(https://x.com/bx_on_x/status/2013273174683549746)
(https://bxwrites.substack.com/p/kannibal-keith-part-1) (a)
(https://bxwrites.substack.com/p/kannibal-keith-part-2) (a)
(https://bxwrites.substack.com/p/kannibal-keith-part-3-to-catch-a) (a)
This is the strange true story of how I found myself in the middle of an investigation into a network of cannibals.
Disclaimer: All info contained in this article is true to the best of my knowledge. Some names have been changed and/or redacted. All parties are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.
Sanctioned Suicide is a website that connects suicidal site users to sellers, individuals that peddle “suicide kits” to the most vulnerable and despairing. The contents of these kits range from poison to “exit bag” devices meant to be filled with inert gas. The sellers pose as fellow website users, commenting on posts to validate people’s suicidal ideations, offering advice on the best suicide methods and then urging them to go through with it. Among the countless victims of this site was Kacey’s own teenage son.
Over the course of our investigation, we uncovered many of Sanctioned Suicide’s darkest secrets. In addition to poison dealers, there were various other users of the site who did not appear to be on the site for purposes of suicide information or support. Some had been on the forum for many years and boasted about helping hundreds of users end their lives. Other users would invite suicidal people to livestream their deaths in Discord servers for their own sick enjoyment.
But we also found other users with even more sadistic intentions. A “Partners” subforum was set up on Sanctioned Suicide to allow members to meet in person after making a suicide pact with each other. Multiple users complained about being sexually assaulted or otherwise victimized by these online “friends” after meeting them. In at least one case, a site user agreed to a mutual suicide only to flee after killing their partner. The person later admitted they weren’t suicidal at all – they just wanted to know what it was like to take a life.
In 2019, a man named Craig McInally was sentenced to jail for targeting vulnerable women on the forum’s partner thread, offering to help them take their lives and then luring them to his home where he sexually assaulted them. It’s not far-fetched to imagine the site being used by a serial killer to find easy victims, or as would turn out to be the case in this situation, a cannibal.
Kacey sounded panicky and breathless as she tried to explain the latest development. Earlier that day she had been contacted by a woman, who I will call Jay, on behalf of her friend Jenny. Jenny was incarcerated at the John E Polk Correctional Facility in Seminole County, Florida, awaiting trial after firing a gun at police officers outside a Florida hotel. Jay sent Kacey a message on social media claiming she had information regarding the death of Kacey’s son, who had committed suicide 4 years earlier after joining Sanctioned Suicide.
But after a brief phone conversation with Jay, Kacey was able to glean that the woman had no useful information about her son’s death. It seemed that Jay’s mention of this information was merely a way to get Kacey to agree to help her find information about another user of Sanctioned Suicide – a man with the username Flightlinek.
Jay had already identified the user account as belonging to a man from Orlando, FL named "Keith E". Keith and Jenny became online friends after meeting on Sanctioned Suicide, where they exchanged DMs lamenting their current situations and, eventually, entered into a mutual suicide pact. The original plan, as Keith would later admit to police, was for Jenny to shoot and kill him in a remote area before driving to a more populated location and turning the gun on herself.
Keith told Jenny that he had locations in mind and convinced her to travel to his home in Florida to execute their plan. In a state of suicidal despair, Jenny packed a few belongings, left her home in Prospect Heights, Illinois, where she lived with her husband and young child, and made her way to Florida. She left a goodbye message on Facebook prior to leaving.
Jenny was promptly reported missing by her husband, and a widely shared Facebook post surrounding her disappearance resulted in many people attempting to locate her. What the Facebook post failed to mention was that Jenny had an outstanding warrant in Illinois for felony vehicular invasion. As a result, a country wide manhunt was initiated for her.
Jenny’s disappearance made waves quickly as concerned onlookers shared the Facebook post. It turned out Jenny was already well-known in certain circles as a result of her own dark past. Jenny was the subject of a 2017 documentary film called The Last Stop about Elan School, a now closed boarding school founded in 1970 by a Harvard psychiatrist which was exposed for running a grotesque behavioral modification program for troubled teens, replete with psychological abuse, "humiliation rituals", and a gladiator style punishment program that forced kids to fight in a ring.
Jenny and several other former students were featured in the documentary about this program. Though Jenny eventually settled down, married, and had a child, she continued to suffer from PTSD and suicidal thoughts, which ultimately led her to join Sanctioned Suicide.
Jay told Kacey that she was being assisted by a forensic investigator from California and a private investigator from Texas. As a licensed PI in Texas, I found it curious that a PI from Texas would be assisting in a case from Illinois. I asked Kacey to inquire further about this, and she stated that Jay became aggravated and accused her of not believing her story. Jay went on to reveal that the PI had experience helping other former students from Elan School, many of whom have been suffering from severe mental health problems as a result of their abuse.
But if that were the case, I argued, then why would the PI still be involved after Jenny was located? Why would they be trying to use Kacey to gain access to inside information on Sanctioned Suicide? Jay teamed up with a fly-by-night private investigator from Texas and a forensics investigator from California to help a woman from Illinois, by investigating a cannibal in Florida. How did that make sense? I also pointed out to Kacey that Jay had baited her into talking by claiming to have info on her son’s death, which later turned out to be untrue. In light of the inconsistencies in the narrative presented by Jay, I warned Kacey to proceed with extreme caution and to refuse any requests to give information unrelated to Jenny.
***
When police found Jenny holed up at a hotel in Fern Park, Florida, they were well aware of her history. According to the police reports from that fateful day, “The defendant was located at the [Days Inn] after a day long investigation. The defendant was suicidal and had made comments about not wanting to die alone.” What happened next shouldn’t have surprised them.
The Sheriff deputies confronted Jenny as she exited her hotel room. Jenny, who was suicidal, responded by reaching for a handgun in her pocket. As she drew the weapon, an undercover detective flanked her from the side and grabbed her hand. The gun fired once, and the round struck a wall behind the Sheriff deputies. The police report goes on to state that “Detectives were in fear of being shot and killed,” and Jenny was charged with 1 count of attempted 1st degree premeditated murder of a law enforcement officer and 1 count of aggravated assault with a firearm on a law enforcement officer. If you think this sounds a bit extreme given the circumstances, well… I’d be inclined to agree, especially considering what Jenny revealed next.
Things didn’t go according to plan when Jenny met Keith in Florida. Keith quickly revealed to Jenny that he wasn’t really suicidal. He was a cannibal, and he was hoping to convince Jenny to let him murder and cannibalize her on video – a snuff film which he would later market for sale on the dark web. Keith told Jenny he had killed at least two other people who he met online in this way. Jenny recounted with horror how Keith had taken her into his home and showed her what she described as a “kill room”.
Jenny politely rebuked Keith’s offer. While she was still suicidal, she wasn’t exactly keen on the idea of being eaten on video. Keith understood her hesitation and offered to put her up in a nearby hotel, encouraging her to take some time to reconsider his proposal. Jenny agreed. Keith gave Jenny a small firearm to take with her – a fact that he would later admit to investigators.
When police showed up at Jenny’s hotel room on July 1, 2023, she was in the throes of a mental health crisis. Disheveled and disoriented, and having just been propositioned by a cannibal while over 1000 miles away from home, she tried to commit one final act – suicide by cop. Fortunately, that act was thwarted by the quick actions of an undercover officer. No one was injured in the hotel incident, and Jenny was taken to the hospital for a mental health evaluation prior to being incarcerated. Jenny told Jay that she begged the police to arrest Keith, but that they dismissed her concerns and also repeatedly prevented her from speaking with her lawyers.
But police did visit Keith shortly after Jenny was arrested, on July 7th. During that initial discussion, Keith said that he had picked up Jenny from the Orlando airport on the 1st and brought her to a hotel. He admitted to making a suicide pact with Jenny, but said that he backed out of the pact soon after picking her up and gave her money for a hotel room, instead.
Afterwards, he immediately left the state and traveled to Tennessee to “visit family”. When police asked Keith if he knew where Jenny obtained the firearm used in the shooting, he adamantly denied giving her the gun and insisted all of his guns were accounted for. But when asked to give police a full inventory of the firearms in his possession, Keith found that he was missing a Walther handgun.
Police questioned Keith on the nature of his suicide pact with Jenny, to which Keith insisted he was of sound mind, and that he had an appointment to see a psychiatrist the following week. The police report stated, “[Keith] appeared to be nervous, and [his answers] were generic and non-descriptive… It appears as if [Keith] left Florida in the event that [Jenny] was successful in her attempts to take her own life, so he could avoid suspicion and liability.”
Despite this assessment, and despite the evidence that Keith gave the gun to Jenny, and despite the police’s knowledge of numerous firearms in Keith’s home, the police report concluded that Keith did not meet the criteria for an involuntary mental health examination, and the police left Keith alone.
Three weeks later, the Seminole County Sheriff’s office traced the handgun fired by Jenny back to Keith and went to his home to interview him again on July 27th. During that interview, Keith once again admitted that he had solicited Jenny to shoot and kill him before turning the gun on herself, but that he had backed out of the plan at the last minute. He also admitted to having done this on multiple other occasions with other individuals he’d met online, each time chickening out at the last minute.
But Keith also changed his story. He confessed to bringing Jenny to his home in Fern Park and providing her with a Walther P99C AS 40 S&W handgun. He admitted that after handing her the firearm, he helped her chamber a round and then wiped his fingerprints off the gun. Keith also conceded that before he gave it to her, Jenny had told him she was considering suicide by cop.
In addition, Keith admitted to police that he frequented online forums related to both suicide and cannibalism. This time, the police determined they had enough evidence to issue an extreme risk protection order. They confiscated Keith’s firearms – 2 Walther pistols, a shotgun, and a rifle – and transported him to a mental health facility under the Baker Act, which allows for a 72-hour involuntary mental health hold under Florida law.
The Risk Protection Order from Seminole County revealed that Keith had prior run-ins with law enforcement in similar incidents. In January of 2007, police contacted Keith after he solicited a woman to murder him in exchange for his house deed. The woman turned out to be a confidential informant, and Keith was placed under a Baker Act mental health hold.
Then in December of 2007, another well-being check was conducted on Keith by the Seminole County Sheriff. A woman who had spoken with Keith on Craigslist told police that he had asked her to come to his residence and “hurt him”. He offered to compensate her for her time and expenses. Keith told police that he was attempting to play out an autoerotic fantasy in which a female would beat him up and then shoot him, but he denied being suicidal and claimed it was just a fantasy. Despite the similar case just a few months prior, the Seminole County Sheriff did not believe Keith met the criteria for a Baker Act hold at the time, and they did not pursue the matter further.
Although the police documents from the July 2023 incident contained detailed records of Keith’s history of soliciting internet strangers to commit violent and sadistic acts, Seminole County released him after his 72 hour hold ended.
Keith E., or as we would come to know him, Kannibal Keith, was (and as far as I know, still is) living life as a free man in Florida.
***
I suddenly realized that I had spent my entire evening looking into Kannibal Keith. I looked away from my computer screen, blinked a few times and stretched my arms above my shoulders and back behind my head. Then, I sent a message to my small team of investigators letting them know about the new rabbit hole I had uncovered. I didn’t know it at the time, but that rabbit hole was about to get much, much deeper.
Shortly after sharing the relevant info with my team, I was inundated with an internet footprint so atrocious that it could have come straight out of a horror movie. Cannibalism, snuff films, strange sexual fetishes, and even a possible trafficking case was on the horizon of our investigation.
I could have never guessed on that cool night in October where the rabbit hole would lead me. Eventually, I’d find connections to a high-profile case in Toronto. And, more than a year later, I’d be contracted by a major media outlet to go undercover and try to catch a cannibal red-handed... pun very much intended.
On the surface, Keith appeared to be a completely ordinary person. He was an Executive for a telecommunications company and owned several businesses related to web media and e-commerce hosting. His LinkedIn profile picture featured a professional headshot of a smiling, well-groomed, middle-aged man. Keith’s social media accounts were similarly unremarkable. He had a deep interest in aviation, took frequent vacations in Mexico, trained in Jiu Jitsu, and posted pictures with a solemn-faced, teenage son. One of the pictures featured his son in a Jiu Jitsu gi and a caption that read, “Even after a great class, this kid just will not smile.”
Interestingly, Keith didn’t go to any lengthy efforts to hide his prurient online activities. He had only two main usernames that were linked to everything from his personal business to the website Sanctioned Suicide. But because Jenny and Keith met on Sanctioned Suicide, I decided to start there. Jay had sent Kacey a screenshot of a private message exchange between Jenny and Keith on Sanctioned Suicide where the two laid out the plan for their mutual suicide pact.
“I have tons of plans for after the date, but that’s more about keeping up the appearances for others,” Jenny messaged Keith. “If I stop making plans with friends and appointments with therapists and what not, people will know something is amiss.
“Since you want to be found,” Keith responded, “the place I have in mind for you should have you found pretty quickly. No one will bother you while you’re doing it, but it won’t take long once it’s done. It’s in an area where plenty of people mind their business but will hear the shot and come look. For me, it needs to be the opposite, so I may have to look further out of the city and in less populated places. This is going to be an endeavor.”
But Keith had no intention of keeping his side of the bargain. In reality, this was nowhere near the first time that he had attempted to lure a suicidal individual to his home in hopes of fulfilling his cannibal snuff film fetish.
Whether or not Keith had ever actually killed anyone was less ambiguous. Though he bragged to Jenny that he’d successfully killed and eaten two people, he told the police that he was merely a fantasist, and because there was no evidence to the contrary, police were forced to drop the matter.
Keith’s arrangement with Jenny wasn’t the first time he had used Sanctioned Suicide for this purpose. Keith joined the website in August of 2018 and accumulated 113 posts prior to deleting his account soon after Jenny’s arrest. Most of his posts were deleted, but there were a few archived posts remaining that confirmed our suspicions. Keith had solicited several suicidal individuals to travel to his Florida home under the guise of a mutual suicide arrangement.
A year prior, in December of 2022, Keith had responded to a Sanctioned Suicide user who was desperate to find a suicide partner and urged her to come to Florida. Soon after, the two indicated they were moving the conversation to private messages. In September of 2018, on a post titled, “Ever think of just going missing?”, a user named Wildflower said, “I'd rather go missing because then my friends and family and people who knew me would still have some measure of hope. I know they would/will be devastated. Look at the Mollie Tibbetts case, even after a few weeks people held out hope that she might turn up alive... Sadly I don't have the resources/confidence to do so.”
“Wildflower, I feel exactly the same way. I want to just disappear,” Keith replied. “Also, I'm also in central Florida... we should talk.” Suffice to say, Keith had a years long history of trying to lure people to his home, a history which seemed to corroborate his chilling claim of having killed before.
After confirming the information I’d been given about the matter was real and verifiable, I shared it with my small research team. It was time to start digging. We would soon learn that Sanctioned Suicide wasn’t the only website Keith used to lure people to his home in hopes of cannibalizing them on video. Our investigation was about to get a lot darker.
It didn’t take my research partner, Paul, very long to unravel Keith’s massive online footprint. He had two primary usernames that he used for almost everything and made it easy to confirm his identity. This is how we were able to chase down the link between Keith’s telecommunications LLC and a concerning network of websites that he owned – a network called the Ariana Society.
The description on the Ariana Society website read, The Ariana Society is a VIP online membership club offering an extensive selection of features, benefits, and exotic and adult content. With various plans and membership options, there is something for everyone. Something about the webpage just felt off. Ariana Society offered vague services including exotic travel, yoga classes, and restricted chat rooms. A Facebook page, last updated in January 2022, featured innocuous yoga and marketing services along with “Society” brand coffee available for purchase.
The Ariana Society boasted a members-only private community to “make connections, close deals, make friends or just talk.” The site further claimed that all facilities were private, secure and fully encrypted. The website’s contact page offered a phone number with an Orlando, FL area code. The contact person – Keith.
The membership packages available on the website offered access to exclusive content. The “Black Metal” level membership cost $399.00 per year and boasted full digital access to the entire Ariana Network. The perks included a Black Metal membership card, an exclusive luxury Ariana Society wristwatch, a free 3-Day/2-Night and a free 8-Day/7-Night Travel Certificate to an undisclosed location, restaurant and grocery savings vouchers, and a $100 gift card to something called The Vore Store. For the unfamiliar, vore refers to a fetish in which the person fantasizes about being eaten, eating others, watching people eat others, and watching people eat various objects, which sometimes includes living animals.
The Ariana Society site also linked to four affiliated pages with fetish content. Each site featured paid members-only access and therefore couldn’t be explored in any detail. That was fine with me. I was certain I didn’t want to.
The first affiliated page featured goldfish swallowing – fetish content that revolved around young men and women swallowing live goldfish (a type of content I was happily unfamiliar with leading up to this investigation.) A Twitter account connected to the page featured people doing just that, among them, girls from the Philippines who appeared to be very young.
The next site was called Ariana Girls – The original exotic content site, Ariana Girls brings you face to face with the beautiful, amazing models of the Ariana Network. This site was also paywalled. Another was called Hot Teen Bellies – Features hot, candid teens in bikinis. The description of the site clarified that underage models are prominently featured, but do not appear nude.
The last of the four sites featured crushing content. “Crushing” involves models stepping on items with bare feet and crushing them. This type of fetish frequently features live animals being crushed to death in this manner. As animal crush videos are illegal, I had a glimmer of hope that we might have a chance to get Keith investigated.
The Ariana Network had a good amount of what appeared to be coded language and innocuous descriptions designed to hide the more sinister content. Interestingly, the history of the Ariana network dated back to at least 2006, when Keith operated a BBS site called “Ariana Interface”. Further analysis of Keith’s online footprint revealed that he had been trying to find a way to circumvent US law by hosting an offshore server for an escort website – an action that would have broken federal law. Then there were Keith’s frequent trips to Central America, the Ariana Society’s offer for travel vouchers to undisclosed locations, the sexualized teens on his website, and so on.
The Epstein vibes were off the charts. And man, I hate to say it, but our investigation just got worse from there.
Seriously, this is a warning. You may want to skip this part if you are particularly squeamish.
That’s when we started to find the cannibalism connections. Ariana Society was connected to a message board called Her Stomach. One board was titled, “RL Vore & Cannibalism – The real stuff, including cannibalism. You can also arrange meetups here.” In December 2019, Keith posted a comment to this site asking how to upload a video.
Paul used OSINT tools to analyze Keith’s email address, searching the Dark Web, document sharing platforms, Whois data, public data leaks and other archived sites. He located Keith’s email in an index of Usenet groups, indicating that Keith downloaded an mbox file named “alt-sex-snuff-cannibalism.mbox" An mbox is a way to drop encoded files which could then be decoded by an external application.
According to descriptions of the Usenet group, “alt-sex-snuff-cannibalism” was a group that could be used to commit suicide by cannibalism. The inclusion of the word “snuff” indicates that the file contained a video of a murder. Given this information, the download of the mbox file from this Usenet group provides strong evidence that Keith was a user of a group which shared films depicting murder and cannibalism, potentially with a sexual component. The specific purpose of the Usenet group was to locate individuals willing to die and offer themselves to cannibals.
Keith also joined a notorious gore website called Cute Dead Guys in 2018 under the same name he used on Sanctioned Suicide. His bio read, “Always wanted to be snuffed and eaten (not necessarily in that order). Role play or real. I’m in the Orlando area but can travel for the right person.” In February of 2020, he posted that he had found a girl who was willing to eat him. And in March of that same year, he provided an update that the two had confirmed their plan and were attempting to find a 3rd party willing to help.
Keith was also a member of two gay escort service websites. On the website Rent Men, which advertised itself as a hub for pornstar performers and gay masseurs looking to sell services, Keith offered sexual services for sale with a bio that stated, “Open Minded | Will Do Anything. White bear guy here, always feel comfortable with me no matter what you're into.”
On a website called Breeding Zone, Keith’s bio read, “FL. Neg, Recently Tested. Bottom”. Between October 2015 and July 2016, Keith posted several times on this site expressing an interest in meeting HIV positive men for sex in the Orlando, FL area. In a comment to a post titled, “Cum Dump Party” Keith invited another user to Club O in Orlando, FL and said he was particularly interested if the user was “Poz”, a slang for HIV positive. In another post, Keith stated that he just started having sex with men in 2015 and was open to “all loads”, in reference to his willingness to have sex with an HIV positive man. Keith also used the site to organize a “group pozzing party”.
Keith appeared to be intentionally seeking out HIV positive gay men. Was this part of his “ethical cannibalism” fetish? Did he, perhaps, see HIV positive men as being equivalent to suicidal people in regard to the value of their lives? Or maybe Keith was genuinely interested in contracting the virus as a form of self-harm. In April of 2022, Keith replied to a post on Sanctioned Suicide regarding HIV contraction as a form of suicide, stating it is “a lot harder to contract HIV than you’d imagine”. He referred to a community of individuals called “bug chasers” who he described as gay men intentionally trying to contract HIV.
Regardless of Keith’s intrinsic motives, one thing was for certain - he had been using fringe websites to lure people to his Florida home in hopes of cannibalizing them for years. His first documented encounter with Seminole County police took place in 2007, when he attempted to hire a woman to murder him. That woman turned out to be a confidential informant, and Keith was able to successfully convince police he was only playing out a sexual fantasy and had no intention of following it through.
Later that same year, Keith was again questioned by police after he used Craigslist to solicit a woman to shoot him as part of an erotic fantasy. Once again, no action was taken by the police. Several years later, Keith joined the gay escort websites and began actively pursuing HIV positive homosexuals to lure to his home for sex. And in 2018, Keith joined Sanctioned Suicide, where he sought out suicidal users looking for a person to help them end their lives.
Rehashing this saga today, I’m faced with the same levels of shock and outright disbelief as I felt while uncovering it the first time. I remember sitting in front of my computer with my face contorted into an expression of sheer horror for hours at a time. I joked with Paul that I worried my face might freeze that way.
As we continued to peel back the layers of Keith’s morbid online footprint, we began to reveal a link to another infamous cannibal – a serial killer, in fact, who preyed almost exclusively on gay men in Toronto. A man by the name of Bruce MacArthur.
Bruce McArthur seemed like a normal guy. Born in 1951 in rural Ontario, he grew up in a small farming community and married his high school sweetheart. He worked as a salesman for a Canadian clothing company, raised two kids, and later got into landscaping after moving to Toronto. By all accounts, he was a friendly, unassuming figure – someone who posted cat pictures and anti-Trump memes on Facebook, dressed up as Santa at a local mall, and ran a small landscaping business. But beneath this wholesome facade, McArthur was living a double life.
McArthur’s killing spree took place in Toronto’s vibrant LGBTQ+ community, an area known as the Gay Village. In November of 2012, Toronto police launched Project Houston – a task force which was assembled to investigate the disappearance of three missing men from the Gay Village - Skandaraj Navaratnam, Abdulbasir Faizi and Majeed Kayhan. All three men were homosexual and of Middle Eastern descent, and all three went missing in a similarly suspicious fashion. These unusual details ultimately alerted Toronto police to the possibility of a serial killer.
McArthur was a fixture in the Gay Village, socializing in the bars and clubs of Church and Wellesley since at least the late 1990s. He was known to have had a romantic relationship with Skandaraj Navaratnam, and yet, when police interviewed community members about McArthur’s possible connection to his disappearance, they described McArthur as an ordinary gay man, and the last person anyone suspected of being a predator. That’s what made his crimes so insidious: he blended in, gaining the trust of men who were marginalized and struggling with their sexuality.
The Village was a safe haven for many of these men – a place where they could be themselves away from societal judgment or family expectations. But Bruce McArthur turned this sanctuary into a hunting ground. His method was brutal yet calculated. He lured his victims – most of them men he met through dating apps or in bars – to his apartment or other locations, where he sexually assaulted, strangled, and dismembered them.
Some victims were posed post-mortem in degrading ways, with McArthur photographing them in fur coats or with cigars in their mouths before stashing the images as trophies on his computer. He hid their remains in large garden planters at properties where he worked as a landscaper, a practical choice for a man whose job gave him access to sprawling suburban yards.
Navaratnam, McArthur’s first known victim, disappeared in September 2010 after leaving a gay bar. Abdulbasir Faizi vanished a few months later, last seen at a bathhouse in the Village. Majeed Kayhan went missing in 2012, followed by others over the years. The disappearances sparked fear in the community, with rumors of a serial killer circulating as early as 2010. But the Toronto Police were slow to act, initially dismissing the idea of a serial killer and attributing the disappearances to the lifestyles of the victims, many of whom used dating apps or lived double lives to conceal their sexual identities from their friends and families.
In 2012, two years after the disappearance of Navaratnam, Toronto police received a tip from an anonymous source in Switzerland which led them to uncover a sordid network of online cannibals. The Swiss tipster told police that he had chatted on a website with a self-proclaimed cannibal who bragged about killing and cannibalizing Toronto-area men.
Suddenly, police found themselves chasing a lead that sounded like something straight out of a horror movie. The website in question was called Zambian Meat, a forum where users fantasized about torturing and eating people. One user, going by “Chefmate50,” claimed to have killed and eaten a man in Toronto, specifically mentioning someone named “Skanda,” which matched Skandaraj Navaratnam’s nickname. The user was traced to a man named James Alex Brunton, a 65-year-old retiree from Peterborough, Ontario.
Now facing the possibility of a cannibal serial killer, police launched Project Houston, named after the phrase “Houston, we have a problem,” to investigate. Detectives even flew to Switzerland to interview the source; a man named Markus Dubach who had previously helped Swiss police catch another cannibal serial killer in Europe.
The investigation into Brunton was intense. Police discovered he had exchanged nude photos with minors and engaged in graphic online chats about torture and cannibalism. They also briefly considered whether Luka Magnotta, the infamous Montreal murderer who killed and dismembered a man in 2012, might be linked, as he had worked as a dancer at a Toronto strip club and lived near Brunton’s hometown during his teens.
But after months of surveillance and interviews, the police concluded that Brunton’s cannibalism fantasies were just that – fantasies. There was no evidence linking him or Magnotta to the disappearances, and there wasn’t sufficient evidence to indicate Brunton had ever actually followed through with his cannibalistic urges. They did, however, have enough evidence to convict Brunton on child pornography charges in 2014. As for the Toronto case, the police found themselves back at square one.
Interestingly, McArthur’s name also surfaced during Project Houston. His email and username, “silverfoxx51,” were found in Navaratnam and Faizi’s computer data, and he was interviewed as a witness in 2013. But with no concrete evidence tying him to the crimes, he slipped through the cracks. The cannibalism lead, while sensational, distracted investigators from the real killer hiding in plain sight.
The turning point came in 2017 with the disappearance of Andrew Kinsman, a well-known figure in the Gay Village. Unlike the other victims, Kinsman’s absence sparked immediate community action, with friends organizing searches and canvassing the neighborhood. His disappearance, coupled with that of another man earlier that year, prompted the Toronto police to launch Project Prism, a new task force. A crucial clue emerged: Kinsman’s calendar had an entry marked “Bruce” on June 26, 2017, the day he vanished. Surveillance footage showed Kinsman getting into a van later traced to McArthur, which contained traces of his blood.
By late 2017, McArthur was under 24-hour surveillance. In January 2018, police moved in when they saw him bring a man to his apartment. Inside, they found the man, Sean Cribbin, chained to a bed – a potential ninth victim who was rescued just in time. The search of McArthur’s apartment uncovered folders of photos of his victims, including post-mortem images, and forensic teams later found dismembered remains in planters at properties linked to his landscaping work. McArthur was arrested on January 18, 2018, and in January 2019, he pleaded guilty to eight counts of first-degree murder. He was sentenced to life in prison with no parole for 25 years.
Online fetish communities like Zambian Meat exist in a murky space where fantasy and reality can blur, making it hard for police to separate credible threats from role-play. The tip about “Chefmate50” was compelling enough to warrant a transatlantic investigation and fortunately resulted in the arrest and conviction of another monster. But detectives who worked on Project Houston said the tip ultimately diverted resources from McArthur. They were quick to debunk the cannibalism rumors, stating there was “no truth to that at all.”
But what about the Swiss informant’s mention of the name, Skanda? Could there have been a connection between some of the victims and the online cannibal fetish community? McArthur was well-known to be involved in some prurient online BDSM scenes, and by the time his victims were unearthed from the property where he crudely buried them in planters, many of the remains were years old and reduced to skeletons. I guess it’s worth pointing out that while detectives couldn’t prove McArthur cannibalized his victims, they couldn’t necessarily disprove it, either. Nor would they necessarily be inclined to try. After all, both Brunton and McArthur were locked away in maximum security prison, and the detectives were probably more than a bit eager to purge the sordid details from their memories.
Enter Keith.
Keith was an ordinary, unassuming middle-aged man with a steady job and an apparently normal life. Keith preyed on gay men who he found in sketchy online forums and at clubs in the Orlando area. Keith was a member of several cannibal forums, where he hunted for willing victims, engaged in role-playing discourse, and even uploaded snuff films – potentially of his own making. Keith claimed to have killed and eaten two people, and there was plenty of evidence of him succeeding in luring a number of people to his home in Florida. And Keith’s sadistic online activities took place between 2006 and present day, a time period during which he would have likely run across Brunton and others like him in the same network.
I pulled myself away from my computer screen and peered 1000 yards at the wall 2 feet in front of my face. There is a network of cannibals. Not just a singular serial killer. A network. As in, more than a few.
After forcibly snapping myself back to reality, I decided to go get some fresh air.
***
The next few weeks went by as usual. During this period, every free moment of my time was spent researching Sanctioned Suicide, incels, accelerationism and mass shootings. Meanwhile, Seminole County police dropped the charges against Jenny and transported her back to Chicago to stand trial for her unlawful entry charges. The strange investigation into Kannibal Keith, while still heavy on my mind, was mostly drowned out by more pressing issues. That is, until I got a message.
A major media outlet, tipped off to the case against Keith by Jenny’s friends, had decided to get a head start on a podcast about her ordeal. The fact that they jumped the gun so early – without even waiting for an arrest – told me everything I needed to know. “Suicide by cannibal” had the potential to be a very hot topic.
I couldn’t really blame them. It would certainly make for an enthralling podcast, and it was sensational enough on its own that it needed no embellishment. During my first Zoom call with the journalist, Jeff*, he made it clear that his main goal was to tell Jenny‘s story and link it to Sanctioned Suicide – a noble cause in my mind. I hated that website more than anything at the time.
But there was a catch. They didn’t just want a static retelling of Jenny’s ordeal. They wanted Keith, too. The obvious hurdle would be getting him to talk, and the solution that Jeff proposed was a honeypot operation. The concept was quite simple. He needed someone to get on a sock account, engage with Keith on one of his preferred websites, and offer to show up at his home as a willing sacrifice.
To Catch A Cannibal: Season 1, Episode 1. Starring BX.
To make things even easier, Jeff had already created a sock account on a particularly nasty cannibal site and began engaging with a user he believed to be Keith. On the sock, Jeff was pretending to be a suicidal woman in her mid-30s looking for a creative way to end it all.
“So this person is posting a lot about cannibalism and helping people with suicide,” Jeff said. “You’ll see a ‘Susan White’ in one of the comments. That’s me.” Though Jeff’s target claimed his name was Steve, he also claimed to be a white man in his 50s who lived near Orlando, and his MO matched that of Keith’s to a T. It was certainly possible, if not extremely likely, that “Steve” was actually Keith.
“He immediately DM’d,” Jeff continued. “I said I was in Atlanta considering suicide. He has been emailing daily and is very keen to help. I either fly to him or he flies to me. I’ve slowed things down by saying there are some things I need to sort out, to put right, before I go. So we can go slowly.”
Jeff handed me the email login information for Susan White’s sock account, and I promptly fired up my Virtual Machine to catch up on the emails he’d already exchanged with Steve. My blood went cold when I read the first message Steve sent:
My curiosity was certainly piqued. I logged onto the cannibal fetish website and located Steve’s profile. The Bio read “In search of meat”. The About Me read, “Here to explore the mind at all it's limits... To interpret pain as pleasure for mutual satisfaction… To sacrifice flesh in return as reward... To take you through the dark, right to where you need to be, with a kiss...”
Steve’s account boasted a 1-year achievement badge. His user activity revealed he had reached out to multiple other members in his search for a suitable victim and had also posted many disturbing images and videos on the site (the kind of things I’m not even sure I can write about here, at the risk of conjuring them back into my memory.) One image in particular was of a document titled, Body Donation Form which read, “Livestock Application: Human Female Livestock Owners Association; USDA CHOICE LOVE ROASTERS, PRIME CUTS & SNUFF SLAVES.” There was an email address as well as a physical address located in Milwaukee on the form. At the bottom of the form was a computer-generated image of a naked woman impaled end-to-end on a skewer.
Steve’s Favorites tab revealed multiple pornographic thumbnails that were BDSM themed. The Galleries tab was similarly themed, and contained a computer-generated image titled, “Volunteer” which depicted a woman being subjected to sexual violence. A link in that image led to something even more shocking – an animation of a naked, hog-tied woman roasting on a skewer. The caption read, “Are You Considering SUICIDE? We can help. The Human Female Livestock Owners Association.”
The post had 33 comments, and Steve had responded to some of them the way an advertiser would: “We can make all your fantasies come true.” I shuddered when I read the word, ‘We’.
Later that day, I sent the profile with all the associated info to Paul to see what else he could uncover. Paul immediately doubted the profile belonged to Keith. He pointed out that Steve’s profile said he was straight, whereas Keith had never been shy about disclosing his identity as a gay/bisexual man.
“It’s a cover. It’s got to be him,” I argued. “He’s been trying to convince the sock account to fly to meet him, saying he lives 40 minutes away from Disney World. I mean really, how many men in Orlando are cannibals looking for suicidal victims on weird gore websites? Hopefully only one. Hopefully…”
“I don't think it's him,” Paul insisted. “I'll look more in a bit.”
“If there is a network of cannibals I swear to God I am moving to the mountains and getting rid of the Internet completely,” I lamented.
Paul replied in his usual matter of fact tone: “You know there is. Lol.”
***
The next day, Paul wrapped up his assessment of the profile by definitively concluding that Steve was not Keith. “I've looked at everything and lost my appetite for lunch. Anyways, I don't think it's him, but I could be wrong. They could always bait him and fake a no-show if it's not him,” he said, referring to Jeff’s honeypot plan.
Or maybe, I mused, it would be just as useful to catch another cannibal in the act. If we can’t get the one we are after, maybe showing the audience that there is more than one would work just as well. Jeff agreed with this sentiment. Our strategy shifted from linking the account to Keith to linking the account with its rightful owner.
Jeff had already had a few conversations with Steve before I took over the account. Steve opened up only slightly to the Susan White sock, claiming to be a simple mechanic who sometimes helped his farmer friends out with their slaughters. But Steve was hesitant to speak with Susan White much further via email and insisted she download WhatsApp to continue working out their plan. Among other things, Steve said he wanted some pictures of Susan to determine what size car he would need to dispose of her body.
It was all so morbid, yet so comical. I was having a hard time coming to terms with the fact that I was at least a little excited to be involved. So, without further hesitation, Jeff sent me an Amazon gift card and instructed me to go to the store to buy a burner phone, install WhatsApp, and continue my deep dive.
Immediately upon contacting Steve on WhatsApp, he added me to a group chat called Butchering, Life Management. I jotted down his phone number and ran it through my people finder database. I instantly got a hit. Steve Labelle - a mechanic from Florida. I was shocked. Steve hadn’t even attempted to hide his identity from me or anyone else. He had a public LinkedIn profile that showed he once worked for Lockheed Martin (because of course he did). His Facebook profile featured pictures of what appeared to be a happy and normal looking Midwestern family consisting of Steve, his wife, and two teenage children.
The wife beamed in her public Facebook photos. With her blue eyes, fair skin, and blonde hair fashioned in a dated, Farrah Fawcett haircut, she was practically the poster girl for a housewife at your friendly neighborhood social club (and this, Ladies and Gentlemen, is why I no longer participate in potlucks.)
“They look like they would invite you in for a home-cooked meal before turning you into meal prep,” I joked to Jeff. Jeff admitted to being slightly disappointed that Steve was not Keith, however, he asked me to keep baiting Steve anyways in hope that he would incriminate himself enough to justify a meet-up.
So, that’s exactly what I did. Steve started our conversation convinced I was a federal agent trying to entrap him, but he began to warm up to me as our conversation progressed throughout the day. That night, I had trouble sleeping. I’d been involved with deep cover operations before, including the time I joined a cult as part of a PI gig, but nothing as sordid as this. It made me feel sick to my stomach every time I sent Steve a message, and every time he responded, the hairs on the back of my neck stood straight up.
I was very hesitant to send Steve the pictures he asked for. I don’t think I’ve ever taken such out-of-focus, dimly lit pictures in my life. He protested that I was fully clothed and that my phone was obscuring my face. No way, buddy, I thought to myself. This is all you will ever get. Our conversation didn’t go much further. I thought Steve was the most revolting person I’d ever investigated, and Steve was convinced I was an undercover fed. So, Jeff and I decided to hit pause on the operation, with hopes of resuming our project in the future when Jenny was in a better position to collaborate.
Writing this article series has been a rollercoaster of emotions coming back. In remembering this misadventure, I’m experiencing the same exact feelings I did when I was in the moment. Shock, horror, disgust, but simultaneously shaking my head and laughing at the absurdity of it all. I now live with the knowledge that the cannibal rabbit hole goes far deeper than I ever imagined. I live with the knowledge that these cannibals look just like your normal, suburban neighbors. But most importantly, I live with the knowledge that Kannibal Keith is still out there… and he isn’t alone.
(https://bxwrites.substack.com/p/kannibal-keith-part-1) (a)
(https://bxwrites.substack.com/p/kannibal-keith-part-2) (a)
(https://bxwrites.substack.com/p/kannibal-keith-part-3-to-catch-a) (a)
This is the strange true story of how I found myself in the middle of an investigation into a network of cannibals.
Disclaimer: All info contained in this article is true to the best of my knowledge. Some names have been changed and/or redacted. All parties are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.
Part 1 - Meal Prep
On a chilly Texas night in October of 2023, I received an unexpected phone call from my colleague, Kacey. I had been helping Kacey investigate a sordid website known as Sanctioned Suicide for several months. While the founders of Sanctioned Suicide were insistent the site was merely a support group with no ulterior motives, our investigation had led us to conclude that the site essentially functioned as a suicide-for-profit scheme. (Read more about Sanctioned Suicide here).Sanctioned Suicide is a website that connects suicidal site users to sellers, individuals that peddle “suicide kits” to the most vulnerable and despairing. The contents of these kits range from poison to “exit bag” devices meant to be filled with inert gas. The sellers pose as fellow website users, commenting on posts to validate people’s suicidal ideations, offering advice on the best suicide methods and then urging them to go through with it. Among the countless victims of this site was Kacey’s own teenage son.
Over the course of our investigation, we uncovered many of Sanctioned Suicide’s darkest secrets. In addition to poison dealers, there were various other users of the site who did not appear to be on the site for purposes of suicide information or support. Some had been on the forum for many years and boasted about helping hundreds of users end their lives. Other users would invite suicidal people to livestream their deaths in Discord servers for their own sick enjoyment.
But we also found other users with even more sadistic intentions. A “Partners” subforum was set up on Sanctioned Suicide to allow members to meet in person after making a suicide pact with each other. Multiple users complained about being sexually assaulted or otherwise victimized by these online “friends” after meeting them. In at least one case, a site user agreed to a mutual suicide only to flee after killing their partner. The person later admitted they weren’t suicidal at all – they just wanted to know what it was like to take a life.
In 2019, a man named Craig McInally was sentenced to jail for targeting vulnerable women on the forum’s partner thread, offering to help them take their lives and then luring them to his home where he sexually assaulted them. It’s not far-fetched to imagine the site being used by a serial killer to find easy victims, or as would turn out to be the case in this situation, a cannibal.
Kacey sounded panicky and breathless as she tried to explain the latest development. Earlier that day she had been contacted by a woman, who I will call Jay, on behalf of her friend Jenny. Jenny was incarcerated at the John E Polk Correctional Facility in Seminole County, Florida, awaiting trial after firing a gun at police officers outside a Florida hotel. Jay sent Kacey a message on social media claiming she had information regarding the death of Kacey’s son, who had committed suicide 4 years earlier after joining Sanctioned Suicide.
But after a brief phone conversation with Jay, Kacey was able to glean that the woman had no useful information about her son’s death. It seemed that Jay’s mention of this information was merely a way to get Kacey to agree to help her find information about another user of Sanctioned Suicide – a man with the username Flightlinek.
Jay had already identified the user account as belonging to a man from Orlando, FL named "Keith E". Keith and Jenny became online friends after meeting on Sanctioned Suicide, where they exchanged DMs lamenting their current situations and, eventually, entered into a mutual suicide pact. The original plan, as Keith would later admit to police, was for Jenny to shoot and kill him in a remote area before driving to a more populated location and turning the gun on herself.
Keith told Jenny that he had locations in mind and convinced her to travel to his home in Florida to execute their plan. In a state of suicidal despair, Jenny packed a few belongings, left her home in Prospect Heights, Illinois, where she lived with her husband and young child, and made her way to Florida. She left a goodbye message on Facebook prior to leaving.
Jenny was promptly reported missing by her husband, and a widely shared Facebook post surrounding her disappearance resulted in many people attempting to locate her. What the Facebook post failed to mention was that Jenny had an outstanding warrant in Illinois for felony vehicular invasion. As a result, a country wide manhunt was initiated for her.
Jenny’s disappearance made waves quickly as concerned onlookers shared the Facebook post. It turned out Jenny was already well-known in certain circles as a result of her own dark past. Jenny was the subject of a 2017 documentary film called The Last Stop about Elan School, a now closed boarding school founded in 1970 by a Harvard psychiatrist which was exposed for running a grotesque behavioral modification program for troubled teens, replete with psychological abuse, "humiliation rituals", and a gladiator style punishment program that forced kids to fight in a ring.
Jenny and several other former students were featured in the documentary about this program. Though Jenny eventually settled down, married, and had a child, she continued to suffer from PTSD and suicidal thoughts, which ultimately led her to join Sanctioned Suicide.
Jay told Kacey that she was being assisted by a forensic investigator from California and a private investigator from Texas. As a licensed PI in Texas, I found it curious that a PI from Texas would be assisting in a case from Illinois. I asked Kacey to inquire further about this, and she stated that Jay became aggravated and accused her of not believing her story. Jay went on to reveal that the PI had experience helping other former students from Elan School, many of whom have been suffering from severe mental health problems as a result of their abuse.
But if that were the case, I argued, then why would the PI still be involved after Jenny was located? Why would they be trying to use Kacey to gain access to inside information on Sanctioned Suicide? Jay teamed up with a fly-by-night private investigator from Texas and a forensics investigator from California to help a woman from Illinois, by investigating a cannibal in Florida. How did that make sense? I also pointed out to Kacey that Jay had baited her into talking by claiming to have info on her son’s death, which later turned out to be untrue. In light of the inconsistencies in the narrative presented by Jay, I warned Kacey to proceed with extreme caution and to refuse any requests to give information unrelated to Jenny.
***
When police found Jenny holed up at a hotel in Fern Park, Florida, they were well aware of her history. According to the police reports from that fateful day, “The defendant was located at the [Days Inn] after a day long investigation. The defendant was suicidal and had made comments about not wanting to die alone.” What happened next shouldn’t have surprised them.
The Sheriff deputies confronted Jenny as she exited her hotel room. Jenny, who was suicidal, responded by reaching for a handgun in her pocket. As she drew the weapon, an undercover detective flanked her from the side and grabbed her hand. The gun fired once, and the round struck a wall behind the Sheriff deputies. The police report goes on to state that “Detectives were in fear of being shot and killed,” and Jenny was charged with 1 count of attempted 1st degree premeditated murder of a law enforcement officer and 1 count of aggravated assault with a firearm on a law enforcement officer. If you think this sounds a bit extreme given the circumstances, well… I’d be inclined to agree, especially considering what Jenny revealed next.
Things didn’t go according to plan when Jenny met Keith in Florida. Keith quickly revealed to Jenny that he wasn’t really suicidal. He was a cannibal, and he was hoping to convince Jenny to let him murder and cannibalize her on video – a snuff film which he would later market for sale on the dark web. Keith told Jenny he had killed at least two other people who he met online in this way. Jenny recounted with horror how Keith had taken her into his home and showed her what she described as a “kill room”.
Jenny politely rebuked Keith’s offer. While she was still suicidal, she wasn’t exactly keen on the idea of being eaten on video. Keith understood her hesitation and offered to put her up in a nearby hotel, encouraging her to take some time to reconsider his proposal. Jenny agreed. Keith gave Jenny a small firearm to take with her – a fact that he would later admit to investigators.
When police showed up at Jenny’s hotel room on July 1, 2023, she was in the throes of a mental health crisis. Disheveled and disoriented, and having just been propositioned by a cannibal while over 1000 miles away from home, she tried to commit one final act – suicide by cop. Fortunately, that act was thwarted by the quick actions of an undercover officer. No one was injured in the hotel incident, and Jenny was taken to the hospital for a mental health evaluation prior to being incarcerated. Jenny told Jay that she begged the police to arrest Keith, but that they dismissed her concerns and also repeatedly prevented her from speaking with her lawyers.
But police did visit Keith shortly after Jenny was arrested, on July 7th. During that initial discussion, Keith said that he had picked up Jenny from the Orlando airport on the 1st and brought her to a hotel. He admitted to making a suicide pact with Jenny, but said that he backed out of the pact soon after picking her up and gave her money for a hotel room, instead.
Afterwards, he immediately left the state and traveled to Tennessee to “visit family”. When police asked Keith if he knew where Jenny obtained the firearm used in the shooting, he adamantly denied giving her the gun and insisted all of his guns were accounted for. But when asked to give police a full inventory of the firearms in his possession, Keith found that he was missing a Walther handgun.
Police questioned Keith on the nature of his suicide pact with Jenny, to which Keith insisted he was of sound mind, and that he had an appointment to see a psychiatrist the following week. The police report stated, “[Keith] appeared to be nervous, and [his answers] were generic and non-descriptive… It appears as if [Keith] left Florida in the event that [Jenny] was successful in her attempts to take her own life, so he could avoid suspicion and liability.”
Despite this assessment, and despite the evidence that Keith gave the gun to Jenny, and despite the police’s knowledge of numerous firearms in Keith’s home, the police report concluded that Keith did not meet the criteria for an involuntary mental health examination, and the police left Keith alone.
Three weeks later, the Seminole County Sheriff’s office traced the handgun fired by Jenny back to Keith and went to his home to interview him again on July 27th. During that interview, Keith once again admitted that he had solicited Jenny to shoot and kill him before turning the gun on herself, but that he had backed out of the plan at the last minute. He also admitted to having done this on multiple other occasions with other individuals he’d met online, each time chickening out at the last minute.
But Keith also changed his story. He confessed to bringing Jenny to his home in Fern Park and providing her with a Walther P99C AS 40 S&W handgun. He admitted that after handing her the firearm, he helped her chamber a round and then wiped his fingerprints off the gun. Keith also conceded that before he gave it to her, Jenny had told him she was considering suicide by cop.
In addition, Keith admitted to police that he frequented online forums related to both suicide and cannibalism. This time, the police determined they had enough evidence to issue an extreme risk protection order. They confiscated Keith’s firearms – 2 Walther pistols, a shotgun, and a rifle – and transported him to a mental health facility under the Baker Act, which allows for a 72-hour involuntary mental health hold under Florida law.
The Risk Protection Order from Seminole County revealed that Keith had prior run-ins with law enforcement in similar incidents. In January of 2007, police contacted Keith after he solicited a woman to murder him in exchange for his house deed. The woman turned out to be a confidential informant, and Keith was placed under a Baker Act mental health hold.
Then in December of 2007, another well-being check was conducted on Keith by the Seminole County Sheriff. A woman who had spoken with Keith on Craigslist told police that he had asked her to come to his residence and “hurt him”. He offered to compensate her for her time and expenses. Keith told police that he was attempting to play out an autoerotic fantasy in which a female would beat him up and then shoot him, but he denied being suicidal and claimed it was just a fantasy. Despite the similar case just a few months prior, the Seminole County Sheriff did not believe Keith met the criteria for a Baker Act hold at the time, and they did not pursue the matter further.
Although the police documents from the July 2023 incident contained detailed records of Keith’s history of soliciting internet strangers to commit violent and sadistic acts, Seminole County released him after his 72 hour hold ended.
Keith E., or as we would come to know him, Kannibal Keith, was (and as far as I know, still is) living life as a free man in Florida.
***
I suddenly realized that I had spent my entire evening looking into Kannibal Keith. I looked away from my computer screen, blinked a few times and stretched my arms above my shoulders and back behind my head. Then, I sent a message to my small team of investigators letting them know about the new rabbit hole I had uncovered. I didn’t know it at the time, but that rabbit hole was about to get much, much deeper.
Shortly after sharing the relevant info with my team, I was inundated with an internet footprint so atrocious that it could have come straight out of a horror movie. Cannibalism, snuff films, strange sexual fetishes, and even a possible trafficking case was on the horizon of our investigation.
I could have never guessed on that cool night in October where the rabbit hole would lead me. Eventually, I’d find connections to a high-profile case in Toronto. And, more than a year later, I’d be contracted by a major media outlet to go undercover and try to catch a cannibal red-handed... pun very much intended.
Part 2: The Spider's Web
I settled in for a long night of research. I already had Keith’s username on Sanctioned Suicide; from there, finding his associated emails and other online accounts would be relatively straightforward. Much of the work had already been done for me by the investigators who brought the case to Kacey, but there was still a lot more to learn about our new friend, Keith.On the surface, Keith appeared to be a completely ordinary person. He was an Executive for a telecommunications company and owned several businesses related to web media and e-commerce hosting. His LinkedIn profile picture featured a professional headshot of a smiling, well-groomed, middle-aged man. Keith’s social media accounts were similarly unremarkable. He had a deep interest in aviation, took frequent vacations in Mexico, trained in Jiu Jitsu, and posted pictures with a solemn-faced, teenage son. One of the pictures featured his son in a Jiu Jitsu gi and a caption that read, “Even after a great class, this kid just will not smile.”
Interestingly, Keith didn’t go to any lengthy efforts to hide his prurient online activities. He had only two main usernames that were linked to everything from his personal business to the website Sanctioned Suicide. But because Jenny and Keith met on Sanctioned Suicide, I decided to start there. Jay had sent Kacey a screenshot of a private message exchange between Jenny and Keith on Sanctioned Suicide where the two laid out the plan for their mutual suicide pact.
“I have tons of plans for after the date, but that’s more about keeping up the appearances for others,” Jenny messaged Keith. “If I stop making plans with friends and appointments with therapists and what not, people will know something is amiss.
“Since you want to be found,” Keith responded, “the place I have in mind for you should have you found pretty quickly. No one will bother you while you’re doing it, but it won’t take long once it’s done. It’s in an area where plenty of people mind their business but will hear the shot and come look. For me, it needs to be the opposite, so I may have to look further out of the city and in less populated places. This is going to be an endeavor.”
But Keith had no intention of keeping his side of the bargain. In reality, this was nowhere near the first time that he had attempted to lure a suicidal individual to his home in hopes of fulfilling his cannibal snuff film fetish.
Whether or not Keith had ever actually killed anyone was less ambiguous. Though he bragged to Jenny that he’d successfully killed and eaten two people, he told the police that he was merely a fantasist, and because there was no evidence to the contrary, police were forced to drop the matter.
Keith’s arrangement with Jenny wasn’t the first time he had used Sanctioned Suicide for this purpose. Keith joined the website in August of 2018 and accumulated 113 posts prior to deleting his account soon after Jenny’s arrest. Most of his posts were deleted, but there were a few archived posts remaining that confirmed our suspicions. Keith had solicited several suicidal individuals to travel to his Florida home under the guise of a mutual suicide arrangement.
A year prior, in December of 2022, Keith had responded to a Sanctioned Suicide user who was desperate to find a suicide partner and urged her to come to Florida. Soon after, the two indicated they were moving the conversation to private messages. In September of 2018, on a post titled, “Ever think of just going missing?”, a user named Wildflower said, “I'd rather go missing because then my friends and family and people who knew me would still have some measure of hope. I know they would/will be devastated. Look at the Mollie Tibbetts case, even after a few weeks people held out hope that she might turn up alive... Sadly I don't have the resources/confidence to do so.”
“Wildflower, I feel exactly the same way. I want to just disappear,” Keith replied. “Also, I'm also in central Florida... we should talk.” Suffice to say, Keith had a years long history of trying to lure people to his home, a history which seemed to corroborate his chilling claim of having killed before.
After confirming the information I’d been given about the matter was real and verifiable, I shared it with my small research team. It was time to start digging. We would soon learn that Sanctioned Suicide wasn’t the only website Keith used to lure people to his home in hopes of cannibalizing them on video. Our investigation was about to get a lot darker.
It didn’t take my research partner, Paul, very long to unravel Keith’s massive online footprint. He had two primary usernames that he used for almost everything and made it easy to confirm his identity. This is how we were able to chase down the link between Keith’s telecommunications LLC and a concerning network of websites that he owned – a network called the Ariana Society.
The description on the Ariana Society website read, The Ariana Society is a VIP online membership club offering an extensive selection of features, benefits, and exotic and adult content. With various plans and membership options, there is something for everyone. Something about the webpage just felt off. Ariana Society offered vague services including exotic travel, yoga classes, and restricted chat rooms. A Facebook page, last updated in January 2022, featured innocuous yoga and marketing services along with “Society” brand coffee available for purchase.
The Ariana Society boasted a members-only private community to “make connections, close deals, make friends or just talk.” The site further claimed that all facilities were private, secure and fully encrypted. The website’s contact page offered a phone number with an Orlando, FL area code. The contact person – Keith.
The membership packages available on the website offered access to exclusive content. The “Black Metal” level membership cost $399.00 per year and boasted full digital access to the entire Ariana Network. The perks included a Black Metal membership card, an exclusive luxury Ariana Society wristwatch, a free 3-Day/2-Night and a free 8-Day/7-Night Travel Certificate to an undisclosed location, restaurant and grocery savings vouchers, and a $100 gift card to something called The Vore Store. For the unfamiliar, vore refers to a fetish in which the person fantasizes about being eaten, eating others, watching people eat others, and watching people eat various objects, which sometimes includes living animals.
The Ariana Society site also linked to four affiliated pages with fetish content. Each site featured paid members-only access and therefore couldn’t be explored in any detail. That was fine with me. I was certain I didn’t want to.
The first affiliated page featured goldfish swallowing – fetish content that revolved around young men and women swallowing live goldfish (a type of content I was happily unfamiliar with leading up to this investigation.) A Twitter account connected to the page featured people doing just that, among them, girls from the Philippines who appeared to be very young.
The next site was called Ariana Girls – The original exotic content site, Ariana Girls brings you face to face with the beautiful, amazing models of the Ariana Network. This site was also paywalled. Another was called Hot Teen Bellies – Features hot, candid teens in bikinis. The description of the site clarified that underage models are prominently featured, but do not appear nude.
The last of the four sites featured crushing content. “Crushing” involves models stepping on items with bare feet and crushing them. This type of fetish frequently features live animals being crushed to death in this manner. As animal crush videos are illegal, I had a glimmer of hope that we might have a chance to get Keith investigated.
The Ariana Network had a good amount of what appeared to be coded language and innocuous descriptions designed to hide the more sinister content. Interestingly, the history of the Ariana network dated back to at least 2006, when Keith operated a BBS site called “Ariana Interface”. Further analysis of Keith’s online footprint revealed that he had been trying to find a way to circumvent US law by hosting an offshore server for an escort website – an action that would have broken federal law. Then there were Keith’s frequent trips to Central America, the Ariana Society’s offer for travel vouchers to undisclosed locations, the sexualized teens on his website, and so on.
The Epstein vibes were off the charts. And man, I hate to say it, but our investigation just got worse from there.
Seriously, this is a warning. You may want to skip this part if you are particularly squeamish.
That’s when we started to find the cannibalism connections. Ariana Society was connected to a message board called Her Stomach. One board was titled, “RL Vore & Cannibalism – The real stuff, including cannibalism. You can also arrange meetups here.” In December 2019, Keith posted a comment to this site asking how to upload a video.
Paul used OSINT tools to analyze Keith’s email address, searching the Dark Web, document sharing platforms, Whois data, public data leaks and other archived sites. He located Keith’s email in an index of Usenet groups, indicating that Keith downloaded an mbox file named “alt-sex-snuff-cannibalism.mbox" An mbox is a way to drop encoded files which could then be decoded by an external application.
According to descriptions of the Usenet group, “alt-sex-snuff-cannibalism” was a group that could be used to commit suicide by cannibalism. The inclusion of the word “snuff” indicates that the file contained a video of a murder. Given this information, the download of the mbox file from this Usenet group provides strong evidence that Keith was a user of a group which shared films depicting murder and cannibalism, potentially with a sexual component. The specific purpose of the Usenet group was to locate individuals willing to die and offer themselves to cannibals.
Keith also joined a notorious gore website called Cute Dead Guys in 2018 under the same name he used on Sanctioned Suicide. His bio read, “Always wanted to be snuffed and eaten (not necessarily in that order). Role play or real. I’m in the Orlando area but can travel for the right person.” In February of 2020, he posted that he had found a girl who was willing to eat him. And in March of that same year, he provided an update that the two had confirmed their plan and were attempting to find a 3rd party willing to help.
Keith was also a member of two gay escort service websites. On the website Rent Men, which advertised itself as a hub for pornstar performers and gay masseurs looking to sell services, Keith offered sexual services for sale with a bio that stated, “Open Minded | Will Do Anything. White bear guy here, always feel comfortable with me no matter what you're into.”
On a website called Breeding Zone, Keith’s bio read, “FL. Neg, Recently Tested. Bottom”. Between October 2015 and July 2016, Keith posted several times on this site expressing an interest in meeting HIV positive men for sex in the Orlando, FL area. In a comment to a post titled, “Cum Dump Party” Keith invited another user to Club O in Orlando, FL and said he was particularly interested if the user was “Poz”, a slang for HIV positive. In another post, Keith stated that he just started having sex with men in 2015 and was open to “all loads”, in reference to his willingness to have sex with an HIV positive man. Keith also used the site to organize a “group pozzing party”.
Keith appeared to be intentionally seeking out HIV positive gay men. Was this part of his “ethical cannibalism” fetish? Did he, perhaps, see HIV positive men as being equivalent to suicidal people in regard to the value of their lives? Or maybe Keith was genuinely interested in contracting the virus as a form of self-harm. In April of 2022, Keith replied to a post on Sanctioned Suicide regarding HIV contraction as a form of suicide, stating it is “a lot harder to contract HIV than you’d imagine”. He referred to a community of individuals called “bug chasers” who he described as gay men intentionally trying to contract HIV.
Regardless of Keith’s intrinsic motives, one thing was for certain - he had been using fringe websites to lure people to his Florida home in hopes of cannibalizing them for years. His first documented encounter with Seminole County police took place in 2007, when he attempted to hire a woman to murder him. That woman turned out to be a confidential informant, and Keith was able to successfully convince police he was only playing out a sexual fantasy and had no intention of following it through.
Later that same year, Keith was again questioned by police after he used Craigslist to solicit a woman to shoot him as part of an erotic fantasy. Once again, no action was taken by the police. Several years later, Keith joined the gay escort websites and began actively pursuing HIV positive homosexuals to lure to his home for sex. And in 2018, Keith joined Sanctioned Suicide, where he sought out suicidal users looking for a person to help them end their lives.
Rehashing this saga today, I’m faced with the same levels of shock and outright disbelief as I felt while uncovering it the first time. I remember sitting in front of my computer with my face contorted into an expression of sheer horror for hours at a time. I joked with Paul that I worried my face might freeze that way.
As we continued to peel back the layers of Keith’s morbid online footprint, we began to reveal a link to another infamous cannibal – a serial killer, in fact, who preyed almost exclusively on gay men in Toronto. A man by the name of Bruce MacArthur.
Part 3: To Catch a Cannibal
When you think of a serial killer, you might picture a shadowy figure lurking in dark alleys, not a jovial landscaper who moonlights as a mall Santa. But Bruce McArthur, a 66-year-old grandfather from Toronto, was ultimately revealed to be Canada’s most prolific serial killer, responsible for the murders of eight men between 2010 and 2017.Bruce McArthur seemed like a normal guy. Born in 1951 in rural Ontario, he grew up in a small farming community and married his high school sweetheart. He worked as a salesman for a Canadian clothing company, raised two kids, and later got into landscaping after moving to Toronto. By all accounts, he was a friendly, unassuming figure – someone who posted cat pictures and anti-Trump memes on Facebook, dressed up as Santa at a local mall, and ran a small landscaping business. But beneath this wholesome facade, McArthur was living a double life.
McArthur’s killing spree took place in Toronto’s vibrant LGBTQ+ community, an area known as the Gay Village. In November of 2012, Toronto police launched Project Houston – a task force which was assembled to investigate the disappearance of three missing men from the Gay Village - Skandaraj Navaratnam, Abdulbasir Faizi and Majeed Kayhan. All three men were homosexual and of Middle Eastern descent, and all three went missing in a similarly suspicious fashion. These unusual details ultimately alerted Toronto police to the possibility of a serial killer.
McArthur was a fixture in the Gay Village, socializing in the bars and clubs of Church and Wellesley since at least the late 1990s. He was known to have had a romantic relationship with Skandaraj Navaratnam, and yet, when police interviewed community members about McArthur’s possible connection to his disappearance, they described McArthur as an ordinary gay man, and the last person anyone suspected of being a predator. That’s what made his crimes so insidious: he blended in, gaining the trust of men who were marginalized and struggling with their sexuality.
The Village was a safe haven for many of these men – a place where they could be themselves away from societal judgment or family expectations. But Bruce McArthur turned this sanctuary into a hunting ground. His method was brutal yet calculated. He lured his victims – most of them men he met through dating apps or in bars – to his apartment or other locations, where he sexually assaulted, strangled, and dismembered them.
Some victims were posed post-mortem in degrading ways, with McArthur photographing them in fur coats or with cigars in their mouths before stashing the images as trophies on his computer. He hid their remains in large garden planters at properties where he worked as a landscaper, a practical choice for a man whose job gave him access to sprawling suburban yards.
Navaratnam, McArthur’s first known victim, disappeared in September 2010 after leaving a gay bar. Abdulbasir Faizi vanished a few months later, last seen at a bathhouse in the Village. Majeed Kayhan went missing in 2012, followed by others over the years. The disappearances sparked fear in the community, with rumors of a serial killer circulating as early as 2010. But the Toronto Police were slow to act, initially dismissing the idea of a serial killer and attributing the disappearances to the lifestyles of the victims, many of whom used dating apps or lived double lives to conceal their sexual identities from their friends and families.
In 2012, two years after the disappearance of Navaratnam, Toronto police received a tip from an anonymous source in Switzerland which led them to uncover a sordid network of online cannibals. The Swiss tipster told police that he had chatted on a website with a self-proclaimed cannibal who bragged about killing and cannibalizing Toronto-area men.
Suddenly, police found themselves chasing a lead that sounded like something straight out of a horror movie. The website in question was called Zambian Meat, a forum where users fantasized about torturing and eating people. One user, going by “Chefmate50,” claimed to have killed and eaten a man in Toronto, specifically mentioning someone named “Skanda,” which matched Skandaraj Navaratnam’s nickname. The user was traced to a man named James Alex Brunton, a 65-year-old retiree from Peterborough, Ontario.
Now facing the possibility of a cannibal serial killer, police launched Project Houston, named after the phrase “Houston, we have a problem,” to investigate. Detectives even flew to Switzerland to interview the source; a man named Markus Dubach who had previously helped Swiss police catch another cannibal serial killer in Europe.
The investigation into Brunton was intense. Police discovered he had exchanged nude photos with minors and engaged in graphic online chats about torture and cannibalism. They also briefly considered whether Luka Magnotta, the infamous Montreal murderer who killed and dismembered a man in 2012, might be linked, as he had worked as a dancer at a Toronto strip club and lived near Brunton’s hometown during his teens.
But after months of surveillance and interviews, the police concluded that Brunton’s cannibalism fantasies were just that – fantasies. There was no evidence linking him or Magnotta to the disappearances, and there wasn’t sufficient evidence to indicate Brunton had ever actually followed through with his cannibalistic urges. They did, however, have enough evidence to convict Brunton on child pornography charges in 2014. As for the Toronto case, the police found themselves back at square one.
Interestingly, McArthur’s name also surfaced during Project Houston. His email and username, “silverfoxx51,” were found in Navaratnam and Faizi’s computer data, and he was interviewed as a witness in 2013. But with no concrete evidence tying him to the crimes, he slipped through the cracks. The cannibalism lead, while sensational, distracted investigators from the real killer hiding in plain sight.
The turning point came in 2017 with the disappearance of Andrew Kinsman, a well-known figure in the Gay Village. Unlike the other victims, Kinsman’s absence sparked immediate community action, with friends organizing searches and canvassing the neighborhood. His disappearance, coupled with that of another man earlier that year, prompted the Toronto police to launch Project Prism, a new task force. A crucial clue emerged: Kinsman’s calendar had an entry marked “Bruce” on June 26, 2017, the day he vanished. Surveillance footage showed Kinsman getting into a van later traced to McArthur, which contained traces of his blood.
By late 2017, McArthur was under 24-hour surveillance. In January 2018, police moved in when they saw him bring a man to his apartment. Inside, they found the man, Sean Cribbin, chained to a bed – a potential ninth victim who was rescued just in time. The search of McArthur’s apartment uncovered folders of photos of his victims, including post-mortem images, and forensic teams later found dismembered remains in planters at properties linked to his landscaping work. McArthur was arrested on January 18, 2018, and in January 2019, he pleaded guilty to eight counts of first-degree murder. He was sentenced to life in prison with no parole for 25 years.
Online fetish communities like Zambian Meat exist in a murky space where fantasy and reality can blur, making it hard for police to separate credible threats from role-play. The tip about “Chefmate50” was compelling enough to warrant a transatlantic investigation and fortunately resulted in the arrest and conviction of another monster. But detectives who worked on Project Houston said the tip ultimately diverted resources from McArthur. They were quick to debunk the cannibalism rumors, stating there was “no truth to that at all.”
But what about the Swiss informant’s mention of the name, Skanda? Could there have been a connection between some of the victims and the online cannibal fetish community? McArthur was well-known to be involved in some prurient online BDSM scenes, and by the time his victims were unearthed from the property where he crudely buried them in planters, many of the remains were years old and reduced to skeletons. I guess it’s worth pointing out that while detectives couldn’t prove McArthur cannibalized his victims, they couldn’t necessarily disprove it, either. Nor would they necessarily be inclined to try. After all, both Brunton and McArthur were locked away in maximum security prison, and the detectives were probably more than a bit eager to purge the sordid details from their memories.
Enter Keith.
Keith was an ordinary, unassuming middle-aged man with a steady job and an apparently normal life. Keith preyed on gay men who he found in sketchy online forums and at clubs in the Orlando area. Keith was a member of several cannibal forums, where he hunted for willing victims, engaged in role-playing discourse, and even uploaded snuff films – potentially of his own making. Keith claimed to have killed and eaten two people, and there was plenty of evidence of him succeeding in luring a number of people to his home in Florida. And Keith’s sadistic online activities took place between 2006 and present day, a time period during which he would have likely run across Brunton and others like him in the same network.
I pulled myself away from my computer screen and peered 1000 yards at the wall 2 feet in front of my face. There is a network of cannibals. Not just a singular serial killer. A network. As in, more than a few.
After forcibly snapping myself back to reality, I decided to go get some fresh air.
***
The next few weeks went by as usual. During this period, every free moment of my time was spent researching Sanctioned Suicide, incels, accelerationism and mass shootings. Meanwhile, Seminole County police dropped the charges against Jenny and transported her back to Chicago to stand trial for her unlawful entry charges. The strange investigation into Kannibal Keith, while still heavy on my mind, was mostly drowned out by more pressing issues. That is, until I got a message.
A major media outlet, tipped off to the case against Keith by Jenny’s friends, had decided to get a head start on a podcast about her ordeal. The fact that they jumped the gun so early – without even waiting for an arrest – told me everything I needed to know. “Suicide by cannibal” had the potential to be a very hot topic.
I couldn’t really blame them. It would certainly make for an enthralling podcast, and it was sensational enough on its own that it needed no embellishment. During my first Zoom call with the journalist, Jeff*, he made it clear that his main goal was to tell Jenny‘s story and link it to Sanctioned Suicide – a noble cause in my mind. I hated that website more than anything at the time.
But there was a catch. They didn’t just want a static retelling of Jenny’s ordeal. They wanted Keith, too. The obvious hurdle would be getting him to talk, and the solution that Jeff proposed was a honeypot operation. The concept was quite simple. He needed someone to get on a sock account, engage with Keith on one of his preferred websites, and offer to show up at his home as a willing sacrifice.
To Catch A Cannibal: Season 1, Episode 1. Starring BX.
To make things even easier, Jeff had already created a sock account on a particularly nasty cannibal site and began engaging with a user he believed to be Keith. On the sock, Jeff was pretending to be a suicidal woman in her mid-30s looking for a creative way to end it all.
“So this person is posting a lot about cannibalism and helping people with suicide,” Jeff said. “You’ll see a ‘Susan White’ in one of the comments. That’s me.” Though Jeff’s target claimed his name was Steve, he also claimed to be a white man in his 50s who lived near Orlando, and his MO matched that of Keith’s to a T. It was certainly possible, if not extremely likely, that “Steve” was actually Keith.
“He immediately DM’d,” Jeff continued. “I said I was in Atlanta considering suicide. He has been emailing daily and is very keen to help. I either fly to him or he flies to me. I’ve slowed things down by saying there are some things I need to sort out, to put right, before I go. So we can go slowly.”
Jeff handed me the email login information for Susan White’s sock account, and I promptly fired up my Virtual Machine to catch up on the emails he’d already exchanged with Steve. My blood went cold when I read the first message Steve sent:
My curiosity was certainly piqued. I logged onto the cannibal fetish website and located Steve’s profile. The Bio read “In search of meat”. The About Me read, “Here to explore the mind at all it's limits... To interpret pain as pleasure for mutual satisfaction… To sacrifice flesh in return as reward... To take you through the dark, right to where you need to be, with a kiss...”
Steve’s account boasted a 1-year achievement badge. His user activity revealed he had reached out to multiple other members in his search for a suitable victim and had also posted many disturbing images and videos on the site (the kind of things I’m not even sure I can write about here, at the risk of conjuring them back into my memory.) One image in particular was of a document titled, Body Donation Form which read, “Livestock Application: Human Female Livestock Owners Association; USDA CHOICE LOVE ROASTERS, PRIME CUTS & SNUFF SLAVES.” There was an email address as well as a physical address located in Milwaukee on the form. At the bottom of the form was a computer-generated image of a naked woman impaled end-to-end on a skewer.
Steve’s Favorites tab revealed multiple pornographic thumbnails that were BDSM themed. The Galleries tab was similarly themed, and contained a computer-generated image titled, “Volunteer” which depicted a woman being subjected to sexual violence. A link in that image led to something even more shocking – an animation of a naked, hog-tied woman roasting on a skewer. The caption read, “Are You Considering SUICIDE? We can help. The Human Female Livestock Owners Association.”
The post had 33 comments, and Steve had responded to some of them the way an advertiser would: “We can make all your fantasies come true.” I shuddered when I read the word, ‘We’.
Later that day, I sent the profile with all the associated info to Paul to see what else he could uncover. Paul immediately doubted the profile belonged to Keith. He pointed out that Steve’s profile said he was straight, whereas Keith had never been shy about disclosing his identity as a gay/bisexual man.
“It’s a cover. It’s got to be him,” I argued. “He’s been trying to convince the sock account to fly to meet him, saying he lives 40 minutes away from Disney World. I mean really, how many men in Orlando are cannibals looking for suicidal victims on weird gore websites? Hopefully only one. Hopefully…”
“I don't think it's him,” Paul insisted. “I'll look more in a bit.”
“If there is a network of cannibals I swear to God I am moving to the mountains and getting rid of the Internet completely,” I lamented.
Paul replied in his usual matter of fact tone: “You know there is. Lol.”
***
The next day, Paul wrapped up his assessment of the profile by definitively concluding that Steve was not Keith. “I've looked at everything and lost my appetite for lunch. Anyways, I don't think it's him, but I could be wrong. They could always bait him and fake a no-show if it's not him,” he said, referring to Jeff’s honeypot plan.
Or maybe, I mused, it would be just as useful to catch another cannibal in the act. If we can’t get the one we are after, maybe showing the audience that there is more than one would work just as well. Jeff agreed with this sentiment. Our strategy shifted from linking the account to Keith to linking the account with its rightful owner.
Jeff had already had a few conversations with Steve before I took over the account. Steve opened up only slightly to the Susan White sock, claiming to be a simple mechanic who sometimes helped his farmer friends out with their slaughters. But Steve was hesitant to speak with Susan White much further via email and insisted she download WhatsApp to continue working out their plan. Among other things, Steve said he wanted some pictures of Susan to determine what size car he would need to dispose of her body.
It was all so morbid, yet so comical. I was having a hard time coming to terms with the fact that I was at least a little excited to be involved. So, without further hesitation, Jeff sent me an Amazon gift card and instructed me to go to the store to buy a burner phone, install WhatsApp, and continue my deep dive.
Immediately upon contacting Steve on WhatsApp, he added me to a group chat called Butchering, Life Management. I jotted down his phone number and ran it through my people finder database. I instantly got a hit. Steve Labelle - a mechanic from Florida. I was shocked. Steve hadn’t even attempted to hide his identity from me or anyone else. He had a public LinkedIn profile that showed he once worked for Lockheed Martin (because of course he did). His Facebook profile featured pictures of what appeared to be a happy and normal looking Midwestern family consisting of Steve, his wife, and two teenage children.
The wife beamed in her public Facebook photos. With her blue eyes, fair skin, and blonde hair fashioned in a dated, Farrah Fawcett haircut, she was practically the poster girl for a housewife at your friendly neighborhood social club (and this, Ladies and Gentlemen, is why I no longer participate in potlucks.)
“They look like they would invite you in for a home-cooked meal before turning you into meal prep,” I joked to Jeff. Jeff admitted to being slightly disappointed that Steve was not Keith, however, he asked me to keep baiting Steve anyways in hope that he would incriminate himself enough to justify a meet-up.
So, that’s exactly what I did. Steve started our conversation convinced I was a federal agent trying to entrap him, but he began to warm up to me as our conversation progressed throughout the day. That night, I had trouble sleeping. I’d been involved with deep cover operations before, including the time I joined a cult as part of a PI gig, but nothing as sordid as this. It made me feel sick to my stomach every time I sent Steve a message, and every time he responded, the hairs on the back of my neck stood straight up.
I was very hesitant to send Steve the pictures he asked for. I don’t think I’ve ever taken such out-of-focus, dimly lit pictures in my life. He protested that I was fully clothed and that my phone was obscuring my face. No way, buddy, I thought to myself. This is all you will ever get. Our conversation didn’t go much further. I thought Steve was the most revolting person I’d ever investigated, and Steve was convinced I was an undercover fed. So, Jeff and I decided to hit pause on the operation, with hopes of resuming our project in the future when Jenny was in a better position to collaborate.
Writing this article series has been a rollercoaster of emotions coming back. In remembering this misadventure, I’m experiencing the same exact feelings I did when I was in the moment. Shock, horror, disgust, but simultaneously shaking my head and laughing at the absurdity of it all. I now live with the knowledge that the cannibal rabbit hole goes far deeper than I ever imagined. I live with the knowledge that these cannibals look just like your normal, suburban neighbors. But most importantly, I live with the knowledge that Kannibal Keith is still out there… and he isn’t alone.
