in Puerto Rico. Mike Reinbach, 39, a Baltimore Orioles outfielder for one year in 1974, drove his car off a San Diego, in a suicide on May 20th. On May 30, 1989, Virgil Stallcup, a pitcher with the Cincinnati Reds in the late 1940s and early 1950s, shot himself.
Then within a week of the Moore suicide, a rising African-American college basketball star, Ricky Barry, 24, of the Sacramento Kings, killed himself using a gun in August 1989. How many other young African-American ball players died by suicide after the Moore death is unknown, because no one in MLB was tracking what was going on in 1989. The baseball establishment and the sports media circled their wagons, and little was heard of Donnie Moore or other suicidal players for years.
While Barry’s suicide may have been modeled on Moore’s suicide, those that preceded Moore’s suicide clearly were not. But was Donnie Moore’s death was a copycat itself? Certainly those prior suicides would have been well known within the small fraternity of baseball players.
In any case, the suicides have continued.
On May 31, 1990, almost a year exactly to the day of Stallcup’s suicide,
Charlie Shoemaker, a Kansas City second baseman in 1961-62, 1964, shot himself.

I take no joy in my predictions being true, but to ignore the patterns that are there and to not try to communicate them to those who would listen, I feel, would be the greater irresponsible act.

This way a storm comes....

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