When Arrested, Magnotta Was Reading About Himself

Luka Rocco Magnotta once published an online guide to disappearing, but he wasn't such a cunning fugitive in real life. The Canadian, who is accused of murdering a man and sending his body parts to political offices, was arrested at an Internet cafe in Berlin yesterday, and police say he was reading online news stories about himself when he was caught, the Globe and Mail reports. The cafe's owner ran outside to flag down police after he recognized Magnotta, who was quickly overpowered by seven cops. "You got me," said the alleged killer.

"He was using the web to glorify himself," a Montreal police spokesman says. "This is the same web that brought him down." Magnotta's case is a strange one, and not just because of the gore, a criminal profiler tells the Daily Beast. Magnotta's torture of animals fits the profile of a serial killer, but his quest for notoriety resembles the profile of mass murderers who plan to make a huge splash and don't care if they die in the process. Magnotta is an "attention whore" who thought of himself as a criminal genius, but proved completely unable to stay ahead of a real-life international manhunt, the profiler says. "What happened here is that fantasy met reality; reality won." (More Luka Rocco Magnotta stories.)