I know game developers, and this is really not how it is. The ones I know are smart, upstanding young women and men, some of whom develop horror-genre and violent games with the 100% understanding that it's fiction... because they're not mental.
There is just NO comparing them to this killer, who lived at home with his mum and had no social life, didn't try to make one, and cannot be healthy of mind, because he killed a woman, set fire to her and took pictures. There's killer cops, nurses and doctors, do we blame their exposure to real violence and blood for their crimes?
Not being cross at you, kiwi, just a bit tired of the blame being put on content that's normal for many normal people and has been for decades now.
How about blaming the killers.
This guy behaves like a classic disorganised killer, and if the driving back and forth at the school thing is true, I am pretty sure he was monitoring police activity, and seeing as he took a photo trophy, maybe getting a thrill out of it as well.
He aint too smart, and/or his excitement overwhelmed good sense.
Still catching up on this thread (I've been absent..) but I am betting we find in this killer many similarities to Morgan Huxley's killer, another 20-something loner and misfit, living at home and with no mates. Might be wrong - but my feeling is he'll have had a similar fantasy building in his mind for months, maybe longer, and poor Stephanie may or may not be the sole focus of it.
It will come out that this guy has been a bit "off" all his life.
Reminds me of Dupas (another one..like Kelsall too..) - soft loner of a kid, mum's boy, outwardly 'harmless' looking, passive to authority but sick in the head beyond belief.
Anyway, late to thread but thanks all for the posts. I can't focus too much on poor Stephanie and her loved ones, it's emotionally getting to me, all these murders here.. words can't express how sad this makes me, how terrible it is.