Laughing Jack-Inspired Murder

Perhaps it is the ultimate Phantom Clown story. 

A correspondent tonight writes: "One of the more disturbing clown events to take place this year. Laughing Jack, a character brewed up on the same site The Slender Man was created. The 12 year old girl claims, Laughing Jack told her to fatally stab her stepmother to death."

~ Urban Dictionary

The New York Daily News captures the latest...

A 12-year-old Indiana girl who fatally stabbed her stepmother said an online horror story clown named “Laughing Jack” told her to do it, according to reports.
The Elkhart girl set her family’s apartment on fire and stabbed Maria Torres “at the direction of a fictional character found on the CreepyPasta website known as 'Laughing Jack,’” according to court documents filed Tuesday and cited by WSBT-TV.
The admission by the girl, who has been declared incompetent to stand trial in the July killing, comes after two Wisconsin girls said they tried to kill their friend in May 2014 to please a different character from the fan-created horror story collections named “Slender Man.”

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The unidentified Elkhart girl “heard voices and had an 'alter ego' months before the stabbing and begged her father for help,” the court documents said.
One website that posts readers’ own fictional horror stories, creepypasta.com, blocked the Daily News from accessing its site after an inquiry about the stabbings allegedly inspired by CreepyPasta characters. Another one, creepypasta.org, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Doctors have diagnosed the Indiana girl as suffering from post-traumatic stress and dissociative identity disorder, formerly known as multiple personality disorder, WSBT reported. She’s been living for months in a Goshen juvenile detention center, where she’s seeing a counselor and taking medication but still pleading staff for help. She won’t stand trial unless she’s deemed fit to understand the charges against her.
Her family’s main concern is getting her transferred to a state mental hospital after 16 psychiatric facilities have refused her, the girl’s lawyer, Elkhart public defender Holly Curtis, told the TV station.
“This little girl has been failed by everyone,” Curtis said. “The risk level for her is beyond anything I think anybody can imagine. For her not to be able to get the help she's crying out for is probably one of the biggest travesties I've seen so far with the system and with a state agency not willing to step up and do their job.”
State officials have promised to comply with a juvenile court order to move the girl into a mental institution.
“There is work being done to find the appropriate place for this young woman,” state Family and Social Services Administration spokeswoman Marni Lemons said, noting privacy concerns prohibited her from sharing more information about the case.

The overlap between the CreepyPasta clown, Laughing Jack, and Slenderman is, well, creepy, especially because of the recent history of violence with both. A judge ruled in August that the two 12-year-old Wisconsin girls would charged and put on trial as adults. The girls said Slenderman threatened them and their families, if they didn't do his bidding. Plus Slenderman told them he would invite them into his forest castle, if they just would kill one of their classmates.

Elkhart Makes 3 in 3

Authorities in Elkhart, Indiana say Shawn Walter Bair, 22, killed an employee and a shopper in a supermarket on January 15th, Wednesday night.

Krystle Dikes [left] had just started working as a stocker at Martin's Super Market [3900 E Bristol St] in Elkhart, Ind., though her real passion was caring for children and the 20-year-old continued to take babysitting jobs.
Rachelle Godfread, 44, had recently moved from southern Indiana to Elkhart, where she was closer to her son who played basketball at the South Bend campus of Indiana University.
On Wednesday night, the two were about 12 aisles apart in the supermarket when Shawn Walter Bair, 22, walked in and began firing. Both died before police shot Bair dead, not far from Godfread's body, according to Indiana State Police.
Bair also fired at another store worker but missed, and briefly took the store manager hostage before police confronted him. Chicago Tribune.

Above is a previous photo of Bair after he was arrested by Elkhart County Sheriff's Department in 2010.

Bair had a history of legal troubles that included a felony theft conviction from Martin's Super Market. He also had a history of drug problems. Three years ago, he was convicted for felony drug possession and sentenced to prison. He was reportedly able to avoid that sentence by going for treatment at the Oak Lawn Psychiatric Hospital.
Police also said his Faceboook page had pictures and references to serial killers. ABC News

"Elk" is a name we have met before, in the realm of mass shooters (e.g. Elk Grove, Illinois), just as we sometimes encounter "Oak" (e.g. Oak Creek massacre).

Bair has its origins in the Germanic "Bär." The original spelling of the German name "Bär" (meaning a beast) is now standardized as "Baer" in Germany and Switzerland. The established Bär families had a coat of arms with a bear carrying three sheaves.

The most common American spelling was "Bear" before the War of 1812. From then until just following the Civil War, the name continued to be spelled "Bear." At that time, some of the families changed the spelling of their surname to "Bair." Source.

The Elkhart event was the third mass shooting in three straight days.

Shootings occurred when a Reeves killed a man in a movie theater and a boy shot up a Roswell school, before the Elkhart killings (see here and here.) 

T. Peter Park sends in the note that Elkhart is the birthplace of Ambrose Bierce.