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Journalism of Courage
Award-winning American drama crime series Dexter has found itself in the eye of the storm of the Mehrauli murder case after the arrested accused, Aaftaab Poonawala, 28, revealed to the police he was inspired by the show to hack and discard his partner’s body.
In May, Poonawala allegedly murdered his 27-year-old live-in partner Shraddha Walkar. The accused revealed to the police that he wanted to “silence her” but ended up strangulating Walkar. Poonawala then hacked Walkar’s body and kept the parts in small black poly bags, allegedly, inspired by the show’s main character, Dexter Morgan, played by Michael C. Hall, who is shown to have homicidal tendencies.
In the show, Dexter is a forensic technician who works at the fictional Miami Metro Police Department. While Dexter solves crimes in the morning, he leads a discreet parallel life of a vigilante serial killer, hunting down and killing murderers who the justice system has not adequately punished.
Dexter’s modus operandi, at least for the most part of Season 1, involves cutting his victims’ bodies and placing the dismembered parts inside black garbage bags. He then carries these bags in his vehicle and loads them onto his boat. After adding rocks to weigh down the bags and sealing them with duct tape, Dexter would dump them into an oceanic trench.
After dismembering Walkar’s body parts, Poonawala told the police he had bought a new fridge to store them. He made multiple trips to the Mehrauli forest area over the next two to three months and emptied the bags full of dismembered body parts. Police sources revealed he removed the intestines first so that they could decompose easily.
This, however, is not the first time the TV show has garnered infamy because of being linked with a murder. In April 2011, Mark Andrew Twitchell, a Canadian filmmaker, was convicted of the first-degree murder of a 38-year-old man. In 2008, Twitchell lured the victim into a garage, bludgeoned him and cut him apart. After partially burning the parts, Twitchell dumped them into garbage bags and threw them into a storm sewer. During the trial, the court noted Twitchell’s identification with the character of Dexter Morgan, following which, several media outlets termed him the Dexter Killer. Twitchell had even recreated a ‘kill room’, which was part of the fictional character’s preparation for a murder that would not leave any forensic evidence.
Similarly, in 2014, an American teenage boy, who obsessed with the show’s protagonist, was jailed for 25 years for murdering and dismembering his 17-year-old girlfriend. Likewise, in 2011, in Norway, Shamrez Khan, 28, hired Håvard Nyfløt to kill a Norwegian-Pakistani woman, Faiza Ashraf. Nyfløt claimed that after being inspired by Dexter, he wanted to kill Khan in front of Faiza, similar to the television series, to “stop evil”.
In 2013, a pair of studies published in the journal Pediatrics linked violent TV shows to excessive aggression and perhaps later antisocial behaviour in children. A 2021 research paper also states excessive exposure to media violence makes youths less emotional and desensitised towards real-life violence, which leads to aggressive behaviour and negative long-terms effects on the brain.
