When FBI agents started combing through the digital footprint of a dead school shooter, they found more than the usual missed warning signs.Sources:https://www.maargentino.com/narrative-examination-of-the-antioch-high-school-shooters-manifesto-and-diary/https://www.maargentino.com/digital-dystopia-the-dark-nexus-of-violent-extremism-and-sexual-exploitation-a-case-study/https://www.maargentino.com/examining-the-soyjak-attacker-video-fandom-part-i/https://www.propublica.org/article/madison-nashville-school-shooters-online-extremismhttps://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/trump-assassionation-plot-nikita-casap-terrorgram-wisconsin-propublica/https://www.rawstory.com/raw-investigates/solomon-henderson-natalie-rupnow/https://www.accresearch.org/accreports/inside-terrorgram-a-strategic-look-at-the-collectives-historyhttps://gnet-research.org/2024/08/16/dead-society-tracing-the-online-dimension-of-a-militant-accelerationist-inspired-attack-in-turkey/https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/terrorgram-collective-bratislava-murders/https://www.wsmv.com/2025/05/02/antioch-school-shooter-signed-paperwork-not-have-gun-morning-shooting-juvenile-criminal-records-show/https://wpln.org/post/first-came-the-warning-signs-then-a-teen-opened-fire-on-a-nashville-school/https://fox5sandiego.com/news/local-news/court-bars-carlsbad-man-linked-to-wisconsin-school-shooter-from-obtaining-firearms/ https://therighting.com/original/meet-the-radical-feminists-who-stoked-the-biggest-olympics-gender-controversy/https://www.buzzfeed.com/ishmaeldaro/the-baron-nsclrpSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Every case that is a cold case that has DNA right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime.
On the new podcast, America's Crime Lab, every case has a story to tell, and the DNA holds the truth.
He never thought he was going to get caught.
And I just looked at my computer screen.
I was just like, ah, gotcha.
This technology is already solving so many cases.
Listen to America's Crime Lab on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
The Girlfriends is back with a new season.
And this time, I'm telling you the story of Kelly Harnett.
Kelly spent over a decade in prison for a murder she says she didn't commit.
As she fought for her freedom, she taught herself the law.
He goes, oh, God, Harnett, jailhouse lawyer.
And became a beacon of hope for the women locked up alongside her.
You're supposed to have your faith in God, but I had nothing but faith in her.
I think I was put here to save souls by getting people out of prison.
The Girlfriends, Jailhouse Lawyer.
Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Ian Pfaff, the creator and host of the Uncle Chris Podcast.
My Uncle Chris was a real character, a garbage truck driver from South Carolina who is now buried in Panama City alongside the founding families of Panama.
He also happens to be responsible for the craziest night of my life.
Wild stories about adventure, romance, crime, history, and war intertwine as I share the tall tales and hard truths that have helped me understand Uncle Chris.
Listen now to Uncle Chris on Will Farrell's Big Money Players Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Just like great shoes, great books take you places through unforgettable love stories and into conversations with characters you'll never forget.
I think any good romance, it gives me this feeling of like butterflies.
I'm Danielle Robet, and this is bookmarked by Reese's Book Club, the new podcast from Hello Sunshine and iHeart Podcasts, where we dive into the stories that shape us on the page and off.
Each week, I'm joined by authors, celebs, book talk stars, and more for conversations that will make you laugh, cry, and add way too many books to your TBR pile.
Listen to Bookmarked by Reese's Book Club on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Coolzone Media On March 31st, 2025, FBI agents in Wisconsin received records in response to a search warrant.
TikTok had turned over a mountain of data that would take weeks to comb through.
The owner of the accounts in question had been dead for months, which you might assume would mean there was no real reason to rush.
The crime they were investigating was already solved, and there was no perpetrator to prosecute.
But in the time that it had taken to get these records, they'd already missed something big.
The digital footprint of a school shooter is always full of red flags.
That's no surprise.
But these red flags weren't just missed warning signs of a shooting that it was too late to prevent.
By the time that search warrant was served, another shooting had already happened, and they were worried it wouldn't be the last.
As they began sifting through the records, they found exactly what they were looking for.
Another mass shooter in the making.
I'm Molly Conger, and this is Weird Little Guys.
Weird Little Guys This story is awful in every way.
It's complicated.
There are too many moving parts and sealed documents and ongoing court cases and investigations that will never yield any court records because the perpetrator is dead.
It's impossible to really nail down the truth in any way that I'm at all comfortable with.
I'm not going to get to the bottom of anything here.
And it's ugly.
Uglier than usual, even.
I am, for better or worse, pretty good at tuning out my own emotions when I read and write about terrible things.
I try not to let my heart get hard, of course.
But when I'm working, I'm working, not feeling.
It's easier that way, and I've had a lot of practice at it.
I can get through the day reading page after page of old neo-Nazi forum posts without letting it in.
I close my laptop at the end of the day, have dinner, watch a little TV, and I don't think about it when I'm lying in bed at night.
That's not working this week.
The story of this tangled network of online mass murder enthusiasts contains some of the darkest shit I've ever seen.
But it is, unfortunately, time to update the story of Terrogram.
I did an episode way back in September of 2024, very early on in the show's existence, an episode called White Terror.
When I wrote that episode, the FBI had recently arrested Matthew Allison and Dallas Humber, two of the leaders of the online community known as the Terrogram Collective.
What had started out as a sort of loose collection of informal online spaces started to coalesce around 2019 into something more organized.
By 2022, the Terrogram Collective was pushing out slick propaganda, manuals for acts of terrorism.
Their online chats were centered around the idea of militant accelerationism, a violent worldview bent on forcing the collapse of civilization as we know it, triggering a race war that ends with the creation of a white ethnostate.
As part of their plan to bring all of that about, Terrogram encourages mass shootings by celebrating the acts of prior shooters, elevating them to a kind of sainthood.
Saint Tarrant, Saint Roof, Saint McVeigh, Saint Brevik.
Canonizing the men who would bathe the world in blood.
There are scores of saints, depending on who you ask, but those four are always fan favorites.
Brenton Tarrant killed 51 people at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand in 2019.
Dylan Roof killed nine people in a black church in South Carolina in 2015.
Jimothy McVeigh killed 169 people when he blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995.
Unders Brevik killed 77 people in Norway in 2011, most of whom were teenagers at a summer camp.
These saints aren't just revered figures, though.
They're role models.
The goal of saint culture is not just to talk about what they did, it's to encourage others to join their ranks.
Allison and Humber are still in custody with no date set for trial.
Their cases haven't really budged at all.
None of the updates to this story come from documents produced in those cases.
I wish they had.
Because the updates we do have are more attacks, more murders, linked to the Terrogram collective.
There have been a few more arrests, a few more foiled plots, and a few more manifestos.
There are more than a few episodes worth of updates to this story.
Adam Woffen founder Brendan Russell and his girlfriend Sarabeth Clendaniel have both been convicted for conspiring to blow up the power grid in Baltimore.
A man in Tennessee was arrested mere moments before launching a drone armed with a bomb that he planned to drop on an electrical substation.
A teenager in Australia tried to stab a member of parliament.
A man in Washington was convicted for possession of a machine gun.
A man in Pennsylvania was arrested for possession of child sexual abuse material.
A teenager in Wisconsin murdered both of his parents because he needed to empty their bank accounts to fund his plan to overthrow the government.
Both the United States and Australia have joined the United Kingdom in officially designating TerraGram as an international terrorist organization.
And just this month, the FBI arrested a man in California who they allege was the primary author of the list, which was Terragram's collection of personal information about people they deemed high-value assassination targets.
All of these crimes are connected.
Not directly, necessarily.
These people didn't all know each other, but they all consumed the same content.
They traveled in the same digital spaces.
They had friends in common.
And they all wanted to destroy society as we know it.
Many of those are stories that we'll get to, eventually.
I've been kicking the can on writing about Brandon Russell all year, but some of the others will take time to wind their way through the courts to some kind of conclusion.
No, today we're talking about Damien Blade Allen.
Kind of.
His story isn't quite over yet either.
But to start telling it, we have to start so far before the beginning that we might as well get a head start.
Damian Allen was arrested in April of 2025 in Palm Beach County, Florida.
He's been charged with written threats to conduct a mass shooting, unlawful use of a badge, and unlawful use of a two-way communications device.
That third charge is something you see pretty often in felony cases in Florida.
It just means you used a phone or a computer to facilitate the commission of a felony.
It kind of just feels like a way to add five years to any underlying felony.
But Florida's criminal code isn't the point here.
The point is, Damian Allen didn't actually shoot anyone.
He just talked about it.
But to understand how he ended up facing these charges, we have to talk about who he was talking to when he made those plans.
And we have to go back in time to talk about several people who did carry out their attacks.
Yuri Kražik in Slovakia, Arda Kosukya Tim in Turkey, Samantha Rupnow in Wisconsin, and Solomon Henderson in Tennessee.
Yuri Kražik and Arda Kosukya Tim, we've already talked about in the Terragram episode last fall.
Kražik was Teragram's first saint.
He was the first member of the group to heed the call and add himself to the pantheon.
He was in direct personal contact with the group's leaders for months leading up to his death in October of 2022.
He shot himself after killing two people outside of a gay bar in Bratislava.
And after he died, Dallas Humber recorded an audiobook of his manifesto.
Arda Kosukia theme was discussed briefly in that episode too.
In August of 2024, the 18-year-old stabbed five men outside of a mosque in Iskishahir, Turkey.
Thankfully, none of his victims died, and he was taken into custody alive.
His manifesto explicitly credits several Terrogram publications for inspiring the attack, and Terrogram channels praised the attack.
Writing in one Terrogram chat, Dallas Humber noted that despite his obvious commitment to the cause, he couldn't be added to the list of saints worshipped by the group because he wasn't white.
When Terrogram leaders Dallas Humber and Matthew Allison were indicted a month after Khasukyatim's attack, his attack was one of three acts of terror that the Department of Justice alleged they can concretely connect the pair to, charging them with directly soliciting it.
Another of those three attacks was the Bratislava shooting.
After Arda Khsukyatim was arrested, he told Turkish authorities that he'd been assisted and encouraged throughout the process of planning the attack over a period of months by someone he'd met online.
He said they communicated in English, and he believed this person was a teenager living in Eastern Europe.
His online friend used the name Fjotolf Hansen, which you might think sounds like a clue, but it really isn't.
It's just another homage to the mass shooters these young men idolize.
Fjotolf Hansen was, from 2017 until 2025, the legal name of Norwegian mass murderer Anders Brevik.
Brevik has since made yet another legal name change and he is now going by Far Skaldgrimmer Rauskjolder av Northriki.
I haven't pronounced that right and that's okay.
It is apparently an entirely made-up name loosely based in Old Norse.
This Hansen though, the one chatting with Arda Kosukyatim about how to most efficiently carry out mass murders, was not actually Anders Brevik, obviously.
He's just a fan.
And on the day of Kosukya Tim's attack, August 12th, 2024, this Hansen served as a sort of public relations agent for these attempted murders.
Kosukya Tim had prepared an array of photographs and documents ahead of time to be shared online, which Hansen appears to have spent the day doing on a variety of platforms.
Mark-Andre Argentino, a senior research fellow at the Accelerationism Research Consortium, notes this trend in this and similar attacks, calling it a sort of press kit.
Kosuki team had taken selfies posing in his gear, and photos of all the gear laid out neatly on the floor.
He uploaded his own manifesto, along with more than a dozen other documents, including Mein Kampf, James Mason's Siege, several Terrogram publications, and a publication by a group called the Maniac Murder Cult.
Also in that folder were the manifestos of several mass shooters who inspired him, including the one that Yuri Krazik had sent directly to the leaders of the Terragram Collective before he murdered two people in Bratislava in 2022.
But once Kuzuki team was out there trying to commit mass murder, he couldn't really be posting.
He couldn't be checking his phone.
That was Hansen's job.
He created a Twitter account to post links to the live stream in the files.
He posted links and images on forums devoted to gore videos.
And around the same time, someone, probably Hansen, posted those same links on 4chan.
And he also invited a small handful of users to a private group chat on Telegram.
A foot washed up, a shoe with some bones in it.
They had no idea who it was.
Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable.
These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change.
Every case that is a cold case that has DNA right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime.
A small lab in Texas is cracking the code on DNA.
Using new scientific tools, they're finding clues in evidence so tiny, you might just miss it.
He never thought he was going to get caught.
And I just looked at my computer screen.
I was just like, ah, gotcha.
On America's Crime Lab, we'll learn about victims and survivors.
And you'll meet the team behind the scenes at Authram, the Houston lab that takes on the most hopeless cases, to finally solve the unsolvable.
Listen to America's Crime Lab on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Jan Marcelek was a model of German corporate success.
It seemed so damn simple for him.
Also, it turned out, a fraudster.
Where does the money come from?
That was something that I always was questioning myself.
But what if I told you that was the least interesting thing about him?
His secret office was less than 500 meters down the road.
I often ask myself now, did I know the true Rhian at all?
Certain things in my life since then have gone terribly wrong.
I don't know if they followed me to my home.
It looks like the ingredients of a really grand spy story here, because this ties together the Cold War with the new one.
Listen to Hot Money, Agent of Chaos on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
The End There's stuff they don't want you to know.
Is there a conspiracy afoot to create a rationalization or the rollout of martial law?
Every Monday, we break down the news, make connections, and reveal the stuff they don't want you to know.
Crypto investor allegedly tortured captive Italian businessman with a chainsaw.
New chat GPT model refuses to shut down when instructed.
A secret deal between members of Mexican cartels and the United States government.
Residents are reporting sightings of exploding birds.
There is a video of this sphere zigzagging through the sky.
Listen to stuff they don't want you to know on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows.
OpenAI is a financial abomination, a thing that should not be, an aberration, a symbol of rot at the heart of Silicon Valley.
And I'm going to tell you why on my show Better Offline, the rudest show in the tech industry, where we're breaking down why OpenAI, along with other AI companies, are dead set on lying to your boss that they can take your job.
I'm also going to be talking with the greatest minds in the industry about all the other ways the rich and powerful are ruining the computer.
Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you happen to get your podcasts.
Before the attack began, Kasuki team sent Hansen a message on Telegram announcing that it would begin soon.
The message had the links to the photos, the documents, the manifesto, and the live stream.
Hansen forwarded that message to the private chat just before the stream went live.
There were nine people in the chat.
They'd assembled ahead of time, with foreknowledge of this impending attack.
This was a watch party.
The stream was short.
The longest version of the video that I could find, which does seem to be the entirety of the original stream, is less than three minutes long.
The opening frames show the attacker's face.
He's staring directly into the camera.
It's like he's looking at you.
He's wearing a helmet, goggles, and a half-face skull mask.
And the shot lingers there on his face for a little too long before he affixes the camera to the front of his tactical vest and starts walking.
Outside of the mosque, a dozen or so older men were sitting in a cafe area after evening prayer.
And they seem to ignore this oddly dressed teenager until he approaches a man from behind and stabs him.
But then, instead of attacking any of the other men in the immediate area, most of whom are in their 70s and sitting down, he takes off running.
It's an odd scene.
Remember, he's wearing safety goggles, a helmet, a skull mask, a black tactical vest, and camo pants.
He looks weird.
And he's just stabbed a man.
But the reactions from most of the people around him are pretty subdued.
He lunges towards another man who cries out and does try to run from him.
But an older man smoking a cigarette a few feet away watches this happen and just says, what are you doing?
In a tone that I can only describe as disinterested.
As Kasuki team runs off, down the street and through a nearby park, he stabs several more people at random.
An old man on a bench in the park yells at him to go away, but a lot of the people don't react to him at all.
He was tackled by police less than a minute and a half after the attack began.
And the video ends with the camera pointed up towards the sky, with faces peering down at it.
He's lying on his back in a parking lot, surrounded by a handful of police officers and a crowd of curious onlookers.
In the chat, the group was disappointed.
He had stabbed several people, but in the video, you can't actually see much.
There's no blood.
There's barely any screaming.
There's no corpses.
Nobody died.
It was just a lot of shaky footage of the path in a park and audio of a nervous teen breathing heavily.
A user known only as Nitro wrote, A for effort.
Hansen said, at least he did it.
And a third user replied, credit for that, at least.
That third message, posted in that invite-only private watch party for what they hoped would be a mass murder, was written by a 14-year-old girl in Madison, Wisconsin.
Four months later, not long after her 15th birthday, she murdered two people before taking her own life.
Natalie Rupnow, who preferred to go by Samantha, didn't live stream her attack, which was a great disappointment to her followers.
In the final few minutes before she opened fire in a classroom at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin on December 16th, 2024, she was sitting in a bathroom stall, making her last posts.
A photo of her own hand, making the OK symbol commonly used to mean white power, and a link to her manifesto.
The post garnered significant attention later in the day.
But at first, before it was big news, only a few people saw it.
She only had a handful of followers.
One of those followers replied to the post, writing, quote, live stream it.
He quoted her post too, adding the same message.
Live stream it.
He seemed to know what it was, despite the fact that the link to the manifesto she posted didn't work.
He could only see the photo, a photo posted without a caption, of a hand held out over a bathroom floor.
Live stream it.
He understood, or perhaps knew, that this was her final post before an attack.
There's no concrete Evidence, at least none that's been made public, that this user had communicated directly with Rucknow about the specifics of what was about to happen.
But they were mutuals.
They followed each other's Twitter accounts.
Screenshots of her account taken before the attack hit the news showed that she followed 19 accounts.
I can only tell you for sure who two of them belonged to.
She followed two accounts that both belonged to a 17-year-old boy in Antioch, Tennessee.
A month after Rupnow's death, he was dead too.
Solomon Henderson shot and killed a student in his high school cafeteria before taking his own life.
It's like a virus.
It's like the ring.
These kids are watching people die online.
They're consuming online media about mass murder.
And then within weeks, they're dead too.
And they've taken other people with them.
Samantha Rupnow killed two people, Erin West, a teacher, and a 14-year-old student named Ruby Vergara.
Erin loved camping and Disney World and her husband of 20 years and their three daughters.
Ruby loved art, her pets, and playing keyboard in her family worship band.
They weren't targeted.
Their deaths were random, a meaningless, nihilist act of violence.
Jocelyn came to the United States from Guatemala when she was nine.
She was on the soccer team, and she hoped to become a doctor.
The photo in her obituary is from Jerkinsaniera.
They were so much more than that, of course.
Those few small details don't capture the depth of what was lost.
But I only know as much about these victims as their families shared with the media or wrote in their obituaries.
I had to try to learn something about who they were.
They were real people.
People who were loved.
People who had passions and struggles and dreams.
People with so much life left to live.
And that can't be allowed to get lost in this story of contagious, hateful violence.
Violence seemingly for the sake of violence alone.
The way they died was meaningless.
But their deaths weren't.
And their lives weren't.
And, selfishly, I had to see their faces, smiling and alive.
It's the only way to push out the images of things I wish I hadn't seen.
After Solomon Henderson carried out his attack at Antioch High School in Nashville, Tennessee, two documents surfaced.
One was a manifesto, 51 pages long.
The other was nearly 300 pages of his online diary, covering the months leading up to the attack.
Both documents are full of links, screenshots, memes, selfies, copied sections of other texts, and any truth they hold is buried in so many layers of irony and inside jokes from incredibly insular online communities that it's hard to take much away from them.
It is a manifesto and a diary.
That's what the documents are.
But reading those documents, it felt like I spent most of the day reading a child's suicide note.
Because that's really what they are.
Like Arta Kasukiatim, like Yuri Kražik, like Samantha Rupnow, Solomon Henderson was struggling with thoughts of suicide.
His diary starts in October of 2024, three months before he died.
It opens with, quote, I'm burning with hate.
Hate will change the world.
An entry later in the evening that same day includes the line, quote, the only good N-word is a dead N-word, and that includes me.
Solomon Henderson, it may surprise you to hear, was black.
He knew this meant he couldn't be made a saint.
Tarogram saints have to be white.
But he wanted to do it anyway.
He wanted to be like his heroes and he wanted to inspire more violence.
And he wanted to be dead.
A few days later, he wrote, I'm perfect for this.
I have no faith in humanity.
He doesn't say yet what this is, but it's the same it he meant when he told Samantha Rupnow to live stream it.
It's clear that he was already planning a shooting and that he had been for months.
The same week he started keeping the diary, he pulled a box cutter on another student at school and was suspended for two days.
He was charged with attempted reckless endangerment, but was placed in a diversion program instead of being prosecuted.
On December 16th, 2024, at 2 a.m., he wrote in the diary, When I think about what I'm going to do, I get sad, seeing and reading kids and adults before who did similar attacks.
The loneliness.
The fact we had no other choice, no help, just nothing.
So like I said, it's clear that he'd already been planning to do something.
He'd had the idea in his head long before what happened later that day.
But after Samantha Rupnow's attack, he became fixated on her, and his resolve to carry out his attack intensified significantly.
Later that evening, he wrote in the diary, Holy shit, the newest school shooter followed me.
And he pasted in screenshots of her account before it was deleted, showing that they did indeed follow each other.
On December 18th, two days after she died, he wrote, She's stuck in my head.
The next day, he created a new Discord server.
The portions of that server that I've been able to view don't show very many messages prior to the day he died.
But based on the reactions from the other users, it appears they all understood when he invited them to the server that its purpose was for them to be able to access the live stream on the day he decided to do it.
Creating the server was a concrete step taken toward the attack, and it was directly motivated by his new obsession with Rupnow, who he refers to as Saintress Rupnow, in both his diary and his manifesto.
At the end of the manifesto, in a section titled Final Remarks, Henderson wrote, I was so miserable.
I wanted to kill myself.
I just couldn't take it anymore.
I'm a worthless sub-human, a living, breathing disgrace.
That all changed once I read Yuri Krajik's manifesto and the English edition Mass Cleaner Handbook.
He's referring to the Bratislava Shooters Manifesto and the document written by Arda Kusukyatim.
Back when I originally read Kusukyatim's manifesto in August, I had to copy and paste the Turkish text into Google Translate one paragraph at a time.
The English edition he's talking about was posted online by that mysterious user calling himself Hansen.
Henderson's manifesto ends with this, quote, I take great pride in the fact that the people before and after me will commit similar acts, not only in the USA, but all over the world.
I hope you all enjoyed the broadcast.
After the shooting at Antioch High School on January 22nd, 2025, people on Twitter noticed something.
They found his account.
He'd been mutual followers with Rupnow and interacted with her on the day of the shooting.
Several users had said back in December that the authorities should follow up with him specifically based on those posts.
In January, at least one person posted that they'd gone to the trouble of submitting an official FBI tip the month prior.
It's not clear if the tip was even made or if anyone followed up on it or if the authorities had Henderson on their radar at all.
Well, it's not clear if he was on their radar in January of 2025 because the authorities had been in contact with Solomon Henderson several times.
He was arrested in 2020 when he was just 13 after his mother called the police to report that he'd run away after punching her in the face and hitting her with a chair.
In November of 2023, he was charged with aggravated sexual exploitation of a minor after downloading child sexual abuse material.
There aren't any more details provided in the reporting on this.
He was a minor himself, just 16 at the time.
But child sexual abuse material is always illegal for anyone to have for any reason.
And it's also rampant in the same online communities that traffic in gore videos and mass shooting worship.
As a minor, his court record is not open for public inspection.
But news outlets report that he was court ordered to have no access to the internet except for as needed for schoolwork.
But it's not clear what the duration of that sentence would have been.
At some point in 2023, the Nashville police took two guns away from the home.
But police will only say that the guns belonged to an adult.
But they can't release any more details about why they were called to the house in the first place because it involved a minor.
And then in October of 2024, he was arrested for pulling a knife on a girl at school.
On the day of the shooting, in January, he was dropped off at school late.
He'd spent all morning at court with his mother.
As part of the diversion program he'd been put into for that charge, he had to sign paperwork acknowledging that he was court-ordered not to possess any guns or ammunition.
So there were warning signs.
They knew who he was.
He wasn't allowed online and he wasn't allowed to touch a gun and the cops had previously removed all of the guns from his home.
It doesn't seem to have made a difference.
And while the cops may have missed some of the red flags in Solomon Henderson's final days, they did show some initiative.
The day after Rupnow's death, authorities in California detained a 20-year-old man named Alexander Pfefendorf.
It would take months to get records from the various platforms where Rupnow had been posting and messaging in order to see the full scope of her online communications.
But her messages with Pafendorf were seen by agents immediately.
And those messages were very concerning.
Apparently the pair had been messaging in the days leading up to the attack.
It isn't entirely clear to me based on the reporting that I could find if Pafendorf had specific prior knowledge of the shooting, like an actual time, date, and place.
But they had been exchanging fairly explicit messages about their shared intent to carry out a mass shooting in the near future.
His messages to her contained details of a plan to attack a federal building using guns and explosives.
The FBI acted quickly, and they arrived at his home with guns drawn the very next day.
When he was interviewed by FBI agents, he admitted to exchanging messages with Rupnow, but he wasn't charged with a crime.
Instead, the Carlsbad, California Police Department filed an application for a gun violence emergency protective order, and they placed him on a psychiatric hold.
It turned out that Alexander Pafendorf didn't own any guns.
He had no guns or bomb-making materials at all.
He'd just been trying to impress a teenage girl online.
The two talked online quite a bit, chatting about their suicidal thoughts, their white supremacist beliefs, and their plans to murder as many people as possible.
But he claims he didn't mean it.
He apologized in court, saying he'd been attempting to pursue a romantic relationship with the girl and never had any intention of purchasing any weapons or following through on the things they talked about.
Maybe he assumed she didn't mean it either.
No criminal charges were filed against Pafendorf, and a judge in San Diego ruled in April that he will be legally barred from owning a gun until at least 2028.
It's not entirely clear if he knew she was only 15, but given the nature of the online spaces they were in, I would bet that he did.
A foot washed up, a shoe with some bones in it.
They had no idea who it was.
Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable.
These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change.
Every case that is a cold case that has DNA right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime.
A small lab in Texas is cracking the code on DNA.
Using new scientific tools, they're finding clues in evidence so tiny, you might just miss it.
He never thought he was going to get caught.
And I just looked at my computer screen.
I was just like, ah, gotcha.
On America's Crime Lab, we'll learn about victims and survivors.
And you'll meet the team behind the scenes at Authram, the Houston lab that takes on the most hopeless cases, to finally solve the unsolvable.
Listen to America's Crime Lab on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Jan Marcelek was a model of German corporate success.
It seemed so damn simple for him.
Also, it turned out, a fraudster.
Where does the money come from?
That was something that I always was questioning myself.
But what if I told you that was the least interesting thing about him?
His secret office was less than 500 meters down the road.
I often ask myself now, did I know the true Rian at all?
Certain things in my life since then have gone terribly wrong.
I don't know if they followed me to my home.
It looks like the ingredients of a really grand spy story because this ties together the Cold War with the new one.
Listen to Hot Money, Agent of Chaos on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
There's stuff they don't want you to know.
Is there a conspiracy afoot to create a rationalization or the rollout of martial law?
Every Monday, we break down the news, make connections, and reveal the stuff they don't want you to know.
Crypto investor allegedly tortured captive Italian businessman with a chainsaw.
New chat GPT model refuses to shut down when instructed.
A secret deal between members of Mexican cartels and the United States government.
Residents are reporting sightings of exploding birds.
There is a video of this sphere zigzagging through the sky.
Listen to stuff they don't want you to know on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows.
OpenAI is a financial abomination, a thing that should not be, an aberration, a symbol of rot at the heart of Silicon Valley.
And I'm going to tell you why on my show Better Offline, the rudest show in the tech industry, where we're breaking down why OpenAI, along with other AI companies, are dead set on lying to your boss that they can take your job.
I'm also going to be talking with the greatest minds in the industry about all the other ways the rich and powerful are ruining the computer.
Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you happen to get your podcasts.
I'm going to go to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you are.
And Alexander Pafendorf was not Samantha Rupnow's only online boyfriend.
That six-page document she posted just before the shooting was locked.
It was a link to a Google Doc that she'd forgotten to make publicly accessible.
Unlike Artica Zakiatim, she hadn't prepared a mass shooter's press kit and left it with a co-conspirator.
So at first it seemed like no one would ever know what was in the manifesto.
Within hours though, a Canadian woman named Anna Slatz claimed to have made contact with the shooter's boyfriend.
Slatz is a journalist, I guess.
In 2018, she was the editor of her college newspaper until she was forced to step down after making the editorial decision to publish a racist screed from a known neo-Nazi.
She worked briefly for the far-right, virulently Islamophobic outlet Rebel News and sometimes wrote for the post-millennial.
In 2022, she founded her own outlet that focuses almost exclusively on stirring up hatred towards trans women.
And that may have been what sparked Slatz's initial interest in the story.
There were rumors in the immediate aftermath of the shooting that Rupnow was transgender.
She wasn't.
By all accounts, she was a heterosexual cisgender female.
But regardless of what drew Slatz to the story, she managed to convince a user who claimed to be Rupnow's long-distance boyfriend to share a copy of the manifesto with her.
She then proceeded to watermark each page of the manifesto with her own name before posting the images to Twitter.
Now, as a journalist, I understand the frustration at having your work stolen and your research used without credit.
I do.
It's happened to me too many times to count.
But I can't for the life of me even begin to imagine the series of thoughts and ideas that would have to pass through your head to lead you to a place where you are watermarking your name onto the pages of a manifesto of a dead child hours after the author shot up a school.
That makes me nauseous.
But like I said, journalists is kind of a loose term here.
The boyfriend, who's never been named publicly, says Rupnow sent him the manifesto on WhatsApp about an hour before the shooting, but that he didn't see it until hours later.
A classmate says Rupnau had talked about having an internet boyfriend who lived in Germany, and that appears to be the same individual who provided the manifesto.
We don't know if he's actually a teenager or actually in Germany, but these are the elements of his identity that he claims and that she was telling people in her life.
The unnamed Twitter user Slat SpokeDu said they'd been talking for about two years, and he did seem to know a significant amount of information about Rupnow's home life.
So she sent the manifesto to her German boyfriend.
She exchanged murder fantasies with Alexander Pafendorf.
But there was at least one more internet boyfriend chatting about mass shootings with Samantha Rupnow.
The first two internet boyfriends came to light on the day of the shooting.
FBI agents saw the messages between Rupnau and Pafendorf as soon as they took custody of her phone.
And the unnamed German boyfriend outed himself in a series of tweets and ultimately shared the manifesto with Anna Slatz.
The third man's existence didn't come to light until he was arrested at the end of April 2025, four months after Rupnau's death.
It took that long for the very slow wheels of the justice system to turn.
According to the charging documents in Damian Allen's case, the FBI searched Rupnow's cell phone and home almost immediately.
But they didn't even apply for the search warrants for her TikTok accounts until over a month later, on January 30th, 2025.
It's useless to speculate about why that might be.
Maybe that's just how long it took to get around to the paperwork.
Maybe that's how long it took for them to figure out which accounts belonged to her.
It's common for people active in online extremist communities to cycle through accounts pretty quickly, getting banned for posting something hideous, making a new account, reconnecting with old followers, getting banned again, and so on forever.
So maybe it took a little bit of legwork to know what to even ask for when drafting the warrant.
I'm willing to bet that played a role here.
But the timing does raise an uncomfortable question.
Had they not planned on looking at everything?
They'd gone in guns blazing to grab Alexander Pafendorf right away.
And that turned out to be a situation that was admittedly gross, but not life-threatening.
There was no mass murder in the making there.
He was just a guy with violent fantasies who wanted to date a child.
Again, disgusting, abhorrent.
But he was lying about planning a mass shooting.
He didn't even own a gun.
So maybe it took the entire six weeks between December 16th when the shooting occurred and January 30th when the warrant was signed.
Maybe it took six weeks to identify all the TikTok accounts connected to Rucknow.
But maybe Solomon Henderson's attack on January 22nd played a part in that timeline.
Pafendorf was bluffing.
But after the shooting in Tennessee, it was all too clear that not everyone she talked to online was.
Some of them were deadly serious.
Either way, we'll never know.
And it took TikTok two months to respond to the court order to produce those records.
So it wasn't until April of 2025 that FBI agents in Milwaukee made an urgent call to the FBI field office in Miami.
They needed to get in touch with the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office as soon as possible.
One of the men who'd spent all summer chatting with Rucknow appeared to be one of their deputies.
After what must have been a very tense call between the FBI and the Internal Affairs Bureau in Palm Beach, it was determined that the accounts did belong to Damian Allen, but despite the scores of photos of Allen posing in his apparently very real Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office uniform, he'd never been employed there or by any law enforcement agency.
When police searched his home, they found 18 guns, 12,000 rounds of ammunition, and a variety of authentic or realistic replicas of uniforms for various law enforcement Agencies and branches of the military.
According to the charging documents, Damian Allen communicated with Samantha Rupnow regularly between May and September of 2024.
The documents only contain excerpts of their conversations over TikTok DM, but they exchanged usernames for a variety of other platforms, including Snapchat and Discord.
In one message in May of 2024, Rupnow tells Alan, quote, I wanted to do a black church that was near me, but, you know.
He responded by telling her about his gear, describing his bulletproof vest, his collection of high-capacity magazines, and stockpile of flashbangs and smoke grenades.
Rupnow, who was at the time just 14 years old, said she only had access to her dad's handguns.
In the middle of this conversation about guns, Alan wrote, quote, once you get to a point, there's no going back.
And he said he had a plan to strike seven different locations.
Two weeks later, in another late-night conversation about their plans to carry out mass shootings, Alan wrote, quote, we go down together.
To which Rupnow replied, correct.
I love you.
I love you more, Alan wrote.
In July, Rupnow scolded Alan for a post he'd made.
The post isn't described in the affidavit, and his accounts are gone for the most part, but it sounds like he'd probably posted one of those fan edit videos of cut-together clips and photos of different murderers.
It's a popular style of content in these communities.
But Rupnow's message admonishes him.
She wrote, quote, Dylan Klebold was a Jew.
Adam Lanza was a gay pedophile.
Nick was also a pedophile.
The Trump shooter, also a Jew.
Peyton Gendren was into furry porn, which all of that is disgraceful and disgusting.
Look stuff up before posting it.
Apparently, she thought his taste in mass shooters was lowbrow.
By September of 2024, they seemed to have broken up.
The charging documents only contained snippets, so there's no context.
But on September 23rd, Rabnow wrote, quote, I know I un-added you and I apologize.
I love you and I'm so sorry about all this.
I hope all goes well for you and I don't do what I did again.
A few minutes later, she followed up, writing, I will always care and love you, even if I'm not right for you.
As much as I want to talk to you every day and hour of my time, I can't because I don't want to harm you in any way.
A few days later, Alan messaged her to say his other account had been banned and asked her to add him on Snapchat.
It is possible they continued chatting on another platform.
The Palm Beach Sheriff's Detective's affidavit only describes the communication he reviewed from the direct messages on TikTok.
And there's no allegation made in the affidavit that they believe Alan had specific prior knowledge of the shooting that Rupnow carried out in December.
And all mention of communications between the two of them stops after September of 2024, three months before the shooting.
The latter half of the affidavit is just dedicated to describing the hundreds of Instagram, TikTok, and Discord posts he made pretending to be a sheriff's deputy, which again, he was not.
But there is one rather cryptic line at the end of the affidavit.
Quote, it should be noted that it appears Alan stopped communicating in his chat before Rucknow executed her plan and has not communicated again since.
Alan was talking to numerous members prior to the attack almost daily.
So he stopped posting in his own Discord channel right before Rucknow carried out her attack.
He'd been posting in that Discord constantly and then suddenly he stopped.
He went dark online.
There's no mention of anything he posted anywhere after December of 2024.
I found a handful of posts made in January, February of this year on TikTok and Instagram accounts that he used for posting pictures of his cop roleplay server in Grand Theft Auto, but his real accounts, his personal accounts, his accounts where he expressed himself politically, those went away.
Was Damian Allen actually preparing to carry out a mass shooting of his own?
Or was he just another grown man telling a 14-year-old girl he loved her while encouraging her to kill?
The difference between Damian Allen and Alexander Pafendorf is the guns.
Pafendorf was talking shit.
He didn't actually have so much as a bullet in his possession.
Allen, however, had so much ammunition in his home that the initial reports just listed it as 300 pounds of bullets because it was easier to weigh them than to count them.
He also had a closet full of police and military uniforms that were so realistic, the FBI thought he was a real cop.
It's impossible to know what might have happened, but his fascination with both mass shootings and 14-year-old girls seems to date back at least a couple of years.
In October of 2021, when Alan was a 19-year-old high school senior, he was charged with lewd and lascivious molestation of a victim under 16.
I will note for the record that he was not actually convicted on this charge.
He was placed on a pretrial diversion program that required him to complete a mental health evaluation and prohibited him from possessing firearms for a period of time.
The case was dismissed after he successfully completed the diversion program in 2023, which is weird because he was posting videos of himself all over social media throughout 2022 and 2023, of himself handling firearms.
So, I guess this one just slipped through the cracks.
So, to be clear, technically, he was not convicted of groping a 14-year-old girl's breast.
But the affidavit is interesting either way.
The victim told police she'd noticed Alan watching her during gym class.
After gym class, he followed her as she walked to lunch.
At some point, she asked him what sort of vibe he was going for with his outfit, and he responded that he was trying to achieve a, quote, 1999 columbine vibe, like a black trench coat with stuff strapped to me.
This obviously made the girl a little uncomfortable, so she turned to walk away.
He followed her, then grabbed her by the shoulder and slid his hand down her chest, grabbing her breast.
Alan told the responding officer that the girl was making up the stuff about him touching her because she'd been scared of what he said about Columbine.
So he does admit that he told a much younger student that he was cosplaying as a school shooter.
He just denies that he touched her.
Damian Allen is currently being held without bond in Palm Beach County.
I'm interested to see if his case turns up any new evidence about the online spaces where he may have first met Rapnow.
I seriously doubt he just messaged her on TikTok at random.
They overlapped somewhere.
The recent indictment of a man named Aniruth Kopaswami in Pennsylvania offers a hint that only raises more questions.
Kopasami was an avid consumer of Terogram content, but he was arrested for the possession of child sexual abuse material, material that he'd solicited from a teenage girl that he was grooming online.
The victim in this case lived in Georgia.
Kapasami lived in Pennsylvania.
And in filings in his case, the government notes that the victim posted on Instagram that she'd been friends with Rupnow.
And while his charges are related to the allegations that he coerced a minor into sending him sexual photographs, their conversations weren't just about sex.
He was also talking to her about how to commit and get away with murders.
I couldn't tell you exactly how many men are online right now trying to convince a teenager to commit random, unprovoked acts of lethal violence, but it doesn't feel like a coincidence that these girls encountered each other online before.
It turns out this wasn't really a story about Damian Allen at all, was it?
I could have written a few thousand words about Alan's tragic backstory.
I certainly wasted enough time digging it up, trying to fill in the blanks in court records and old Facebook statuses.
His parents seemed to have had a pretty violent relationship.
His father was charged several times with things like domestic violence and child neglect, but it never seemed to stick.
His mom left him with his father, taking his baby brother with her when she moved in with a new boyfriend and had another son.
His mom was in and out of rehab a few times before ending up in prison in 2017 for sex trafficking a friend's teenage daughter.
That seems to be when he started pretending to be a cop online.
But none of that really matters, does it?
I don't know when he started fantasizing about mass murder or how he met the murderer he said he loved.
I don't know if he was lying to impress a child or if he really was going to do something with all those guns.
Maybe he was all talk.
Or maybe he was going to be the next link in the chain reaction of violence that started in an online chat room.
But if not him, who will it be?
Yuri Krajik is dead.
Samantha Rucknow is dead.
Solomon Henderson is dead.
All three teenagers took their own lives after carrying out a shooting at the urging of people they met online.
Between the three of them, they killed five people.
But Terragram killed eight.
They were sucked into online communities steeped in gore.
Communities that celebrated death and made them believe that the only way their lives would have any meaning is if they died doing something too horrible to forget.
Arta Kasukiatim was arrested before he could attempt to take his own life, and he now faces over 100 years in prison.
Dallas Humber and Matthew Allison are awaiting trial for their role in encouraging these attacks.
Terrogram has been designated as a terrorist organization.
At least a dozen people associated with the group have been arrested around the world.
TerraGram is dead.
Kind of.
But it's not really something you can kill.
It can kill you, but you can't kill an idea.
This particular network operating under this name and with these particular leaders, that's gone.
The virus is still spreading.
In the dark corners of the internet, people are posting fan edits of mass shooting live streams and egging each other on, asking each other, who's going to be the one to get the next high score.
Thank you.
Weirdly guys see production of Coolskill Media and My Heart Radio.
It's researched, written, and recorded by me, Molly Cohen.
Our executive producers are Sophie Licterman and Robert Evans.
The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan.
The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert.
You can email me at WeirdLittleGuyspodcast at gmail.com and we'll definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it.
It's nothing personal.
You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit.
Just don't post anything that's going to make you one of my Weird Little Guys.
This episode contained discussion of suicide and child sexual abuse material.
If you're experiencing thoughts of suicide, you can dial 988 in the United States and Canada to reach the Suicide in Crisis helpline.
If you have encountered child sexual abuse material online, believe someone may be coercing minors into producing sexually explicit images, or believe a child is being sexually abused, report it to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children at report.cybertip.org.
That's report.cybertip.org.
Every case that is a cold case that has DNA right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime.
On the new podcast, America's Crime Lab, every case has a story to tell, and the DNA holds the truth.
He never thought he was going to get caught.
And I just looked at my computer screen.
I was just like, ah, gotcha.
This technology is already solving so many cases.
Listen to America's Crime Lab on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
The Girlfriends is back with a new season.
And this time, I'm telling you the story of Kelly Harnett.
Kelly spent over a decade in prison for a murder she says she didn't commit.
As she fought for her freedom, she taught herself the law.
He goes, oh, God, Harnett, jailhouse lawyer.
And became a beacon of hope for the women locked up alongside her.
You're supposed to have your faith in God, but I had nothing but faith in her.
I think I was put here to save souls by getting people out of prison.
The Girlfriends, Jailhouse Lawyer.
Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
My uncle Chris was a real character, a garbage truck driver from South Carolina who is now buried in Panama City alongside the founding families of Panama.
He also happens to be responsible for the craziest night of my life.
Wild stories about adventure, romance, crime, history, and war intertwine as I share the tall tales and hard truths that have helped me understand Uncle Chris.
Listen now to Uncle Chris on Will Farrell's Big Money Players Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Just like great shoes, great books take you places through unforgettable love stories and into conversations with characters you'll never forget.
I think any good romance, it gives me this feeling of like butterflies.
I'm Danielle Robet, and this is Bookmarked by Reese's Book Club, the new podcast from Hello Sunshine and iHeart Podcasts, where we dive into the stories that shape us on the page and off.
Each week, I'm joined by authors, celebs, book talk stars, and more for conversations that will make you laugh, cry, and add way too many books to your TBR pile.
Listen to Bookmarked by Reese's Book Club on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
