There are people who get way too attached to fictional characters, and then there is whatever the hell happened here.

In 2024, an 18 year old in England murdered three members of his own family. What makes the case particularly bizarre is that part of his motive appears to have revolved around his obsession with Clementine, the young girl from Telltale's The Walking Dead, and choices his little sister had made while playing the game.

This wasn't some argument that suddenly went horribly wrong either. His online history shows that something had been going very wrong with him for quite a while.

Before the murders

He lived with a pretty ordinary family. His mother was 48 and was remembered as someone who spent a lot of her time helping other people. She worked at a supermarket, volunteered and raised money for charities.

His 16 year old brother was into football and boxing and had started posting videos online. His 13 year old sister did well at school and was apparently very close to her older brothers.

Then there was him.

People around the family described him as quiet, standoffish and extremely opinionated. There were also known concerns about his mental health, and according to people close to the family, attempts had been made to get him help.

His internet activity gives a much uglier picture.

He spent a lot of time in online communities centered around gore and real deaths. He wasn't just lurking either. He regularly argued with people, made jokes underneath videos of people dying and posted increasingly fucked up sexual comments.

Some of his biggest arguments revolved around children.

He repeatedly tried to defend sexual relationships between adults and minors, dressing his arguments up like academic papers and demanding sources from anyone who disagreed with him. Eventually even one of the gore communities he frequented banned him for sexualizing children. Instead of realizing why, he created alternate accounts and started arguing with the moderators about the definition of "sexualization." They banned those too.

He later moved onto other platforms and continued basically the same behavior. He made rambling videos defending his beliefs and spent an absurd amount of effort trying to present them as some kind of rational intellectual position.

Some of the topics got even worse. He defended viewing child sexual abuse material, argued about necrophilia and discussed having seen some of the most infamous abusive material on the internet. He also posted racist and anti Muslim comments elsewhere.

Somewhere in the middle of all this was another obsession.

Clementine.

Clementine

He was massively into the Telltale Walking Dead games.

For anyone who hasn't played them, they're story games where the decisions you make change parts of what happens later. Clementine is one of the central characters and is a child when the series begins.

He played the games repeatedly and became completely infatuated with her.

He used Clementine pictures for his online profiles. He made an entire Pinterest account where he collected hundreds of pictures of her. At one point he wrote about wanting to somehow travel into the game's universe and inhabit a body resembling hers.

Eventually it went beyond simply being obsessed with a character.

He began treating Clementine almost like a religious figure.

In his own writing, he described himself as being destined to follow her. His imaginary relationship with her also started appearing alongside his other increasingly strange online beliefs.

Then he introduced his younger sister to the game.

That is where this becomes fucking insane.

There are moments in the game where the player can choose whether certain people are killed in front of Clementine. His sister chose options he didn't approve of.

Clementine isn't real.

His sister obviously knew this was a video game.

He apparently couldn't accept that distinction.

He became furious that she had allowed these things to happen in front of Clementine and held onto that anger for months. According to the material surrounding the case, his resentment eventually expanded from his sister toward the rest of his family.

Meanwhile, his online behavior kept getting stranger. The thumbnails on his videos became black and white drawings of Clementine. He referenced what sounded like an imaginary relationship with her. One of his final videos discussed religion and the afterlife, suggesting that he may already have been thinking about his own death.

Then he got a shotgun.

The final video

Despite not having the certificate legally required to own one in the UK, he managed to obtain a shotgun. Shit's beyond me on how he did that in the UK of all places. Pretty sure they were stricter about his TV license.

Anyway though, before the murders, he sat in front of a webcam and recorded himself.

He directly blamed his sister's choices in The Walking Dead and said he intended to mutilate her face because of what she had done in the game.

He also complained about a completely unrelated gaming video where someone had made similar choices. Apparently even watching strangers play the game "wrong" pissed him off.

Then came the religious part.

He described himself as Clementine's chosen one and compared his devotion to her with Christians following Jesus. He talked about preventing characters from being killed in front of her and "preserving" her happiness.

After recording this, he went back to his collection of Clementine pictures and uploaded a few more.

Then came the morning of September 13, 2024.

September 13

At around 5:30 in the morning, he confronted his family with the shotgun.

He shot his mother.

Then his 13 year old sister.

Then his 16 year old brother.

All three died.

His father and youngest brother were not among those killed.

He grabbed several kitchen knives and fled on foot. Neighbors had heard the shots, but the area wasn't somewhere people expected to hear gunfire. Some initially assumed that a car had backfired.

Police arrived and found the three victims inside the home.

During the search they also found the abandoned shotgun. Drones were sent over the surrounding area while officers searched for him.

While he was still running from police, he apparently had one more thing to do.

The video.

He uploaded his final recording online and then posted a link to it from his Facebook account at 6:22 AM.

He didn't remain free for very long.

Police found him running down a road and arrested him on the pavement. The knives he had taken from the house initially gave police an immediate possession charge while the killings were investigated. Firearms charges followed shortly afterward.

There wasn't much mystery left as to who had killed the family.

Afterwards

His first court appearance produced probably one of the bleakest moments of the entire case.

Members of his surviving family were sitting in the gallery. His father saw his 18 year old son brought into court in shackles and broke down.

Despite what had happened, he yelled out that he still loved him. This part nearly made me cry. Just imagine losing damn near all your family members and having no choice but to end up loving and forgiving your only seperate living child left.

The teenager was remanded into custody while investigators began putting together the forensic evidence and assessments of his mental health.

Outside the family's home, a memorial began growing.

People who knew his mother remembered how much she cared about her children. His sister was described by her school as a model pupil. Friends remembered his brother as a quiet kid who never caused trouble.

A fundraiser for the surviving family quickly reached and then surpassed its £20,000 target.

And somewhere underneath all of that is what makes this case so fucking strange to think about.

A 13 year old sat down and played a video game.

She made decisions inside a fictional story that her older brother didn't like.

Months later, that same brother was recording himself talking about a fictional child like she was a religious figure, blaming his real sister for what she had done to that character and preparing to murder his own family over it.

The game obviously didn't make him do this. His internet history alone makes it painfully obvious that the problem went far beyond The Walking Dead. Long before the murders, he was already disappearing into increasingly disturbing beliefs and obsessions.

Clementine just somehow ended up sitting at the center of the world he'd built inside his own head.

She wasn't even fucking real.