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Insane Robot Killer
Here’s a very strange news item out of Austin, TX. It’s a murder story with a very bizarre twist: the killer allegedly thought his victim was a robot designed to kill him.
[Jackson] Ngai’s attorney has said Ngai believed music professor Danielle Martin was a robot or was controlled by a computer chip in her brain and was trying to kill him. On her body was a handwritten note that said, “Computer chip in brain.”
Daneen Milam, a defense expert who said Ngai was insane, said the number of wounds on Martin’s head, which left a deep hole in her skull, showed he was focused on something other than just killing Martin.
“He said he was getting a computer chip out,” Milam testified. “He said that’s what he was going to do. When he couldn’t do it, he called the police to help him.”
The really weird part is that after reading some science fiction over the weekend, this story seems all too plausible to me… but then, maybe this guy is just a very clever murdered with a purposefully bizarre excuse.
October 25th, 2005 at 9:10 pm
dammnit tim, you forgot the best part:
October 25th, 2005 at 10:34 pm
he obviously failed to complete his mission to remove the chip but was thoughtful enough to tell the authorities of it`s existance. what`s not insane about that?
October 26th, 2005 at 10:21 am
I didnt forget the best part: it’s included in my quote above.
I should have commented on it separately though. I wonder whose handwriting the “computer chip in brain” note was in. What if it was the victim’s and not the killers?
October 26th, 2005 at 11:21 am
that would be nuts.
October 26th, 2005 at 1:22 pm
eye don’t say that this ngal person wasn’t nuts and delusional but eye don’t NOT say ngal was nuts and delusional, either. after you read the long history of CIA experiments with making perfect assassins, along with Dr. José Delgado’s creepily, scientifically-rationalized fascism in “Toward a Psychocivilized Society”, I simply find it premature to dismiss these kinds of stories out of hand. I with-hold any opinion on it because, medically and scientifically speaking, this shit could happen, at least since 1965.
October 26th, 2005 at 1:37 pm
Yeah I agree 100%.
I re-read Philip K. Dick’s Radio Free Albemuth over the weekend, and one of the things that’s well done in that book is showing the perspective of somebody like Dick who was on the experiencing end of some weird phenomena, and then how these things would be reported in the news-at-large, and among the enemies of such things. This article has all the hallmarks of the kind of misunderstanding or cover-up that Dick might have been portraying in works such as that.
It’s also too bad that when we as a culture hear that somebody who committed a crime was insane, we sort of just write it off and forget about it. Even if they are insane, it might be interesting and somehow worthwhile to actually interview this person and find out WHY he thought there was a microchip in this person’s brain, and his theories about who put it there.
October 26th, 2005 at 1:40 pm
With that in mind, Jeremy found another really good article along similar lines:
http://www.kcci.com/news/5116630/detail.html
Again, what if it was real? Or what if we interviewed the man who was using it to ward off his aliens, and simply found out what he knew, and what he was fascinated by?
October 26th, 2005 at 1:46 pm
tinfoil hats.
October 26th, 2005 at 9:21 pm
[…] to get people to believe you’re crazy when you kill someone on the grounds that you believed they had a computer chip in their brain designed to get them to in tur […]