KANNIBAL KEITH - Part 2: The Spider's Web

Our investigation into an online cannibal took us to the darkest corners of the internet – a network he used to lure the most vulnerable victims into his sadistic web.

Disclaimer: All info contained in this article is true to the best of my knowledge. Some names have been changed and/or redacted. All parties are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. The following content is graphic!!!

Read Part 1 here.

I settled in for a long night of research. I already had Keith’s username on Sanctioned Suicide; from there, finding his associated emails and other online accounts would be relatively straightforward. Much of the work had already been done for me by the investigators who brought the case to Kacey, but there was still a lot more to learn about our new friend, Keith.

On the surface, Keith appeared to be a completely ordinary person. He was an Executive for a telecommunications company and owned several businesses related to web media and e-commerce hosting. His LinkedIn profile picture featured a professional headshot of a smiling, well-groomed, middle-aged man. Keith’s social media accounts were similarly unremarkable. He had a deep interest in aviation, took frequent vacations in Mexico, trained in Jiu Jitsu, and posted pictures with a solemn-faced, teenage son. One of the pictures featured his son in a Jiu Jitsu gi and a caption that read, “Even after a great class, this kid just will not smile.”

Interestingly, Keith didn’t go to any lengthy efforts to hide his prurient online activities. He had only two main usernames that were linked to everything from his personal business to the website Sanctioned Suicide. But because Jenny and Keith met on Sanctioned Suicide, I decided to start there. Jay had sent Kacey a screenshot of a private message exchange between Jenny and Keith on Sanctioned Suicide where the two laid out the plan for their mutual suicide pact.

“I have tons of plans for after the date, but that’s more about keeping up the appearances for others,” Jenny messaged Keith. “If I stop making plans with friends and appointments with therapists and what not, people will know something is amiss.

“Since you want to be found,” Keith responded, “the place I have in mind for you should have you found pretty quickly. No one will bother you while you’re doing it, but it won’t take long once it’s done. It’s in an area where plenty of people mind their business but will hear the shot and come look. For me, it needs to be the opposite, so I may have to look further out of the city and in less populated places. This is going to be an endeavor.”

But Keith had no intention of keeping his side of the bargain. In reality, this was nowhere near the first time that he had attempted to lure a suicidal individual to his home in hopes of fulfilling his cannibal snuff film fetish.

Whether or not Keith had ever actually killed anyone was less ambiguous. Though he bragged to Jenny that he’d successfully killed and eaten two people, he told the police that he was merely a fantasist, and because there was no evidence to the contrary, police were forced to drop the matter.

Keith’s arrangement with Jenny wasn’t the first time he had used Sanctioned Suicide for this purpose. Keith joined the website in August of 2018 and accumulated 113 posts prior to deleting his account soon after Jenny’s arrest. Most of his posts were deleted, but there were a few archived posts remaining that confirmed our suspicions. Keith had solicited several suicidal individuals to travel to his Florida home under the guise of a mutual suicide arrangement.

A year prior, in December of 2022, Keith had responded to a Sanctioned Suicide user who was desperate to find a suicide partner and urged her to come to Florida. Soon after, the two indicated they were moving the conversation to private messages. In September of 2018, on a post titled, “Ever think of just going missing?”, a user named Wildflower said, “I'd rather go missing because then my friends and family and people who knew me would still have some measure of hope. I know they would/will be devastated. Look at the Mollie Tibbetts case, even after a few weeks people held out hope that she might turn up alive... Sadly I don't have the resources/confidence to do so.”

“Wildflower, I feel exactly the same way. I want to just disappear,” Keith replied. “Also, I'm also in central Florida... we should talk.” Suffice to say, Keith had a years long history of trying to lure people to his home, a history which seemed to corroborate his chilling claim of having killed before.

After confirming the information I’d been given about the matter was real and verifiable, I shared it with my small research team. It was time to start digging. We would soon learn that Sanctioned Suicide wasn’t the only website Keith used to lure people to his home in hopes of cannibalizing them on video. Our investigation was about to get a lot darker.

It didn’t take my research partner, Paul, very long to unravel Keith’s massive online footprint. He had two primary usernames that he used for almost everything and made it easy to confirm his identity. This is how we were able to chase down the link between Keith’s telecommunications LLC and a concerning network of websites that he owned – a network called the Ariana Society.

The description on the Ariana Society website read, The Ariana Society is a VIP online membership club offering an extensive selection of features, benefits, and exotic and adult content. With various plans and membership options, there is something for everyone. Something about the webpage just felt off. Ariana Society offered vague services including exotic travel, yoga classes, and restricted chat rooms. A Facebook page, last updated in January 2022, featured innocuous yoga and marketing services along with “Society” brand coffee available for purchase.

The Ariana Society boasted a members-only private community to “make connections, close deals, make friends or just talk.” The site further claimed that all facilities were private, secure and fully encrypted. The website’s contact page offered a phone number with an Orlando, FL area code. The contact person – Keith.

The membership packages available on the website offered access to exclusive content. The “Black Metal” level membership cost $399.00 per year and boasted full digital access to the entire Ariana Network. The perks included a Black Metal membership card, an exclusive luxury Ariana Society wristwatch, a free 3-Day/2-Night and a free 8-Day/7-Night Travel Certificate to an undisclosed location, restaurant and grocery savings vouchers, and a $100 gift card to something called The Vore Store. For the unfamiliar, vore refers to a fetish in which the person fantasizes about being eaten, eating others, watching people eat others, and watching people eat various objects, which sometimes includes living animals.

The Ariana Society site also linked to four affiliated pages with fetish content. Each site featured paid members-only access and therefore couldn’t be explored in any detail. That was fine with me. I was certain I didn’t want to.

The first affiliated page featured goldfish swallowing – Fetish content that revolved around young men and women swallowing live goldfish (a type of content I was happily unfamiliar with leading up to this investigation.) A Twitter account connected to the page featured people doing just that, among them, girls from the Philippines who appeared to be very young.

The next site was called Ariana Girls – The original exotic content site, Ariana Girls brings you face to face with the beautiful, amazing models of the Ariana Network. This site was also paywalled. Another was called Hot Teen Bellies – Features hot, candid teens in bikinis. The description of the site clarified that underage models are prominently featured, but do not appear nude.

The last of the four sites featured crushing content. “Crushing” involves models stepping on items with bare feet and crushing them. This type of fetish frequently features live animals being crushed to death in this manner. As animal crush videos are illegal, I had a glimmer of hope that we might have a chance to get Keith investigated.

The Ariana Network had a good amount of what appeared to be coded language and innocuous descriptions designed to hide the more sinister content. Interestingly, the history of the Ariana network dated back to at least 2006, when Keith operated a BBS site called “Ariana Interface”. Further analysis of Keith’s online footprint revealed that he had been trying to find a way to circumvent US law by hosting an offshore server for an escort website – an action that would have broken federal law. Then there were Keith’s frequent trips to Central America, the Ariana Society’s offer for travel vouchers to undisclosed locations, the sexualized teens on his website, and so on.

The Epstein vibes were off the charts. And man, I hate to say it, but our investigation just got worse from there.

Seriously, this is a warning. You may want to skip this part if you are particularly squeamish.

That’s when we started to find the cannibalism connections. Ariana Society was connected to a message board called Her Stomach. One board was titled, “RL Vore & Cannibalism – The real stuff, including cannibalism. You can also arrange meetups here.” In December 2019, Keith posted a comment to this site asking how to upload a video.

Paul used OSINT tools to analyze Keith’s email address, searching the Dark Web, document sharing platforms, Whois data, public data leaks and other archived sites. He located Keith’s email in an index of Usenet groups, indicating that Keith downloaded an mbox file named “alt.sex.snuff.cannibalism.mbox.zip”. An mbox is a way to drop encoded files which could then be decoded by an external application. According to descriptions of the Usenet group, “a.sex.snuff.cannibalism” was a group that could be used to commit suicide by cannibalism. The inclusion of the word “snuff” indicates that the file contained a video of a murder. Given this information, the download of the mbox file from this Usenet group provides strong evidence that Keith was a user of a group which shared films depicting murder and cannibalism, potentially with a sexual component. The specific purpose of the Usenet group was to locate individuals willing to die and offer themselves to cannibals.

Keith also joined a notorious gore website called Cute Dead Guys in 2018 under the same name he used on Sanctioned Suicide. His bio read, “Always wanted to be snuffed and eaten (not necessarily in that order). Role play or real. I’m in the Orlando area but can travel for the right person.” In February of 2020, he posted that he had found a girl who was willing to eat him. And in March of that same year, he provided an update that the two had confirmed their plan and were attempting to find a 3^rd party willing to help.

Keith was also a member of two gay escort service websites. On the website Rent Men, which advertised itself as a hub for pornstar performers and gay masseurs looking to sell services, Keith offered sexual services for sale with a bio that stated, “Open Minded | Will Do Anything. White bear guy here, always feel comfortable with me no matter what you're into.”

On a website called Breeding Zone, Keith’s bio read, “FL. Neg, Recently Tested. Bottom”. Between October 2015 and July 2016, Keith posted several times on this site expressing an interest in meeting HIV positive men for sex in the Orlando, FL area. In a comment to a post titled, “Cum Dump Party” Keith invited another user to Club O in Orlando, FL and said he was particularly interested if the user was “Poz”, a slang for HIV positive. In another post, Keith stated that he just started having sex with men in 2015 and was open to “all loads”, in reference to his willingness to have sex with an HIV positive man. Keith also used the site to organize a “group pozzing party”.

Keith appeared to be intentionally seeking out HIV positive gay men. Was this part of his “ethical cannibalism” fetish? Did he, perhaps, see HIV positive men as being equivalent to suicidal people in regard to the value of their lives? Or maybe Keith was genuinely interested in contracting the virus as a form of self-harm. In April of 2022, Keith replied to a post on Sanctioned Suicide regarding HIV contraction as a form of suicide, stating it is “a lot harder to contract HIV than you’d imagine”. He referred to a community of individuals called “bug chasers” who he described as gay men intentionally trying to contract HIV.

Regardless of Keith’s intrinsic motives, one thing was for certain – He had been using fringe websites to lure people to his Florida home in hopes of cannibalizing them for years. His first documented encounter with Seminole County police took place in 2007, when he attempted to hire a woman to murder him. That woman turned out to be a confidential informant, and Keith was able to successfully convince police he was only playing out a sexual fantasy and had no intention of following it through.

Later that same year, Keith was again questioned by police after he used Craigslist to solicit a woman to shoot him as part of an erotic fantasy. Once again, no action was taken by the police. Several years later, Keith joined the gay escort websites and began actively pursuing HIV positive homosexuals to lure to his home for sex. And in 2018, Keith joined Sanctioned Suicide, where he sought out suicidal users looking for a person to help them end their lives.

Rehashing this saga today, I’m faced with the same levels of shock and outright disbelief as I felt while uncovering it the first time. I remember sitting in front of my computer with my face contorted into an expression of sheer horror for hours at a time. I joked with Paul that I worried my face might freeze that way.

As we continued to peel back the layers of Keith’s morbid online footprint, we began to reveal a link to another infamous cannibal – a serial killer, in fact, who preyed almost exclusively on gay men in Toronto.. A man by the name of Bruce MacArthur.

Up Next: Part 3