Stronger than Death

By A.J. Llewellyn

I am a strong believer in the Storyteller's Creed. It sits on my desk and I look at it every day. The last line of it is this: I believe that love is stronger than death.
I've been thinking about death a lot this week. Ever since the "Canadian Pyscho" Luka Rocco Magnotta was arrested in Berlin for murdering his lover, I have seen all the articles online focusing on this horrendous loser. I however, have been thinking of his victim, poor Jun Lin, a 33-year old Chinese student who loved everything French and how he loved cats.
He moved to Canada to study and took up with Magnotta. From all accounts he was looking for love.
Magnotta was a freak who had an obsession with fame and an unfulfilled desire to be a gay porn star.
What Magnotta did when he couldn't make sex films was to film snuff videos involving harmless animals. That should have been a red flag to all who knew him.
I have always believed that anyone who can hurt an animal can easily hurt a human. When that thrill wore off, he grabbed his lover, tied him to a chair and videotaped his killing and dismemberment on a video he posted to the Internet.
And then he began mailing off pieces of June to Canadian politicians.
Can you imagine?
How insane has this world become?
This is a sick, sad case. And it goes to show the extent to which people will go for love. What on earth possessed Jun Lin (pictured above) to get involved with Magnotta, who, by all accounts wore his mental illness on his sleeve.
What worries me is that this is not an isolated case. I remember some years ago researching serial killers and came across John Douglas and Stephen Singular's terrifying book, Anyone You Want Me to Be: A True Story of Sex and Death on the Internet. 
It is a study of John Robinson, the Internet's first known serial killer. The authors talk about how he lured lonely women into sex slave contracts. He took over their lives, their finances and ultimately killed them. What actually came to untangle his web of death however was love.
One of his victims, Suzette Trouten had two dogs. Without even knowing Robinson, she agreed to be his slave after chatting online with him and drove her pets across country to a motel.
He always promised her he wouldn't hurt them. They were her babies. She loved those dogs.
Surprisingly, though she walked around town wearing a dog collar (literally) and began to look more and more bizarre according to the book, and though she was regularly abused by Robinson, he never hurt her dogs.
When he finally killed her, he kept the dogs for himself but they got loose and wound up at the pound. The police traced the animals back to her...
In reading the book, I was astounded how her concern was for them, not for her. Maybe she never thought he'd kill her.
Maybe she thought like so many women do, If I love him enough, I can fix him.
Were these Jun Lin's thoughts?
Did he think he could tame the demon?
It's interesting to me that Magnotta isn't fighting extradition from Berlin. Of course he isn't. As much as he was busy running across the world to evade capture, a part of him must have loved all the attention.
He must have missed being in the spotlight of his own imagined stardom.
I hope that Jun Lin didn't suffer. I suspect he did. Horribly. I can't imagine he was drugged for his snuff movie. I grieve for his family and friends who thought he was on his way to a new journey, a wonderful fantastic new life.
Not death.
But I still believe in love. The romantic in me, the author, who chooses to believe in the worlds I create, the joy I get from giving these stories to my readers has to believe, love doesn't always have to end in death. Love is so much stronger than that.
I am a storyteller. And that is my creed.
Aloha oe,
A.J.