Secrets of the City

Last summer, back when no one was reading this site, we did a little online investigation into Joseph Duncan, the sex offender (and “computer whiz”) from Fargo who killed and kidnapped more people than you want to know. The blog he left behind, The Fifth Nail, became a strange archive of the interior monologue of one seriously fucked up dude. This story should end here, but in one of the weirdest acts of artistic influence ever concocted, Duncan’s blog is being turned into a movie. You read that right — not Duncan’s life; rather, his crazy blog. See for yourself from the trailer recently dropped on iFilm. BLOG, directed by Bert Frishman, who seems to be a local because he appeared in last year’s Free Range Film Festival, looks something like NIN meets The Ring Two meets a Fargo snow storm.

The new issue of The Rake features a note on the emptying of neighborly North Dakota. Interestingly, ‘Dakistan’ — as the piece claims some people call it — was the only state to lose population from 2000 to 2005. Also interestingly, most of those expatriates ended up at MNSpeak.

Confused on what to do the day after Thanksgiving? May we suggest heading to Grand Casino in Hinckley for the Heartland Poker Tour. Buy-in is $400, and the winner takes home as much as $41,500. The event is actually televised on the WB on Saturday nights, and the Strib profiles the the Fargonians behind the show. TwinCitiesPoker.com has several other future poker events.

In a story that reads like a cross between The Onion and 50 Cent, a Fargo man was arrested after videotaping a sexual encounter with a woman. Wait, it gets better: he actually delivered the videotape to police as a way to prove his innocence. Prior to the act, the crazy dude had a restraining order, and he reasoned that taping the carnal act would clear him of charges.

The New York Times has a freaky story about the midwest’s obsession with cage fighting. The perfectly legal competitive brawls sound barbaric to say the least — ouch, check out the slideshow. The story claims that cage fighting is also making a comeback in Rochester, Fargo, and Des Moines, but one must wonder if this story simply allows civilized coastal urbanites to point their finger at the noble savages, thereby making them again feel good for not living in fly-over country.

The Fargo Forum reported Duncan missing on May 6, but he was still posting to his blog through mid-May. On May 11 he wrote on his blog, “My intent is to harm society as much as I can, then die.” The triple murder and double kidnapping occurred on May 15.

The blog isn’t the only place he can be found online — here’s a dating profile on a “Korean friend finder” site (with the teaser “Need more than just great sex?”), here’s his Geocities homepage, here’s his profile on the North Dakota Sex Offenders Site, and here’s his NDSU resume (BS in Computer Science; 3.3 GPA). Cached pages from his blog can be found at Archive.org and Google. Digging through all this will make your skin crawl, and eventually you’ll encounter an eerie police mugshot photo of a 16-year-old Duncan from when he was first arrested for sexually assaulting a 14-year-old boy at gunpoint in 1980.

What’s ultimately confounding about the online trail that Duncan left behind is that he can write mundane posts about flirting with his pretty neighbor, while he can also create completely bizarre home videos such as “What Is Reality?” and “Imagine” (which are undoubtably weird, but are even weirder when you realize he posted them online). Like most bloggers, Duncan writes with an over-valued sense of worth that presumes a large audience, when very few people actually seemed to be reading his blog until his name hit the newspapers — and now he’s got 790 comments (most of them equally crazed rantings) and counting.

If these ramblings are any indication of how complex the human mind can be, it’s probably good that the media doesn’t try to engage in serious psychology. But it seems important to remind ourselves how surreal it is to live in an age where we, the public, have direct access to these kinds of interior dialogues, without the tethered leash of a newspaper reporter.