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Amid the sprawling nature of southeastern Idaho lies the burgeoning city of Pocatello. It is situated on the edge of the Snake River Plain, bordered by the scenic Rocky Mountains, swooping up toward the sky. It is a place known for its mixture of nature, business, farming, and education.
The corporate headquarters of several multinational companies find their home in Pocatello. Large-scale agriculture sweeps across the Snake River Valley and, in the heart of Pocatello, lies Idaho State University, which draws thousands of students from around the world in pursuit of higher education. Over the years, Pocatello has blossomed into one of the larger cities in a state categorized largely by small towns and farming communities.
But even as it has grown, it has managed to maintain its charming small-town atmosphere throughout the community. On September 22, 2006, the autumn season was just beginning in Pocatello, which promised to usher in Idaho's annual changing of the leaves into reds and oranges and browns. The school year had just begun a few weeks prior, and the students at Pocatello High School were settling into a new year
Among them was Cassie Jo Stoddart, a 16-year-old starting her junior year. That Friday was an ordinary day for Cassie, much like those of many high school students across the United States. She went to school, attended her classes, completed classwork, and saw her friends at school. Friday pulsed with the anticipation of the weekend for the high school students, who would be looking forward to having the next couple days off from classes and coursework.
It was no different for Cassie. The weekend promised a break from school and, on this weekend in particular, she had some fun plans. That afternoon, Cassie's mother picked her up from school and dropped her off at her aunt and uncle's house in Pocatello.
Cassie was a trustworthy teenager, and her aunt and uncle often turned to her for babysitting needs. They had offered to hire her to house-sit for them, while they were out of town for the weekend so she could take care of their three cats and two dogs, while also looking after their property. For a teenager, the opportunity to house-sit presents an exciting prospect to gain some degree of freedom.
For a high school student like Cassie, having a house to herself provided her with the opportunity to have her own space for the weekend away from home. She could organize a hangout, invite a few friends over to spend time with her, and experience life out of her parents' house for a couple days. As most teenage students would, Cassie embraced the opportunity.
That Friday night, Cassie invited her boyfriend, Matt Beckham, to the house. She then invited two other friends from school, who were Brian Draper and Tori Adamczyk, to watch a movie with them. They settled down in the living room for a quiet evening, deciding to watch Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill Vol. 2. But before the movie ended, Brian and Tori left the house, deciding instead to go to the local movie theater to catch another film.
Matt stayed with Cassie to continue to watch television in the living room. It was late at night when strange events began to occur in the house. First, as the couple watched television, they started to hear loud noises downstairs in the basement. Suddenly, the power went out, thrusting Cassie and Matt into darkness. After a brief power outage, the lights flickered back on.
Even after the power returned and the lights came back on, Cassie, understandably, was spooked. She was not the only one. One of the dogs in the house that Cassie was caring for also seemed uneasy, as it became fixated on the basement stairs and occasionally barked and growled. Noticing that both his girlfriend and the dog were on edge, Matt was concerned.
He did not want to leave his girlfriend alone in the house, so he called his mother to ask if he could spend the night with Cassie to make her feel more secure. Matt's mother did not like the idea, but she did offer that Cassie could come home with them and stay at their house for the night so she would not be alone in her aunt and uncle's house overnight.
However, Cassie was a responsible girl and felt obligated to remain in the house while her aunt and uncle were away so that she could complete the task for which they had hired her. She did not want to leave the pets alone. So Cassie opted to remain in the house alone for the night. Around 10:30, she said goodbye to her boyfriend as her mother picked him up, leaving the house empty, except for Cassie and the animals. Or so she thought.
As Matt drove off with his mother, neither of them knew that this final interaction would be the last time Matt would see Cassie alive. Within an hour, she would be dead. Cassie returned to the couch in the living room, but it did not take long for eerie occurrences to begin to unfold again within the house. The lights flickered out again in another freak power outage. A closet door near the top of the basement staircase slammed, seemingly on its own.
Suddenly, intruders were upon Cassie and began to attack her, stabbing her again and again. She fought back, but to no avail. She was overpowered. When the attackers were through with their brutal act, Cassie lay on the couch, motionless and bleeding out. She had 30 deep lacerations across her body, with 12 fatal wounds, including one that sliced through the right ventricle of her heart.
which caused her to bleed out and die rapidly. Once they were sure the deed was done and that she would indeed succumb to her injuries, the intruders fled the scene. Around 12:30 a.m., Matt called Cassie to check in on her, but the phone continued to ring. She never picked up. For the next two days, no one heard from Cassie.
On Sunday, September 24th, Cassie's aunt and uncle and their three children returned from their weekend trip and were greeted with an unexpected and grisly sight. Their own daughter, only 13 years old, found Cassie's body sprawled in the living room. Cassie was still lying on the floor beside the couch where her murderers had left her, drenched in blood and covered in slash wounds.
their niece had been murdered and their house had become a gruesome crime scene. Shock rippled through the family, the student body of Pocatello High School and the community beyond. Now, it was up to the police to determine how a well-loved teenager, alone in a house in the small town community of Pocatello, had become the victim of a heinous stabbing.
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Part 1. Revisiting Cassie's Final Hangout The case was a baffling one from the start for the community of Bocatello and its police force.
Even those in the community who had not personally known Cassie were visibly shaken. Pocatello was just a small dot on the map of the United States. For those who lived there, crime was a rarity, and fatal crimes like Cassie's murder were especially unheard of. They simply did not happen in places like Pocatello… until now. Beyond that, details of the case did not seem to add up for investigators.
They could find no evidence, no murder weapon, and no sign of forced entry in the house. Yet somehow, a teenager alone in the house had ended up dead. At the beginning, the police had nothing. They had no leads about how the intruders gained entry to the house. Nor did they have any ideas about the motive for the crime. By all accounts, Cassie was a shining example of a teenager bound for success. She was a straight-A student and took school seriously.
She had plans to go to college one day after she graduated high school. She was liked by classmates and friends, and she was known for being kind, smart, and pretty. As far as investigators could see, she had no clear enemies. So why would anyone want to kill her? The law enforcement officers assigned to the case began their investigation with the most obvious question: Who was the last person to see Cassie alive?
The answer, of course, was that Matt, her boyfriend, was the last known person to have seen and interacted with her when he left her house around 10:30, which was within an hour of her murder. Police started with him. When police arrived at Matt's house to deliver the tragic news about his girlfriend's murder, Matt did not show much emotion in response to the news, which made them somewhat suspicious. Could Matt have been involved in his girlfriend's death?
to rule out Matt as a suspect, law enforcement officers decided to give him a polygraph test. The test revealed that Matt was telling the truth. He had not been involved in the murder, but his interview would provide valuable information about Cassie's final hours. As investigators questioned Matt about that night, he shared that he had gone to the house to spend the evening with Cassie, but he informed them that he had not been the only one there.
Matt revealed that friends and fellow classmates, Brian and Tori, had also made a brief appearance at the house to catch part of Kill Bill Vol. 2, before heading off to watch another movie at the local theater. In fact, Matt said he even called Tori's cell phone after he left Cassie at the house to see what Tori and Brian were up to so they could potentially hang out later. But Tori was whispering on the other end of the line, and Matt could not hear him.
so Matt assumed they were in the movie theater as they had planned and hung up. Naturally, investigators decided to interview the other two teenagers confirmed to have seen Cassie alive that evening. They asked both Brian and Tori about visiting Cassie at the house before leaving to see a movie at the theater. However, when police asked about the movie the two boys said they had seen at the theater, a curious thing happened.
Neither Brian nor Tori could tell the investigators anything about the plot of the movie they had supposedly watched on the big screen only several days prior. Investigators followed up with the movie theater to check if the two boys had indeed seen a movie that night. Interestingly enough, an employee who had been working during that time was also a fellow Pocatello High School student, was sure neither Brian nor Tori had visited the movie theater Friday evening.
The boy's bizarre case of short-term memory loss, coupled with the employee's statement, raised major red flags for police investigators. There was no question that Brian Draper and Tory Adamchuk were lying to authorities. But why would they do such a thing? What did they have to hide? The police decided to catch Brian in his lie. When police pointed out that they knew he was lying, Brian changed his story. He admitted that he and Tory had lied.
But he said they had done so because they had been committing another crime, just not the one investigators thought. Brian claimed they had been breaking into cars instead of going to see a movie, and that they had lied to the police about their actions that night to avoid getting in trouble for their illegal activities. But police investigators were not convinced. Brian had already lied once. How could they be sure he was not lying to their faces again? They refused to take his word for it. Instead,
They once again resorted to the most surefire method they had at their disposal for getting the truth out of the suspects involved in the case. They scheduled another polygraph test, this time for Brian. As Brian learned that he was to undergo a polygraph test, he became more uneasy. The police began to prep the polygraph test, but as Brian sat in the room with his parents to wait for the test, he became visibly nervous and emotional.
The pressure of the lies and the looming test were getting to him. Right before he was set to take the polygraph test, Brian broke down and asked to speak to the detectives on the case. He had something to confess. The police once more heard an account of the events of the night of Cassie's murder, only this time it was from a different perspective. They retraced the occurrences of that evening through Brian's eyes.
Brian recounted his brief visit with Tori to the house where Cassie was house-sitting to watch "Kill Bill Vol. 2." Only Brian included a detail that Matt had not been aware of. During their visit, Brian and Tori had a much more nefarious agenda than simply watching a Quentin Tarantino movie with friends. Cassie showed them around the house during their visit, and the two boys mentally mapped out the layout of the house, which would serve their purposes later in the evening.
Then, before leaving the premises, unbeknownst to Cassie and Matt, Brian had snuck downstairs to the basement and unlocked the basement door to provide an easy access route for he and Tori to use to sneak back into the home secretly later that night. Brian admitted that, as the police had suspected, he and Tori had neither gone to a movie nor participated in a petty crime like breaking into cars. Both stories were lies.
Instead, they had returned to the neighborhood of the house where Cassie was house-sitting a short time later and parked a ways down the street. There, they changed into outfits comprised of dark clothing, gloves, and white masks. Worse, they each brought a hunting knife they had purchased from a pawn shop several weeks prior. Now that they were dressed for the part and armed with sharp weapons, they set their plan in motion.
Brian and Tori returned to the house when Matt was still there, watching television upstairs with Cassie. The two boys slipped through the unlocked basement door, successfully entering the house undetected. In an effort to lure Matt and Cassie downstairs, they generated the loud noises the couple had heard, and then they attempted to coax the couple down to the basement by shutting the power off in the house through the circuit breaker in the basement.
Matt and Cassie had not come downstairs as the two boys had hoped, so Brian and Tori switched the power back on. After Matt left late that night, Cassie was finally alone in the house. Brian and Tori messed with the circuit breaker again, but still Cassie remained upstairs in the living room.
Finally, tired of waiting for their prey to come to them, the two boys ventured upstairs themselves, opening and slamming a door on the way to instill more fear in an already spooked Cassie. As a now emotional Brian relayed his story, he claimed that the temporary power outages, the costumes, and the knives were all meant to scare Cassie. But Brian alleged that he had never wished to actually harm her.
In fact, he told investigators that he was shocked when his accomplice, Tori, began to actually stab and kill Cassie. Tears streamed down Brian's face as he told the police that the horrific events that had occurred were just a joke that had gone too far. It was supposed to be a simple prank intended to scare a friend, only it had ended with her dead on the ground. By then, it was too late to go back in time to undo what they did.
Now that he had confessed in his part in the murder, Brian caved completely and brought investigators to a spot near a local recreation and nature area called Black Rock Canyon. He and Tori had buried key evidence from the murder there after they had stabbed Cassie to death. There, the police found the clothes and masks that the two teenagers had worn during the murder, as well as the knives used as murder weapons. The evidence was just as Draper had indicated in his story.
The two killers involved in the incident had been caught, but the case was far from over. There was much left to be uncovered, and the answers lay in the other few pieces of evidence found at the spot near Black Rock Canyon. Oddly enough, investigators found a camera and burned videotapes buried with the murder weapons and clothes.
With the discovery of these pieces of evidence, the police had a new angle to investigate in this murder that would once more prove Brian a liar and make it clear that what happened to Cassie Jo Stoddart was much more than a cruel joke gone terribly wrong. Part 2: The Makings of a Real-Life Slasher Film The police now had an intriguing new group of items in their possession as potential evidence.
a series of burned videotapes that had been buried in the dirt of a remote nature area by two 16-year-old murderers who had killed their classmate and friend. But the evidence was damaged. The first question that investigators had to answer was if the tapes could even be salvaged, or if the burn damage had compromised the tapes to an irretrievable extent.
They set to work on retrieving the data from the videotapes and, luckily, they were able to recover the footage. Interestingly, the video footage, shot by Brian and Tori themselves, dated back to long before the night that Cassie lost her life and provided insight into a much larger and shocking story than a prank gone wrong.
Brian and Tori had met each other as classmates at Pocatello High School, and they developed a close friendship rooted largely in their shared love of film. They especially loved horror films, and they often watched horror movies during their hangouts. They had a particular interest in the 1996 cult favorite film, Scream. When Scream hit the theaters in 1996, it became an instant classic in the horror genre.
Prior to its release, the horror film industry, particularly the slasher subgenre, was plagued with drawn-out franchises that grew tiring quickly. But Scream was different. It was self-aware, unlike any horror movie before.
it balanced a nod to past films in the horror genre while also, from many perspectives, revitalizing the horror genre with a fresh slasher franchise that brought something new to the table rather than falling back on the usual tropes. The movie follows a small-town teenage girl whose mother was murdered a year before
During the movie, a masked killer known as Ghostface sporting the now iconic white painted Scream mask aims to hunt down and kill her and her friends by playing a dangerous game inspired by former scary movies. The lead girl and the victims are all high school students who struggle to outwit and unmask the killer throughout a tense runtime of 1 hour and 40 minutes.
Horror is a popular film genre, and many moviegoers and film aficionados enjoy the adrenaline rush and chills running up their spine. However, it is contained in the world of fantasy, and moviegoers can remain grounded knowing they are secure in their movie theater seats, out of reach of the story unfolding on the screen before them.
There is a distinct, and, for the horror genre, comforting, line between reality and film that allows most moviegoers to walk out of a theater and back into their ordinary lives after experiencing the rollercoaster of jump scares and gore packed into a horror film. But for Bryan and Tori, their enjoyment of horror films grew into an obsession.
They had an intense fascination with the macabre and, as the school year kicked off in September 2006, and they began their junior year alongside their soon-to-be victim, Cassie Jo Stoddart, the line between reality and fiction blurred for the two teenagers. They decided to yank elements from the horror genre into their own lives and imitate their hero from their favorite film.
Unfortunately, their hero was not the victims in the movie Scream. Rather, it was the monster who hunted down and murdered the high school students in the film. Inspired by the masked killer in the film, Brian and Tori realized they could make their own story in their high school environment, modeling it based on the events of Scream. They set off to make their own horror film. It would be a slasher movie, like Scream.
and as in most horror movies, it would end in death and pain for an undeserving victim. The videotapes that Brian and Tori had attempted to burn contained detailed footage of their actions that month leading up to the night they killed Cassie, which they foolishly recorded, providing a look into their step-by-step process for committing the murder.
The two teenagers decided that, like the screen villain, they aspired to pick off and kill their classmates one by one. To determine who they would kill, they wrote a long death list of targets in their school library and, unfortunately, they placed their friend Cassie Jo Stoddart at the top. A disturbing recording from the day before Cassie's death displays Brian speaking while filming.
In the tape, he acts as if Cassie's murder is unavoidable, saying, The premeditation was unmistakable.
Brian and Tori knew that Cassie would be house-sitting that Friday night, and they plotted to kill her and any friends she had with her, planning to transform any hangout Cassie would have into what Tori referred to as a slaughterhouse. The recordings also displayed another layer to the motive of the two teenagers turned killers, beyond their fixation on classic horror films.
They had a strange reason for carrying out the killing that centered around a wayward perspective of other killers in general. It is widely accepted that people denounce the damage that serial killers bring upon victims, families, friends, loved ones, and society as a whole. But Brian Draper and Tory Adamchuk were different. They did not adopt this traditional view of serial killers at all. Rather, they were fascinated by them.
and even inspired by them. They desired to become notorious serial killers. In a chilling revelation, it seemed as though perhaps they never intended to get away with their crimes at all. The way they spoke seemed to indicate that they wanted to be remembered for their actions and for the pain they inflicted. They wanted to be infamous. Or in Brian's words recorded on tape the day before the murder, "They were gonna go down in history."
The next night, they donned their white masks and black clothes, inspired by the white mask and dark clothes of the killer in screen, and carried out their vicious attack on their unknowing victim. The videotapes featured a chilling and methodical premeditated process, with scenes sequenced almost as if they were making their own true crime documentary about a crime they were about to commit.
It even included footage of Cassie at their high school, greeting the camera with a cheerful hello, oblivious to the nefarious reason for the filming. The tape also contained a chilling apology from before they carried out the murder, with Draper speaking to the camera. "I'm sorry to Cassie's family, but she had to be the one," he says. "We have to stick to the plan."
They also filmed themselves directly before and after committing the murder, with Draper recording himself in the car as they waited to re-enter the basement of the house and saying: "Unfortunately, we have the grueling task of killing our friends." At one point during filming, one of them even acknowledged that what they were doing was wrong and disgusting, saying that they were sick psychopaths who get pleasure out of killing other people.
After the teenagers fled the scene of the crime, they ran back to their car and immediately filmed their reactions to the murder they had just committed. Quite literally capturing their own confessions on tape, with the adrenaline from the act still pumping through his blood.
Brian looked into the camera and exclaimed excitedly. Stabbed her in the throat and I saw her lifeless body just disappear. Dude, I just killed Cassie. Brian had put on quite the performance when confessing his part in the murder to police, trying to project the bulk of the blame on DeTore, but it seemed he had lied once again.
The videotapes salvaged by investigators were deeply incriminating and shed light on a more disturbing motive than anything the police had originally predicted. This was not a sudden act of passion or anger, or a bad joke gone awry. This was the work of two twisted individuals who wanted to become notorious for taking the lives of others, and not just anyone. They wanted to kill their classmates and friends, who trusted them and spent time with them.
With new evidence that had come into the picture, the police charged both Brian and Tori with first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder. Part 3: The Aftermath of the Scream Killing It took less than a week after Cassie's death for the police to zero in on the killers and charge them. After the two teenagers were arrested and charged for murder, they each turned on the other.
Brian tried to claim he was in the room when the murder occurred, but that Tory took the lead, and that he only joined in when ordered to do so by Tory. However, the police did not need any statements from the two killers once they had the video footage from the tapes. They had each confessed on camera to having a major role in planning and executing the murder.
With the evidence collected in the canyon, the police and prosecution had an open and shut case for both killers. With the two murderers behind bars, the investigators had foiled any further plans to kill the rest of the local students listed as targets on Brian and Tori's death list. But for one young Pocatello resident, the capture of the two teenagers came too late, and because of it, the community was feeling the painful effects.
The Pocatello community was in mourning for Brian and Tori's undeserving victim. About a week after her death, Cassie Jo Stoddart's family held a funeral for the beloved teenager who had lost her life in the horror fantasy killing. 500 people from the Pocatello community went to the funeral, including members of the city that Cassie did not even know personally who wanted to pay their respects to Cassie and her family and loved ones.
Despite the gruesome way in which she lost her life, Stoddart left a legacy as an intelligent, kind, outgoing girl with great plans for her future. Plans that would now never be realized. The trials for the two killers occurred the following year, in 2007, producing easy convictions and additional revelations. Both Brian and Tori were tried as adults because of the severity of the crime.
During the trial, it came to light that they were not only inspired by horror films, but that they also found inspiration for violence and the actions of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the infamous students who carried out the Columbine High School shooting, the well-known Colorado school shooting that left 15 dead in 1999. The defense, pressed into a corner by the overwhelming amount of evidence in favor of the prosecution,
attempted to argue that the video footage filmed by Brian and Tori was simply part of a horror movie that the teenagers intended to make. This weak defense had no effect on the trial. Both Brian and Tori were sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for the homicide and conspiracy to commit murder.
In the years following the trials, each of the killers have made appeals to allow for reconsideration of their rulings and the possibility of parole after three decades of their sentences have been served. However, each of their appeals have been repeatedly denied by the courts, regardless of repeated attempts and expressions of remorse. Part 4: The Legacy of the Scream Killing and Similar Events
Even after the police deduced that the murder of Cassie Jo Stoddart was a horror film fantasy based on Scream, questions still loomed about how two teenagers could descend to such a crime and become enraptured by the idea of killing a classmate and a friend. Could a form of media really wield such a strong influence over the minds of two horror film fans and push them to commit such a brutal act?
The role of media in the creation of killers and other criminals has become an expanding topic of study in psychology, especially in light of crimes such as Stoddart's disturbing murder. The scream killing by Brian and Tori is not the only crime to be associated with the form of media such as a movie or a novel. In fact, it joins a rather long list of crimes that have been linked to different pieces of media.
from assassination attempts on presidents to the actions of serial killers. John Hinckley Jr., the man who shot President Ronald Reagan in 1981, would later be found to have an unrestrained fixation on Martin Scorsese's 1976 film Taxi Driver. The shooting resulted in a bullet to the lung for the president and permanent disability for Reagan's press secretary.
Another major public figure, the Beatles' John Lennon, was murdered in 1980 by a man obsessed with the novel The Catcher in the Rye. Per the investigation that ensued after the crime, the killer seemed to indicate that he used the controversial book as a source of inspiration.
Another extremely disturbing incident occurred in 1994, when a man by the name of Daniel Sterling took his girlfriend on a date to see the film Interview with a Vampire. The day after watching the film, he told his girlfriend that he was planning to kill her and drink her blood, as a vampire would. And he followed through with his plan that night, stabbing her seven times and drinking her blood.
Though she survived, the incident taking place directly after the couple went to watch a vampire movie is a chilling coincidence. And Sterling admitted to being influenced by the film. Even some serial killers have pointed to certain movies as inspiration for their crimes. Such as Nathaniel White, a notorious serial killer active during the 1990s who beat and killed six women.
He claimed the initial inspiration for his deeds knocked into him when he watched RoboCop 2, and that the first murder he committed was an exact replica of a death he had seen in the film.
The influence of the media, in particular on young people, has become a hot topic of concern as parents wonder what impact violent movies and video games can have on malleable preteen and teenage minds. An infamous crime in the United Kingdom in 1993 was initially linked to the 1991 horror film Child's Play 3. In the crime, two 10-year-old boys kidnapped and killed a toddler.
Similarly, Stephen King's 1977 book Rage was linked to several instances that displayed chilling similarities to the plot of the novel. In the book, a high schooler named Charlie Decker goes to school, shoots his math teacher, and holds his classmates hostage.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, rage was reported to have played a role in inspiring two cases of a high school student taking his class hostage, as well as two high school mass shootings that left multiple people dead. In fact, the links between King's book and the crimes carried out by these high school students led King to ask his publisher to remove the book from the market due to the potential that his novel was harming people.
The Scream franchise itself has a particularly rocky past with being associated with gruesome crimes, especially among young fans. In addition to the murder committed by Brian Draper and Tori Adamczyk, several other teenagers have taken their own viewing experiences of the slasher film and decided to translate them into real-life events.
In the 1990s, two teens watched the film and, shortly after, stabbed a 13-year-old friend. Yet another Scream viewer, this time 16 years old, was stabbed and killed by his mother. Another murderer donned the ghostface mask modeled after the one featured in the franchise in order to stab a 15-year-old girl to death with kitchen knives.
Events such as these, in which media portrayal of violence inspires others to act in similar ways, have been dubbed the "copycat effect," which first emerged as a term in 1916 when people began to commit crimes inspired by the infamous killer Jack the Ripper, who received a large degree of media coverage.
The copycat effect defines what happens when the media inspires criminals and non-criminals alike to commit crimes they might not have done otherwise. The psychology of the copycat effect and crimes allegedly inspired by the media have fueled a decades-long culture war that questions whether or not violence has become too ubiquitous and glorified in the movies we watch and the books we read, especially for young people.
While Brian and Tori certainly credited a large degree of their crime to their manic obsession with horror films and the Scream franchise, there is much more to the psychological issues behind the crime than that. Over a decade and a half after he participated in the brutal crime in Pocatello, Brian Draper spoke out in a rare interview for Dateline, shedding additional light on the reasoning and psychological state behind his role in Cassie Jo Stoddart's murder.
In a phone call from jail, Brian Draper said his mental state had been affected by quite a bit more than the violence in Scream and other films. He also struggled in middle school and was allegedly bullied by other students, which affected his mental state and his personal view of himself. He said he had a stutter growing up and that he had felt as though he never fit in with the other kids at school, isolating him from the rest of the students and making it difficult for him to make friends.
Even before he became friends with Torrey in high school, Brian was deeply interested in school shootings, especially the Columbine High School mass shooting, and often spent his time searching through chat rooms online about the subject. The violent models in Brian's life, both in fiction and in reality, became his idols.
Then, when he and Adamchuk met and became friends, the violent thoughts and ideas clicked and grew as they found unity in their shared love of the macabre. As a result, their thoughts spiraled out of control, and the two boys planned and carried out murder. In retrospect, Brian explained his actions this way: "I felt like a nobody, and I felt like I'd be somebody if I did something, you know, big and big."
In the interview though, he said that his views had changed drastically since the incident. Many years had passed since the murder and he had plenty of days behind bars during which he was able to analyze his actions from that night that would determine the remainder of his life. Now, he claims he feels remorse for his actions and regrets what he did to Cassie every day.
as he expressed his regret. He added that while it was too late to change his story and the outcome of his own life, it was not too late to save other students and teenagers who were considering carrying out a violent crime like he did. There are others who can still improve their lives and make better choices than he and Tori did that day.
The screen killing, along with the lengthy list of copycat crimes modeled after scenes and characters in movies, television and books, continues to beg the question: What effect does the media, and particularly the violence so commonly found in it, have on young minds and what young people do? Where does the line between fiction and reality become too blurry for some young people to decipher between wrong and right?
And why does violence on screen affect some people to such a great extent and not others? What makes one viewer different from the other? Now, nearly two decades after Stoddart's murder, the debate rages on across society with no clear answer. Regardless of the psychology behind the killing at the time, Cassie is still gone, and Brian and Tori continue to suffer the consequences of their actions.
To this day, they both remain at the Idaho State Correctional Institution in the desert south of Boise serving out their life sentences with no end in sight.
