FAYETTE – Patrick Armstrong was an angry and troubled young man in the months before the slaying of Marlee Johnston, according to the thousands of words he left scattered across the World Wide Web.
At one point, he says that a friend could use a baseball bat to “break someone’s kneecaps” and repeats the hateful lyrics of a song. In another entry, however, he explains that his favorite dessert is chocolate cake.
On another day, he’s asked if he’s killed anyone. His response: “Not yet.” Shortly before the slaying, he wrote that he was schooled at home, “until I get arrested, at least.”
In the months before the slaying, he spent hundreds of hours chatting with a small group of friends on three sites popular with teens: livejournal.com, myspace.com and ign.com. By 5 p.m. Friday, the first two sites had been blocked.
An intelligent teen with strong writing skills and close friends, the 14-year-old has been charged with murdering his teenage neighbor, a girl who never seems to appear in his Web entries.
He writes often, in fondness and anger, about his former girlfriend. They dated in the spring and summer and his posts show he’s desperate to stay together, but the couple broke up sometime early in the school year.
On Sunday, Nov. 13, two weeks before the slaying, he blogs angrily about her popping back into his life to brag about her new boyfriend, and accuses her of taunting him. “You have a perfect boyfriend, perfect friends, perfect grades, you play the perfect sport at the perfect school, and you have two perfect big brothers. I have given you your dose of attention. You should be happy, because you have everything in the world. Everything but my anger.”
In his final post on that site, recorded four days before Johnston’s slaying, Armstrong writes that he has been nothing but civil and polite to his former girlfriend and now wants absolutely nothing to do with her. In signing off, he calls her stupid, moronic and a “pathetic excuse for human life,” among more harsh things.
Most of his posts, however, are highly literate for a 14-year-old, and completely uncluttered by the abbreviations, spelling and grammatical errors common to such Web conversations. In fact, in one post, he says he despises abbreviations and that “he has a way with words.”
He uses emoticons at the end of every post, tiny Web symbols representing his mood. They range from “rage” to “indifference” to “giggly.” In one place, he says he feels “loved.”
In the most recent posts that don’t deal with his anger toward this former girlfriend, Armstrong describes himself as depressed and confused by what he sees as outbursts by his father, Kenneth.
On Nov. 10, he writes: “How come I always get yelled at for doing nothing? What part of this is fair? … My father started yelling at me for no reason (as usual) today. He sat there and yelled at me until I cried. He also called me damaged.’ I’m getting so (expletive) fed up with him. I don’t know. Thoughts? Opinions? Anyone? I wanna hear what you guys think on the subject. Anyway, I have a bag packed up with shit just in case. I doubt anything is going to happen. I figure I’ll most likely just tolerate him for the next four years until I can get out of the house. Meh. If he does hit me, I’m gone. I’ll be at (friend’s) house within ten minutes if it came to that. (Expletive) it, I don’t care. I just hope the bastard dies.”
Armstrong fights with his father and is frequently critical of what he describes as his father’s anger drama. In August, after his sister was kicked by a horse and needed five staples to close the wound in her head, Armstrong wrote that he thought his father would grab a gun and shoot the horse. “If he is gonna explode at tiny little things, then I don’t want to be around him. It’s not worth it.”
While he expressed discomfort with his father, Armstrong is not critical of his mother, Betty. Home-schooled, he calls his mother his favorite teacher and writes that he had been enjoying this year’s lessons on literature. He doesn’t like math, but generally enjoys school.
The teen attends church with his family, but thinks religions are a waste of time and energy.
In every post, he notes the rock groups that supply the background music of his young life. One, SlipKnoT, seems to dominate his listening and his Web posts.
Armstrong lists himself on the site as “saintmaggot,” a possible connection to the explicit hard-core metal band, known for its violent stage performance and referring to its fans as “maggots.”
The group was scheduled to appear in Lewiston, and Armstrong was disappointed when the appearance was canceled.
Like many teens, he dreams of being a rock star when he grows up.
He doesn’t play any sports, but is interested enough in competition to have attended the Kents Hill vs. Hebron varsity football game on Nov. 5 at Winthrop High School.
He’s a gamer and a blogger and really doesn’t like the telephone. He says he drinks but doesn’t use drugs.
And, he says, he lives in a dented – but not broken – family.
Yet he refers to cutting himself, and one photo shows his former girlfriend’s name cut into his arm. Teens sometimes cut themselves in response to their unstable emotions, according to a book on personality disorders.
In January, Armstrong created a profile for himself at IGN Insider, a site devoted to games and gaming. He posted a bio, which begged users not to use shorthand in posting and responding because it really bothers him, but he never posted anything himself.
In April, Armstrong signed on to livejournal.com. His first post of April 8 reads: “Hey, look, I exist!”
He blogged and posted photos only occasionally for two months, and stepped up his participation in June.
In a June 16 bio, he admitted to having thought about suicide and, asked whether he’d killed anyone, he answered “not yet.”
In that same post, Armstrong admitted his greatest fear was “that my friends are all going to hate me all of a sudden. Or that I’ll grow up to be like my father.”
In the months that followed, he and his friends wrote and posted violent short stories in which zombies are featured as the main characters and killing is ordinary.
On Aug. 10, he co-wrote a short story with a friend that detailed Armstrong’s own accidental death at the hands of a turkey hunter, and detailed his funeral, with friends and family sobbing around the closed casket. In the second part of the story, Armstrong turned into a zombie who attacked his sister. In that story, he writes: “Leaning in, the monstrous creature bit and tore into Katie’s arm. Patrick ripped it out of its socket, and then proceeded to beat his sister to death with her own arm.”
That same day, he wrote: “The world sucks, but it has the love of my short existence in it, so I can’t complain.”
He includes a P.S. to his former girlfriend: “If you even suggest that I’m talking about anyone but you in that last bit, I’m going to hunt you down and beat you to death with a piece of dog food.”
A call to the Armstrong home on 9 Water Lily Lane was not returned, and one of Patrick Armstrong’s best friends declined to comment on her friend.
In his final post of Nov. 23, which focused on his anger over the breakup with his girlfriend, Armstrong described his mood as “indifferent.” The opening message of that post describes the post as: “The end of the beginning of the second half of the start.”
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