This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Stock photography's been the butt of internet jokes for years—and with good reason, mostly. When people decided they'd had enough of the uncanny, plastic-sheened falseness of the average stock image, they let the world know. We've seen iterations of stock photography's sterile scenarios turned into punchlines ever since.

Women-focused humour site The Hairpin kicked things off in 2011 with their caption-less photo blogpost of women laughing alone with salad, skewering the stock image trope of women so delighted to be chowing down a plate of leaves. Within a few years the blogpost had spawned an honorary Tumblr account, and in 2014 The Guardian's Women in Leadership website squeezed out the last few drops of fun with an earnest thinkpiece —by then it was probably too late to tell those responsible for this play in New York that they were about three years late to the party. You just have to enjoy the joke in the moment then, as with any other meme, file it away. At most, you can return to it in private with a chuckle, but for the love of god, let the thing go.

But not every stock image photographer sticks to the grinning in offices, city-skyline-at-dusk cliches. Caran Caravan, who made her start in the 1980s shooting and directing music videos for the likes of British synthpop musician Marc Almond and space-rock band Hawkwind, switched to photography in the 90s and ended up selling photos of her own family to Getty Images, filling them with the sort of intimacy you don't normally find in stock image libraries.

Born Karen Bentham, Caran shoots exclusively on film, but isn't a pretentious idiot about it. Before an exhibition of her portraiture opens in Leeds' White Cloth Gallery on the 1st of March she spoke us about casting your own children in images for widespread use, selling those shots to one of the world's most prominent stock photography agencies and maintaining a sense of autonomy through it all.

VICE: You ended up at art school as a teenager but when did you start shooting photographs? Was it a hobby, or linked to your studies?
Caran Caravan: Oh no, I didn't get into photography at art school. That was about painting, finding identity and messing with heads. Photobooths in Woolies were the nearest I got to taking photographs—I didn't even own a camera. I started shooting seriously when I seriously started producing children. I ended up with three kids under 3, and it can get hellishly boring—with the best will in the world. Photography became an obsession and a user-friendly outlet for a dying creative. Two years later, in 1998, I was awarded a Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society, with a submission of black-and-white auto portraits created using multiple negatives—a very hit-and-miss technique that is either fucking wonderful or a complete disaster. Either way, they were one-offs. No negatives, no reprints.

You were making videos for a while, after art school, before moving into portrait-based stock photography. What drew you to still photos, given your work with moving images? Why transition?
Time and circumstance, really. My love affair with the 35mm camera began due to constraints born within my commitment to raising a family. Video shoots take forever. Left to my own devices, and no deadlines, I set up a darkroom, hunted down the hippest kids in town, and started shooting—upstairs, downstairs, and in the ladies chamber. Working with video had already given me the skills needed for setting up good lighting and recognising striking images. The transition was natural and timely.

"Boy Throwing Autumn Leaves"

When was your first official foray into photography, then? Which set of images felt like the first ones that made you think "yes, this is something I could do to make a living"?
It was only last year, in June, when I had my very first exhibition at the Galleon Coffee Bar in Blackpool. Claire Griffiths from Alt Blackpool wrote a review and I suddenly realised I was quite good. She described my work as "beautiful but surreal" with "sadness, joy and whimsical faces staring back at us as we ask, 'who, where and when'?"

Having a critic define a tipping point is unusual, though. How did you make the move into stock photography on your own?
I my had three kids under the age of 3, as I said, and they were sitting ducks as stock subject matter, so to speak. I originally started submitting images to a company called Photonica and they signed me, which was cool. Photography equalled money. They were subsequently bought out by Getty Images, who put me on their books for several years.

What was it like being on Getty's books? Do you still own the rights to those images for example?
I have no idea if I have the rights ... I am the worlds worst at documentation, contracts etc. Sometimes they send me a cheque, haha.

You're clearly into 35mm film for your personal work. Were you shooting your Getty images on film too? What were the briefs like when they would want you to produce work for them?
Oh yes, I did everything on film. I have never used, nor will I ever use a digital camera. Film to the bone. I used to send Getty 10x8 prints, and they'd scan them and send them back. I stopped submitting to Getty when they stopped accepting analogue submissions. The digital camera they recommended I buy was about $15,800 at the time, and I thought, 'fuck that for a game of soldiers.' Haven't sent anything over for a long time.

The briefs they sent over when they wanted work were very specific, and well laid-out. I never really took much notice though, so I suppose the briefs were really only guidelines. If the brief was 'woman juggling career and baby,' I'd have my oldest son holding a screaming baby, mother nowhere to be seen.

How much freedom did you find you had with stock photography?
I sort of tweaked the briefs they sent, and more often than not got away with it. I'm not knocking stock photography—hell, there's lessons to be learned everywhere.

What about staging? The thing that makes so much stock photography so laughable is how transparent its setups look, while yours are more reminiscent of family photo albums pictures.
None of it was staged, really. I'd take photos and then find a brief to fit. That's the funny thing—I'm not really a stager. The plan is there is no plan. It's kind of like street photography, but not. I could never do 'street photography', because I'm too scared—and that's silly, I know. I can confront shop girls who serve me in the British equivalent of Hudson News, and shoot awesome photos that very same evening of them, but I'm too scared to take a photo of a bin man on his round.

Did doing the Getty work ever feel corny? How did you consider the balance between it as art and as commerce?
Needs must, darling. I would happily post my Getty stuff alongside my other work, there's nothing to be ashamed of there. It all still takes time and thought. Not involved in that world anymore though—starving artist and all that, you know. Digital? Schmigital.

Caran Canavan's photography exhibition opens at White Cloth Gallery in Leeds on Tuesday the 1st of March.

@tnm___

Writer Morgan (left) in the lift with Shia Lebeouf. Photo courtesy of Oxford Union.

It's a Friday morning in Oxford, Shia LeBeouf is here, and not many people care. Yesterday, I lost out on securing a spot on the Oxford Law Society's puppy playdate, which booked up online in under four minutes. Someone was trying to sell their spot for £100. Today, the Transformers actor-turned-conceptual artist is standing inside a lift for 24 hours, asking people to come and join him, while the whole thing is livestreamed on YouTube. He is also due to give a talk at the Oxford Union debating society tonight.

Apparently people love puppies more than they love performance art, so when I turn up to Shia's lift at the EC English language school, there is a meagre queue outside. It may be that it is 9AM on a cold February day, but Oxford students have queued for hours here for less – namely in to be in the same debating chamber as Made in Chelsea stars. Everyone here seems pretty bemused at their own interest in the event, and nobody coming out of the lift looks any more enlightened. The most pressing question here really is why? Why here, in this abrasively orange building, on a market square in a quaint university town? Apparently, because Oxford asked. And apparently, because no other building would have them.

We didn't wait long to get to the lift doors. After pressing the "up" button a few times, a group filed out and we filed in. I shook Shia's hand, then the hands of his collaborators Nastja Rönkkö & Luke Turners and then the door closed. Forgetting that our voices were being live-streamed we talked about the elves in The Lord of The Rings – the subject of the dissertation my nerdy best friend I brought with me is writing; we talked about how Shia had liked the floors in the college he stayed in, because they "have a lot of history"; and we talked about how much he likes partying at Mexican quinceañeras. I brought up Transformers once, tentatively. He changed the subject.

The author outside Shia's lift

After a couple of minutes, two Chemistry students came in and momentarily we forgot that we were in a confined space with a celebrity, and just chatted between ourselves about mundane student things. Eventually when conversation ran dry, and aware that we were Shia-hogging, we left. On my way out, someone asked me what he smelled like. But like any short conversation with another human being, my only real impression of him is that he is a nice guy. Listening to the livestream now, he just told someone he liked their corduroys, at another point he makes everyone get out of the lift so an old woman can actually use it. He holds the elevator door for you. He wants to know your dog's name.

Shia has been the simultaneous subject and arbiter of the media frenzy about his spiralling descent for the past couple of years – ever since charges of plagiarism over his short film HowardCantour.com. Critics who are unaware, or more likely unwilling to acknowledge that this narrative has been created by Shia himself, have dismissed his artistic performances as the self-indulgent narcissism of a celebrity desperate for acknowledgement from intellectual circles. Recently, we watched him watch every single one of his movies in reverse chronological order in #allmymovies, snidely joking about his falling asleep in Transformers. We made and shared GIFs out of his motivational 'Just Do It' video. We read articles about him allegedly being raped in the process of #Iamsorry, but apparently no one went to the exhibition itself. We laughed about his lurid spandex outfit when he ran laps around a gallery in Amsterdam to mark a 12 hour art conference in #metamarathon. We were bemused by the pretension of the silent interview in a hotel room he did with Dazed magazine. We were bemused, period.

Shia La Beouf makes everyone get out of the list so an old woman can use it.

It is easy to call Shia's behaviour erratic and attribute his performances to the same crazed celebrity mentality which saw him fighting outside strip clubs or checking into rehab. But it is so much harder to seriously engage with him. This is, obviously, less hard to do when you are in a confined space with the man himself, as he looks into your eyes and says that #allmymovies was just a struggle to "come to terms with myself". Alongside sincere moments like that, there was the inevitable bullshit that you would expect from someone who has had to be in the same room as Megan Fox a lot. Like when he told the Chemistry student we were in the lift with that he believed in science like he believed in magic. That was one of those times.

This piece, called #elevate, is an effective, if trite, exploration of the painful performance of small-talk, of the yearning for genuine human interaction, of bringing celebrity down to earth. Of course it's a derivative rip off of Marina Ambromovic's The Artist is Present – like how his apology tweets for plagiarism were all blatantly plagiarised, and just like how Damien Hirst's work is a rip off of every artist ever. This is just where art is at right now – and the enduring popularity of self-referential narcissists like Kanye West, James Franco, Joaquin Phoenix and Bret Easton Ellis is a testament to that. Whether or not I am able to confirm a wry irony in his smile, or an element of performance in his earnestness, standing in an elevator with Shia LaBeouf was worthy of my time. Listening to him is worth yours.

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New York city. Some call it "the big apple." To others it is "the city that simply doesnt ever sleep." Others still know it as "the city of angels." Me? I just call it home. I mean, I am not from here nor do i live here. But for the short time that i was in this city full of a milion stories, the only story that matered was my own: I witnessed the god of comedy Jery Seinfeld perform live for the first time ever

Just to clarify that last sentance, this was not Jery seinfelds first time performing. How else do you think he earned his own hit NBC sitcom (Seinfeld) that literaly DOMINATED television sets across this great nation throughout the 1990s and left a mark that still courses thru the landscape of popular culture more powerfully than the mighty Missisippi?

But even if you had never heard of Jery before tonite (because u were born in a coma? seriosly WTF, hypothetical person i invented in my mind), watching the show it was clear that one was witnessing a master at work. The theater was his domain, and for anyone asking, yes, jery is still the master

The crowd outside the Beacon was rowdy is fuck. Honestly I havent seen middle aged white people get this turnt up over anything since Beyonces super bowl performance. Then as soon as we were all seated who BERSTS out on stage but none other than Jerys fellow comedy icon Steve Martin (Bringing Down the House). He made some jokes but i dont really remember any of them. Listen, my plan was to type down everything on my iPhone 6S but i was siting next to some journalist's and they had notepads and thats when i sudenly realize that when you are writing about the theatar its simply proper etiquete to not have your phone all lit up and distracting smh.

But anyway just picture steve martin kind of making some wry jokes or whatever and then pulling out his banjo and didling out a couple of melodys and what not when suddenly JERY creep up behind him, no fanfare nothing, just two legends in the game sharing a stage as equals

From that point onward, Jery kept it lit with an hour-plus comedy performance that give the audience a window into what Seinfeld would be like today. Any number of his bits could have been truncated and tossed in to the intro of a brand new epsode of seinfeld—if it was still on TV—and it would be just like old times (paging NBC).

Now if youre like me and you have spent the last three years watching every single late-nite TV appearance Jery has ever done in the event that he makes a face or says something that u can photoshop into a freeze frame of a Drake music video or a GOP debate or whatever the case may be, then some of the jokes n stories he told may not be new for you. Regardless the performance was a tsunami of latter-day Jery greatest hits and deep cuts coming at you from every single direction

He eased into his set by talking about "going out" in general, about how everyone wants to go out, and then once theyre out, they "gotta go." It was pure seinfeld, jerry demonstrating an impresive economy of words to nimbly sum up the human experience of socialization before boiling it down to the very poignant observation that none of us really want to be anywhere and that wherever we are, we arent realy satisfied. Daniel Tosh if youre reading this, take note, comedy is about more than just "janking off" onstage. Its about identifying the universal moments that make us human

From here on Jery triple-axel jumped into a barage of dispatches on american culture, from Swanson dinners to texting to motion detectors in toilets

Some times i have to fill out a form or whatever and I actually have to think for a moment about what my birthday is before writing it down. But Jery can cram thousands and thousands of words of an elegantly crafted and fine-tuned comedy set into his mind and regurgitate it with the precision of the lead balerina in Swan Lake, his voice warbling into the emphatic high tones that are one of the keys to his all-consuming charisma

It felt like just ten minutes but Jery had been going for an hour when he thanked the crowd. After getting a standing ovaish, he asked the crowd if anyone had any questions. My heart rate acelerated. Beads of sweat formed on my temple. This was my moment. I would finaly get to find out what he thinks seinfeld would be like if it was still on TV today with brand new epsodes every week, just like back in the day

In this episode of VICE Talks Film, we sit down with Sundance award-winning director Robert Eggers to discuss his debut arthouse-horror film, The Witch. Eggers talks about his process writing and casting a film set in 16th century New England, the feminine darkness and empowerment of witch folklore, and combining unnerving family trauma with supernatural influences to create a "puritan nightmare."

I never actually took a photo of the Pope when he visited my home, the binational border region of El-Paso-Ciudad Juárez (also known as Paso del Norte).

But I don't think he would have wanted me to either. Not because I'm Jewish or left-handed. He would have wanted me to focus on the people and the spirit and the place of hope in our day to day lives. Because, well, that's what this Pope is about. The people. And hope.

Where I'm from, a little more hope couldn't hurt. Not after the cartel violence of years prior which left tens of thousands of people murdered and thousands more fleeing to El Paso and other cities. Not after the still-unsolved femicides, or the destructive xenophobic language coming from political circles in the United States, which mostly describes the border as a threat and never as an opportunity.

On February 17, as the Pope visited Juárez before returning to Rome, I shot a papal mass at El Punto, a space designed specifically for the mass that's also described as a "window into Mexico." I wanted to photograph the faces and people on this day of hope for a better tomorrow. I wanted to shoot something optimistic in our region. I concentrated on the feeling of the day and not on the man who came into town. I think he would have wanted it that way.

For more of Peter's work, visit his website here.

If you really sat down and tried, you could turn a lot of pages in the space of 30 days. While we've spent over a decade providing you with about 120 of those pages every month, it turns out that VICE isn't the only magazine in the world. This series, Ink Spots, is a helpful guide to which zines, pamphlets, and publications you should be reading when you're not reading ours.

All images courtesy of PYLOT Magazine.

For an independent magazine on its third issue, PYLOT looks surprisingly like the kind of big-budget international mag that's been kicking around for years: It's thick, laid out beautifully, and the photo shoots are so arresting that your eyes will wander straight to the credits in anticipation of finding a famous name. And there are a few of those, from the great American documentary photographer Roger Ballen, to British upstart Tom Johnson, to established photographer and filmmaker Jane Hilton; the talent onboard speaks measures for the magazine.

Focusing on narrative storytelling and marrying fashion editorial with documentary photography, PYLOT occupies a unique place in the market. It's really for anyone who sees the gap between high fashion and everyday life as indecipherable. Also, PYLOT keeps it real. You might not notice it immediately, but the mag holds a firm "no retouching" policy. They don't use any Photoshop "in terms of beauty," as the team explains. "We won't do anything that affects how the model looks physically." Ironic, given that Editor-in-Chief Max Barnett, is—by day—a photographer, as well as a very talented beauty retoucher.

This might have something to do with PYLOT's other policy: analogue photography only. Photo Editor Bex Day thinks this is imperative to the magazine's aesthetic. The color, highlights, and grain you get from shooting on film have an authenticity and finish that are nearly impossible to mimic with digital photography or fake through post production. To find out more about the PYLOT's firm ethos and the exciting stories they cover, we talked to magazine's core editorial team, consisting of Barnett, Day, Fashion Director and stylist Patricia Villirillo, and Commissioning Editor Henry Gorse.

Photo by Roger Ballen, courtesy of 'PYLOT'

VICE: Hey guys. Does someone want to kick things off by telling me how the magazine came to be?
Max Barnett, Editor-in-Chief: It started as an experiment while I was in my second year at university. I spent my final year researching and developing the concept as part of my university course, but I'd say the magazine got in full swing once Patricia Villirillo and Henry Gorse came on board.

It happened pretty organically; I met Bex at London Fashion Week when we were working backstage taking photos, and Bex introduced me to Patricia, and Patricia introduced me to Henry. After that, the team just flourished. We now have 13 members, which has made it possible to create something that not only embraces analogue photography, but diverse casting, real hard-hitting stories, and experimental fashion features.

What are some of the challenges you face with an independent mag like this? Patricia Villirillo, Fashion Director: I think the most challenging thing is to gain credibility within the industry, as we're all young and still finding our feet. We all work for free out of passion for the magazine; another challenge is that we have no budget at all, as all money from the print sales go to the cost of the next issue. We all help with the casting, assisting, pre-production, and post-production of the shoots for each issue as much as we can. It's definitely our labor of love.

Why is it called PYLOT?
Barnett: At first it was because the idea was a pilot; I was trailing the concept. But I prefer the way the name looks as PYLOT (as opposed to PILOT), the 'Y' gives an even weight to the text. The name has since come to symbolize our practice as a magazine—it helps to push us to create and think in ways that are not the norm. This ties in with our zero beauty retouching ethos, as—as far as I know—no one had yet declared themselves to be a zero beauty retouching publication when we started.

Tell me more about that—why no retouching?
We decided not to beauty retouch our imagery because we felt like, at the time of creating the magazine, there was not a great representation of reality in the fashion industry. I feel like this is changing now, which is great to see. A lot of younger, more independent magazines are going for a more natural finish. It was a way for us to state how we felt and still feel about ethics in the fashion industry, and a way for us to celebrate difference and flaws rather than conceal them.

Bex Day, Photo Editor: It's like that quote by the columnist Mary Schmich, which was later used in that Baz Luhrmann song, "Everybody's Free to Wear Sunscreen": "DO NOT READ BEAUTY MAGAZINES THEY WILL ONLY MAKE YOU FEEL UGLY." That really struck me. I could really relate. I thought, Why on Earth should publications be encouraging abnormal weight and overly retouched skin? Plus, it's important to break rigid beauty ideals and change how people think.

What are some of the themes you've had from issue to issue?
The previous themes have been dedicated to "Craft" and "Family." I think having a theme allows consistency throughout the curation of the publication, allowing a smooth flow of intriguing content. Our latest issue is "The Status Quo Issue."

Photo by Eamonn Freel, Styled by Alessia Vanini

What's in the new issue?
Well Eamonn Freel's fashion editorial is about his brother Ciaran who got brain cancer when he was six-years-old, which unfortunately stopped his brain from progressing. His shoot was about Ciaran's concept of "the status quo" and how he interprets the world. And then there was a fashion story the team constructed from the photographer Roger Ballen's archive, in collaboration with Roger himself.

What does it feel like to work with people like Roger Ballen?
Henry Gorse, Commissioning Editor: It was an absolute pleasure to work with Roger. I drove him and his crew down with Patricia to South Wales and we camped by the sea. These guys know analogue inside out, so it was a breath of fresh air to see how he worked. Hearing his stories and becoming a friend of his was a highlight of Issue 3 for me and the rest of the team. The stuff he was shooting back in the 80s and 90s is being ripped off like hell today, it was important for us to bring him back and give him the attention he deserves. Roger keeps out of the limelight, but we won't let that happen.

Day: We try to endorse established and new talent and mix it all together. Collaborating with industry legends feels incredible—it's a really great feeling that they are into what we do and really supporting us. It's kind of magical being able to talk to your idols and work closely with them.

For example, we also commissioned the fine art photographer Anna Fox to shoot her first fashion story, "Everyday Folk," which portrayed real Morris dancers who she cast and shot over a few days. We featured unseen works of Jane Hilton and an interview with Cheryl Newman to coincide with her renowned series Precious which is about her intimate portraits of Nevada prostitutes.

Photo by Jane Hilton, courtesy of 'PYLOT'

Why do you exclusively publish analogue photography?
In such a digital saturated world, we thought it was important to push for a resurgence in analogue photography. Using film as a medium is important because of the patience and the space you have to have in between shooting and waiting for the negatives to return—the images do not come back instantly. You also think much more carefully about each shot that you take because it is expensive, and you only really need one shot rather than the 50,000 you would take on digital. I guess it also sets a boundary for all the photographers to work to and again, keeps a consistency, too.

What's next for PYLOT?
Gorse: We'll continue to stick to our ethos. I think issue four will really show our quality, when you consider this is all done with no budget, it's scary to think what we could achieve with it. We like to pay attention to past greats, the underdogs and try to look for things in people we can elevate. The most exciting thing for me is watching the team grow together, the talent in this team is special, together there is no limit!

Check out PYLOT's website for more from the magazine and info on the next issue, which is due out in April.

Follow Amelia on Twitter.

In early 2014, writer Charlotte Shane began using an email newsletter service, TinyLetter, to send out confessional and crushing missives about love, sex, relationships, and the inner life of an American sex worker—Shane's "dayjob" at the time. Collated under the name Prostitute Laundry, the newsletters quickly amassed a following of more than 5,000 subscribers, and readers began anxiously awaiting each installment so they could devour the next story of Shane's personal life and work.

Soon, these addictive, intimate writings began to feel much like a serial novel, and last year a Kickstarter campaign to make her TinyLetter series into a book, raised $27,842—more than three times the amount she was asking for. It was clear that people were more than willing to consume Shane's writing in print, even though they may already have read it in their inboxes. The subsequently created volume of 57 unflinching entries totals nearly 400 pages of writing, spans 2014 and 2015, and culminates with the author's eventual retirement from sex work.

Prostitute Laundry is not popular because of its graphic sexual content (which there is plenty of), but more so because of Shane's ability to write so poetically about humanity. When she unexpectedly falls in love with an artist who readers will know as her now-boyfriend Max, she writes with such emotion and affection, you hope and pray that he doesn't disappear from her life after finding out about her sex work. Shane sometimes likens her readers to TV audiences, which feels on point as their responses to her work on Twitter and across the internet show a level of investment in her characters on par with that of the romantic leads in a favorite sitcom.

Shane, an east coast native and self-described introvert, has been voraciously reading and writing since she was young. It was while studying creative writing at John Hopkins that she began a career in the sex industry in her early twenties, starting with webcam and fetish work before transitioning to in-person and full-service escorting for reasons she didn't divulge to VICE. In addition to writing about her life and sex work at the now-defunct Nightmare Brunette blog—which she also published as an anthology titled N.B., and crafting her email letters, Shane has also won fans as a prolific sex writer and reporter online, including bylines at Jezebel, Playboy, and The New Inquiry. In anticipation of her upcoming book tour, VICE spoke with Shane about public and private life, the similarities between sex work and writing, and the myth of the "white knight" ending.

VICE: How did the Tiny Letter series take off and become so popular?
Charlotte Shane: The first one was sent to sixty-some people. I'd see that the subscriber list would jump from 200 to 400 within a week, and a lot of times I was clueless as to why. Sometimes people would tell me that another TinyLetter mentioned me. It was probably the summer of 2014, when I was well into the George saga [a pseudonym for the man Shane had an intense, sexual relationship with outside of work who is featured prominently in the book] when it started to feel like it had evolved in a real way and I had an audience and I decided I would try to do a cliffhanger. I started realizing that this was a serialized experience.

How did the newsletter and people's reactions build your confidence as a writer? I have to assume it's a more positive experience than writing for the general internet?
It's been overwhelmingly positive, which is very lucky. I think, at the risk of sounding arrogant, I always felt relatively confident as a writer, since I've been writing for so long. Every time I send a letter, people will tweet about it and reply to it and have reactions much like a TV audience would. Some of these readers are all really invested. A lot of time I feel like I have relationships with them; they don't really feel like strangers.

Do you feel like your readers know you or do they just know aspects of you?
I would say most people do know a lot about me, but there are other things people don't know. I look at the two books I've published, and there's so much I wrote about, but there's still so much I didn't write about. They know part of me. The letters are not a performance; they are sincere and I try to be as honest as I can. But not only am I self-reporting, which is suspect from the start, but then also I'm self-editing, consciously, because I want the writing and storytelling to be stronger.

What are the pros and cons of writing under a pseudonym?
I feel like I get less harassment for it because there aren't pictures of me online. I don't know how to describe the amount of harassment other women get that I don't. It gives you a lot of control over what you reveal and when. Not that I would, but if I tried to get a super straight job, all of this wouldn't come up when they're looking into me. The one down side is that if somebody wants to hurt you, this looks like a point of weakness. Like they could blackmail you or accuse you of being fake or not willing to say this under your real name.

Some of these readers are all really invested. A lot of time I feel like I have relationships with them; they don't really feel like strangers — Charlotte Shane

You have a public persona and a private life. Where does one end and the other begin for you?
The two are overlapping in a way that I want and that I feel I have control over. I would love it if one day I could just be totally out as Charlotte and not care if my face is associated with the name. The biggest obstacle for me right now would be my parents, since they are the only people who don't know, but I have faith that I'll get there. I decided a year ago that virtually any other writing I do for the rest of my life will be under this name. I've built up enough of a reputation and network that it would be self-defeating to start over.

You've written about the financial pressure of retirement from sex work. How do you feel about the transition to full-time writer and author?
I think that I'm focused enough and creative enough that I can figure out a way to make writing sustainable for me. Maybe I'm overestimating my own reputation or abilities—I have a history of inexplicable amounts of self-esteem—but I feel like I spent a lot of time building an audience by writing so much and making it public. Even if I'm not a household name, I feel like I have enough of a portfolio now and I feel more prepared to write books, as well.

When you fell in love with Max, your boyfriend who you write so tenderly about in Prostitute Laundry, and decided to retire from sex work last year, were you at all concerned that people would interpret this as a man saving you from sex work or something akin to that existing narrative?
Most of the people reading the letters seemed to be very sensitive and intelligent. I was always impressed with how they understood my emotional developments and how generous they were in interpreting my choices. I've written about how bogus that "white knight ending" is, and how my current relationship is a great one but still challenging in the ways they all are. And I wrote a lot about how and why sex work was important to me and not something I'm ashamed about or regretful of. So hopefully "now that sex work is done, I can be happy!" was not anyone's take away. I tried the best I could to make sure it wasn't.

"Sex work was important to me and not something I'm ashamed about or regretful of."

Are there any similarities between writing and sex work?
One thing I miss about sex work is that I set my rates and I didn't negotiate beyond that. To me, the biggest parallel is that you have to be confident that what you're selling is worth it. You have to have this degree of self-confidence and a track record. It's really useful as an escort to see what other women's rates are and where you fall among them. I think it's easier to get paid what you deserve with escorting. But publications don't put their rates out there and it can be awkward or hard to know what other writers get paid.

You're passionate about the decriminalization and destigmatization of sex work. Do you think we'll see either anytime soon?
I'm certainly not expecting that we will, but I think the most realistic thing to hope for is that indoor prostitution, not outdoor prostitution, can and possibly will become a little like the equivalent of white people smoking weed; the trafficking angle really complicates things. A younger generation of women right now, some of them are buying into second wave feminism's "sex work is abuse," but I think many more of them can see past that. So many young women have friends who've dabbled in sex work that they can't say, "they're all victims," or "this is institutionalized misogyny."

What type of writing would you like to do from here on out?
There is a book I have in mind right now that I'm sort of working on, which will be non-fiction but not personal writing. I do want to write a proper sex work memoir because Prostitute Laundry isn't about sex work at all; it's just that I do sex work. The emphasis wouldn't be "this happened to me..." or "sex work is exactly like this..." Hopefully it has a more interesting, wider-reaching thrust than, "Can you believe this guy did this and I got this?" It would have insight into what type of connections are and aren't possible between men and women right now.

For book tour dates, or to purchase a copy of 'Prostitute Laundry,' visit Charlotte Shane's website.

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Mechoulam during a lecture, with the structure of Tetrahydrocannabinol behind him, circa 1964. Courtesy of Zach Klein, from his documentary 'The Scientist'

This article originally appeared in the Colombian edition of VICE Magazine.

In 1980, a team of investigators from the Sao Paulo Medicine Faculty of Santa Casa published a study that should have changed the lives of 50 million epilepsy sufferers around the world—but never did.

The findings of the investigation, carried out alongside the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, were, at the very least, encouraging. Researchers administered daily doses of 300 milligrams of cannabidiol, the most important non-psychoactive component in marijuana, to a group of eight epileptic patients. Four months into the treatment, four of them stopped having seizures and three others saw the frequency of their seizures decrease.

"Who cared about our findings? No one!" says Raphael Mechoulam, frowning from his sofa. "And that's despite many of the epilepsy patients being kids who have 20, 30, 40 seizures a day. And what did they do? Nothing! For 30 years, no one has used cannabis to treat epilepsy."

I'd been searching for Mechoulam for a year. Just like anyone else interested in medicinal cannabis, I'd formed this mythical image of him, like a sort of Karl Marx or Syd Barrett figure, a revolutionary mind who defies the conventions of his time and alters, forever, our perception of the world. A few months ago, Norton Arbeláez, the Colombian businessman who designed the medicinal cannabis regulatory system in Colorado, told me that this organic chemistry expert's investigations had added scientific weight to his regulatory lobbying in the United States. Meanwhile, Juan Manuel Galán, a senator from Colombia's Liberal Party, told me last November that he had traveled to Jerusalem to meet the scientist in his laboratory while he was working on the draft for his proposal to have medicinal marijuana legalized, which was approved by the Colombian Senate in December and will be debated in the House of Representatives this March.

Everyone I spoke to about the scientist agreed on one thing: Mechoulam is the father of modern cannabis.

Mechoulam at his current lab, at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. Photo by Elior Rave

The 85-year-old lives in a small, sober but elegant apartment in West Jerusalem, where the marble buildings and the trees in the front gardens make you forget momentarily that Israel is a military state on a permanent state of alert. Every day he drives his silver Peugeot to his lab on the outskirts of the city, where he's spent the last five decades deciphering the chemical mysteries of marijuana, and more importantly, the way in which the human body interacts with the compounds found in the plant. Raphie, as his colleagues like to call him, isolated and deciphered the molecular structure of the "cannabinoids," the chemical compounds in marijuana. In particular, tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the molecule responsible for the cannabis high, and cannabidiol, the main non-psychoactive compound of the plant, carrier of countless medicinal qualities.

At the start of the 20th century, with the gradual prohibition of marijuana in the US, the modern world turned its back on the researching of a sacred and powerful plant used by doctors, shamans, and druids for over three millennia. The Pen-T'sao Ching, the oldest pharmacopoeia in existence, records the use of cannabis in China around 2700 BC as treatment for rheumatic pain, constipation, female reproductive disorders (such as endometriosis), and malaria. Similarly, the father of Chinese surgery, Hua Tuo, developed an anesthetic composed of wine and weed during the first century BC. Similar accounts appear in documents and witness accounts from India, the Middle East, Africa, and even Europe, where in 1838, William Brooke O'Shaughnessy, an Irish doctor, published—following experiments on animals and patients—a book titled On the Preparations of the Indian Hemp, or Gunjah. In Tibet, cannabis was used in tantric Buddhist rituals to "facilitate meditation," while Assyrians used it as incense in the sixth century BC.

Raphael Mechoulam didn't know any of this when he began his research over 50 years ago. The son of a Jewish Bulgarian couple persecuted by the Nazis (his father, a distinguished doctor, survived a concentration camp), Mechoulam left Europe in 1949, soon after the formation of the state of Israel. There, he studied chemistry, completed a masters in biochemistry, served in the army, busied himself studying pesticides, and completed his doctorate in 1963 at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot—the same place he would later discover the secrets of cannabis.

"I was 34 when I started looking for research subjects," he tells me when I ask about the origins of his interest in cannabis. I'm expecting his answer to relate to the hippie era of the 1960s—"I was smoking a joint one day in my lab, when..."—but Mechoulam, who has only consumed cannabis once in his life, gives me a very straight response: "A scientist has to pick an original subject, one that doesn't have another 50 people working on it. The subject must also be substantial and with social impact. Around that time, I read plenty of articles in English, Russian, French, and German to try to discover some unexplored problem, until I realized the scarce chemical knowledge about the compounds in cannabis. I found it very surprising: While morphine had been isolated from opium and cocaine from the coca leaf, no one had studied the chemistry of the marijuana plant. It was very odd."

One day, the young chemist showed up in the office of the institute's director and asked for his help in procuring some weed. The director didn't think twice. He picked up the phone and called the police, who donated 5 kgs of Moroccan hash officers had recently seized coming in from Lebanon (Mechoulam tells this anecdote in a very amusing way in the biographical documentary The Scientist, directed by Zach Klein). Some time later he had isolated, one by one, all the compounds in the plant.

Which of these compounds was the cause for all the mental stimulation that had terrorized governments and legislators in the 20th century? Was it just one, or a combination of all of them? To answer this question, Mechoulam and his team tested each individually on monkeys. The first surprising discovery was that only one of them, tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), had any effect whatsoever. The primates looked drunk, sedated.

Mechoulam had discovered the psychoactive compound responsible for the marijuana high. To confirm it, he took a big dose of THC home with him and asked his wife, Dalia, to add it to her cake recipe. That day, the father of cannabis got high for the first and only time. He was also able to prove a phenomenon that today guides investigation into medicinal cannabis: Each person reacts differently to THC. He knew it when he looked around him: One of his friends talked non-stop, another appeared to be in a trance, a third friend had the giggles. Only one of them looked paranoid.

As I listen to the anecdote, I remember a panel on medicinal cannabis I once attended as an observer, as part of the National Psychiatry Congress in the Colombian town of Armenia. There, three psychiatrists said they were worried about how the mass media talked about medicinal marijuana, particularly how the Colombian Health Ministry has signed a decree regulating it. The growing political sympathy toward medicinal cannabis was, according to the panel members, generating a false sense of security about marijuana. For the psychiatrists, the new media frenzy generated by this political debate has obscured studies that prove that one in ten adolescents who try marijuana develop psychotic episodes and addictive behaviors.

I communicate the panel's worries to Mechoulam.

"Neither THC nor cannabidiol are toxic. However, since the sixth century, we have known that marijuana can provoke psychotic episodes. In addition, there is evidence that 10 percent of marijuana consumers develop an addiction, although not as strong as one to morphine. But beyond psychiatric disorders or the possibility of addiction, there is no evidence of any illnesses caused by cannabis."

Related: War in Weed Country

That whole debate corresponds purely to the recreational use of the drug, Mechoulam tells me. To him, it is one thing to debate the risks involved in smoking cannabis to get high, and another very different thing to explore the potential medicinal applications of its compounds, particularly THC and cannabidiol. The former is something sociologists can do and doesn't concern him much. The latter, however, has occupied a large chunk of his life and those of the members of the International Society for the Investigation of Cannabinoids, a growing network of academics that, under his tutelage, has confirmed in their labs the reasons behind the historical usage of this plant.

It's likely that Mechoulam's greatest discovery isn't actually THC or cannabidiol. After all, following a short frenzy during the 1970s, and while practically every police force on the planet chased the cultivation, commercialization, and consumption of weed, science gradually lost interest in cannabinoids. But Mechoulam did not stop asking questions. In the late 80s, he began to investigate the ways in which THC interacts with the nervous system.

"After we discovered THC, we began to study the metabolism and the ways in which the human body reacts to this compound," he says. "A team in Oxford had claimed that THC works in a non-specific manner. But we, alongside a young researcher, showed that, in reality, it is very specific."

The researcher is Allyn Howlett, doctor in neuroscience, who in 1988 discovered that most animals' brains have a receptor in the nervous system designed specifically to interact with THC. She called it CB1. Finding CB1 was like finding the lock for a particular key—a finding that was followed by an unsettling question: How was it possible that the nervous system had a receptor designed specifically to react with a marijuana compound? Had the human body evolved to interact with a specific plant? Was God (or Darwin) suggesting that man and marijuana were created for one another?

The answer Mechoulam found generated a scientific maelstrom which, to this day, fueled by billions of dollars from big pharma, is still growing larger.

"Our nervous system has many neuronal receptors, and those receptors are linked to some substance produced by our body ," he says. "But these receptors were not created to link up with a shrub. If that was the case, we would have millions of them, one for every species of plant on the planet."

In other words, if the human body has specific receptors for cannabinoids, it means our bodies produce them.

Related: Watch 'Stoned Kids,' our documentary about an eight-year-old leukemia patient who uses massive amounts of weed to treat her illness.

In December of 1992, Mechoulam reported the discovery of a compound produced by the human body, located in and around the brain, which linked perfectly to the receptor he'd discovered years before. It was as if, suddenly, he had found another key that perfectly fit the lock. The discovery was so important that the molecule deserved a worthy name. A member of the team, a Hindu enthusiast, baptized it Anandamide, from the sanskrit "ananda," meaning supreme joy.

With the discovery of CB1 and Anandamide (and the later discovery of a similar receptor, CB2), it became evident to Mechoulam and his team that the human body contained a system of receptors and compounds very similar to those found in marijuana. They named it the endocannabinoid system. Since then, two matters have kept them up at night: What function does that system fulfill within the fragile and quasi-perfect balance that keeps humans healthy? And how can marijuana be used to treat illnesses related to that system?

"The endocannabinoid system is very important. Almost all illnesses we have are linked to it in some way or another. And that is very strange. We don't have many systems which get involved with every illness," says Mechoulam, patiently explaining what he's no doubt explained many times before.

Which illnesses would we be talking about?

"All sorts! Lung, heart, liver, and kidney diseases: It all depends on how intensely the receptors become stimulated. Take dopamine, for example. If our bodies have too little dopamine, we can develop Parkinson's; if they have too much, we can suffer from schizophrenia. It's the same thing with cannabinoids. Receptor CB2 is a protector. It protects the body from a multitude of things. CB1 works in different ways, depending on whether the dosage is high or low. In other words, as long as the levels of Anandamide—and other endocannabinoids since discovered—remain stable, the human body will perform many of its functions correctly. If these compounds become unbalanced, science could use cannabinoids like THC and cannabidiol, naturally occurring in marijuana plants, to cure many ailments.

The professor even assures me that there are some hints this system is related to certain types of cancer.

"But we are not certain," he says, frowning. "We don't have proof because those clinical studies are not being carried out! We know of people who consume THC and have claimed that they were cured of cancer. But beyond that we know nothing. We need more research! We need more clinical studies."

This is a sentiment he repeats at every talk, interview, or class he gives. For Mechoulam is a cannabis science activist. A wise old man who, despite being ignored for decades, insists that humanity is not worthy of what cannabinoids have to offer. Today, he sounds slightly more optimistic thanks to the recent interest in research from academics and pharmaceutical companies.

"I'm curious," I say at the end of our interview. "How come a money-making machine like the medicine industry has ignored all these findings?"

"It's simple", he replies. "Who would want a New York Times front page saying, 'Merck Makes Millions from Marijuana'"?

Students protesting university cuts in Melbourne. Image via

At universities around Australia, O Week kicks off today. This isn't just a big moment for anyone with a Class of '15 jumper, but also for anyone involved in student life or the business of tertiary education.

For many, our years at university are some of our most culturally engaged and opinionated. Issues such as the price of rent or lockout laws will have very tangible effects on our lives. Given that, 2016 is shaping up to be a big year for Australian students.

To find out what will be big issues facing students, we asked some of them—namely the editors producing Australia's university newspapers. Each gave us their predictions for the year ahead, as well as some observations.

Pelican editors Hayden Dalziel and Kate Prendergast

Pelican, University of Western Australia

VICE: What do you think are the biggest issues facing students in 2016?
Pelican: 2016 is looking like it's going to be madness. Every year is a bit bonkers, but this one seems especially so. The obscene response to the international asylum seeker crisis, the obstinacy of both sides of government on the issue of same-sex marriage, our will to fuck over future generations when it comes to climate change, the fact that shock jocks are still able to popularly vocalise statements such as "we need more stolen generations."

At the end of the day though, there's never really any one "big issue." It's what we define. Whatever a student has a problem with, or invigorates them, or annoys them, or delights them: Everything is eligible. Kanye dropping a new album is always a thing.

Are there any Perth-specific student issues?
The overall corporatisation of universities and student unions is starting to reveal itself as more of an issue and that situation is only going to get more shithouse as time goes on. In just the last few years our uni has gone from a fairly respectable (sort of) place to a corporate marketing hellscape.

Student unions were at one point—uh, at least trying to be—truly representative of students, but now it's doubtful they can fight back against threats to higher education. Their original purpose of standing up for student interests has been lost.

Do you think students at UWA are politically engaged?
Not even vaguely. I don't think it'd be a stretch to say we have the most apathetic elections on earth, and who can blame the voters? The only people running are those looking for a career in the major parties, and the only real issues talked about are questions like should there be a Subway on campus?

The Empire Times team. From left: Liam McNally, Eleanor Danenberg, and Simone Corletto.

Empire Times, Flinders University

Simone: As an election year, I think one of the biggest issues is youth voter apathy. I see too many students disillusioned with the system or proudly not understanding how our democracy works.

Eleanor: This apathy extends to university life too, unfortunately. Many students just study and leave, which is the bare minimum. They keep their head down and ignore all campaigners during university election week; they're not engaging with or contributing to their uni in any way. They just have no desire to help make things better.

Liam: The treatment of students by government is the key issue I see. Students are saddled with burdensome debt, and in some cases the up-front costs of tertiary education makes it difficult for students from lower socio-economic backgrounds.

How will you be covering these issues in the student press?
Simone: In the lead up to the election, we'll be trying to publish political think-pieces that engage with the issues and remind people what's at stake.

Liam: Looking at federal, state, and student politics in an effort to present the truth of how their policies and actions impact on student welfare.

Farrago team Sebastian Dodds, Caleb Triscari, Danielle Bagnato and Baya Ou Yang (answers supplied by Caleb Triscari)

Farrago, University of Melbourne

Farrago: 2016 is an election year that I think will shape the political future of higher education and welfare. The first political step to keep an eye out for will be how the Coalition government handles education in the April budget.

What's the role of student media in all this?
The role of student media editors, as elected representatives, is undeniably to make sure their student body is aware of these issues. An issue which I've faced when heading the campus reporting section is being unable to ensure students are engaged with these issues.

Any issues that affect students at Uni of Melbourne specifically?
The University of Melbourne has recently unveiled their Flexible Academic Programming or FAP plan. They've tried to rename it to "FlexAP" since realising FAP is an unfortunate name but it's too late, the deed is done. The working groups of FAP will look into the sizes of lectures, the reduction of face-to-face classes, and the casualisation of university staff.

Do you think it will be a big year for activism?
I think we can count on it. We saw deregulation shelved last year but since then there have been proposals to determine whether the SSAF is paid on an annual basis, or to have student loans repaid by dipping into their superannuation.

Dircksey editor Kitty Turpin (left) with her editorial squad Rhys, Mae, and Sarah

Dircksey, Edith Cowan University

Kitty Turpin: For us the restructuring of some WA universities means they will pool their allocated money and make the faculties fight for funding to influence research output.

What about changes to HECS?
Cutting the student start up scholarship, and pushing that $1000 per semester onto the HECS loan is a massive issue that I don't think enough students are informed about, especially the students ON Youth Allowance who receive this scholarship, which will now be considered a loan.

So funding is a crucial issue?
Yeah. The WA government trying to decrease funding to student unions too. If this happened at ECU, Dircksey would cease to exist. Unions just do not have the funds to continue at all without their allocation of 50 percent of the Student Amenities and Services Fee. All of this has come about because university deregulation has been ruled out.

Students who aren't out there searching for these facts think the fight has been won, but it hasn't. We need to keep informed, because the federal government and universities are keeping all these tactics on the down low to slip changes past the students until we're so deep into these restructures that we can't get ourselves out.

These answers were supplied by one of Honi Soit's 2016 editors Subeta Vimalarajah (right)

Honi Soit, University of Sydney

Subeta Vimalarajah: Political debates around the ongoing treatment of asylum seekers, cuts to Medicare, the treatment of Indigenous people, and the failure of the government to take any real action on climate change.

What about issues that affect tertiary education directly?
Changes to the tertiary education sector, the housing crisis and employment are key issues affecting us directly. Rental prices, particularly in the inner city, are ludicrous, and are a contributing factor to high rates of youth homelessness. Unpaid internships and employers exploiting student workers also continue to be a problem. Only recently the media published news about workers at 7-Eleven being paid less than a dollar an hour for their labour.

Do you think students at Uni of Sydney are politically engaged?
Definitely! The University of Sydney has a radical history of student activism. Our student organisations are also blessed with a considerable amount of the money the university gets from the Student Services Amenities Fee so our SRC (Student Representative Council) has the means to support activism.

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They obviously took a lot more than this. This looks like it's about £500

Ten years ago today, a group of blaggers from London and the Home Counties pulled off the largest cash robbery in British history. After using an inside man to secretly film the interior of a Securitas depot in Tonbridge, Kent, they abducted the depot manager's family to use as hostages, tied up 14 Securitas staff members, and made off with just over £53 million. It was one of the UK's most ambitious crimes – although the perpetrators' competence didn't quite match up to their gall.

Virtually every error imaginable was made, with DNA evidence left on items used in the raid, incriminating information entrusted to a member of the public, and a phone call plotting the heist accidentally recorded. Money linked to the robbery was found in the houses of the culprits, weapons were found abandoned in a van and one of the perps had kept a floorplan of the Securitas depot in his home, covered in his fingerprints, after the heist.

To mark the 10th anniversary of the robbery, I got in touch with some former criminals to get their view on what could have been done differently. Was there a way in which this monumental crime could have been pulled off without the robbers landing themselves with lengthy prison sentences? Former South London villain Johnny Mack, who had taken part in a £250,000 diamond robbery before reaching his 15th birthday, thinks so. He was less than impressed with the depot robber's methods and went so far as to question the logic behind attempting such a large-scale cash robbery in the first place.

Johnny Mack, reformed and visibly loving life

"I would never have got involved with something involving that much cash," Mack told VICE. "If someone said to me: 'I've got a £50 million job, are you interested?', I'd say no. The simple reason is that I don't know of one job yet that's gone down involving that type of money, where they haven't been caught. When you rob that much cash, you need to have people outside the country who are going to buy that money. The group that did the Tonbridge Securitas got around £50 million. If they sold it through the black market, they'd be lucky if they got £20 million back. They would have been better off going after gold or diamonds."

Stuart Campbell, a criminal jack-of-all-trades who has acted as a fixer for robberies, agreed. "It'd have been easier to get rid of diamonds," he said. "Once they've been cut and polished again, their identity's totally altered." It seems there's a reason why most crimes that target cash are relatively small-scale: it's better to do lots of little robberies and actually get away with it than it is to do a huge one that ends up being the subject of a multi-million pound police operation.

Another major error that the gang made was recruiting hairdresser and makeup artist Michelle Hogg, a policeman's daughter with no experience of crime. She had been on a course that taught her how to apply theatrical makeup, and was used to fit disguises to the robbers. After being leaned on by the authorities during the aftermath of the raid, she testified against her alleged co-conspirators, which helped secure their imprisonment, and is now in the witness protection program as a result.

According to Mack, getting her onboard represented a huge error of judgement. "Would you trust a beautician to be involved in something involving that amount of money?" he asked. "When it comes to things like that, the less people involved, the better. They let far too many people in on it."

Mick Judge, Kent Police Detective Chief Investigator in charge of the case at the time, reflects

These sentiments were echoed by ex-gangster Jason Cook, who was a known face in the London underworld from the age of 17. "Too many people knew what was happening," he said. "There was no need for everyone who was involved to see everybody else. Each person should have just seen one other person so that if one of them went down, the others would have been protected."

So it seems that those in the know don't believe the robbery was as great a crime as it's been made out to be. There was one thing that most of them agreed was a good idea, though: the involvement of an inside man. The gang had recruited Securitas employee Emir Hysenaj to film the inside of the depot using a pinhole camera so that they could gain an insight into the place they were about to rob.

"That's what I would have done," Campbell said. "The bad thing there is that even though they had the camera, they still had to leave behind over £100 million because they didn't bring a big enough van. They should have scoped out the amount that was going to be in there so that they could bring the right size vehicle."

Hysenaj arguably took the biggest risk of anyone in the gang, as his position at the company meant that there was a link between him and the heist. Organised crime expert Eduardo Salcedo-Albarán, who's spoken to VICE before, told me that "inside men" tend to get away with their crimes more often than other criminals. This is because the police usually focus on career criminals, allowing grey agents – those within legal organisations who abuse their positions – to slip below the radar.

Unfortunately for Hysenaj, armed robberies are an exception to this rule. In the wake of the convictions of five of the gang members, the Met Police's Flying Squad head John O'Connor told the BBC that there's always likely to be an inside man when a big job goes down. This meant that the police were on the lookout for signs of an inside job, and Hysenaj eventually received a 20-year sentence for his involvement.

Other gang members made the schoolboy error of hiding either money linked to the depot or items used in the robbery at their properties. Van garage owner Roger Coutts stashed overalls and a balaclava that he had worn during the raid at his house in Bexleyheath, and used-car salesman Stuart Royle hid the keys to vehicles used in the kidnapping of the depot manager at his mum's house. Roofer and martial arts expert Lea Rusha left plans of the depot and Securitas note wrappers in his house, and guns and ammunition in his shed. These were the mistakes that most perplexed the former criminals I spoke to.

"I don't know why they did that," Campbell told me. "The money should have been moved to a safe house straightaway, or down to a farm in the middle of nowhere. A few of them left DNA on various different things as well. They should have used gloves whenever they touched anything. The fact that one of them accidentally pressed the record button on his phone when he was discussing the robbery was baffling too, although I suppose everyone makes avoidable errors at times."

Stuart Campbell, in his halycon days

John Costi, a reformed character who has since forged a career as a fine artist, believes that the prospect of being millionaires might have gone to the robbers' heads. "They should have buried the money and guns deep somewhere off the radar, but when you've got £53 million, I think excitement can get the better of you," he told me.

Costi wasn't entirely critical of the robbers' tactics, and pointed out that large sums of money were never recovered. "Even though they got nicked, in the scheme of things they've done pretty well," he said. "The old bill will be all over them when they get out, but the money they're sitting on is more than most will ever make in a lifetime. Now it's just about how they disappear and get the money on release, 'cause they'll have crazy license conditions and the police will be onto them."

One of the ringleaders, Paul Allen, has just reportedly been freed after spending nine years in prison. If he gets his share of the prize, will it justify being forced to endure a decade behind bars? That depends on whether you believe a price can be placed on years of your life. Crime of the century? In terms of scale, maybe, but in terms of attention to detail, it clearly left a lot to be desired.

Thanks, everyone. Mack's currently working on a film about his life of crime, Cook has written a book based on his experiences, Campbell has an autobiographical book on the way, literally called Jibbers, and Salcedo-Albarán's latest book on drug trafficking and corruption came out last year.

Follow Nick on Twitter.

More from VICE:

What Happens to Your Dog When You Get Arrested?

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Image via.

A young Western Australian volunteer firefighter has been charged with three separate incidences of arson in the state's South West region. The Perth Magistrates' Court heard yesterday that Stephen Johnson deliberately started two fires in Irishtown on December 22 last year, and another in Donnybrook on December 28. Johnson appeared in court via video link.

Johnson was arrested following a joint investigation between South West Detectives and the Donnybrook police. He was charged with three counts of lighting a fire likely to injure or damage, having allegedly used a lighter to set fire to bush scrub that surrounded properties and homes on Beelerup Road. The uncontained December 28 fire threatened both lives and homes, prompting a "watch and act" alert from local bushfire authorities.

While a firefighter arsonist might seem like a bit of a contradiction in terms, the phenomenon is surprisingly common. Back in 2005, the Australian Institute of Criminology profiled incidences of firefighter arson around the country, finding the behaviour is usually motivated by "a desire for excitement or as a way of gaining attention and recognition." As the report notes, "There are cases of firefighters who have started a fire, reported it and attended the fire with their unit in the hope of being seen as the hero who saves the community."

US-based research used by the Australian Institute of Criminology claims that the typical firefighter arsonist is male and aged between 17 and 25. Typically, firefighter arsonists are relatively inexperienced, often committing arson within their first three years of service. They often face mental health problems such as depression and unusual stress.

The ABC reports that police told the court yesterday that Johnson had admitted feeling depressed and started the fires so he could help fight them. He volunteers for both the SES and local fire brigade.

Bunbury detectives had urged against granting Johnson bail, fearing he would continue to pose a threat to the community. His bail was set for $10,000 plus a surety by the magistrate. He is due to appear in court again today.

Western Australia's Department of Fire and Emergency Services offers rewards of up to $50,000 for reporting information that leads to the identification and conviction of arsonists.

Follow Kat on Twitter.

Christian Bale in The Big Short, the movie about investors who got rich predicting the subprime mortgage crisis. Image via.

Recent economic news has been getting scary. The reasons for this are as complex and nuanced as you'd imagine, but they essentially come down to stalled growth in China, plunging oil prices everywhere, and emerging markets that can't repay loans borrowed when the US Reserve floored interest rates in 2008. As William White, a former chief economist for the Bank for International Settlements said in January, "The situation is worse than it was in 2007. Our macroeconomic ammunition to fight downturns is essentially all used up."

Post-boom Australia has also been feeling turbulence. On January 11 our share market dipped to a two and a half year low, dragging the dollar below 70 US cents. Then the market dropped four out of five days at the start of February, shedding $42 billion on February 9.

If you've seen The Big Short , you'll know these signs can really spell trouble—but also golden opportunities. You just need to be smart and opportunistic enough to spot them. We're neither of these things, so we asked for some tips from David Stuckler, professor of political economy and sociology at Oxford University.

VICE: Hey David, how can I get rich if the economy falls over?
David Stuckler: There are always some areas of the economy that are recession proof. Some even perform better during economic crises. For example, some medicine sales go up: blood pressure and depression medicine, namely. In hard times, people get stressed so their blood pressure goes up, or they become depressed, and start having suicidal thoughts.

So if I was evil, the best way to take advantage of the crisis would to be invest in unhappiness.
Well, yes. When investors talk about the market, they talk about something called "cyclicality." Antidepressants are counter-cyclical, because when the markets go down, those sales go up.

That's bleak. Is there something else I could invest in?
Well, there are other areas of the economy that generally avoid the effects of the recession. In the aftermath of the GFC, when investors were scratching their heads and looking for something safe to put money in, they landed on rice. Because, you know, people have always got to eat. People started putting money on rice futures in droves, and it pushed the price up almost three times over.

That seems more harmless than buying into antidepressants.
Not really. I've taken part in research that found kids in India were going hungry because of the increasing unaffordability of rice. They were malnourished and some had their growth stunted. That was a price rise totally driven by investors in Wall Street and London.

That's outrageous. Ok, what if I invest in something that's already fallen over and isn't integral to day-to-day nutrition?
Maybe. You've got a good opportunity right now with Chipotle. Their stock has plummeted following a series of E.coli outbreaks. It's possible that the market has over reacted, so Chipotle stock is actually worth more than it's priced at.

So it's a great time to be burrito lover who can buy stocks?
Well, what's happened to Chipotle is actually quite common during economic downturns. That is, something gets quite cheap relative to its actual worth because investors panic and sell. There are definite windows of opportunity in a downturn.

If The Big Short was all about identifying a giant weakness in the economy and betting against it, what's the weakest part of Australia's economy?
Mineral mining, definitely. Though there are both strengths and weaknesses there.

How can I bet against it?
Ha! If you knew, you would be a billionaire.

In your mind, is it wrong to make cash off a downturn? Or is it just part of the game?
That is an ethical question that I can't answer. Markets don't have a conscience: They operate by rules of the game.

Thanks Dave.

Me standing by the Perthiest thing of all, Gina's rock. All photos by the author.

Perth is the kind of city that spends public money on pop-up urinals. Our piss-strewn pavements give way to streets of chain stores and Chicken Treats; little piddling cul-de-sacs that lead to an infinite loop of iPhone repair huts, JB-HiFis, and number plate customisation workshops. How do you beautify a place whose greatest cultural output is Rolf Harris? Why, with crummy public art of course.

I recently toured some of the crummiest statues, monoliths, and indiscernible plinths around Perth. We had commentary provided by a "Mr. K"—a public planner who has worked throughout Perth "okaying some of this shit"—who asked to remained anonymous. We threw in the minute yet pretty Ruby Kerrisk so readers could get a sense of scale, and have something to take their minds off the sheer awfulness of said public works.

This is only a taste of Perth's crummy public art. Mr. K stated that for health reasons no man can expose himself to the "Fukishima-lame" levels of crumminess that are Perth's monuments to existential despair. "It can be done," he told VICE, "but you might just end up with a 300k mortgage and a two bedroom out in Midland. You've been warned."

But before we get to the statues themselves, here's a short contextual interview.

VICE: why do you think public works in Perth are so "controversial"? They're the butt of so many jokes amongst so many Perthians.
Mr. K: A part of me would like to say "cultural cringe," but it's really more than that. Public art is so difficult. You have to strike the right balance of banal and striking, which is just about impossible. But in Perth, where public spaces are so loaded with history and contrast—statues at the sites of massacres, or statues celebrating the mining boom in a neighbourhood that is for all intents and purposes economically dead etc—it becomes very difficult to have a piece that doesn't attract a certain level of absurdity.

On top of that, Perth is pretty daggy. That's what we're know for, right? I feel like no matter what we put up—even if it was something by Ai Weiwei—people would find it laughable because we are always going to be perceived as a city striving to be perceived as cool/cultural, but falling short.

Is it OK to poke fun at this art or are we just solidifying the idea that Perth is lame?
Look, no. Public art is just that: public art. Statues etc are such a part of local identity precisely because they become such a part of the colloquial conscience – taking the piss out of something adds to our cultural shorthand. It's nothing new. If you're willing to have your giant 30 foot statue in the middle of a round about, then you're willing to be made fun of. Besides, the artists get paid handsomely.

And I don't see it as Perth being "lame" so much as totally unique: we are constantly at war with our identity, and that anxiety/uncertainty is reflected in this tonally inconsistent art. I think that friction of self and anxiety is what makes the Perth identity so fascinating, the lack of certainty is why our overall art scene is so strong.

That said, lack of certainty doesn't translate well into a giant statue.

Thanks Mr K. Now let's look at some of these eyesores already!

John Curtin Statue
Kings Square, Fremantle
By John Walsh Smith, Charles Smith 2005

Mr. K: How do you pay tribute to a Prime Minister who was known for his humble nature? Build a statue of him in which he looks like he's beating a neighbour boy's dog to death. Seriously, this thing was commissioned by Mark McGowan, now state Opposition Leader, the placing of Curtin on a giant obelisk speaks volumes re their misinterpretation of the man and his message. And look at this face! It looks like it's fucking melting! And his arm is the deformed claw of a thalidomide baby. Shameful.

Bon Scott Statue
Fishing Boat Harbour, Fremantle
By Greg James 2008

Mr. K: It says everything that the best statue in Perth is one of a man who choked to death on his own vomit. Highway to BULLSHIT!

"Wuyi"
East Cottesloe
Peter Lundberg 2008

Mr. K: I have driven past this on the way to work every day for five years and I still have no clue what it is meant to be. It looks like crumbling dog turd left out in the sun. Or some gunk out of a giant caulking gun. I don't know what it is but I know I find it depressing.

"Round About" AKA Recycle Arrows
Cottesloe
Jennifer Cochrane 2007

Mr. K: Is this a tribute to Windows 98? Maybe it is meant to represent the infinite loop of despair that living in Perth sends you into, your inability to escape etc. The cycle goes unbroken, buy an SUV an drop your kids of at PLC.

"Totem" aka Corn Cob
Perth Stadium

Mr. K: Shit! Did you see that! The damn thing moves! Man, that motion almost takes my mind off the fact that it looks like a corn filled shit rendered in the old N64 engine. Conker's Bad Turd Day, haha!

"Paper Planes"
Adelaide Terrace

Mr. K: At least I know what these are supposed to be. Is it a reflection on the loss of childhood innocence? If so it's pretty mean to put it across the road from a Dome, on a street full of office drones, who are probably depressively soul searching every waking hour of the day. Just glad it's not shaped like a turd.

Ascalon AKA "The Jizz"
St George's Cathedral
By Marcus Canning, Christian de Vittri 2009

Mr. K: Oh FFS. I know everyone calls this "the jizz statue" or "the cumshot" or "the wad" but still, when you are actually standing in front of it you just have to wonder how much the guy who designed it was wanking off in his spare time. It's like an homage to year 10. Cummy tissues and misspent ideas.

Grow your Own aka "The Cactus"

Forrest Chase
James Angus 2001

Mr. K: Another piece best known by its colloquial nickname, "the cactus" has managed to confuse Perthians every day or the past eight or so years. Someone once told me it was meant to be a map of the transit lines? That's pretty bleak. It looks like the ABC logo if it was designed by Brevik. I think 'the cactus' is perfect because it is emblematic of Perth as cultural wasteland.

OMG
Beaufort Street
Lucy Vader 2012

Mr. K: A classic. I think it popped up around 2008-2010? Big controversy over this one. The council coughed up 12k for this, and I remember talk about asking the artist to make the "M" similar to that in the McDonald's sign. It's a neighbourhood known for its 'hip/young' vibe, and some marketing expert in his mid-50s took that to mean "txt-speak." Yes, something truly timeless: O M G. Christ. Its placement in front of a McDonalds is the cherry on the turd McFlurry.

The Walrus
Morley Galleria

Mr. K: Love it. It's baffling. You drive your family into what is one of the bleakest shopping malls in Perth (now THAT'S bleak!) and as you're driving around desperately searching for a park you find yourself circling a cement mountain of seals and walruses, all gazing down at you with benevolent dead eyes. We're twenty minutes inland why are there statues of marine mammals EVERYWHERE!?!

Gina Rinehart's Poetry Rock
Morley Galleria
Gina Rinehart

Mr. K: The ultimate big mama—the Perthiest thing in all of Perth. A 30 tonne boulder which looms over everything, and on it a plaque engraved with Gina Rinehart's batshit rhyming polemic about the importance of the mining industry. A poem with such corkers as: "The world's poor need our resources, do not leave them to their fate / our nation needs special economic zones and wiser government, before it is too late." If there is anything that sums up Perth's Faustian pact with the mining industry like this giant symbolic tumor, I'd like to see it (please don't send me pictures of Twiggy Forrest or Sam Barnett).

Robert Pickton, above, is believed to have murdered nearly 50 women. Screenshot via Global

Robert Pickton, the worst serial killer in Canadian history, has released a paperback book proclaiming his innocence from behind bars.

In Pickton: In His Own Words, the former Coquitlam, British Columbia pig farmer claims he's "the fall guy" in a justice system that wrongfully convicted him for the murders of six women. The book, which is selling for $14.95 on Amazon, was published in the United States by a retired California construction worker named Michael Chilldres, whose name appears on the cover. According to CTV BC, Chilldres was given a copy of the manuscript by a former cellmate of Pickton's—a child sex offender who hopes to use the profits to pay for his own legal fees.

Judging by what appears in the online preview, the book, which is riddled with biblical passages, run-on sentences, and grammatical errors, is unreadable. It is, however, perfectly legal.

There is no federal law in Canada preventing prisoners from profiting by recounting their crimes, although that legislation does exist in Ontario, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Nova Scotia.

Mike Morris, British Columbia's Minister of Public Safety, said his office is "investigating every means available to ensure that the families involved are protected from further harm and that Robert Pickton will not profit in any way from this book."

Toronto criminal lawyer Ari Goldkind says it's "unfortunate" no laws exist in British Columbia and criticized the government there for not following suit with what other provinces are doing.

"We're talking a very populated province with all sorts of killers and rapists who might want to profit off their story," he told VICE. "If the minister doesn't like it, go to a photocopy machine, photocopy Ontario's legislation, and put this before the legislature in BC."

Pickton, 66, was convicted of six counts of second-degree murder in 2007 and is currently serving a life sentence in Agassiz, BC. After his arrest in 2002, he told an undercover cop posing as a cellmate that he was responsible for the deaths of 49 women.

His book makes several assertions, including that the Hells Angels are behind some of the murders for which he was blamed and that the case against him was a "conspiracy theory linked to a bazaar insolent" (sic), CTV reports. He also says he's a "green horn" who has "little experience about women over sexual intercourse as sex is sin without marriage."

As distasteful as his remarks may be, Goldkind said Pickton is protected by free speech rights. He said Pickton likely leaked his writings to his cellmate to avoid having Canadian correctional agents "peekaboo" at his work. But even if prison officials had caught him, Goldkind said, they have no jurisdiction to interfere with publication of the memoir.

At one point, the Canadian federal government tabled legislation similar to that of Ontario's, but it never passed into law. Goldkind said it was based on the Son of Sam laws first enacted in New York in 1977, following reports that serial killer David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam, was being offered lucrative book deals. (Berkowitz did release a book called Son of Hope, but apparently didn't make money off it.)

In November, infamous Ontario rapist and murderer Paul Bernardo released a fictional e-book called A MAD World Order on Amazon, but it was quickly pulled offline due to public outrage.

As of noon Monday, Pickton's book had amassed 91 customer reviews on Amazon, and had earned 1.3 stars. Most people were expressing horror that Amazon would sell something penned by a serial killer, but there were five five-star reviews, including one that said "This is a rare opportunity to get into the mind of a serial killer. Hitler made a book and that's not illegal. Just read the damn book, you all know you want to!!!"

Speaking to the CBC, Sandra Gagnon, who believes her sister was killed by Pickton on his farm, said she finds the book deeply offensive. "It really disgusts me knowing that the worst serial killer in history has the nerve to write that book and reopen wounds."

Chilldres told CTV he empathizes with the victims' families but that he was just helping out a friend by publishing the book. "Don't shoot the messenger," he said, noting that he used Wikipedia to fact check Pickton's story.

Goldkind said the public should be more concerned about the kind of people who would willingly purchase a serial killer's book than about the fact that Pickton has written it in the first place.

"They know they're not getting literature, they know they're not getting great works, they know it's full of typos and grammatical errors, and it's a self-serving document," he said, pointing out that a full confession would be a much more compelling and potentially useful read than a book purporting to tell Pickton's side of the story.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande. Photo by Eoghan OLionnain

This post originally appeared on VICE UK.

This was dubbed a "three-shirt summit." On Friday, after two days of hog-sweating it in Brussels, long after David Cameron's bleary-eyed 5:30 AM departure for a two-hour nap, the EU's 28 leaders were told they were all going to need to get back on booking.com and purchase hotel rooms for one more night.

But the madness isn't how long it lasts, it's that it ends at all. The logistics of making 28 heads of state agree on anything are mind-bending. After all, everyone has to be made better-off by any deal the leaders sign. Have you ever tried to simultaneously give 28 people what they want?

Contrary to British egotistic belief, the attendees at last week's EU summit didn't all turn up just to make sure Dave can see down the challenge of Boris Johnson and Michael Gove. European PMs and presidents all have their own Boris Johnsons and their own challenges, with their own cranky electorates pointing very different guns to their heads, the likes of which we don't even understand. Lithuanian social media campaigns over dairy subsidies. The Maltese obsession with EU red tape on its plug spanner industry. The Cypriot BoJo menacing the Cypriot PM in the polls with his challenge over ATM taxes.

Yet somehow, everyone won. So everyone signed. How exactly? Scratch the surface with our guide to the week's winners and winners.

BELGIUM (AND ALL THE MINNOWS)

WANTED

The Belgians are the biggest Euro suck-ups in the whole place. Not only does their economy depend on the Brussels gravy train pulling into Bruxelles-Midi laden with delicious gravy, they also live in a small country. Pretty much all the minnows are in favor of everything EU because it stands up for their interests against the bigger bully-boys. Without the EU, Belgium is just the welcome mat to future invasions of France, and so, coming into the summit, the leaders were the only ones arguing against any brakes on an "ever-closer union." The Belgians want as much of a closer union as they can possibly have, and they won't be satisfied until they're so close they can feel the EU from the inside.

GOT

The insertion of a clause stating that Cameron's deal was a final offer. That, after last weekend, Britain could never again come back to the table and ask for another helping of national sovereignty. "There's no second chances," Belgian PM Charles Michel proudly proclaimed.

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras. Photo by Panagiotis Maidis

GREECE

WANTED

Greece's far-left Syriza government came into this EU summit less concerned about its economic death-spiral than it has been in a long time, only because its already kerosene-doused politics has been set fully ablaze by the tens of thousands of migrants still turning up every week at Europe's southeastern border.

GOT

Within hours, Alexis Tsipras's government declared its intent to block any Brexit treaty if other EU states continued to close their borders to refugees. This was a coded reference to the Austrians, who've started introducing daily caps. Cue: enough panic to win the Greeks a one-on-one joint summit with the Austrians, which ended in the pair vaguely declaring their intent to "co-operate better."

French President Francois Hollande. Photo by Jean-Marc Ayrault

FRANCE

WANTED

To look imperious by ignoring the whole sideshow. Francois Hollande is under so much pressure at home over terrorism and his still-tanking economy that he would be seen as aloof and trivial if he got too deep into arguing the toss on Brexit.

GOT

An agreement that non-Eurozone countries like Britain can't veto financial rules that only concern the Eurozone countries—thereby allowing the Eurozone to hurtle toward its doom much more efficiently.

Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen. Photo by News Oresund

DENMARK

WANTED

To use Britain as a patsy/battering ram for all the unpleasantness the Danes don't want to throw their own moral weight into. Like the UK leaders, the Danes also seem to have to hold their noses and make gagging gestures every time they walk into a summit room with Merkel and Hollande. The minority party in the Danish government, the Danish People's Party, is staunchly anti-migration, so the members were only too happy to endorse Cameron's plans to index-link child benefits paid back to children in migrants' home countries to the cost of living in those countries. In fact, Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen claimed that this had also been his idea, calling it "a flower in my garden."

GOT

The flower in Rassmussen's garden:

"A proposal to amend Regulation (EC) No 883/2004 of the European Parliament and of the Council on the coordination of social security systems in order to give Member States, with regard to the exportation of child benefits to a Member State other than that where the worker resides, an option to index such benefits to the conditions of the Member State where the child resides. This should apply only to new claims made by EU workers in the host Member State. However, as from 1 January 2020, all Member States may extend indexation to existing claims to child benefits already exported by EU workers. The Commission does not intend to propose that the future system of optional indexation of child benefits be extended to other types of exportable benefits, such as old-age pensions."

Beautiful.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Photo courtesy of Christliches Medienmagezin pro

GERMANY

WANTED

Britain. The Germans understand that without Britain their beloved Euro empire is just them and the French on a series of screechingly awkward dates. They know that once Britain leaves, the French and the Spaniards and Italians will gang up to force through more high-tax protectionist measures, which wouldn't help the Germans sell cars to Americans. Britain's an unlikely soulmate, but a soulmate nonetheless, which is why Mrs. Merkel spent the week waving through all Cameron's carping about migrant benefits, standing up for his demands as "logical and reasonable" before the summit, and intervening again and again in the summit room like a tiger mom at her kid's debating tournament.

GOT

Britain? Or at least, enough flimsy concessions to allow David Cameron to go back and go on about Peace In Our Time for a weekend.

Related: Watch 'Why the Deadly Asbestos Industry Is Still Alive and Well'

THE VISEGRAD STATES

WANTED

Counseling to overcome their own inferiority complexes. The Visegrad states are the four richer nations of eastern Europe: Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia. To them, the debate over child benefits had become a referendum over whether their working-abroad citizens were going to be put in dunce caps and seated at the front of the class just because Joe Stalin rolled over their nations' lawns in 1945. "We agree we need reform," admitted Czech Minister Tomas Prouza. "But historically, we were second-class citizens in Europe for 45 years. The memory is still with us, and I can't imagine any Central European prime minister would agree to reinstate second-class citizenship."

RECEIVED

A reduction from 13 years to seven years for the length of Cameron's benefits "emergency brake" and some similar meaningless "concessions" from original negotiating positions that allowed them to go home and announce that they broke the spirit of the British oppressors.

Follow Gavin on Twitter.

Stéphanie Beaudoin, pictured above, became known as the "world's hottest thief" after she was caught in a string of home robberies in Quebec. Photos via Facebook

Victoriaville is a small town in Quebec better known for its cheese curds than for its criminals. But in the summer of 2014, the region made international headlines when a group of teenaged thieves led by a 21-year-old woman was busted for robbing dozens of homes, Bling Ring style.

Mastermind Stéphanie Beaudoin's Facebook profile went viral, catapulting her into overnight fame as the "world's hottest thief."

This week, Beaudoin was sentenced to 90 days in prison—to be served on weekends—for breaking into at least 39 houses and making off with $80,000 worth of cash and luxury goods. She was also charged with illegal possession of three firearms, which were found in the trunk of her car.

Her three very minor accomplices (aged 11, 13, and 17) are being handled by the Court of Québec's Youth Division, and their identities are kept secret because of their age. Beaudoin told VICE this is a privilege she would have liked to share. "I could have done this when I was 15," she said. "Well, I could have not done it at all, but I did it. And if I had to choose, I would have done it when I was a minor."

Still, both Beaudoin and her lawyer seemed at peace with the ruling. "I told her it would be a good opportunity to bring a book in on Saturday and have it done when it's time to leave," said lawyer Denis Lavigne.

Between June 21 and August 5, 2014, Stéphanie Beaudoin broke into more than 30 houses in Victoriaville with her three accomplices, generally coming in through the basement window. By the end of their spree, they'd stolen $80,000 worth of goods and money. Beaudoin's trademark white Mitsubishi Lancer, adorned with pink rims, was spotted at the scene of the crime a number of times, prompting an unforeseen end to the series of burglaries they were committing. Had it not been for the noticeable blunder, the crime wave might have lasted much longer.

Related: Watch 'Wolf of the West End,' the story of convicted fraudster and infamous British socialite Eddie Davenport

Beaudoin told VICE she had a hunch that something was up before her arrest.

"I knew I was going to be arrested because I had been followed for a week. But I wasn't able to stop—it was just so intense." Initially oblivious to the police's tracking, she says her boyfriend tipped her off to the chase. " had taken my car, and at one time, he took a road that no one uses unless they're going to a specific location, so he understood that he was being followed," she said. "When he turned around, he saw the police badge. He told me, 'I don't know what it is that you're doing, but stop it right now because you're being followed.'"

The former nursing student says this did little to deter her from continuing with her crime spree.

Provincial police showed up on her doorstep on August 5, 2014 and found $7,000 cash in the trunk of her car.

Immediately, Beaudoin asked an officer for permission to delete her Facebook profile for fear that some of the racier content she had shared would be used against her.

"I told him I had some pretty compromising pictures and asked him to lend me his phone so that I could log on Facebook. He said, 'No, no, it can't be that bad.' And that was it." When she arrived at the station, it was already too late. "Journalists had saved the pictures. It was over."

Beaudoin saw the officer again last week. "He said, 'I never thought this would go worldwide!'" she said. But it did. "The sexy thief" became a meme, inspiring articles, tweets, and even an action figure. It's not the first time in recent memory that the media has trained such intense focus on on a criminal's appearance. It's not even the first time that such attention has provided a career path: Jeremy Meeks, a.k.a. the hot mugshot guy, eventually started a modeling career with White Cross Management after his time in prison for armed robbery.

Before her arrest, Beaudoin had been a fledgling model with a limited career that mostly consisted of posing for calendars. "Nothing really big," she said. But as her picture continued to make international headlines, the young woman became in demand. In July 2015, her photo made the cover of local mens mag Summum, and in September 2015, she was recruited by B Models Management.

Curta Rocks Port Lincoln National Park, on the most far eastern tip of the Bight. Image via.

A senate committee yesterday announced it will consider BP's proposal to drill in search of oil reserves off Australia's southern coast.

BP's previous proposal, which was rejected by the National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environment Management Authority (NOPSEMA) last November for not meeting environmental standards, would see four exploration wells drilled 1-2.5 kilometres into the Bight.

BP has confirmed that, pending approval from NOPSEMA on its revised plan, drilling of the first two wells will begin late 2016.

However, the plan faces significant community push back with groups including Sea Shepherd, the Wilderness Society, elders from the Mirning and Kokatha peoples, and more rallying against BP. "If this project goes ahead we really are gambling with the future of the Great Australian Bight," Greens senator Robert Simms said told the ABC.

The worst case scenario for allowing drilling in the Bight is of course an oil spill, which was what happened to BP in 2010 during the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Oil flowed into the Gulf for 87 days until it was finally capped, causing the largest oil spill in history. Last year, BP agreed to pay AU $24.5 billion to settle claims against the company around the disaster.

"A spill would be devastating for South Australia's $442 million fishing industry and its tourism industries in coastal regions, worth more than $1 billion," said the Wilderness Society's South Australian director Peter Owen.

Owen told VICE that while there has been oil exploration in the Bight before, it's never been as far off the coast or to the depth that BP is proposing. In the Gulf of Mexico, BP was working in an established and relatively sheltered oil field, "with the might of the American oil industry on its doorstep." The Great Australian Bight, as Owen pointed out, is both remote and treacherous, with the Southern Ocean facing some of the windiest climates in the world. In the mid-2000s Woodside Petroleum had to pull out of its drilling in the Bight due to the harshness of the conditions.

Yet the Bight's isolation is also what makes it so attractive to drilling companies looking for new opportunities. BP isn't the only oil giant interested in the relatively untapped area, with both Rio Tinto and Chevron both applying for exploratory licenses as well. It's attention that would be attractive to South Australia, which faces the prospect of becoming Australia's worst state economy. As oil and gas industry body APPEA spokesman Matthew Doman noted: "The economic benefits are potentially enormous. While it is very early days, success in the would attract investment to South Australia and see significant local job creation."

Critics of the proposal argue that its economic benefits don't outweigh the environmental risks posed by deep sea exploratory drilling. As the Wilderness Society points out, 85 percent of the species found in the Bight cannot be found anywhere else in the world. The area is also a breeding nursery for the endangered southern right whale, with up to 55 calves born at the head of the Bight each year.

Last year, the Wilderness Society commissioned oceanographer Laurent Lebreton to independently assess the potential impacts of an oil spill in the Bight. In the best case scenario, with the spill having an "optimistic" flow rate and a being capped within 35 days, the modelling predicts that 175,000 barrels of oil would be released into the Bight. Worst case scenario looks more like 50,000 barrels a day for 87 days (the same as Deepwater Horizon)—close to 4.35 million barrels.

BP's own modelling paints a less disastrous picture, positing a 35-day spill in summer would have less than a 12 percent chance of reaching Kangaroo Island, and less than an 11 percent of hitting the Eyre Peninsula. Both sets of modelling agree on one point though—whether conditions would mean the impact of a spill would be a lot more harmful in winter, with the likelihood of reaching Kangaroo Island rising to potential as high as 37 percent.

Putting the risks to one side, Peter Owen says opening up the Bight to deep sea drilling is the completely wrong direction for Australia to be moving in after the Paris climate talks. "There's no way we can allow this, we should be transitioning our economy away from fossil fuels," he said. "It's just not something we believe we should be gambling with."

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Harmony Korine has spent just over two decades drawing equal parts praise and revulsion. At 19, he wrote the Larry Clark–directed Kids about a group of New York City skateboarders, one of whom has both HIV and a passion for having unprotected sex with virgins.

The film caused plenty of controversy at the time—it was 1995, the AIDS crisis was at its high point, and the movie featured kids smoking weed and beating the shit out of people for no reason—but Korine was also praised for his writing. Like Gummo, his 1997 directorial debut, the movie has since become a cult classic.

I recently met with Korine at the Gagosian Gallery in London, where he's exhibiting Fazors, his new series of paintings. We talked about his films, his lost years, and his love of the TV show Cops.

VICE: Let's start with your directorial debut, Gummo. I'd imagine, after writing Kids, the studios were anticipating something vaguely similar, not a nonlinear art film.
Harmony Korine: Yeah, I don't think there was any understanding before, or even after, on the part of the studios or people who financed the movie. I remember giving the script to Miramax, because the studio had produced Kids, and I don't think any of them even made it past page eight. I knew the only reason I'd ever get a chance to make Gummo was because of the success of Kids, so when New Line Cinema financed it, it was more like, "Here, take this money, and hopefully you'll have, like, the residue of the success of the last film." But I was really focused on trying to create something specific that had to do with something that was a vision inside me.

I read that the TV show Cops was a big inspiration.
Yeah. I had a segment from the show that was about glue sniffers, which I re-edited so it was just a kid sitting on a stump with gold paint in his mouth. It was a repetition of him just saying the same thing over and over again and hearing the cops talk to him—a beautiful image of gold flecks of paint and dust flying out of his mouth. I thought I could contextualize that and put it into , but we found his family, and he'd died, and the family didn't want to give us the rights.

Cops was weirdly groundbreaking for its time—pre-internet, you didn't see a lot of that kind of stuff in the media.
Yeah. Also, it was the first representation of what I'd seen growing up in the South in any type of media. There was no proper representation of, like, Southern culture or trash culture. The most exciting thing on the show was that they would kick a door down, and you would see heavy metal posters on the wall or some kid with a Bone Thugs-n-Harmony T-shirt listening to country music. It was the first time you'd see that kind of weirdness at the cross sections of pop culture. It was a really influential show because it was the first time people were seeing this.

A scene from 'Gummo'

You wrote Kids at 19 and were directing at 24. Was is it daunting making movies at such a young age?
It was fun. It was a surprise, maybe, to my parents or to the people who grew up around me because I was mostly a delinquent, but for me, it wasn't a surprise because I knew I needed to make things at that point. It was exciting because I was finally getting to do what I wanted, but at the same time, it was crazy—I started getting into narcotics, and there was a wildness to it all.

In the late 1990s, you set about making the movie Fight Harm, where you'd provoke strangers to the point that they would beat you up. What made you want to make it and why was it never completed?
I just wanted to make what I thought would be the greatest comedy of all time. I thought there was always some essence of violence in the purest form of comedy, like WC Fields slipping on a banana peel, and I thought the repetition of getting into fights would be funny. I saw Fight Harm becoming one of the most popular things I could ever create, but really quickly—after eight or nine fights—it started to take its toll, and I ended it.

You stopped making art and movies from 1999 to 2007, after Julien Donkey-Boy. Where were you in those missing years?
I mostly disappeared. I didn't really want to have anything to do with anything, really. I just wanted to live a separate life. I was obviously super enthusiastic about narcotics, and so I was probably coming out of that. I lived in London for a while... France and South America. I guess, in some ways, those are lost years.

Were you burnt out?
I don't even know if I was burnt out. I always want to entertain myself, so when things become too serious I check out and go do something else. I don't really care what it is—as long as I'm making something, I'm OK.

How were you entertaining yourself during that time?
Mowing lawns or shooting guns.

Were you making movies?
No, not really. At that point in my life, I was more drawn to a more criminal mentality.

Were friends concerned about you or urging you to get back into making things?
I don't think so. Toward the end of that period, I was so lost and debased. I pretty much disconnected from everyone I knew.

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You returned with Mr Lonely in 2007, which is such a sad movie. Did those years play into that sadness?
Yeah, probably. I was coming out of something, and there was a sadness to it.

That Iris Dement song you used in the final sequence is heartbreaking.
I remember watching the first cut of that movie; I thought, Holy fuck. I couldn't believe I had spent so many years making something so sad.

You've said that you hardly watch any movies these days.
I maybe see ten movies a year. Before, I'd see ten movies a week. It's weird because I still believe in them, but my perception of movies or the power of images has changed. I don't even know why movies are two hours long anymore. Films are about emotions and poetry and transcendence—something enigmatic. Why does it have to be feature length? It could almost be a flash. My experiences with new movies don't go as deep as they used to, but if I re-watch movies that meant a lot to me as a kid I still get really excited about them. I thought Mad Max was amazing. On the surface, it was so simple—it was almost like a video game. I thought it was best movie of last year.

We're in an age where so much content is streamed. Do you still care about having your movies open in the cinema?
Always! For me, when making movies I'm always thinking about the cinema experience. That's why I haven't made television yet: Television is a writer's medium. Not to say there aren't good things in it, but television—no matter how good it is—is underwhelming. The size of it, and sitting in your living room. It's pedestrian, whereas cinema is magic, it's huge, it envelops you, and there's something completely sensory when it works. Whereas television now is more relaxed; you can pause it and eat a hamburger.

With 2009's Trash Humpers, you shot on VHS using a bunch of video cameras you found in thrift stores.
Near my house in Nashville , there was an old person's home; they lived in this basement and would only play that band Herman's Hermits. I'd walk by at night and see some of the people were super horny; they'd be rubbing up against each other all the time. It was a highly sexualized thing, and as a kid, it would really freak me out. It's one of those things that stuck in my head, so Trash Humpers was a continuation of that idea—of trying to make something that was visually really corroded and horrible, but at the same time had a real American vernacular to the imagery. I was trying to tap into the way things looked and felt growing up.

You edited everything on VHS tape decks, too, right?
It was in the middle of summer, and my editor was 90 percent blind. He was always shirtless, and he would just sit there and take pencils and start wedging them into the VCRs, getting these kind of beautiful glitches. We were trying to imagine, How do you make a movie that you can imagine was found in the guts of a horse or buried in the dirt? Now you can buy VHS apps for your phone and mimic what took us a really long time to do.

Ashley Benson, James Franco, and Vanessa Hudgens in 'Spring Breakers'

You often see indie directors like Gus Van Sant go from making small, left-field indie movies to big studio pictures, but Trash Humpers to Spring Breakers in 2013 was such a radical jump. Was that difficult to get off the ground?
The easiest part was the actors—that part was very easy. But every movie I've ever made has been hard to make. I've never had an easy experience.

Because of studios getting involved?
There are always those people—no matter what you're making. It's never commercial enough. No one is ever happy enough. There are always people who want to push you in that one direction. I know in my heart if it's right, so I don't doubt myself. People can have their opinions, and I will listen, but in the end, I will know I'm on the righteous path, so it doesn't bother me. Everything is perfect, no matter what happens, even if I'm creating disasters—it's all meant to be the way it is.

Your upcoming movie, The Trap, is about a boat-robbing crew in Miami, and you've spoken before about this idea for it to be ultra-violent and akin to a drug experience.
I'm always trying to get to a point where the movie-making is more inexplicable—an energy, rather than anything steeped in narrative. I was always trying to do something that was closer to a drug experience, or a hallucinatory experience, or something more like a feeling. There's a language that I've been trying to develop for a while, so that was what The Trap was going to be a continuation of. But I don't know if I'm going to make that movie. I was supposed to shoot in May, but I lose interest. It's not that I'm not making it. I'm just almost done with another script. I'm going to make one of the two this year, I'm just not sure which one.

Let's talk about your art. How long have you been painting?
I've always painted. I've made artwork for as long as I've been making movies, but over the last few years, it's taken over.

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Tell me about the Fazors series.
This series was just me trying to make artwork without a specific fixed point. There was a pattern that I started with, and I was taken by this—I call it "phasing." They're kind of sensory or energy-based paintings. I wanted to work with colors that were, like, cut from the sky or something. Again, they relate to the other stuff—the looping, phasing, trancing—and there's a physical component. Like, if you look at them for a while, they wash over you.

And you chose to work on this huge canvas size?
I often do small stuff, but for shows, the size is almost like a movie screen—it feels like there's something powerful about the size.

Do you go into the studio with an empty head and just start?
Sometimes. For this series, I worked on them for a long time—it took a year or so to make these. I'd just go into the studio every day and start riffing. The figurative stuff is more intuitive; there are specific characters I've been drawing since I was kid that keep coming up in these ones.

Finally, I have to ask about David Letterman saying you were banned from his show in 1999 for rifling through Meryl Streep's purse in the green room while you were high?
The way Letterman tells that story, I don't really believe it's true. Truth is, I probably did eat a couple of pounds of shrooms right before, so my hallucinations were probably pretty on point, but at the same time, if you see a revolver in a purse, what are you gonna do? Do you know what I mean? You're gonna pick it up and play Russian roulette.

Harmony Korine's exhibition Fazors is on display at the Gagosian Gallery, 17–19 Davies Street, London, until March 24.

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Umberto Eco in Italy in 1975. Photo by Walter Mori/Mondadori Portfolio via Getty Images

I discovered The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum, the two best-known novels of Umberto Eco, who died on Friday at the age of 84, during my junior undergraduate year. A used-book vendor had parked his formica table of curated paperbacks in front of the university library where I worked, and I wandered over to examine his wares, idly picking up Eco's The Name of the Rose. I asked the vendor if he had anything Borgesian, and he pointed at the book in my hand: "Right there in your hand, buddy." Then he added, "But I'm a bigger fan of this one myself," and handed me Foucault's Pendulum. Somehow I headed home with both books.

The Name of the Rose is an undeniable homage to the great Borges. Published in 1980 to international acclaim, Eco sets his monastic whodunit in a Benedictine abbey's labyrinthine library called the Aedificium, which houses the lost second part of Aristotle's Poetics (the part about comedy). It is guarded by the only two people who know how to navigate it—its librarian, Jorge of Burgos, and his assistant.

Unlike Borges, Eco wasn't a genius librarian but a celebrated semiotician—"the most important representative of semiotics, since the death of Roland Barthes," a reviewer for the New York Times wrote in 1983. It was in Foucault's Pendulum, his second novel, that Eco unleashed his mastery of semiotics. In it, a trio of minor editors at minor publishing houses decide to create their own conspiracy (what they call "the Plan") and in the process mix themselves up in actual conspiracy plots of secret-society world domination. The internet was made for books like this: The first paragraph is in untranslated Hebrew. There are connected references to the Knights Templar, Bogomilism, the telluric current, and Mickey Mouse. Anthony Burgess claimed it needed an index. Salman Rushdie deemed it "fiction about the creation of a piece of junk fiction that then turns knowingly into that piece of junk fiction." Eco called it a thriller. I found it thrilling, not so much for plot but in looking up its esoteric references.

Foucault's Pendulum also showed me how funny erudition could be. Central to the plot is a computer program that randomizes text fed into it, creating improbable storylines: They try passages from the Kabbalah and an automobile manual, the result being that a car's powertrain is a modern-day Tree of Life (a drawing of which appears in the front matter of the book). I wonder if this idea came about during one of his long nights out with his students, a happy habit of his. How many great literary ideas have been birthed by similarly drunken nights?

Not long after I finished Foucault's Pendulum, his fifth novel was published in English: The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana . I literally picked it up the same week I was due to graduate, but I never finished it. No longer a student, I wanted to move on from the coziness of academia, where Eco's concerns for semiotics and meaning felt very immediate, to New York City, where people live in daily and mildly extravagant symbolism.

But Eco left his mark on me. I never skip an unknown reference, choosing instead to look things up as I read along. It's much easier of course to do that now with Wikipedia. Not surprisingly, the writer himself had an interest in the site, writing in his regular column for the Italian magazine L'Espresso about the need to maintain Wikipedia's integrity after his own entry was filled with false information. "Collective control can make sure a fact such as the death of Napoleon is always correct," he wrote, "but it is much less able to protect my own entry from lies and rumors."

Then last year, Eco suddenly and unexpectedly popped back into my life when, in penning a piece titled " Donald Trump Is a Fascist," Slate's senior political editor Jamelle Bouie cited Eco's 1995 New York Review of Books essay "Ur-Fascism" to back up his claim. Eco, a childhood supporter of Mussolini, snidely recalls the early pride of winning an essay competition: "I elaborated with rhetorical skill on the subject: 'Should we die for the glory of Mussolini and the immortal destiny of Italy?' My answer was positive. I was a smart boy." Eco spent most of his life refuting that argument, and in "Ur-Fascism," he warns of 14 signs of fascist ideology, which include Cult of Tradition and Personality, Obsession with Enemy Plots, and Contempt for the Weak. It's practically checklist-ready, and Bouie convincingly argues that Donald Trump hits half of these 14-points. The piece went viral, and suddenly Eco was back in my feed, being used to prove that one of the most notorious presidential candidates in US history was no worse than Mussolini or even Hitler.

In losing Eco, we have lost not just Borges's heir (with, as yet, no heir apparent to Eco) but a mind shaped by an older way of learning: of antiquated research and cataloguing methods. We take for granted these tools at our fingertips, but at least I am in awe of someone like Eco, who could dig deeply without them. I would have loved to have been a student of his. One of his earliest books, How to Write a Thesis, was translated just last year. The critic Hua Hsu, writing for the New Yorker, pointed out some of its anachronistic tips, such as using a date book to keep track of sources, but contended that Eco's purpose was greater than giving useful, if aged, bullet-points. "How to Write a Thesis," he wrote, "isn't just about fulfilling a degree requirement. It's also about engaging difference... and humbly reckoning with 'the knowledge that anyone can teach us something.' It models a kind of self-actualization, a belief in the integrity of one's own voice... and taking oneself seriously enough to ask for an unfamiliar and potentially path-altering kind of mentorship."

Perhaps How to Write a Thesis would have been more useful to me during college, instead of his thick tomes of fiction, but it was in them that I found an unlikely professor, one willing to offer up the encyclopedia inside his brain to help me to begin assembling my own, and to take pleasure and find poetry in the items I include. "Mickey Mouse can be as perfect as a Japanese haiku," Eco once said. I, as many other people, will miss him showing us why.

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William Devin Howell, who's accused of six Connecticut murders and has already been convicted in a seventh killing. Photo via New Britain Police

Something kept calling Chief James Wardwell back to the woods.

In August 2007, a hunter found what appeared to be a human skull discarded in the dense, swampy foliage behind a nondescript shopping plaza in New Britain, Connecticut. The discovery, in a post-industrial city with a large immigrant population, led local police to partial remains belonging to three missing people. "I kept on going back, bringing back our investigators to search again and again," recalls Wardwell, who at the time was running the detective bureau for the New Britain Police Department. "We were never satisfied that all the remains were found."

The New Britain cops did not relent, bringing in a special cadaver dog from the feds last spring. Police systematically excavated the land, going down several feet below the surface across some three-fourths of an acre, and they eventually discovered remains belonging to four more people. Cops, already believing this was the work of a serial killer, put up a $150,000 reward to help find the perp, the largest sum in Connecticut state history for a criminal investigation.

But the state already had its man in custody.

That same week in August 2007, a drifter from Hampton, Virginia, named William Devin Howell was sentenced to 15 years in prison after pleading guilty to manslaughter charges over the death of a 33-year-old woman named Nilsa Arizmendi. Despite the plea, Howell denied responsibility for the death, suggesting he was forced into a deal. At the last minute, in fact, Howell tried, unsuccessfully, to withdraw his guilty plea.

"I offer my sincerest condolences. I know they feel I murdered their daughter. I didn't murder Nilsa," Howell told the judge during the sentencing, according to the New Britain Herald.

Arizmendi's blood was found inside his van, according to police, but the body wasn't discovered until it turned up last spring behind the shopping plaza.

She was last seen getting into a van in July 2003, during a six-month period in which six other people vanished in and around New Britain. It took another decade for cops to put the pieces together, with the other missing dead eventually identified as Melanie Ruth Camilini, Diane Cusack, Marilyn Mendez Gonzalez, Joyvaline Martinez, Mary Jane Menard, and Danny Lee Whistnant. The victims varied in age, but police say all led troubled lives that in some cases were defined by drugs and prostitution. Cops suggested they were most likely lulled in under a ruse by a man promising a quick fix.

For years, police eyed Howell, now 45, for the murders, formally charging him in September. If he is convicted of the six additional killings, Howell will become the state's most prolific serial killer ever, surpassing Michael Ross, who was executed in 2005 for killing eight women: six in Connecticut and two in New York.

It's unclear why Howell would have picked an unremarkable swath of land behind a dance studio and a Subway franchise for his "garden," as he allegedly referred to it in prison. (Wardwell declined to theorize what motivated the killings, citing a pending case.) In 1995, a young woman was found shot in the head in the same wooded spot, but police suggested that case is unrelated to this one. Meanwhile, according to court records, while serving out his initial manslaughter sentence, Howell told an inmate that he dreamed about his seven victims and the plot where they were buried. He also allegedly described himself as a "sick ripper" who had a "monster inside of him that just came out."

A burly man who did odd jobs like cutting grass in New Britain, Howell lived out of a van he allegedly dubbed the "murder mobile."

After killing one of the victims, which he apparently referred to as his "baby," Howell slept next to the body, wrapped in plastic, because, he allegedly said, it was too cold for a burial at that precise moment. According to court records, an inmate claimed Howell admitted to raping his victims, and that during one sex act involving a victim, he discovered the person was a man and killed him. Howell allegedly took a hammer to another victim, cutting off her fingers.

The investigation was made easier when blood and DNA matching the missing were found in Howell's van, a 1985 Ford Econoline, according to Wardwell. Howell faces nine total counts of murder, including capital felony murder charges, though Connecticut has abolished the death penalty; if convicted during trial, the maximum punishment would be life in prison without the possibility of parole.

As Wardwell puts it, "Certainly this has been the biggest investigation in the department's history."

And it might not end at the city limits.

Authorities in Florida recently looked into Howell as a suspect for the unsolved 1991 murder of 21-year-old April Marie Stone, whose body was found off the side of a dirt road outside of Orlando. At the time, Howell, who was living nearby, had recently pleaded guilty to soliciting prostitution after he offered an undercover $15 for oral sex.

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Through tears and broken English, Maria Matos sat outside New Britain Superior Court in December as she recalled her daughter, Joyvaline Martinez.

"Very nice... athletic," Matos said. "She liked wrestling and running."

Joy, a standout runner in high school, had apparently fallen into drug problems around the time she disappeared. Her sister Sandra knew something was up when Joy didn't show up to celebrate her own 24th birthday on October 26, 2003, according to the New Britain Herald. (Joy always celebrated with her mother, whose birthday is around the same time.) Sandra last saw her sister about two weeks before that, when she was heading to their mother's to pick up some clothing.

A few years later, when Sandra saw that remains had been found behind that shopping plaza, she reached out to police and told them one of the unidentified corpses might be her sister, the Herald reported. But due to a backed-up state lab, it wasn't until years later, in 2013, that Joy was identified. The night before Howell's arrest, Sandra said she dreamed about her sister, who told her, "It was OK."

Shackled to a chair and appearing via video conference, Howell was courteous and employed a thick Southern drawl during a December court appearance. "The state has to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt, and in this country, you're innocent until proven guilty," William Paetzold, Howell's defense attorney, told VICE in a brief statement.

This week, Howell will decide whether to pursue a probable cause hearing for the murder charges, a sort of mini-trial where the state must meet a low burden of proof in order to proceed. (Howell's attorney said he doesn't know if his client will waive the hearing.) The case probably won't actually go to trial until sometime in 2018, thanks to what local prosecutor Brian Preleski called "the largest quantity of discovery I've ever had" at Howell's last hearing.

For now, there's a "No Trespassing" sign on the wooded property where Howell is said to have buried his secrets. Only the families of the victims are allowed in.

"They searched for their loved ones for so many years," Wardwell says. "We were happy we brought them some closure. It's sad it had to be this final word."

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