Gore website operator charged
EDMONTON — The owner of an Edmonton-based “real gore” website spent the night in the remand centre after being charged for allegedly posting a video online that purportedly shows the murder of student Lin Jun by Luka Magnotta in May 2012.
Mark Marek, 38, was arrested and charged with corrupting morals after turning himself over to police in Edmonton on Tuesday.
Staff Sgt. Bill Clark said Marek was co-operative and spoke to police for several hours, telling them things that left even veteran officers shaking their heads.
“I’d love to tell you everything he said. I think it would be, let’s just say, shocking.” Clark told reporters. “That is all going to come out when it does come to trial.”
Police allege Marek received the video in an email from Magnotta himself, and then posted it online on his website, bestgore.com, “knowing the video that was sent to him by Luka Magnotta was depicting a real murder,” Clark said.
In statements posted on the Best Gore website, a person that appears to be Marek uses racial epithets, says he believes the police will attempt to frame him, and says he “embrace (s) the possibility of becoming a political prisoner.”
The website contains a banner photograph of what appears to be a dead woman on a spit, with advertisements that flash hard-core pornography down the sides. Among the graphic content on the website is an image purported to be an autopsy photograph of Amanda Todd, the B.C. teenager who committed suicide after nude photographs of her were circulated online. Best Gore also contains warnings that everything on the site is real.
Clark described Marek as a “very different individual” who supports himself through his websites, travels often to various parts of the world like China and the Philippines, and appeared to have been living in his vehicle in Edmonton, which is the base of his operations.
“We still have no address to this day for Mr. Marek,” Clark said.
He said Marek may soon face charges for other content on his website, possibly under hate crime laws.
Marek previously told Postmedia News the site is “the rawest reality you can get, uncensored.”
Clark had a different description.
“I would describe the website … as a racist website inciting hate and violence, above and beyond anything normal, anything that we’ve seen here,” said Clark, a veteran homicide detective who has worked on some of Edmonton’s most disturbing and high-profile cases. “It’s a shocking website, I can tell you that.”
Magnotta, 30, is currently in custody charged with firstdegree murder in the death of Lin, a 33-year-old Chinese international student who was killed in Montreal in May 2012. The victim’s severed hands and feet were mailed to political parties and elementary schools, and his torso was found inside a discarded suitcase.
A Postmedia News story previously described the video, entitled 1 Lunatic 1 Ice Pick, as showing a person in a black hoodie “committing gross indignities to a naked body” on a bloodied bed, with a Casablanca poster behind him on the wall. There are other photos of Magnotta in what appears to be the same room.
Clark said the video was on the Best Gore website for eight days before Marek pulled it down, possibly because of intense attention from the public and media.