Warning: Distressing content
“We’re sick psychopaths that get pleasure off killing other people!”
Those 10 chilling words were uttered from the mouth of 16-year-old Brian Draper just minutes after he and his teenage friend Torey Adamcik had brutally murdered their close friend and classmate.
Hours earlier, on the morning of September 22, 2006, the two boys had taken their camcorder to class and filmed themselves wandering up and down the halls of their high school in the US town of Pocatello, Idaho.
The shaky recording hones in on a teenage girl, their friend Cassie Stoddart, who is standing at her locker shuffling around the books she needed for the day.
Shyly staring back into the camera with a smile, the 16-year-old had no idea that this would be her very last day on earth.
That night, her two friends holding the camcorder would take her life in one of the most horrific ways imaginable.
Later in the school day, Draper and Adamcik set the camcorder up on a table in the school’s library and filmed themselves excitedly discussing how they planned to butcher their friend.
“We’re writing our plan right now, for tonight. It’s gonna be cool,” Draper smiled.
“Our plan is supposed to happen tonight. So hopefully nothing will go wrong and everything will go smoothly.
“And we can get our first kill done and started, and then keep going. This is f**king crazy.
“I’m sorry to Cassie’s family but she had to be the one. We have to stick to the plan.
“She’s perfect. And she’s going to die.”
The pair claimed they had tried at least 10 times to murder someone before, but their plans had always been “interrupted”.
Brian went on to talk about how he longed to be “popular” and thought that killing someone would be the best way to achieve this goal.
The pair also likened themselves to Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the teens who gunned down 12 of their classmates and one teacher at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, back in 1999.
The Columbine shooters had also notoriously filmed themselves in the months and days leading up to the massacre, which is presumably where Draper and Adamcik got the idea for the video diary.
“I’ve always wanted to make my mark on the world and stuff, and this is a good way to do it,” Draper says in the clip.
“To combine my love of horror movies with my love of wanting to be popular and famous.”
“Like Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold,” Adamcik adds with a smile.
Both boys made their love of horror movies clear and in their video diaries, expressing their desire to be just like the fictional killer ‘Ghostface’ in the Scream film franchise.
‘I just killed Cassie’: The night of the murder
Sitting in the front seat of a car, the pair appear giddy talking about what is about to go down.
“Unfortunately we have the gruelling task of killing our two friends,” Draper said to the camera.
“They are right in that house down the street.”
“We just talked to them, we were there for an hour,” Adamcik added.
“We’re listening to the great rock band, Pink Floyd, before we commit the ultimate crime of murder.”
Stoddart had been hired by her aunt and uncle, Allison and Frank Contreras, that weekend while they were out of town to house sit and look after their three cats and two dogs.
The responsible teen was up to the task, and invited her boyfriend Matt Beckham over at 6pm, before their “friends” Draper and Adamcik arrived to hang out and watch Kill Bill: Volume II together.
But before the film ended, the pair suddenly left, saying they preferred to watch a movie at the cinema instead.
What Stoddart and Beckham didn’t know was that they had secretly unlocked the basement door of the house so they could re-enter later on without being detected.
Some time later, the soon-to-be killers slipped on frightening costumes consisting of dark clothing, gloves and white horror masks.
They attempted to lure the couple downstairs by making loud noises, while they also messed with the circuit breaker and cut power to the house.
With the teenage girl feeling uneasy, her boyfriend asked his mother if he was allowed to stay the night to help Stoddart feel less frightened.
In a strange twist of fate, his mother said no, telling her son that he had to come home but adding that Stoddart could join him if she wanted to.
Stoddart declined – and with that, her fate was sealed.
Brandishing their weapons – Draper with a dagger and Adamcik a hunting knife – the pair slowly made their way up the basement stairs.
They tormented Stoddart by opening and slamming shut a few closet doors and messed with the lights in order to frighten her, as she lay on the couch in the living room.
The pair then brutally attacked her, stabbing her approximately 30 times in the chest and neck.
“I just killed Cassie, we just left her house,” Draper said in a chilling video confession after the murder.
“This not a f**king joke. I stabbed her in the throat and saw her lifeless body just disappear.
“Dude, I just killed Cassie. That felt like it wasn’t even real, it went by so fast.”
“I’m shaking,” Adamcik added.
“We gotta get our act straight.”
A horrifying discovery
Two days after the grisly murder had been committed, Stoddart’s 13-year-old cousin walked into the living room and discovered her butchered body.
Leaving their niece to house-sit for the weekend, the grade 11 student’s aunt and uncle never imagined the horrors that would unfold in their home on the Friday night they left.
“We just never went back in that living room,” Stoddart’s uncle said after the murder.
“It was our dream home, and it turned into a nightmare.”
The family has just bought the house a year before the murder.
But after the murder, they never stepped foot in it again.
“Cassie was a good girl,” Frank told the Idaho State Journal.
“She didn’t drink or use drugs and she was a straight ‘A’ student. She was responsible.”
A local police officer said the horrifying details of the case had stuck with him over the years.
“This would rate – if not the top – real close to the top of all the incidents we’ve had to deal with,” said Bannock County Sheriff Lorin Nielsen.
“Senseless, premeditated killing for the thrill of killing. All of those things that scare you the most, this was one of them.”
It took five days of investigation before Draper and Adamcik were charged in the killings.
On August 21, 2007, they were both sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for first-degree murder and 30 years to life for conspiracy to commit murder.
Their attorneys filed separate appeals at the Supreme Court in September 2010 and April 2011. Both were denied.
“I still don’t quite understand what led both of them to do this,” Sheriff Nielsen continued.
“I know the mother doesn’t think her child did anything wrong, but I can guarantee you that they were both involved.
“This was planned. They had a list of others. This was evil, just pure evil.”
Reflections of a teenage killer 17 years on
Both men are now aged 33 and are serving their time at the Idaho State Correctional Institution in Kuna, Idaho.
Last week, Brian Draper’s brand new interview by popular crime channel Explore With Us(EWU) was released on YouTube and has amassed more than a million views in less than 10 days.
While he agreed to chat, Torey Adamcik did not respond to their request for an interview.
“I lived an extremely sheltered life and was limited in my experiences,” Draper told the channel.
“I had a really good childhood, but my dad was always gone. So I largely raised by just my mother and she was busy all the time.
“I think the move to junior high school really exposed all the gaps I had in my development and all my vulnerabilities.”
Draper claimed that he had only known Adamcik for a short amount of time before the murder.
He also touched on how he and Adamcik became friends with Stoddart – who he refers to as his “victim”.
“I knew Torey for a couple of months basically, I met him in biology class,” he said.
“I wasn’t his friend at first, I thought he was arrogant and mean. We didn’t have a connection.
“But what bought us together was that we had an assignment in biology class, and we were assigned into groups.
“The greatest irony of all this is that I was assigned to a table with my victim and with Torey at the same time. That’s how we all became friends.”
He said that his friendship with his co-murderer was not very deep, but instead they talked about bonded over horror movies.
“We didn’t have intense conversations about life or what we wanted out of life,” he explained.
“We just talked about movies. Prior to meeting Torey I didn’t have any DVDs that were horror movies.
“He got me into that stuff. That is what Torey largely bought into my life, that movie ‘Scream’. It just gave us a chance to escape into our own reality.”
When asked if there any warning signs that people may have missed about his personality before committing the crime, he talked about his infatuation with the Columbine school shooting.
“Basically when I entered my junior year of high school, I copied the identity of the Columbine High School shooters,” Brian said.
“I copied how they dressed, how they talked, what kind of music they listened to, I started smoking. I wanted to embody that image.
“I started wearing a trench coat. I talked about it on MySpace that my heroes were Eric and Dylan.”
He also recalled the exact moment the pair had talked about the possibility of taking another person’s life.
“We were skipping an orientation assembly in my junior year of high school, and we were hiding out in the bathroom,” he said.
“We were mimicking the movie ‘scream’ and he asked me ‘Brian, you ever thought about doing something actually real?’
“And I told him I had, I’d been reading about Columbine and thinking about that.
“I was at a very vulnerable place in my life, so the worst actual possible thing that could have happened to me was meeting Torey.”
Reflecting on the crime, he claims to have had no idea that the murder would actually take place.
This despite the two boys excitedly discussing the murder just minutes prior to committing the horrific act.
“I assumed I was lost in the moment. We had been doing this for two of three weeks, going into people’s houses, there was no death or assaults,” he said.
“I had no reason to believe, truthfully, that this night would be any different to the other ones.”
Although Brian is in the same jail as Torey, he said they do not talk to each other and are not friends.
“I don’t really know anything about Torey. I see him here from time to time, we’re amicable. I’m not rude to him, he’s not rude to me,” he said.
“But we have a boundary where we don’t talk to each other. I’ve never talked to him about why he got involved with this.
“I know there is no way that this would have happened had I been alone. I’m not blaming it on him, but when you have two adolescent boys who are trying to outdo each other it can crescendo into something terrible.
“Had I not met Torey, this never would have happened.”