4 – Thierry Jaradin – Copycat of Movie Scream
If it wasn’t bad enough that people copy the crimes of serial killers, there is also the phenomenon of evil individuals committing murder after receiving inspiration from movies and television programs. The movie Scream is the inspiration for several murders, including the slaying of Cassie Jo Stoddart by Brian Draper and Torey Adamcik in 2006. They were just 16-years-old when they killed their classmate and were sentenced to life in prison without parole.
One of the first, and most notorious, Scream copycat killings occurred in 2001. Lonely truck driver Thierry Jaradin brutally murdered 15-year-old Alisson Cambier in his home in the small Belgian town of Gerpinnes. Cambier knew Jaradin as she lived just a few doors away. The unsuspecting Cambier dropped by Jaradin’s house to exchange videotapes and chat. The truck driver made sexual advances on the girl, but she quickly rebuffed them.
The angry Jaradin excused himself and left the room only to return wearing a costume from the movie Scream. He wielded two enormous knives and stabbed his victim 30 times. Rather than attempting to cover up the crime, Jaradin laid the body on his bed, put a rose in one of her hands and phoned a colleague and his father with a confession.
When the police arrived at the scene, Jaradin confessed and admitted that the killing was premeditated and influenced by the first movie in the Scream trilogy. The killer received a sentence of life in prison with no possibility of parole. The scary thing is that Jaradin had absolutely no history of violent behavior nor did he experience any known psychological problems up to that point.
Incidentally, the Scream trilogy is based on a murder spree in Gainesville, Florida in 1990. Over the course of a few days (August 24-27), five students were murdered on the University of Florida campus. All of the slayings were brutal in nature and after a huge manhunt, police arrested a 19-year-old student named Edward Humphrey. He was a schizophrenic who stopped taking his medication and after his arrest, the killings stopped. However, evidence from the crime scenes determined that Humphrey was not the killer, yet he remained in prison for 22 months on a trumped-up assault charge.
It turned out that the real murderer, Danny Rolling, had been arrested for burglary, which is the reason the murders stopped. Ultimately, police gathered enough evidence to convict Rolling, and he was executed in Florida on October 25, 2006.