Hit man tourism

[snopes]

Comment: there is a new rumor going around that there is a place, i
believe i heard thailand, where a person can pay to kill another person
for a large fee that is passed along to the dead persons family. i am
hearing there is a internet site advertising this service as some kind of
murder tourism. ive heard this one now from several people can you please
check this out?

[chillas]

I doubt such a thing actually exists, but the story is that this is the basis for the movie Hostel.

From the IMDb:

The trailers bill the movie as "inspired by true events". Director Eli Roth says that he found a Thai website that advertised itself as a "murder vacation," offering users the chance to torture and kill someone for the price of $10,000. Roth later showed the site to Quentin Tarantino and the two developed the idea for the film. Tarantino and Roth said later on an Icelandic talk show that they have no idea if the website was real or not.

[Skeptic]

Originally Posted by snopes

Comment: there is a new rumor going around that there is a place, i
believe i heard thailand, where a person can pay to kill another person
for a large fee that is passed along to the dead persons family. i am
hearing there is a internet site advertising this service as some kind of
murder tourism. ive heard this one now from several people can you please
check this out?

I heard this last year at work. A workmate has a friend who travels almost continually, (working for a few months to pay for the next year) and he had just been in Asia, in the northern Thailand and Burma area. He went to a place where you can muck about with old war stuff like letting off grenades and firing machine guns etc. For a fee you can kill animals like cattle and dogs. So far, so good. (Kidding). But they quite openly stated that it could be arrange to kill someone for a fee and some of the money would go to the family of the dead person. The victims would be AIDS patients already close to death, and the reasoning was that the families would not be able to support them anyway until they died.
My workmate seemed to trust the source who he had known all his life.
Life is cheap in some parts of the world. I just finished watching the biography of Richard Kuklinski, the Iceman killer, who killed dozens of people for financial reasons. Why is it so hard to think it won't happen elsewhere.

[GrUvGrL]

Never put Thailand on my ist of places to visit!

[diddy]

The trailers bill the movie as "inspired by true events".

Nowadays that phrase pretty much means "something we made up based loosely on a UL we thought up of during a writing session."

They said the same thing about Blair Witch and that was totally made up.

[High Eight]

Originally Posted by chillas

I doubt such a thing actually exists, but the story is that this is the basis for the movie Hostel.

From the IMDb:

Suspiciously similar to the Avengers episode 'Murdersville', first broadcast November 1967:

When Mrs. Peel drives her childhood friend Major Croft to his new home in the isolated village of Little Storping-in-the-Swuff, they discover that Croft’s valet Forbes has vanished. After Croft attempts to look for him, he also disappears; Mrs. Peel then finds Forbes' body, and so she and Steed decide to investigate. They soon discover that the entire population of the village is in the murder business: if someone wants a person disposed of, they just drop them off in Little Storping and the villagers will take care of them – permanently.

[llewtrah]

If it involved dispatching one or more animal abusers/child abusers I might be tempted to book one of those tours.

The question is, do you get a beater and do you get a marksman to finish the prey off if you only wound it?

[Il-Mari]

Well, I don't know if there's some service in the third world where you can kill a person for fun, but it's considering that people are enslaved and worked to death and/or punished gruesomely for various crimes or infractions regularly, I wouldn't consider it impossible.

Personally, I think it's more likely that there's no organisation providing a service like this, though I could see some local gang/warlord doing something similar on a one-off or incidental basis.

- Il-Mari

P.S. What this mostly reminds me of is 'The Most Dangerous Game', the 1924 short story that's been adapted in different forms numerous times. The wikipedia article lists many of these adaptations (including 'Hostel'): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Most_Dangerous_Game

ETA: Ok, there's also a page on 'human hunting', which describes the concept as mostly being an urban legend:

Human hunting is a quasi-urban legend, where certain people go hunt and kill humans for the purpose of pleasure or entertainment.

It is commonly said that rich clients (usually those who have power over the jurisdiction) pay certain fees to underground organizations, which collect the "targets".

Certain serial killers, such as Robert Hansen or Donald Neilson would often abduct and hunt their victims before they killed them, while such hate groups like the Posse Comitatus have tried or allegedly actually committed such acts in the wilderness.

Some science fiction writers depicted fictional future or alternate history tyrannical regimes where the hunting of humans for sport is institutionalised (see The Sound of His Horn).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_hunting

[Flyer22]

Slightly off-topic: A lot of criminals are caught by means of the police talking to enough people who might know them. I've thought for some time that it would be more sensible to commit a crime in a strange city than in the place where you live, (assuming you're careful about not leaving evidence), because most likely nobody in that city would know you.

[Graham2001]

Originally Posted by Il-Mari

P.S. What this mostly reminds me of is 'The Most Dangerous Game', the 1924 short story that's been adapted in different forms numerous times. The wikipedia article lists many of these adaptations (including 'Hostel'): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Most_Dangerous_Game

ETA: Ok, there's also a page on 'human hunting', which describes the concept as mostly being an urban legend:



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_hunting

One adaption that is not part of that list and which is related to Flyer22's comment is the novel Trail of the Dead by Jon Evans, in that novel, you have a group of five people who go around the various backpacker routes killing people in an 'artistic' fashion (I'll leave it to the reader to guess what that means.), believing themselves to be safe because the local police will be too concerned with keeping the tourists coming than with properly investigating the murder.