Don’t F**k With Cats: Hunting an Internet Killer, follows a team of armchair detectives searching for an anonymous cat killer before he can escalate to something worse. Crime Writers On… host Rebecca Lavoie talks with director Mark Lewis about the rise of online sleuths, his choice to show segments of the animal abuse videos, and whether the audience should also be complicit in the crimes of Luka Magnotta.
Don’t F**k With Cats: Hunting an Internet Killer, follows a team of armchair detectives searching for an anonymous cat killer before he can escalate to something worse. Crime Writers On… host Rebecca Lavoie talks with director Mark Lewis about the rise of online sleuths, his choice to show segments of the animal abuse videos, and whether the audience should also be complicit in the crimes of Luka Magnotta.
Melissa: Welcome to You Can’t Make This Up, a companion podcast from Netflix.
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Melissa: I’m Melissa Slaughter and I’m introducing this week’s episode. Here on You Can’t Make This Up, we go behind the scenes of Netflix Original true crime stories with special guests. Before we go any further, you should know that this episode is going to feature some strong language, starting with the title of this documentary. Don’t Fuck With Cats: Hunting an Internet Killer follows a team of armchair detectives searching for an anonymous cat killer before he can escalate to something worse.
Crime Writers On host Rebecca Lavoie talks with director Mark Lewis about how these internet investigators, led by Deanna Thompson and John Green, use a variety of online techniques to help the police in an international manhunt.
Rebecca: Mark Lewis, the director of Don’t Fuck With Cats, it is so nice talking to you.Thank you so much for having this conversation with me.
Mark: Well, thanks for having me on, Rebecca. Thank you.
Rebecca: I’m really interested to know, how did you intersect with this story, learn about it, and decide to make a film about it?
Mark: Well, I had met—directed another feature documentary a couple of years ago about Silk Road, which is this sort of billion-dollar drug cartel that ran on the dark web, and the extraordinary mysterious character behind it. And it was after that, I think, you know, my interest had been really piqued in these sort of internet crime and dark web type stories, and I was really on the lookout for something else.
And the company that I work with, Raw, we were really on the lookout for something, like something similar, just because it was so sort of zeitgeist. And when we came across the story, I think, you know, we were sort of really wowed by the fact that, you know, it was a murder story in some ways like a kind of real-life thriller story will all sorts of twists and turns, but that it had the most unusual original protagonists you could possibly have.
You know, the story was that some pretty horrific videos were posted online of cats being killed. And this drew the attention of the internet, specifically sort of people who loved animals. And indeed the title of the series, Don’t Fuck With Cats, is because there is this—it’s not even an unwritten rule—it’s a written rule of kind of 4Chan and 7Chan that you can post absolutely anything you like on the internet—violence and, you know, defame religious imagery and post, you know, hardcore sex or whatever. But the one thing you can’t do is do anything that will harm the lovely fluffy kittens and cats that we all love to post pictures of on Facebook.
And the very fact that this guy was breaking this kind of rule zero, don’t fuck with cats, was done, it seemed, on purpose to kind of inflame the ire of the internet. And the people that responded most swiftly were animal lovers, initially hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands of people.But there were some extraordinary ethically minded, sensible, intelligent—I don’t know what you’d call them—sort of armchair detectives, internet detectives, who were doing good.
Rebecca: So you’re talking about Deanna Thompson and John Green, who would be right up top.
Mark: Yeah.
Rebecca: And they are a part of this very robust community.As I’ve learned in some of the reporting projects that I’ve worked on, you know, outside of this case there are thousands, probably, of people who spend hours and hours every single day trying to help, actually trying to do good on the internet—solve mysteries, make connections, find adoptive parents.
One of the dilemmas that I just want to talk to you about, because I imagine that there was a lot of decision-making and discussion around it, was how to let the audience of your documentary know what the content of the cat videos was without subjecting us to the content of the cat videos. And you do that in a way that seems very purposeful to me, and I would love to hear your thought process around how you decide—made that decision.
Mark: Yeah. It was very purposeful. And we spent a lot of time thinking about how to show but not show these videos responsibly.The videos are horrific. And if you see them, you will never sort of un-see them. They’re not something that I think that ever should be kind of gratuitously shown.However, it was important for us that you understand the impact of these videos.
So Deanna Thompson, our main protagonist, the principal internet activist, we showed her the first video, the first cat-killing video. Strangely though, she had analyzed it, you know, every single frame of it. Because she is such an animal lover, she had never watched it from beginning to end in one long run. And we said, “Do you think you should see it?” She said, “I think I should watch it, and I think you should film me watching it.” And this was something that we sort of planned together.
So the first reason for showing it to people on camera, but not showing the video itself to the television viewers, was to understand the emotional response of a protagonist, but people in general, to these videos, so you could understand why they then wanted to hunt the perpetrator down.
But there’s another critical reason why we wanted our protagonist, our main interviewees to see the videos, is because contained within the videos in certain frames of the videos are pieces of evidence which they then—the internet sleuths then used to try and successfully work out who was responsible.
They are clues, what clue in fact he was leaving possibly on purpose, because he was trying to create this extraordinary kind of cat-and-mouse game. The perpetrator who was revealed absolutely wanted to inflame the anger of the internet and wanted people to come after him, so he was laying down breadcrumbs for the internet sleuths to follow.
Rebecca: That’s what I was wondering. So, do you think—you know, we often hear in stories about profilers that people who end up killing people very often begin with animals.
Mark: Yeah.
Rebecca: Do you think this was more about inflaming the internet? Because this guy, Luka Magnotta, his whole MO, his whole life, was about this internet fame, this creating of personas, the fan websites that were probably just him and the sock puppet accounts. Was the cat thing deliberate for that reason, do you think?
Mark: Look, it’s impossible for me to say what was going through his head from the very first moment that he posted the very first cat video. I think, you know, the animal activists and the police believe that he made these videos, the cat-killing videos, initially in order to get people to be interested in him, and in order ultimately to lead them to his name, Luka Magnotta, so that more and more people would be interested, and his name would be out there.
He would deny that he had made the videos. But in a sense, it’s sort of like any publicity is good publicity. I think that’s probably what the motivation was initially. The degree to which he—right from the beginning when he did the first animal abuse videos—was actually thinking about murdering someone later on down the line is a huge question.
Rebecca: Right.
Mark: But I think what is interesting about this series is what you are watching is the evolution of a kind of psychopathic killer from the beginning. And it’s almost like you’re watching it in real time.
Rebecca: Do you think he was the one who sent the tip with his own name to the internet group? Because at one point they do receive a tip that says the cat killer is Luka Magnotta. And I found myself wondering, who would know that, other than him, who wouldn’t report it in some other way? What was that game about?
Mark: I think—yes, I think it was him. I think it was him that lay the tip down. I think what happened was, initially, when the first cat-killing videos were out there, there was this mad scramble by tens of thousands of people to try and work out who it was. And people were recklessly pointing the finger at the wrong people with disastrous consequences. And I think at that point that Luka Magnotta probably got irritated that they weren’t after him.
And so, as Deanna says, he threw them a bone, threw them extra little clues so that they would come after him.Just because they know his name doesn’t mean that they can pin him for it. He knew that. But I think, yes, he did give them that tip that led the animal activists to him.And I think that was, yeah, a very purposeful move by him.
Rebecca: And also, the video that Deanna receives in episode one of her own workplace—I mean, this is complicated. This is somebody with means, with resources.
Mark: I think that they developed this extraordinary relationship between the hunter and the hunted. And Deanna’s reaction to that, you know, was really awful, I think, you know, when we were interviewing about it, how traumatic that was for her that suddenly she realized that there she had been conducting this hunt, an almost obsessional hunt, to try and hunt this animal abuser down before he killed someone.
And then all of a sudden, that guy comes after her. You know, she had been doing all of this from the safety of her own computer in her bedroom at night or in her living room or her dining room table at night, and then all of a sudden this person is coming after her and knows where she works. And it is sort of classic kind of cat-and-mouse sort of thriller material, isn’t it?
Rebecca: It is. And one of the things I love about Deanna Thompson is—because, you know, if this does happen in a movie, what you don’t get is the scene where the person’s like, “Great, now I have to go tell my boss that my sideline that I like doing in my free time is hunting killers on the internet.” Like it’s a very practical consideration that can kind of mess up your life, to have to go have that conversation with your boss.
I love that you included that.To me it was the most impressive piece of sleuthing, that we see in the film anyway—I know there’s a lot of impressive pieces of sleuthing that happened in real life—was after the ice pick video, after John Green receives it, after the group sees it, they then start cross-referencing more current images of Luka online to figure out his location.
Female: The second thing that was important were the pedestrian lights. They were very unique. They didn’t look like Toronto. They were black. I know the ones in Toronto are yellow. They were square.
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Female: So my hairs immediately went up on my neck.Oh, my God, okay, maybe he went to Montreal. And we just opened up Google Maps and started walking down the streets digitally.
Rebecca: And then there is this—at least in the film anyway, portrayed as this real-time moment where, when the story breaks about the body being found and the murder being committed, they know. They are already a step ahead in this investigation of the investigators.
And we see then the juxtaposition of their online investigation which has been taking place for a really long time with a new detective coming into the story and trying to solve this murder, and comparing those two side-by-side, because at first, the police in Montreal think it’s Luka that’s been murdered.
They get it completely wrong.But to watch that real-life shoe-leather police work in parallel with the work that we know these other guys have been doing for so long is just a fascinating moment. Can you talk about that juxtaposition?
Mark: Yeah, I think it’s—it’s extraordinary, isn’t it?That the kind of level of detection that they’re doing is so sort of forensic. And, in a sense, I think it’s a kind of detective work that police forces don’t generally do, because they just don’t have the time or the manpower to do it. And that’s one of the truths about internet crime, is that it doesn’t get prosecuted so much, because the amount of man hours that are needed and sort of, you know, internet sleuthing skills that are needed are just often beyond the resources of most police departments.
And I think the juxtaposition really comes—when you see this kind of forensic digital detective work that our internet activists do, it really contrasts very sharply with the kind of physical forensic work that the Montreal Police did in this case. I mean, it all sort of dovetails by the end, so that you’re beginning to get a much clearer picture of how and why and when the murder happened. And I think the internet detectives, the internet sleuths find out different things from the police officers.
But you’re right, it is an extraordinary juxtaposition, because the skills are very, very different. And I think that was one thing that we always wanted to very clearly demonstrate in the series, that there is this incredible difference between the internet world and the real world. And, at the beginning of the second episode when a body is found, you know, these internet detectives have been trying to hunt down this guy digitally from the safety of their own computers.
And all of a sudden, when a torso is found in a suitcase in an alleyway in Montreal, the realities of what they had been doing come crashing through into the real world. And that was something we were really, really wanting to show, the difference, the juxtaposition between the two. You know, what was a very sort of internet digital-based film to begin with suddenly becomes a very forensic, physical film of the real world.
Rebecca: And gruesome. I mean, the murder was truly gruesome. And I think, as a viewer, that texture, that very sort of clinical, in the safety of my own home, behind a computer screen, behind an alias investigation, it feels clinical and detached. And then you have your detectives. Claudette, the detective that we meet in the film, is talking about, the smells and the blood.
Claudette: It’s hard to describe what blood smells like.But, if you take a pound of ground meat and you leave it on the counter for six, seven hours, and definitely in the apartment, it smelled of blood.
Rebecca: This sort of marriage of the physicality and the reality of what happened versus the imagery is really something. And one of the things that I want to commend you on in this film is that you do spend a nice amount of time, a really appropriate and sensitive amount of time, talking about the story of our victim here, Jun Lin.It is really tragic.
You have his best friend kind of talking about, you know, the search for him, how he knew something was wrong. And you don’t shy away from the human impact. As fascinating as it might be to sort of follow the cat and mouse in this international detective story, like that is really the heart of, really, the middle of the documentary. And I just want to—I hear you talk about how that came together for you.
Mark: Well, I meant, I think, really, our ambition with this series right from the beginning was we never wanted to sort of do a kind of serial killer porn. We never wanted to do that. That wasn’t what this story was about for us. This was about a horrific crime committed and portrayed on the internet with a real victim whose life was lost with, you know, horrific, disastrous consequences for his family and his friends.
There was a real person here.And it was important for us that you got to know a little bit about the victim so that you understood the sense of loss and you understood that this was not a crime to be glorified in any way, sensationalized in any way, but this was a real person who was killed with, you know, the most unimaginable tragic consequences for his family and friends.
And Benjamin Xu, who was his best friend, who’s featured in the film, was an extraordinary interviewee, I think. He constantly reminds you, you know, that this isn’t a sensational story, that a real friend was lost. A real son was lost. A real brother was lost. And that was very, very important to us.
Rebecca: Luka’s mother, Anna Yourkin, how did you get her to participate in this film on camera?
Mark: Again, she had never done an interview before.Even through the whole case, the whole trial, she’d never done an interview before. And I guess she wanted to sort of communicate her story of how the case had impacted her and what she believed through conversations with her son had really happened. And she wanted to communicate that story.
She had written an account of it that she was going to publish as a book, and I guess we were fortunate to come across her at possibly the right time, when after all of—after some years, she was ready to tell her story. She is a remarkable lady. I mean, I can’t help but feel sorry for her, because, you know, carrying the weight of what happened and the responsibility of what happened and, you know, how that impacted her family is just enormous. I mean, you can see it written all over her face.
I don’t think she’s a woman who’s had a particularly easy life anyway. But to have to confront this and what your son may have done must be extremely difficult for her. So she was very brave, I think, in coming forward and agreeing to do an interview with us. It’s easy, I think, to tarnish something like the mother of somebody who’s involved in a crime and tarnish them with the same brush. But she is, you know, like any other mother who still loves their son and struggles to cope with the story and the truth of the story.
Rebecca: She does. And she—you know, it’s interesting, because I think that, as you said, it is easy to sort of cast judgment on somebody, especially somebody who’s so in denial about, you know, what someone in their family clearly did do.And there’s literally video of him doing it. So she gets wind of all the things that, you know, Luka likely did.
And she then leans very heavily on a story he tells her about it being somebody else’s fault, which is a big part of kind of the twists and turns that take us through the end of the documentary. So I don’t want to spoil it too much. But can I just ask you a very quick question that maybe teases my theory about maybe one of those mysterious shots in that video with the python that we see?
Mark: Yes?
Rebecca: Isn’t it likely that that snake belonged to someone else, who Luka needed someone with a snake to come and help him film this video? I mean, that’s what I think possibly explains the presence of a second person there.
Mark: Do you know, I think for many of us who worked in this production, the making of this series was as much a kind of twist-and-turn thriller as the story itself. And I think myself and Felicity Morris, the producer, and Dimitri Doganis, the executive producer, and everyone at Netflix that we were making it with, were very much on this ride where it was almost difficult to know what to believe at certain points. There is a huge twist in the third episode, which people won’t see coming.
And, you know, that was a twist that we only really found out during the production. In answer to your question, yes, there is a video where you can see that, if it is Luka in that video, he is not alone, which raises a big question about who was responsible for, in this case the animal abuse [unintelligible 00:21:08] and potentially, by association, a murder. So it’s a huge twist. And my theory is—I’m not going to tell you what. It’s a secret. It’s a mystery. Yeah.
Rebecca: So, one other thing that I want to ask you about, about these—you know, the internet investigation and what we see in terms of imagery on the screen—there is an incredible moment where yet another citizen hero makes a decision in the real world to help in a way that really stunned me. You know, Luka, we follow him as he becomes a fugitive. He gets on a plane. He goes to Paris. We have all of this CCTV footage.
I really want to know how you were able to get all of that and include it. It’s incredible. And then we have this guy who was running an internet café, who is literally reading an article on Luka Magnotta and looks up, and he’s standing right in front of him.And then we see him go out on the street and somehow get—I don’t know, the entire German police force to come into his store. [Laughing.]That was amazing. That was an amazing moment and an amazing bit of citizen heroism.
Mark: Yes. There was an extraordinary amount of footage coverage him, you know, right from all of the photographs and things that he posted of himself on the blogs and all those kind of things, all the way through to the animal abuse videos, the murder video, and then there was of course an extraordinary amount of CCTV footage that was filmed in the apartment block where the murder happened.
And then, once when he went on the run everywhere, from the airport in Montreal, the airport in Paris, and various images of him in Paris, and then ultimately in Berlin where he finally fled. And it really was extraordinary for us that actually you were kind of—you know, at one point we thought about, you know, should we do sort of drama recreation images?
And we eventually decided, no, we didn’t need to, because the whole thing in a sense had been filmed on CCTV cameras and so on. And that ends up actually becoming an important part of the story, that everything has been filmed. And what does that mean?
Rebecca: But that was a large amount of cops, would you agree? [Laughs.]You’ve got a lot of police officers.
Mark: It’s nine, yeah. It’s extraordinary, isn’t it? Yeah, I mean—
Rebecca: Were they driving by in like a truck or something?
Mark: Yes. Well, no, the story was actually that it was a kind of German—from the Berlin Police it was this perhaps sort of police officer who trained other kind of police cadets. And he had like a kind of minivan with eight police cadets in the back. And they were kind of driving up and down the streets of Neukölln [phonetic 00:23:39], which is a suburb of Berlin.
And I think, you know, what they were meant to do is, you know, if there was a shop theft—that’s the kind of thing that they thought they were going to be doing—and then all of a sudden this guy outside the internet café kind of waves down their police van and says, “I’ve got this Interpol-wanted international murdering fugitive in my internet café.”
And, actually—I mean, we barely sort of covered this in film, but actually what really happened, the police trainer guy said to the Turkish guy cadet—he said, you know, “Who is it? Who is it?” And he said, “Oh, he’s a guy called Luka Magnotta, and I think he’s in my internet café.” And the police sergeant turned round to his cadets and said, “Look him up. Look him up.” And they all got their phones out, their mobile phones, and started Googling him.And so then they went, “Oh, yeah, yeah, it is him.”
Rebecca: But you’re in Montreal, and you’re in your internet café.
Mark: But you’re in Montreal, yeah. So they all bundle in to go and get him. So, you know, once again, even they were researching on the internet.
Rebecca: Yes. And then the extraordinary real-time tracking of his journey back to Canada that John Green and Deanna Thompson were able to do by watching the flight tracker, because, of course, commercial didn’t want to fly Luka Magnotta back to Canada.
Mark: No.
Rebecca: So they’re able to actually watch his apprehension almost in real time after they have very much, you know, been driving the background of this investigation for—at this point, what? Had it been a year-and-a-half or something like that? A really long time.
Mark: Yeah, about a year-and-a-half. Yeah, they had—and, again, this is a story of, you know, how the internet world and the real world connect, isn’t it? So, actually, you can tell a story both from the real-world perspective of people involved or police officers involved and the internet world, as people follow a story as it unfolds live, you know, to the point that you can even follow a plane mile by mile as it crosses the Atlantic. You know, that becomes very much part of our story. The first episode is really a kind of digital world story.
The second one is more a kind of real-world story. By the end, you realize that these two worlds, the world of the internet sleuths and the world of kind of real-world physical police officers, intertwine and ultimately sort of dovetail in the successful prosecution of—and really working out what the real story behind was, that the hows, the whens, and the whys, these really dovetail by both methods of detection, internet detection and real-world forensic detection. And that was the point of the film.
Rebecca: Deanna Thompson, at many times during the real-life investigation, she pulls back and she tells us during the documentary why she feels in some ways complicit, even though she’s trying to catch this guy, that he is performing because she’s trying to catch him, and that she pulls herself back from the investigation at several points and then comes back in.And at the end, she does ask that question.
She wants to know whether or not this is the fault of people who consume this material, people who investigate it, people who actually are on the internet. Would these crimes be happening were it not for her and me and people on the other side of the screen? I really loved it that you left that question in there. And I’m curious to know if that’s something that you thought about the entire time you were making this, or whether she really challenged you in that moment.
Mark: Oh, I think both is the answer to that. I mean, first of all, I think in some ways we knew that the story of the complicity of the people that were trying to catch him, that this was going to be the endpoint of the series. But, equally, the complicity of us making a series about him or the viewers watching a series about him was an important theme to address and something that we really had to confront head-on.
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Female: Did we see the monster, or did we create it?And you, you at home watching a whole fucking documentary about Luka Magnotta, are you complicit?
Mark: This is the story of a person who evolved into a killer on the internet before your eyes and was induced to do ever worse things because the internet were interested in him and were wanting to hunt him down.The title of the series is Don’t Fuck With Cats because that is the rule, the unbreakable rule of the internet, that he broke from the get-go in order to inflame the ire of the internet and get them to come after him.
And this is something that Deanna Thompson, our protagonist, was acutely aware of throughout the investigation and during the making of this series. And it was a big consideration for her about whether she should do an interview at all with us. And she was very adamant that we should address it at the end of the series. And I think it gave her some comfort that we as filmmakers said to her, “Hold on, it’s not just you that’s complicit. It’s us making a series about it.”
You know, we as filmmakers, we as an audience and viewers, we all love serial killer documentaries and Mindhunter and, you know, Silence of the Lambs. And to that extent, you know, were we—because we were interested in this story, are we sort of in some ways granting the murderer in this case the celebrityhood that he craved from the beginning? Are we in that sense, just like Deanna, complicit?
And I think the answer is, yes, we are. I mean, you know, our very interest in this does make us complicit in this particular story. However, I don’t think it means that those internet sleuths should not have gone after him to try and hunt him down. They had to try and hunt him down. Unfortunately, it was fanning the flames. But they had to try and hunt him down before he killed.
In the end he did. But, you know, perhaps they managed to get him before he killed again. And, equally, should we be making a series about this? Well, I say yes, because of course it’s an entertaining story. Of course it’s got twists and turns. Of course as a [unintelligible 00:29:44] I’d be stupid to deny that. But there are lessons to learn from this story. There are lessons to learn about the difficulty of prosecuting internet crime.
There are lessons to learn about the rise of internet vigilantism, and what do we do about it?And if it’s sort of unchecked, is it a good thing or a bad thing? Whether you like it or not, internet sleuths are here to stay. And we have to address it. We have to embrace it. And we have to see it as a force for good when it is and a force, you know, for wrong when it’s also wrong. We have to—you know, it’s here to stay, whether we like it or not.
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Melissa: And that’s it for this week’s episode. We’ll be back January 2020 with a new true crime series for you to add to your watch list. You can find this show on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Google Play, Spotify, and wherever else you get your podcasts. Make sure to subscribe, rate, and review this show. It will make the end of our year feel pretty great. You Can’t Make This Up is a production of Pineapple Street Studios and Netflix.Our music is by Hansdale Hsu. I’m Melissa Slaughter. See you in 2020.