Latest / 10 Minute Murder | Bingeable True Crime Stories / Murder Gone Viral
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- 0:35Seventeen year old Bianca Devns and twenty one year old Brandon Clark viewed their relationship
- 0:41very differently. In early twenty nineteen, the two of them first connected on
- 0:46Instagram when Brandon saw Bianca's profile and sent her a follow request. Despite their
- 0:52age gap, the two started talking and before long they started spending time together
- 0:58irl that means in real life in case she didn't know, Brandon met Beyanca's
- 1:03family, who later described him as a trusted family friend. From early on,
- 1:10Brandon made it clear that he was sexually and romantically interested in Bianca.
- 1:15However, she did not feel the same way about him. During a conversation
- 1:19with her mother, Bianca confessed that she had turned Brandon down and told him
- 1:23that she did not want to be in a romantic relationship. Despite this,
- 1:27when Beyonca's mother looked at the way Brandon interacted with her daughter, she believed
- 1:33that he hadn't quite gotten the message. Some of Bianca's friends were deeply concerned
- 1:38by Brandon's behavior. They believed that Brandon would give Bianca drugs, and when
- 1:44she was under the influence, he would take advantage of her. He also
- 1:48allegedly offered her drugs as a way of convincing her to hang out with him
- 1:51more often. Bianca had her share of mental health struggles, which might have
- 1:57made her an easy target for this type of manipulation. For most of her
- 2:00teenage years, she had been receiving treatment for anxiety and depression, and she
- 2:05was also diagnosed with PTSD and borderline personality disorder. On multiple occasions, her
- 2:12symptoms had been so severe that she had spent time in a hospital. Bianca
- 2:15found a lot of comfort in spending time on the Internet, but she received
- 2:21a lot of online harassment, mostly by men who identified as being in cells,
- 2:25a term that is short for involuntary celibate. I've done episodes in the
- 2:30past on in cells that turned out to be killers, and the in cell
- 2:35community are bonded together by the belief that they are unable to get a romantic
- 2:38sexual partner, often leading to a deep hatred for women who they believe are
- 2:44rejecting them. For in cells, a conventionally attractive teenage girl such as Bianca
- 2:50was the perfect target. On the thirteenth of July twenty nineteen, Bianca and
- 2:55Brandon went into New York City to attend on Nicold Doling Angered concert, along
- 3:00with one of their other friends, a young man named Alex. At some
- 3:05point during the night, Alex and Bianca allegedly kissed, and Brandon saw the
- 3:10whole thing. He didn't say anything about it at the time, but when
- 3:14he and Bianca were alone in his car, he brought it up and they
- 3:17started fighting. Brandon reached down beside a seat where he'd hidden a knife earlier.
- 3:23He then used that knife to repeatedly cut Bianca's neck, severing her carotid
- 3:28artery and slicing it so deeply that he almost completely removed her head. Bianca
- 3:34Devins died at the age of seventeen in the early hours of July fourteenth.
- 3:39Brandon left her corpse sitting in the passenger seat while he got out, played
- 3:44some music, and started to build a fire. Shortly afterwards, he placed
- 3:49several calls to members of his family, implying that he was about to take
- 3:53his own life. Immediately, his family called the police. Meanwhile, Brandon
- 3:59got busy taking pictures of Bianca's nearly decapitated body and posting them online. He
- 4:05posted photos from multiple angles in one of the discord servers that Bianca had spent
- 4:10time in captioning one of them with a message telling them that he's sorry.
- 4:15They're going to have to find someone else to orbit. He also had a
- 4:17video of himself murdering Bianca, but decided not to post that one. Some
- 4:24of the discord users initially believed that the photos were a bad joke or some
- 4:28kind of prank, but eventually they came to the conclusion that they were real,
- 4:32and several of them called the police. By now, the local police
- 4:36were well aware that a situation was unfolding, and Brandon decided to call them
- 4:43himself. He had a brief conversation with a dispatcher where he stated, my
- 4:46name is Brandon, the victim is Bianca Michelle Devins. I'm not going to
- 4:51stay on the phone for long because I still need to do the suicide part
- 4:55of the murder. Suicide, Brandon used a piece of tarp to cover Bianca's
- 5:00body and then attempted to follow through with his plan. He had written out
- 5:04a suicide note as well as a shorter message that simply said may you never
- 5:10forget me, and as soon as the police arrived at the scene of the
- 5:14crime, he used the knife to stab himself in the throat, lying down
- 5:18on top of Bianca's body. On the fifteenth of July, law enforcement confirmed
- 5:25that Bianca was the victim. Brandon had survived his suicide attempt, and he
- 5:30was charged with second degree murder, implying that there had not been any kind
- 5:34of planning or premeditation. This might have been true if Bianca had been killed
- 5:40in a crime of passion, but several investigators believed that Brandon had planned out
- 5:45the whole crime. Several pieces of evidence supported this theory, in particular the
- 5:49fact that he had thought to hide a knife in the car and that he
- 5:54had brought the equipment that he needed to take a video of the murder.
- 5:57Before the crime, Brandon also made several inc criminating Google searches, including looking
- 6:01up how to kill someone and where to find the carotid artery. The same
- 6:06day that Brandon was being charged with the murder, a community vigil was held
- 6:12in Beyonca's memory. But while Beyonca's family and friends were mourning her sudden,
- 6:16violent death, the photos that Brandon posted of her corpse were going viral online.
- 6:23Within hours of the murder, the photos had been reshared on Facebook,
- 6:27Twitter, and Instagram, including another site called four Chan. Some of the
- 6:31in cell communities that had harassed Bianca when she was alive, praised Brandon for
- 6:38killing her, believing that she deserved it for rejecting him. Unfortunately, Beyanca's
- 6:44family also saw the photos. Her sister stated that when she tried to fall
- 6:48asleep at night, she couldn't stop thinking about them. Beyonca's stepfather also started
- 6:54experiencing traumatic flashbacks, and her mother became increasingly concerned about the effect that those
- 7:00pictures would have on random Internet users who had never even known Bianca. So
- 7:04many people have been affected by the pictures, she said, their scarred for
- 7:10life and suffering from PTSD, Unable to erase the images from their mind.
- 7:15Facebook and Instagram both deleted Brandon's account from their platforms in an attempt to stop
- 7:20the photos from circulating further. Facebook went a step further, placing the images
- 7:27in a digital fingerprint database and banning hashtags that were being used to share the
- 7:30photos. Meanwhile, Instagram had a much more casual response. On multiple occasions,
- 7:38Instagram users who found the photos claimed that they'd tried to report them.
- 7:42However, they received responses from Instagram claiming that the images did not violate the
- 7:46app's guidelines. For at least four days after Bianca's death, pictures of her
- 7:51body could still be easily found on Instagram. On the twenty ninth of April,
- 7:58Brandon Clark made the decision to plead not guilty to the second degree murder
- 8:01charge. At around the same time, he allegedly wrote a letter to a
- 8:05friend where he boasted about what it felt like to take life. In the
- 8:11same letter, he also finally stated his motive for the murder. He couldn't
- 8:15handle the thought of Bianca walking out of his life. Shortly before his trial
- 8:20was set to begin, Brandon changed his mind. He pleaded guilty. The
- 8:26COVID nineteen pandemic delayed the start date of his sentencing, and when it was
- 8:30rescheduled, he claimed that his lawyer had failed him and he asked to take
- 8:33back the guilty plea. However, at this point he'd already admitted that he
- 8:39was guilty, so the request was denied. Finally, in March of twenty
- 8:43twenty one, Brandon received his sentence twenty five years to life. In late
- 8:50twenty twenty, Bianca's family attempted to introduce Bianca's Law, which would require all
- 8:56high earning social media platforms to have a dedicated office for locating and taking down
- 9:01violent content that had been posted. An additional law was introduced that would make
- 9:05it illegal for people to circulate pictures of people who had been the victim of
- 9:09violent crimes in an attempt to gain popularity or harass others. Two years later,
- 9:16a version of Byanca's law was passed, making it illegal to share or
- 9:20post images with the intent to abuse or degrade other people. However, the
- 9:26fight to make sure that Bianca was respected in death was not over. Byanka's
- 9:30family had learned that the Oneida County District Attorney's office had been sharing footage of
- 9:35Bianca's murder, as well as video footage of her engaging in sexual activity.
- 9:39Multiple documentary makers who had covered the case had allegedly been shown or sent the
- 9:45footage, and Bianca's family ended up suing the DA's office, claiming that they
- 9:50were guilty of distributing child pornography by sharing these images of seventeen year old Bianca.
- 9:56Thousands of people have seen the pictures of Bianca's body, and in some
- 10:01online communities there are still people who argue that Brandon Clark did nothing wrong.
- 10:20That's ten Minute Murder for today brief and bingeable true crime. My name is
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