Snuff Films

Snuff Films

Also known as "white heat" films and "the real thing," the snuff film myth lives on like Bigfoot, despite the fact that no law enforcement agency in America has publicly admitted to ever locating one. Alan Sears, former executive director of the Attorney General's commission on pornography during 1985-86, agrees with the more than two dozen law enforcement agencies I interviewed. "Our experience was that we could not find any such thing as a commercially produced snuff film," says Sears. "Our commission was all-inclusive and exhaustive. If snuff films were available, we'd have found them."

This sentiment is echoed by Ken Lanning, a cult expert at the FBI training academy at Quantico, Virginia. "I've not found one single documented case of a snuff film anywhere in the world. I've been searching for 20 years, talked to hundreds of people. There's plenty of once-removed sightings, but I've never found a credible personality who personally saw one."

Yet the rumour of snuff persists. The scenarios are invariably the same - a remote jungle village in South America, a deserted beach in Thailand, the landscaped garden of a German industrialist, a lonely Everglades swamp. The victims are usually women, often performing a sexual act, their deaths sensational and unexpected.

One of the most resilient snuff rumours concerns convicted "Son of Sam" killer David Berkowitz, who allegedly filmed the murders of some of his victims. Maury Terry, author of "The Ultimate Evil,"...

Snuff Films

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