Crime Weekly - S3 Ep223: Crime Weekly News: Bianca's Law

Episode Date: July 10, 2024

On July 14th, 2019, 17 year old Bianca Devins was murdered by 21 year old Brandon Andrew Clark, a man she had met on Instagram and was in some kind of relationship with. After committing the murder, Clark posted a photo of Bianca’s body on social media before slitting his own throat, and posting a picture of that as well. Clark then posted a photo of himself laying over Bianca’s lifeless body. Clark was rushed to the hospital and was later charged with Bianca’s murder, but the photos of her still circulate on the internet, and still haunt her family and friends. Try our coffee!! - www.CriminalCoffeeCo.com Become a Patreon member -- > https://www.patreon.com/CrimeWeekly Shop for your Crime Weekly gear here --> https://crimeweeklypodcast.com/shop Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/CrimeWeeklyPodcast Website: CrimeWeeklyPodcast.com Instagram: @CrimeWeeklyPod Twitter: @CrimeWeeklyPod Facebook: @CrimeWeeklyPod 

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with expert AI tools. Build, scale, and enjoy the incredible results. You can do it all yourself on Wix. with expert AI tools. Build, scale, and enjoy the incredible results. You can do it all yourself on Wix. Hey everyone, welcome back to Crime Weekly News. I'm Derek Levasseur. And I'm Stephanie Harlow. And we're going to get right into this week's episode. But before we do, I had asked Stephanie a couple of weeks ago about CrimeCon Cruise. It looks like we're going. So if you want to go on the CrimeCon Cruise, it's in November. You can go to crimecon.com

and check it out. You can use our code and get a discount, I believe, on the regular priced rooms, not on the VIPs, although I think the VIPs are sold out. And if you want to find us, just look for the red haired girl who is attached to the tall man with some sort of child leash so that she doesn't fall over the side of the boat or get thrown over the side of the boat. I will be leashed to Derek the entire time. We're going to make sure that you don't have a balcony room. You have to have it in, what do you call those rooms? I don't even know what it would be like a, you have a little porthole. That's all you're getting. No, because then I'll be like all claustrophobic. Yeah. It'll be great. It'll be great. We'll tell them to put a lock on your balcony door. Yeah. So if you're thinking about going on a cruise and you enjoy CrimeCon as much as we do, this may be the right option for you. If not, there's always Denver next year. So with that all being said, let's get into this week's episode

because it's a tragic one. But as we've talked about in the past, there's some positives that can come from these tragedies. And I always hope that's the case with these situations, what we can learn from them, how new laws can be developed because of them, what we can do as a society to try to prevent this from happening in the future. So some of you or many of you may know that Stephanie already covered the Bianca Devins case on her main channel a while back. She was telling me before we hit record. But for anyone who doesn't know, we're going to talk about the case in general. And then we're also going to talk about why we're covering it today, because there may be something coming out

of this tragedy that people in the future can benefit from. So a quick recap. On July 14th, 2019, 17-year-old Bianca Devins was murdered by 21-year-old Brandon Andrew Clark, a man she had met on Instagram and was in some kind of relationship with. After committing the murder, Clark posted a photo of Bianca's body on social media before slitting his own throat and posting a picture of that as well. Clark then posted a photo of himself laying over Bianca's lifeless body. Clark was rushed to the hospital and was later charged with Bianca's murder, but the photos of her still circulate on the internet today and still haunt her family and friends,

which brings us to why we're covering this. Stephanie, fill us in. Yeah, I mean, it's like we make jokes and we're like, ugh, you know, everything that goes on the internet is forever, but it's not a joke, it's true. And that's why it feels like there should be more laws, more regulations about personal information of others being posted by the people that they are not. You should choose what personal information of your own goes on the internet, but that's not how it always works. And even if these things get

deleted and removed from the platforms, somebody took a screenshot, somebody shared it. So then it keeps going and going and going. And that's what Bianca Devins' family is dealing with right now. And they were in the wake of her murder because in the days, weeks and months following Bianca's death, family members would be tagged in photos of Bianca's corpse accompanied by mean and vile messages almost every day. And they tried to get the photos reported and taken down. But every time one was taken down, several more would pop up elsewhere. Just last month, Bianca's mother, Kim Devens, received a reminder of her daughter's gruesome death. She said, I just got a message yesterday. It wasn't a picture of Bianca, but someone recreated the

death photo with a Lego person and then sent me a nasty message about her. It still does happen. It will suddenly pop up that the photo is posted somewhere. End quote. So after Brandon Andrew Clark posted those photos, they went viral. They showed up on sites like 4chan and Discord. And now, Bianca's mother, Kim Devins, is speaking out about the underbelly of social media and its toxic online communities. Devins said, quote, I want to tell the world about Bianca.

I always want to speak about my daughter, but we also have a really important message to get across. Some important changes need to be made as far as legislation and social media companies go. I'm her mom. I can't let that picture be online, end quote. Kim Devins says what I think we all understand and realize, that there's no good way or fast way to get photos like this removed. She says, quote, all social media platforms have a reporting mechanism, but more often than not, we were getting reports that the photo didn't go against their guidelines. That still happens to this day. There's no person to contact so that you can explain what's going on. I wasn't able to get in contact with Instagram, so I went to my local congressman. His wife was

friends with my best friend's sister, so I was able to get in contact fairly quickly and easily. Most people don't have that. That's the one thing I would like to see as federal law. I've proposed that these social media companies need to have a crisis response center. We need to be able to contact these companies in real time, end quote. And they do have some state laws that sort of coincide with what Kim Devins is saying. In late 2022, Bianca's law was signed by New York Governor Kathy Hochul. It establishes the crime of unlawful decimation of personal images, particularly crime scene photos, and it establishes criminal and civil penalties for distributing personal images of victims with the intent to hurt them or their families. And these days, we know many of us spend a lot of time on the internet. Some people

might say they spend most of their time on the internet. It's how we shop, socialize, unwind, and entertain ourselves. But online spaces can also be breeding grounds for harassment campaigns that can turn very dangerous and dark when coupled with the anonymity that the internet offers. There's currently no federal laws against doxing, which is the practice of posting someone's personal information with the intent to incite harassment in real life. There's also no federal laws against using deep fake images of another person. And states have only started recently introducing legislation for the practice of swatting. And if you don't know what

swatting is, it's when coordinated groups online place fake calls to law enforcement with the intent of sending SWAT teams to private residences with the hopes of violent and traumatizing confrontations. It's very bad. And I think a few people have, a few public figures have died from swatting. So it's a very real issue. But the Internet's kind of the Wild West right now. You know, people say what they want. They do what they want. And even if you get these things removed, they're still there on the Internet forever.

And it can be life-altering and life-ruining in many, many, many places. And Bianca Devins, her mother, her family, they don't want to see this picture. They don't want to constantly be reminded of what happened lot of hate towards her after her death. You know, people saying, oh, she just wanted attention. She let him on, basically saying she deserved to die. And when Bianca's mother and her family are getting messages like this, like your daughter deserved to die, along with pictures of Bianca's body, you can never get past how horrible and traumatizing her death was. You're constantly being re-victimized and re-traumatized every single day. And when does it end? When those pictures continue to circulate freely. So it's all valid points that Kim Devins has. And I'm glad there's a rule in New York or a law in New York now, but we need to make this happen on a federal level. associated with it, AI, all these different things, they're outpacing law enforcement's capabilities exponentially. We just can't keep up with it. We really can't. It's rapidly evolving

every single day. And the law just takes a long time to write up, create, get passed, enact. And so by the time you get a law passed, the technology has already advanced past it. So we're constantly just playing catch up. And I find myself in a situation even in the private world, but even more so when I was in law enforcement where we had situations where not only, even when we had the laws, it was almost impossible to get through to these companies, social media companies, but even the cell phone providers or even like Apple. We had situations where we would have a search warrant for a phone that was potentially connected to a murder and it was an act of Congress to get into that phone. They just wouldn't do it. the main takeaway that I had from that is once they were allowing law enforcement to get into the phone, it just opened Pandora's box and it then would have customers questioning the security

of their phones on a more broader scale. So they just really didn't want to do it regardless of what the cost was to our case. And as a police officer, obviously I see one side of it. As a civilian, I see another. As it pertains specifically to social media, you would like to think that when you go online, whether it's Instagram, X, Pinterest, whatever the hell you use, that you have protections there where your privacy is going to be protected by the companies that you're trusting to disseminate whatever information you're putting out there online. And there's also the First Amendment right to freedom of speech where you can go on and say what you want to say. But what you want to say doesn't come without consequences. But it kind of gels on the Internet a little bit, right?

Well, that's the problem, right? On social media right now, where it's this gap where law enforcement, by the time they catch up to you, you're already gone. It's really difficult to hold anyone accountable for what they put. I'm glad to see the laws are there civilly and criminally as far as disseminating crime scene photos and using it specifically to harm the family members. But it all goes back to what can they actually do, right? If someone goes on Instagram right now and posts that picture and sends it in a private message to- There's not much they can do, yeah. Good luck.

Yeah. Good luck getting that information. I mean, law enforcement can try, but even if they're successful in getting that information, the amount of different layers that someone can, and it doesn't have to be like a cybersecurity expert that you can put into place where you use like a VPN or a fake email to sign up for the account. It's going to be hard to catch this person. It's going to be even harder to prosecute them successfully. So I don't know what the answer is. It's difficult, but I will say silver lining

here. You have someone who's been through the worst thing possible as a parent, and she's still experiencing things from this instead of crawling into a hole and just, you know, forgetting that life exists. She's trying to make a difference for the next parent or the next sibling or the next spouse or whatever it might be who goes through something like this, because more than likely it's too late for her. I mean, she can stop it, but by the time it actually comes to fruition, whatever she's able to get done won't most likely benefit her, but it will benefit the next person. So it's just a really selfless act on her part. And again, it sucks that she's going through this and her reasoning behind doing this is because of what she's experienced herself. But I'm glad to see that

she's not going down without a fight, if you will. She's trying to push back against the people who are re-traumatizing her on a daily or weekly basis. And hopefully something comes from it where the people who are doing this are eventually held accountable. Listen, the internet happens on such a grand scale. No law enforcement agency could ever keep up with it. And that's kind of the definition of, you know, this is why we can't have nice things. Because what should happen is the mass collective of people should have some sort of moral conscience and be like, this isn't the right thing to do.

But because they're operating under screen names, because they're operating under, you know, anonymity and sometimes, yes, protected with VPNs and things like that, they don't they don't they don't use the moral compass that society like says they should because they can just do everything in the dark. Yes, it's good what Bianca Devon's mother is doing. And it's good that there's laws in place on the local level and there should be some on the federal level. But even if the laws are in place, there is no law enforcement body that has enough time, energy or resources to track down every single person doing everything bad on the Internet. It's just not possible, especially when there's horrible things happening. Like we know there's, you know, pedophile rings operating on the internet and we have task force that are trying to combat those things. And even they can't keep up with everything happening. It's just not, the internet's not the safest place to be at this time.

And so hopefully there's changes, but it just looks to me like it's going to get worse and everybody needs to do their very best to protect themselves and maybe not trust anybody with sensitive information about yourself. And I mean, in Bianca's case, there's nothing she could have done. There was not. I mean, she only knew this dude for two months. So anybody who wants to say she was leading him on this, she knew him for two months. She was a teenager. He was a grown man. There's nobody at fault here but Brandon Andrew Clark. So anybody who's out there still continuing to harass Bianca's family, there will be karma

coming your way. And it may not be in the legal form and it may not be in this lifetime, but you will see your karma for that. It's despicable and vile. Couldn't agree more. And definitely thinking about Bianca's family specifically, Kim, where you guys can go from here with this, because I'm hoping most of you haven't experienced what Kim has experienced. But maybe to a lesser degree, you have experienced some type of online bullying or harassment. There's not a ton you can do. It's interesting when we do Crime Weekly this week, we have a sponsor in there, Delete Me. I'm signed up for them. You guys should check it out as well. It can keep a lot of your personal data off there.

But that's just the initial start to it. Overall, this is not a great answer, but the best way to remove yourself from the toxicity of social media is not to have social media. But I think for most of us, that's not a reasonable ask. Some of us, it may be. But for people like us, we're on social media all the time. We're fortunate where we make a living being on social media. So we have to take the good with the bad.

I would say just try to limit your time on there. Try not to involve yourself too much with what's going on. Maybe be one of those silent lurkers who's more reading and consuming the material as opposed to participating because when you do, you can get tied up into something that you don't want to. I got exposed to social media when I went on Big Brother. And it's funny, I tell this story all the time. When I went on Big Brother, I only had a Twitter account and I had 21 followers. And I had them because I was doing fantasy football on Twitter. I was undercover a lot, so I never really had any social media and had no use for it.

And then I went on Big Brother. My friends ran my Twitter account. It grew to a couple hundred thousand people. And then I started an Instagram account when I got out. And I don't regret it, but I will tell you that I exposed myself to a world that I had never been exposed to before. And I was perfectly fine without it because I didn't know what I was missing. And as soon as I started my Instagram, I won Big Brother, but there were a lot of people who didn't like me as well.

And so you get both sides of it. You get people who are congratulating you and want to follow what you're doing in the future. And then you get people who really just, to put it bluntly, have no life. They just have no life and they're sitting at home and they're miserable. And their real world is online, right? Like a lot of the times the people who are online hurting other people have a horrible personal life. So they go on there to make themselves feel better about their own situation, but then they still have to put that phone down and go back to what they're really experiencing every day. And I feel bad for them because

there's a lot of truth in the phrase, hurt people, hurt people. That's a lot of where it's coming from. So I try to limit the amount that I post online. I post my kids here and there because I'm proud of what they're doing. And because you want to share because there's people out there that support you and are kind to you and you want to share parts of your life that make you proud and happy with them because you guys do become like family to family to us in a way we talk to you every day you're so important to us we love they bring gifts to our kids at crime con yeah and you bring so much like joy and fulfillment to our life so we want to share parts of our life with you that make us feel good just like you share parts of your life that make you feel good with us so we want to have that reciprocal sort of relationship with you. But then, you know, it sucks because there's those people and you just have to have you have to develop a thicker skin and you have to not care.

You have to really have a good handle on who you are, what you know to be true. You know, you're you're doing the right thing. You know, you're trying your best. No one's perfect. And just kind of like understand where where it's coming from, which it's not even really that personal to you. It's, as Derek said, you know, hurt people hurt people. And that's it. And when I talk about the people who are doing this, the sad thing is it's a very select few. It's not the majority. But they have a lot of time on their hands. They have a lot of time and they're usually the loudest. Yeah. But what I would say for everybody out there is you can do a couple of things. If you are experiencing some type of online harassment and it's, let's just say, for example,

it's on Twitter, take a second and go look at some of this person's other replies or comments. I guarantee you most of the time what you'll find is that they're attacking different people. They hate everyone. Yeah. And that's what you got to take from it and just say, oh, this person's in a bad place. I'm not going to even engage with this. And another thing that you can do, which I started implementing years ago, I wrote about it in my book, is I'm a prideful guy. You know, I like to respond. I like to think that I'm not afraid of much. And if someone confronted me on the street and said something, I would defend myself. So when I see something online, my first reaction is to respond to that. Yeah, but it's pointless. So what I do now, and I've gotten better at it, we don't even have to do this, but you type up what you were going to write back to them, but you don't send it. Just type it up. Don't send it. Go for a walk, do some dishes, walk outside, clean the grill. Be in the real life and be in real world. Yeah. Honestly, Stephanie, for five minutes, just something to give that second between that impulsive decision to press send, just wait five, 10 minutes. And 98% of the time

after I do that, I don't want to do it anymore. I don't end up sending it. I just see what I was going to write and I don't send it. But in a more severe case like this, where you're talking about Kim Devins to kind of wrap this up, this is a different situation. We're not talking about online trolling. We're talking about targeted harassment involving the death of her daughter. These people need to be found as hard as it may be because the only way to really stop this is to start making examples of people who are doing it.

Once people start going to prison for it, then someone might step back and take a second and say, do I really want to send this? Because once I do, the cat's out of the bag and I'm involved. So the only way to stop it is to start deterring people. That's on the more extreme level of what Kim's experiencing. But on just a superficial level, like everyday trolling, don't acknowledge it, block them, move on with your life. Try to do the best you can to keep your personal information offline. If you really want to have social media and you're not in the public eye, maybe keep your accounts on private as well. I would strongly recommend that. Don't use your real name. Yeah.

Yeah. There's a lot of small things you can do to keep your circle tight and make sure that you're only engaging and involving people that you want to engage and be involved with. But that's all I got. Any final words from you? It's a bigger issue. Again, I don't want to be doom and gloom, but social media is so massive and growing every day. It's on us. I'm talking about the users to do the best to protect themselves. Yeah. And I think in issues with the victims like Bianca, it's just a good rule of thumb. When somebody loses their life and is murdered, it's probably just not best to speak negatively about them when they're not alive to defend themselves or to tell you the context which exists in every situation. It's just best to kind of take the high road there. And you have your opinions,

you have your feelings, but there's never a time when we should be blaming a victim for their violent and brutal death ever. Just, I don't know. Is that a hot take? I don't know. Let's start holding them accountable. And then people may have a second thought before doing something like that. That will do it for us, guys. We're going to be back later this week with part three, the final part of Marlene Warren. It's coming to a head here. I'm looking forward to finding out who is responsible for her murder and to see- Who's the clown? Who is the clown?

Are we going to find out who the clown is? Is someone arrested for this? Is someone charged? Or is it a situation where we know who did it, but we just can't prove it? I hope it's not one of those. So we're going to get we're going to actually record that right after we get done recording this. So you will hear that in two days if you're listening on audio on Friday and it'll be out on Sunday on YouTube. Until then, everyone stay safe out there.

Maybe stay off social media. I don't know. Just a guess. But don't stay off Crime Weekly. Follow us on all our accounts. Right. Yes. Stay off social media, but don't stay off our social media. I have a quick question before we wrap up a legal question. Maybe you don't know if something's a state law like this law for Bianca. What if the person who's doing the crime does not live in New York? Can they be persecuted under that state law or do they also have to reside in New York? It's where the victim is. Okay. And that's most, that's most crimes. So it's where the crime occurred. So if the person's in California, but the person that they're committing the crime against lives in New York, well, then that's where the crime occurred because the victim would have to file the report and that crime would be in New York City or upstate New York, wherever they are. That would be where the crime would be

because we've had situations like that before for different cyber issues where it's like, you know, obtaining money under false pretenses. The first thing we'll ask is, okay, where does the victim live, but where did the crime occur? So in that situation gets a little bit more sticky because let's say you live in New York and you live in Manhattan, but the bank where the money was taken from is in Brooklyn. Well, then Brooklyn would, you know, that's the jurisdiction it would happen in. Obviously it's still NYPD, so it's not the best example of New York. But for a smaller state like Rhode Island, where we have 36 or 37 municipalities, if you live in Providence, Rhode Island, but the crime occurred in Newport, Rhode Island, where the bank is, then the crime would be filed in Newport at that bank by the Newport Police Department. Does that make sense? Yes, absolutely.

And that's good. I wanted to know. Because that's why kind of local laws are not as all-encompassing because there's restrictions. There's state lines. And even if you find the police department that's supposed to be handling it, I hate to tell you, but a lot of the times, unless this police officer is super tech savvy, and even if they are, there's not much they're going to be able to do. They're going to file a report. They're going to have detectives look at it. Detectives may reach out to X or Instagram or one of them.

But by the time it all happens, they're inundated with these types of requests, Instagram and X. So it's probably not going to go anywhere. So like I said, to just kind of reiterate and wrap it up here, the best defense and protection you're going to have on social media is going to come from you. That's the truth. It's unfortunate, but that's the truth. So do the best you can to put parameters in place to protect you and the people you care about.

And you will more than likely have a better experience online. That's all I got. Absolutely. Yes, I am. Okay. We will see you guys later this week. Everyone stay safe out there. Have a good day.

Thank you.