Meet Dennis Markuze, AKA Dave Mabus. If you happen to be a scientist, an athiest, someone who disagrees with him, or just somebody who said hi to somebody he didn’t like, you’ve been receiving his profanity-laden death threats — probably for years. Mabus has been spamming everybody and anybody he doesn’t like since the early ’90s, and over time has increased in volume and hatred. He’s kept up with the technological times, too: he’s a prolific Twitter troll (his account is presently suspended) and has an extensive email list.
Markuze’s technique was simple: start screaming inarticulate and profane death threats at one person he didn’t like to shut up. Find somebody who was their friend, and start screaming at them, too. Find their friends. Rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat, all day, every day for nearly twenty freaking years. The Christian extremist is the troll’s troll, so to speak.
Why hadn’t anybody called the police? Well, many have complained about Markuze over the years and even launched campaigns calling for his arrest (like the flier above), but since Markuze wasn’t actually a physical threat, there wasn’t much the police wanted to do about it. Sure, the man was clearly mentally ill, but he was never deemed a physical threat — even though he apparently had shown up at an atheist convention at least once.
So, researchers at the University of Montreal started looking into this guy … which made the leader of that effort pop up on Markuze’s radar, and thus he got added to the hit list. Then Markuze tracked down just about everyone who had the nerve to read and comment about all the death threats he’d sent and started sending them death threats too! Unfortunately for Markuze, one of the people who’d replied to this article was the press department for the Montreal City Police. Suddenly, they became very interested, and now Markuze is in jail.
The moral of the story? Apparently, you can’t get the Montreal police to do a damn thing until you annoy them enough. But at least an awful troll is in jail, where he belongs.
Here’s a recent news report on Markuze/Mabus…