Severed heads, mangled corpses, aborted babies. It's the kind of content that would give most people nightmares, but to members of an underground gore subculture it's a dish suitable for daily consumption.
The websites they frequent feature countless images and videos depicting real-life stomach-churning violence. Many of the images come from Mexico, where photos such as these are seen as acceptable journalistic material and are frequently published in magazines and newspapers. But while the origins of those photos can be explained easily, others cannot.
The websites deal in images taken at crime scenes, inside autopsy rooms, at the wreckage of car accidents and other places only authority figures are allowed. So who is leaking the images?
Last week one of the most popular online gore websites published images of the dead body of Queensland teenager Leanne Holland — ninemsn has chosen not to publish the name of the website. Although it was later revealed the Holland images were also published in a 2002 textbook, it drew widespread outrage from the Australian public, and sparked concerns that authorities could be involved in the trade.
To learn more about the trade and the origins of the images, ninemsn interviewed the editor of the website, a woman who goes by the screenname JohannaXn. The contents of the interview are reproduced below.
What can you tell me about yourself?
I live somewhere in Europe, my country of origin is something I prefer to keep to myself. I am in my 30s and I am a housewife (it pays nothing of course but it gives me time for myself). I have my own hours and it's like I'm always on holiday. I can spend time with my hobbies like dolls and books, being social and such. And of course I spend some of my time to acquire material of interest for the site and for myself.
Please explain the online gore scene to me. How did it start? What kind of people are involved? How popular is it?
The online gore scene is a massive place with people with all kinds of life stories, everyone is different and there is no stereotypical gore person. Many people are actually from areas where people work with trauma every day, like nurses or emergency personnel. Some are there to deal with trauma of their own but the largest group is just regular individuals. I cannot pinpoint any general gore individual.
The gore scene's origin is really hard to tell. On the Internet there were sites like the **** and ****. But **** really was the place where it all took off. The whole subculture gained its notoriety with the beheadings in Chechnya and especially the Iraq war made a big impact, with lots of people not originally belonging to the scene coming in. People that wanted to see the uncensored media as it was. Simply being tired of being treated as children.
How did you become part of it?
My beginning was not in the gore scene but I actually got started by transferring autopsy videos and death movies from VHS to digital format and then spreading these in p2p networks like DC++. That was my origin, my "rips" then seeped down to the gore scene and were cut up and made into small low quality clips that were posted on different sites. And it is from this time I built my global network for videos of this kind.
I was of course a member on the gore sites early on, but I was not collecting gore. I have never been into "gore" in itself without purpose. I do not even like "gore" in the general meaning of the word.
What attracted you to the scene? Were you exposed to some traumatic event that encouraged you to seek out this material?
There is no traumatic event that got me into the scene, I just slid in almost unwillingly, because of my interest in autopsies and extensive interest in crime scenes and post-mortem procedures (loooong before it got trendy with the truly fake TV shows like CSI).
I am interested to read about it and in order to understand I have to see. Our site is not a mirror image of me as a person but it is a purposefully designed gore site I made with friends, just as a hobby. If it had not been for the site I would personally have not even collected the majority of the images posted. I am not into regular gore as I said earlier.
Some would assume that a person who hosts such a large collection of this material would have to be a killer themselves. Are you?
Haha, anyone saying like that have to be completely bananas! It is like saying anyone watching SAW movies is a serial killer in training. The site is a project I do with my friends as a sequel to another gore site called **** we were doing that was closed down (by one of the co-owners). We decided to continue the legacy. Because we had our circle of friends and networks, why not? [The site is] a place to hang out with friends from different backgrounds.
We decided to put a completely different angle on it than other gore sites though. Not just posting media, but we also have the mission of educating and now and then showing real things that the regular media really should be showing instead of talking about it. In my opinion many of our posts serve a true journalistic purpose, while others are just random gore. It is a mixed site. That is probably the hard part to understand for the dumb people out there.
It says on your website that you have contacts all over the world who deliver these images to you. What is your network like? How many contributors? Who are they? How many work in law enforcement?
It is very large, all kinds of people. A lot we do on our own but we have lots of contributors from all sorts of fields. Some are from my old network back in the heyday of the ripping scene, some are people I've befriended who share my interest in crime scenes and forensics. Others came along for the ride as our sites progressed. Sometimes it is also a waiting game, where we used different kinds of exploits in order to acquire the material we need. Not to mention Latin American news that is very generous to us, they show death as it is without hiding one bit. Amazing really what a different world that is from the West. The magazine Alarma is sold openly and contains images and stories in the same vein as our site.
A woman can die in a car wreck and 10 hours later we either have the video or the images, and that is from many different countries. There is no shortage of people dying all over the world because of drug-crimes, accidents and plain old suicides. It is such a flood of death in images and videos, that if you position yourself in the right places you cannot possibly handle all of them. We post maybe a few percent of everything we get a hold of on our site, and most of our content hasn't even been published yet but is awaiting publication.
Why do these people give the images to you?
Depends on from where they are or what they do. Some are proud to show their trade, some give it to me without even knowing who I am. It is so varied that the acquiring of content is almost impossible to describe. Besides, I do not want to reveal how we work.
How many of these images do you have in your possession?
Images and videos? I lost count a long ago. Maybe one terabyte or more material. It sounds like hoarding but it is not really like that, to acquire some content you need to trade for it. So it is always a good thing to keep material even if it is not in your range of interest.
How can posting images of a dead girl's naked body serve any purpose other than to shock and offend?
According to many of our commenters and the emails we've gotten, they served a purpose for a lot of people. My personal stand, and I think the rest of the crew of our site agree on this, is that crime scene images should be public property because they are investigated by public entities. Ten-thousand eyes, even if they are amateurs, can give clues or ideas that just a handful police officers cannot.
The Leanne Holland crime scene images serves a purpose in that they show people the brutality of the crime. Instead of media luring people into some kind of fantasy world (it's not Lovely Bones, but reality and we all need a reality check). Public outcry should not be directed towards us but against the people that let an innocent man sit in prison for 15 years … It is a travesty of justice.
The crime scene images are of public interest because when I checked Australian media it has been described as one of Queensland's most famous cases. They had to be released. So people know what really happened, and the police investigation should be made fully public with everything in it. So people themselves can judge and see the miscarriage of justice. Leanne deserves it!
Our site is a gore site but now and then we have informational pieces, like we inform about female genital mutilation, quoting UN-sources, and take a strong stand against it. We are not the run of the mill gore site, everything is not black and white. We have a shock value part of the site and we have a very important part where we inform people of causes that can lead to death. I am especially proud of those parts, where we warn people of diseases caused by alcohol or different types of drugs. Some journalist even called some part of what we do real journalism.
Queensland Attorney-General Cameron Dick has been quoted telling the media that police have failed in their attempts to have the Leanne images removed from your site. What contact have you had with police regarding the photos?
As of the time of this interview neither we nor our server host have been asked to take the images down by any government official. Police have not contacted us whatsoever. My take is that they just filed away some papers and decided to set up a commission and then tell the media they had been unsuccessful without even trying. I do not know really what is going on. The only requests we've gotten is from ordinary citizens that want us to take them down, but we have gotten even more support for posting them and taking a stand against a political and judicial system spiraling out of control (according to Australian citizens themselves). We believe free speech is a very important issue wherever it is threatened in the world.
Are there any images in your collection that you won't publish? Why?
Private images, images of no interest for the public, pure forensic images without any value for other people than a forensic pathologist. Images i receive with the label "do not share". A very large part of my images falls into this category. The blog has almost reached 1000 posts and that is just the tip of an iceberg.
I had instances where I was not sure to post or not, like when a guy sold me a set of a woman that had been beheaded and whose headless corpse had been sexually posed. It was a hard decision because if I posted them and if it was an unsolved murder case I could expect the police rushing in. I asked the individual who sold me the images if I could post them and I got his approval. The images turned into one of the biggest things to hit the Internet at that time.
It turned out to been a German woman murdered a year before (so my post came almost on the anniversary of her killing) and the images had been suppressed by the German authorities. The killer himself had uploaded them onto a site before committing suicide. How my source got them I have no clue, I am glad he did though. The set is not published on the blog, yet. It was published on the original website **** I used to be co-owner of.
If the government was not already monitoring your website, they certainly are now. It's likely it will be banned in Australia under the proposed internet censorship laws. What are your thoughts on this?
Australians make up a very small percentage of our total amount visitors, it will not affect us at all. The filters usually are very easy to bypass even for the layman. It does not worry us.
Even though we are aggressively against all kinds of filtering it can also have its benefits. When you put a blanket over something you don't like, the things beneath the blanket will still continue, business as usual. And with filtering, no more people getting upset over what happens under the blanket. The people above the blanket of internet censorship (the people who fear free speech and freedom) are happy in their little make-believe world. Whatever the politicians do, they cannot win. All they can do is to pretend they are doing something. To me it is all a big scam.
We will teach Australians how to bypass the filter shortly, we can even block out the entire continent of Australia ourselves if we want to on our own. We do not make any money, how will a dumb little filter blanket affect us?
Why should Australians be allowed to access your site? What purpose does it serve?
In a free society any free person should be able to choose what site they want to visit or not. If they do not like what they see they just close the screen and go on with their life. Who wants a Big Brother to tell them what to see or not to see? If people want a filtering service it should be voluntary like a downloadable program for families where a private company filters out all inappropriate content for children (a private enterprise solution that can create jobs even).
The government has no business to trespass on what people do with their own computers on the Internet (except real computer crimes, hacking, phishing and such matters).
But let us hope the Australian debate take a healthy turn from being upset with the crime scene images, into actually investigating who killed Leanne, and why Internet censorship is not an option in the first place.
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