A possible murder suspect's google-trail?
April 2, 2004 3:14 PM Subscribe
A possible murder suspect's google-trail of dark and bloody tales?
A contributing writer for 'Deviant Minds' webzine (scroll down a few clicks to Donn Gash) may be linked to the gruesome murder of his father. His mother has already been charged.
A contributing writer for 'Deviant Minds' webzine (scroll down a few clicks to Donn Gash) may be linked to the gruesome murder of his father. His mother has already been charged.
Hi tyllwin- welcome aboard. Soon I'll be announcing a date for the long awaited Blue Ridge MeFi Meetup here in Asheville. You should drop by...
Yes, I'm hearing lots, especially since a friend knows the pathologist on the case. Oddly enough, another friend is the daughter of the man that Gail embezzled 80k from- she was convicted in '01. The world is too small when you have about two degrees of separation from such a lovely lady.
While grisly and sad, I'm less interested in the murder itself, but rather the aforementioned google-trail. With so many Americans on the net, evenetually some will go 'bad' and will leave histories of their proclivities behind, for journalists and prosecutors to interpret however. The implications are interesting from a cyber-sociological viewpoint.
I found quite a bit regarding his gore-fiction. There's a fair amount out there. That certainly doesn't indict, but it can't look good. Especially in Henderson county, where 'goth' could be easily twisted to mean many unpopular things down there worthy of biased attention.
What I've heard is that he helped mama by operating the 'agricultural device' to, shall we say, shred the evidence. She delivered the fatal blow, and he took a little trip on the Parkway to dispose of the carnage. Luckily, we still enjoy a low (reported) violent crime rate down here, but when something goes down, it gets everyone in a twitter.
posted by moonbird at 8:11 PM on April 2, 2004
Yes, I'm hearing lots, especially since a friend knows the pathologist on the case. Oddly enough, another friend is the daughter of the man that Gail embezzled 80k from- she was convicted in '01. The world is too small when you have about two degrees of separation from such a lovely lady.
While grisly and sad, I'm less interested in the murder itself, but rather the aforementioned google-trail. With so many Americans on the net, evenetually some will go 'bad' and will leave histories of their proclivities behind, for journalists and prosecutors to interpret however. The implications are interesting from a cyber-sociological viewpoint.
I found quite a bit regarding his gore-fiction. There's a fair amount out there. That certainly doesn't indict, but it can't look good. Especially in Henderson county, where 'goth' could be easily twisted to mean many unpopular things down there worthy of biased attention.
What I've heard is that he helped mama by operating the 'agricultural device' to, shall we say, shred the evidence. She delivered the fatal blow, and he took a little trip on the Parkway to dispose of the carnage. Luckily, we still enjoy a low (reported) violent crime rate down here, but when something goes down, it gets everyone in a twitter.
posted by moonbird at 8:11 PM on April 2, 2004
As my mother put it, after sad incident that happened near where she lives involving a love triangle and a shotgun, the difference between the town and the country is not the murder rate but the fact that everybody knows all the people involved and their histories.
The google trail is relatively new, but keeping journals and writing fiction isn't (all grist for the prosecutorial mill) so I'm not sure that posting things to the web changes much -- except perhaps that we'll all get to feel more like "locals" because we have access to some of the back story.
posted by Quinbus Flestrin at 8:51 PM on April 2, 2004
The google trail is relatively new, but keeping journals and writing fiction isn't (all grist for the prosecutorial mill) so I'm not sure that posting things to the web changes much -- except perhaps that we'll all get to feel more like "locals" because we have access to some of the back story.
posted by Quinbus Flestrin at 8:51 PM on April 2, 2004
tyllwin- apparnetly i misread that you were presently in spartanburg- upstate n.y. is a "far piece" from "down yonway in the holler."
posted by moonbird at 10:25 PM on April 2, 2004
posted by moonbird at 10:25 PM on April 2, 2004
No, not anymore, and however tempting a Mefi meetup might be, I'm not likely to go back to live down the holler either!
OK, so with some physical evidence that's apparently not being released, and the obvious percentages which dictate that any homicide detective faced with a chopped up corpse is going to start out by looking very hard at males who were close to the victim, it's inevitable that this guy is going to become a "person of interest to the police." It amazes me, in fact, that despite having been a long time gone from that part of the world, I still have the almost instinctive reaction of wanting to step back and ask how much of that interest was dictated by the suspect being outside the norms of a mid-sized southern city. I admit that would not have been my first thought if the story had been datelined in San Francisco or London.
That said, I certainly wouldn't have had the prescience to have worried about this man based on the Google trail beforehand. Gore fiction isn't my cup of tea, but I wouldn't have been urging that somebody should be keeping an eye on a potential danger. The web is full of people who look more like ticking bombs than Donn Gash.
posted by tyllwin at 7:27 AM on April 3, 2004
OK, so with some physical evidence that's apparently not being released, and the obvious percentages which dictate that any homicide detective faced with a chopped up corpse is going to start out by looking very hard at males who were close to the victim, it's inevitable that this guy is going to become a "person of interest to the police." It amazes me, in fact, that despite having been a long time gone from that part of the world, I still have the almost instinctive reaction of wanting to step back and ask how much of that interest was dictated by the suspect being outside the norms of a mid-sized southern city. I admit that would not have been my first thought if the story had been datelined in San Francisco or London.
That said, I certainly wouldn't have had the prescience to have worried about this man based on the Google trail beforehand. Gore fiction isn't my cup of tea, but I wouldn't have been urging that somebody should be keeping an eye on a potential danger. The web is full of people who look more like ticking bombs than Donn Gash.
posted by tyllwin at 7:27 AM on April 3, 2004
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I'm presuming that living in the area, you're hearing a lot of gossip that isn't in the linked articles. What I get from them is that Donald Sr. got whacked on the head, dismembered, and his body parts thrown in a ditch. His wife Gail went missing. The cops search for her, figuring she's involved, or another victim, find her hiding out in a shed and arrest her. Now they suspect his son, Donn Jr. to be involved.
But, umm, based on what? Simply the fact that most murders are done by people close to the victim, and hey, Donn Jr. likes horror fiction a heck of a lot? We can add in, I suppose that wives who kill their husbands don't generally dismember them, but the "Google trail" doesn't show a fast path to a raging psychopath: Con pictures, a letter criticizing John Edwards for being insufficiently liberal, an interview from his job with the Humane Society?
Maybe I'm knee-jerking, because (a) I like horror fiction myself, and (b) when I lived in that region of the country I felt a bit claustrophobic, but what do the cops know that isn't in the press?
posted by tyllwin at 7:15 PM on April 2, 2004