Suicide Voyeur persuades others online

M

Mrs.Lucysnow

Valued Senior Member
A man allegedly addicted to watching others kill themselves online could be charged with encouraging and assisting suicide.

William Melchert-Dinkel, 47, an American nurse with a loving family, allegedly spent years posing as a 20-something woman while trawling the internet for people he could persuade to kill themselves while he watched, the Daily Mail reports.

He has allegedly admitted to US police that he was involved in at least five deaths. A US prosecutor is still deliberating over whether to charge the Minnesota man with assisting suicide.

On the day Mr Melchert-Dinkel was arrested he was admitted to hospital. His medical notes record that he told nurses he was addicted to suicide chatrooms and had "posed as a 28 year old female formed suicide pacts with some that he had no attention (sic) of following thru... 4 yrs suicide fetish offered medical advice for assisted suicide x2".

A 64-year-old grandmother from Coventry, central England, led police to Mr Melchert-Dinkel after she heard of a teenage girl being urged to join a suicide pact.

Mark Drybrough received his final email at 10.32am. It asked: "Are you all right?"

Seconds later he switched off his computer, walked to his bedroom and hanged himself from a decorator's ladder.

When Mr Drybrough's sister later read through the months of emails and chatroom posts stored on the computer, it appeared the message was part of a suicide pact with a young female nurse.

"My daughter told me that a nurse called Li encouraged Mark to kill himself and said that some people had allowed her to watch before," she said.

http://current.com/news/92336426_su...allegedly-talked-people-into-death-online.htm

The guy is obviously sick but I do wonder how much of assistance he was able to give these suicide cases other than egging them on.

Can we say that Dinkel actually aided them?

There is a chance that these people would have taken their lives anyway. I'm not saying they shouldn't find some reason to jail Dinkel, the less pervs around the better, but does anyone really believe that another can convince someone to end their life?

I really like how the elderly English woman was able to track Dingle which lead to his arrest even when police shirked her off and told her not to look if she didn't like it, undeterred she found a way around their apathy. Nicely done.

And what is with this new 'suicide voyeurism'? Is it like a new snuff film phenomenon? What can be so fascinating about watching a sad soul top themselves?


Why kill yourself in front of another? Really such a thing used to be a private matter:shrug: But now with the internet and online communities its seems people are now willing to share more than their blog.

Is the internet desensitizing people as a whole? I mean does anyone think someone would actually invite another into their home to watch them commit suicide?

Would the person watching really not react and try and stop someone if the suicide was happening right in front of them in real time?

I think its the medium that allows such detached callousness. After all this wasn't the first time:

"Police found Abraham Biggs Jr on Wednesday at his home in Broward County, Florida, some 12 hours after he first announced on a bodybuilders' website that he had taken the pills and redirected viewers to another site showing his webcam footage.

Hundreds of people are believed to have watched the footage on the website Justin.tv, some encouraging him or posting insults.

William Hill, a Miami lawyer, said there were probably no legal grounds to prosecute those who watched the suicide broadcast and did not act."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/wor...er-slams-online-voyeurs-who-egged-on-son.html
 
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While there might be alsorts of run arounds in regards to the legal angle of online assisted suicides, it's really the prerogative of a website to police itself. Obviously I'm pretty sure here at Sciforums we don't condone attempts to get people to commit suicide publically or kill people in general.

In fact you could suggest that causing people to attempt suicide could be covered by laws in regards to Malice. ("...With Malicious Intent")

As for why people should be stopped from watching it? Well when Warhol suggested "...15 minutes of fame", It was always joked that "...is about as much time as people will spend reading the obituaries." If a society becomes a group of sickofants wanting to watch the termination of others, then obviously we have not become civilized but backtracked to a more primative state.

As for the people that watch, they are potentially tomorrow's serial killers getting to terms with feeling of death and the absence of remorse. Watching one day and escalating the next to murder. Stopping them watching is a preventative measure to lessen the number of people that escalate to this.
 
But that's just the thing. Watching is passive, inactive, I mean one is able to disengage from the immediate reality of a situation as long as that reality is altered through t.v or your computer screen.

In other words this guys fascination with 'watching' doesn't necessarily mean he would sit back and watch if it were happening in real time unbuffered by he cold eye of a computer screen.

Same thing for the hundreds who watched Biggs Jr. die. These same people may (I'm hoping anyway) have reacted differently if they were connected to these people in reality and not just some image on webcam.

By the way what makes you think the nurse would have turned into a serial killer?

As for culpability of the website the lawyer William Hill of Miami had this to say:

William Hill, a Miami lawyer, said there were probably no legal grounds to prosecute those who watched the suicide broadcast and did not act.

He also said it would be a "stretch" to argue that the San Francisco website, on which people broadcast live footage of their everyday lives, had been negligent.
 
I don't agree with "more primitive". Snuff-fandom has been persistent in civilized society and has never been abandoned. Public executions are still performed, as well as this underground stuff. Furthermore, it continues to parallel the technologies of the time (internet, VHS, guillotine, etc)
 
Watching someone kill themselves over the internet is one thing (did the viewers even believe what they were seeing was real and where they sure it was taking place in real time?), egging them on is quite another.

I think a person in a vulnerable state can definitely be pushed into doing something they'd never have done on their own.
 
i agree with mad, its the equivilant of pediling mirical cures to cancer at the least which was specifically made a crime in Australia BECAUSE it was judged to be morally reprehensable. This is just as bad if not worse

There is a legal principle relating to "you take your victom as you find them". The way it was explained to me that ment that if you pushed a person with parkensons on the stairs and they fell in front of a train you CANT go to the courts and argue that "if they were healthy they wouldnt have fallen". Thats just to bad, you chose THAT victom. This would fall under the same catigory, yes they might have died anyway but they DID die because of what he did (alegedly). The only excuse for this would be his own mental illness (if he has one), apart from that he deserves to have this declared a "special circumstances" crime because he DELIBRATLY sort out victoms who would be vunerable
 
Lucysnow said:
By the way what makes you think the nurse would have turned into a serial killer?
Click to expand...

They undergo a similar evolution to Serial Rapists, that first "fantasize" what they would like to do, but to begin with they don't go through with it fully. It's actually due to neurochemistry in regards to what endorphines are released which they could technically get through other avenues, like using particular illicit drugs or actually talking to psychiatrists who would only too happily provide them the right drugs to negate actual killing or raping.

Why a nurse? I honestly couldn't say, however some nurses will see some people wanting to legally terminate themselves are years of putting up with painful incurable illnesses and will understand their is no treatment for them, so they can be open to the hypothesis that a person should have the capacity to end their own suffering. This of course is a problem when of course they are applying their reasoning to people that are just depessed or bullied into it, since that is something that can be fixed.


As for culpability of the website the lawyer William Hill of Miami had this to say:

William Hill, a Miami lawyer, said there were probably no legal grounds to prosecute those who watched the suicide broadcast and did not act.

He also said it would be a "stretch" to argue that the San Francisco website, on which people broadcast live footage of their everyday lives, had been negligent.
Click to expand...

William Hill is not the Law, he is not the interpreter of the Law, that is in fact up to a Judge and potential the peers to which the absense in a Law can effect.

His statement as to what he believes is one of the main problems in current law, it predefines a response to a criminal activity to be "apathetic". This if coupled with being the "Defendants Lawyer" is basically a way to predisposition a mistrial.

and you wonder how criminals buck the system and get off scott free.
 
There are previous cases that will obviously referred to, and likely why William Hill made his statement.

For instance you could look at "Malice". In the case of Megan Meier It wasn't suttle or misinterpreted, in fact it pulled up a number of cases of fraud and changed they way that mainstream worldwide social network sites are suppose to handle the cases of fraud.

In the instance of Steven Carmichael-Timson the "suicide websites" spammed him constantly to slowly convince him to actually do it, this meant it actually manipulated him mentally to give him that final push.
 
This is more common than you know. People compete against eachother about how many people they have driven to suicide.

I almost got caught in their web once myself, at a "philosophy" forum.
 
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