Three hundred miles away, in Central Java, police there were closing in on a different address. We had also set out to find Mini’s owner, by messaging him privately posing as a monkey hater. We found out that he ran a second-hand clothes business on Facebook that was linked to an address. One day we visited him at home, going undercover as a potential video buyer. M Ajis Rasajana lived with his wife and infant son in a modern two-storey family house, tucked away at the end of a long road opposite a rice paddy that was recognisable from his torture videos.
We alerted the police to Ajis’s address, and when they knocked on his door he came willingly to the station. After a few hours of questioning, he was released and went home, and the next day we visited him again, not undercover this time, to ask him about his crimes.
Ajis Rasjana holds Mini, in undercover filming by the BBC
Ajis Rasjana holds Mini, in undercover filming by the BBC
When Ajis first started posting monkey videos on YouTube, he was surprised by how many views he got. “I wanted to have a lot of viewers, because then I can get the money from YouTube ads,” he said. He noticed that abusive videos got more views, so he made more abusive videos. Soon foreigners began to message him. He set up a Telegram account and advertised it on YouTube. “Message for more extreme videos,” he wrote. And they did. The foreign customers were “psychopaths”, Ajis said. But he made enough from them to buy a new car.
By the time he purchased Mini, when she was just a few days old, he had killed 20 other monkeys through abuse or neglect, he said. But he managed to keep Mini alive, and she became his star. And he tortured her for a year, right to the very end.
“When I remember her I feel really sorry,” Ajis said, crying again.
“Even though I was evil to her, she loved me.”
The FBI eventually came to interview Lucy Kapetanich, after her second online tip off, and she handed them all of the evidence she had gathered. Then months went by with no developments and she was beginning to get frustrated. But unknown to Kapetanich, other law enforcement agencies had received tip offs too. One day last summer, a casefile landed on the desk of Special Agent Paul Wolpert at the Department of Homeland Security, about a ring of monkey torture enthusiasts across the US. Agent Wolpert normally went after child sexual abuse gangs, and he wondered why the hell he was looking at a case about monkeys. “It was so out there,” Agent Wolpert recalled, shaking his head. “Like nothing I’d ever seen.” The more he looked at it though, the more it began to make sense. “It’s actually just like a child abuse investigation,” he said. “The groups, the secrecy, the way they vet people — it’s exactly the same.”
Special Agent Paul Wolpert. “It's just so out there,” he said. (Joel Gunter/BBC)
Special Agent Paul Wolpert. “It's just so out there,” he said. (Joel Gunter/BBC)
Possession of animal torture videos isn’t necessarily illegal in the US, but distribution is, and punishable by up to seven years in prison. So Wolpert began to follow the money. Stacey “Sadistic” Storey had been using a Cash App account registered in her real name. The Torture King and Mr Ape had both sent and accepted transfers too. Money was bouncing all over the place with real names and phone numbers attached. And as Wolpert combed through the exported Telegram chats, he saw the group members getting brazen to the point of stupidity. When they weren’t talking torture, they talked about their children, pets, where they lived and worked. One day, the Torture King had told his group that they all needed to trust each other and build a strong community, so they should all post their real picture and name in the chat. And they did.
Agent Wolpert couldn’t believe the idiocy of it all. The Torture King had claimed he’d done it to help identify the monkey haters, but of course it helped the authorities to identify him too. Wolpert sent a team to set up surveillance cameras on a telephone pole opposite McCartney’s house, and a few weeks later, wary that McCartney might be armed, a SWAT team descended on his house.
As Homeland Security agents searched the property, Wolpert questioned McCartney, seized his devices, and then let him go. We had obtained McCartney’s address, from a public records website, and we went to knock on his door too. Sitting in his garage-turned-man cave, he recalled the rush of first rising up in the monkey hate community. It was like the old motorcycle gang days again, he said. “I loved the respect."