Tokyo-based experimental artist and composer Rory Viner got in touch with us about his fascinating experiment in musical psychotopology:
"Using Japanese suicide statistics, I assigned each statistic point to a piano note. Each section of twelve notes encompasses a year of self-killings within a prefecture. I then did that for every prefecture, decontextualizing dry statistics and weaving them into a sonic map. I also created a sonic map for U.S. murder and rape rates, which may especially be of interest to your readers."
Here's Viner's "One Year in Suicide Statistics in Japan for Piano"
And two other compositions...
Could Miranda Barbour be the next iconic serial killer? CNN reports:
19-year-old Barbour told a reporter for the Daily Item in Sunbury, Pennsylvania, that she participated in at least 22 killings in the past six years in Alaska, Texas, North Carolina and California. “When I hit 22, I stopped counting,” Barbour is quoted as saying in a phone interview on Friday night. “I can pinpoint on a map where you can find them.”
A law enforcement source close to the investigation said Miranda Barbour’s new claims could be “the real deal.”
Barbour told the newspaper she had her first experience with killing when she just 13, shortly after she said she joined a satanic cult in Alaska.
Barbour and her husband, Elytte Barbour, 22, are accused of luring Troy LaFerrara, 42, through a “companionship” ad on Craigslist, and stabbing and strangling him to death. The couple, married for only three weeks at the time of the slaying, just wanted to kill someone together, police said.
Manuel Longoria led police on a lengthy chase in a stolen vehicle before they managed to box him in. After being blasted with several less-than-lethal beanbag rounds, Longoria appears to try reach into, or re-enter his vehicle. At that point, the man appears to turn his back to the police and raise his hands in the air. That’s when two lethal rounds were fired into his back. Warning: The video is graphic, and you may want to skip it.
Pinal County, Arizona- Police shoot another unarmed man to death. Manuel Longoria had turned away and raised his arms mere moments before an officer fired into him. A week later that officer is back to work. The video included below contrasts with the explanation given by police.
The Pinal County Sheriff’s Office said it investigated the shooting. That investigation found the officer’s use of force justified. But that was before the video taken by an onlooker surfaced.
A mixture of exorcism and insanity leads to a bone-chilling crime, the Washington Post reports:
The Montgomery County mother accused of stabbing her four young children during a bloody exorcism — killing two of them — believed that demonic spirits were jumping from one child to the next and that she had to keep attacking them, a Montgomery County prosecutor said in court Tuesday.
Avery and 21-year-old Monifa Sanford claimed to be part of a four-person group called the “Demon Assassins,” with Avery having the title of “commander” and Sanford “sergeant.”
During the stabbings, the women would later tell detectives, they saw the children’s eyes turn black and a black cloud over one of the children. At one point, they said, the spirits jumped inside of Sanford.
The hearings for each woman underscored how the case appears to be a jumble of belief in demonic possession laced with some level of mental illness.
You might want to avoid meetings strangers you find on Craigslist, per this story of murder from Reuters:
A newlywed couple in Pennsylvania killed a man whom the wife had lured to a rendezvous though an online dating advertisement, strangling him and stabbing him repeatedly, police said on Friday.
The pair, named as Elytte and Miranda Barbour, “just wanted to murder someone together,” Sunbury Police Corporal Brad Hare told Reuters.
Elytte Barbour, 22, hid under a blanket in the back of their car as his 18-year-old wife Miranda drove to pick up a man she met through Craigslist at a mall north of Harrisburg on November 11, the Sunbury Police Department said in a report.
On Miranda’s signal, Elytte strangled the man, 42-year-old Troy LaFerrara, with a cord while she stabbed him about 20 times, it said.
They dumped his body in an alley in Sunbury, where police found him the next day.
An officer whose goal is to serve you. ABC News reports:
A German police officer may have seduced and murdered a man he met on a cannibalism fetish website. The suspect has been arrested.
Police on Wednesday found body parts on a property in the Ore Mountains that, according to German tabloid Bild, came from a murder carried out as part of a cannibal fetish act. The body parts are believed to belong to a 59-year-old man from Hanover, while the main suspect, who owns the property on which the remains were found, is a 55-year-old police officer.
The suspect allegedly invited the man to his property in Reichenau, a small town in the mountains. The victim had been cut into many small pieces some time in early November and many parts of the victim have yet to be found, leading to suspicions part of his body may have been eaten.
The white-washed version of the Thanksgiving holiday you were told in school isn’t anywhere close to the true, blood-spattered story of disease, slavery and genocide.
“Tell me what you want done,” the hit man says. “Do you want something done?”
“Oh, I want something done. I want that bitch’s face cut.”
Just saying it out loud, it’s the first step toward healing. Lucero knows that for sure now, and he says it repeatedly—cut her face up—and each time he feels lighter, a load off his heart, his pounding, suffering heart. The love of his life, she walked away laughing.
The hit man has ice blue eyes that don’t wander, don’t shift or pierce with disdain. “So you don’t want her dead, you want her scarred up?”
“Yeah,” Lucero says. “For all the money she took from me. All the money I gave—I gave her the world. And I got this back?
Legendary editor Russ Kick returns to the DisinfoCast to discuss his new collection Death Poems, an anthology of verse both modern and classic dedicated to all aspects of death: Funerals, the death penalty, serial killings, the Underworld and more. Funny, sad, atheistic, spiritual, mythic, wise and morbid, this is the perfect collection for anyone who needs a little “memento mori”.
Additional subjects discussed: Near-death experiences, morbid thoughts, the afterlife or lack thereof, “the 357 test”, the role of art, post-modernism and more.
The MI6 spy whose naked body was found inside a zipped, padlocked gym bag probably died … by accident, UK police have decided. The coroner said last year Gareth Williams was probably killed by someone else in a criminal act, but now the Metropolitan Police have completed an evidence review and say it’s “more probable” no one else was in his apartment when he died in his bathroom in 2010, the BBC reports. The deputy assistant commissioner said today it’s “theoretically possible” Williams locked himself into the bag.
Tokyo-based experimental artist and composer Rory Viner got in touch with us about his fascinating experiment in musical psychotopology:
Could Miranda Barbour be the next iconic serial killer? 
A mixture of exorcism and insanity leads to a bone-chilling crime, the 
GQ’s profile of an undercover ATF agent who poses as a hitman to foil murder for hire schemes is an interesting read.
