TV shows strive to be influential, but there’s a big difference between “without Arrested Development, there would be no Community” and “Dexter stirred feelings in a British teenager of wanting to murder his girlfriend, which he did.” Steven Miles, 17, was sentenced to 25 years in prison for stabbing Elizabeth Thomas, “before cutting up her body with saws in his bedroom.”
The teenager, who had been diagnosed as having an autistic syndrome, told his family that a voice in his head named Ed told him to kill someone.
He used tools from his father’s tree surgery business to cut up his girlfriend’s body before wrapping her dismembered limbs and placing them in bin bags. When Miles’ sister returned to the family’s flat about an hour after the murder, he told her “Ed made me do something bad.”
The court was told Miles had…wanted to copy the actions of Dexter, the main character in an American TV series about a police forensics officer who is also a serial killer. (Via)
Twenty-five years may not sound like much for someone who did something so terrible, but seven of those years will be spent on a treadmill, which is worse than the death sentence.
