By Lark Anderson
February 11, 2020
True Crime Docuseries
CAUTION: SPOILERS EVERYWHERE
Don’t F**k With Cats(DFWC) came on my radar after watching an episode of Command Zone on YouTube(it was their recommendation). I don’t think I would have considered watching it otherwise, but it was worth the time.
DFWC is a true crime docuseries showing internet sleuths investigating and identifying a cat torturer.
I’m going to start by saying, it is very well done, but I can’t necessarily recommend it to the masses. It will affect some people negatively, and it’s not worth the bad feels it ignites in some cases. I’ve watched horror movies since I was a child, and even I didn’t really want to see some scenes.
That being said, there is a lot to learn from the true crime docuseries, and I think it would be useful as a teaching tool for some lines of work.
It starts with a woman who goes online under an alter ego and finds a video of a man murdering kittens. Outrage ensues, and a vigilante group forms thereafter, pitchforks are grabbed.
Now, this group grows huge rather quickly and encompasses many different types of people. I’ll put them into two distinct categories:
1. The emotional investigators.
2. The analytical investigators.
Because I’ve done fraud investigations, skip tracing, and business analytics, I identify more with the second group. The data analytics portion is the best part of the series. I know what it’s like to track down shady people. There’s a thrill involved.
And I’m not overly emotional. I’m not a pitchfork grabber. I wouldn’t harass anyone online other than a snarky comment usually meant to be good-natured, especially because in the logical portion of my brain, I know it could impede an investigation. I would gather evidence, try to get access to more information, and report it to the police.
That is NOT what happened, and the first group really fucked up. They harassed a man that seemed to have issues but didn’t commit the crime, and low and behold, he committed suicide.
The level of rage I felt during that moment of the show validated how I feel about many online communities—which is not good. It’s easy to harass with anonymity in today’s internet world.
But there are fucking consequences.
After the death, the group splits, and honestly, it should have split sooner.
They eventually receive the name of the pet torturer, but even with a name, it’s wasn’t easy to catch him. Especially because he’s a globe trotter—you’ll have to watch to get more details on this.
Perhaps the greatest missed opportunity throughout the situation is that they didn’t play on the guy’s vanity. If I were investigating, I would have enlisted a producer to assist me with offering him a position on a reality show or something. Have someone famous go online and be like, ‘Who is this guy? We think he’d be perfect for whatever fake reality show we’re filming?’ He wanted to be famous. BAIT HIM! You can even pretend to be a producer yourself.
I’m no necessarily criticizing as much as I’m putting on my ‘investigator’ hat and anticipating what may have caught him sooner.
Back to the show. Eventually, the animal torturer moves on to humans, which he had threatened to do, and a video is posted of him killing a man bound to a bed. There is a puppy in the video, and this is where things get weird.
There’s a female detective on the case, and eventually, the video is shown to her. She goes through how she watched the death and the murderer messing with a dismembered head of the man. At that point in the film, the murderer focuses on the dog, and the investigator is like, I just couldn’t watch at that point.
So, you watch a man being killed, dismembered(not sure if that is on camera), and the murderer playing with a decapitated head, but you had to turn it off when the puppy came on screen? As unfunny as what happened is, I had to almost laugh. WOW!
I’m not going to spoil the rest, so if you want to know anything more, you’ll have to watch. I tend to be very picky with what I watch, and I consider this a good investment of my time.
Lark Anderson - Author, Friend, Nerd... 