Love is the drug…

Roxy Music said it best: the things that fulfill us can often be the very yawning wells that consume us.

Society conditions us to believe that institutions like family and marriage — along with “pure” sentiments like love, hope, and faith — are indisputably positive forces that compel us to act rightly. A lovely sentiment, but still false.

Any curtain-closing kiss can fade to deep, devastating black even after the credits roll, and anyone who’s loved too well knows the treacherous paths our hearts can lead us down — a desert-spanning Lost Highway dotted with signs reading “Danger Ahead” and “Dead End” under the shadowy wingspan of the looming vulture.

For all the lurid curiosity lavished upon sex crimes, too often it’s overlooked that love crimes can be the more monstrous and psychologically weird offenses; this is the dynamic in which selves start to inextricably entwine, superegos begin to topple, and shared fantasies of blood and death find an outlet. Pair killers — Bonnie and Clyde, Martha Beck and Raymond Fernandez (aka The Lonely Hearts Killers), and “Schoolgirl Killers” Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka — bound by inhibition-drowning desire and lethal codependency turn up again and again in the annals of True Crime, each seeming to strive to top the vicious, predatory eroticism and all-cylinders-to-oblivion self-destruction of the duo that preceded them. Soul-mirroring love is the goal we all strive for, but we’re never admonished of the peril of fulfillment, the folly of storybook love; sometimes, finding our idealized mate signals the very crack of doom, and as we lose ourselves in symbiotic abandon, the question becomes not so much Happily Ever After? as it is:

Will we kiss or kill?…

Porn crime certainly ranks up there among the most illicit and tawdry of pulp malfeasance, and this month we got a doozy out of Florida. Jason Andrews (opening image, right) — known in various tiered subcultures DJ Veritas or the mono-monikered Addison from Sean Cody — had been a suspect in the murder of New Port Richey resident and tattooist Dennis “Scooter” Abrahamsen that occurred back in May, and though he initially managed to avoid arrest due to lack of sufficient evidence, Johnny Law ultimately closed in as of last week, officially charging Andrews in the slaying.

The heat really amped up when an alleged co-conspirator to the crime entered in the form of Amanda Logue (left) — porn alias, Sunny Dae — Andrews’s girlfriend/accomplice. Are these two the straight porn variation on Harlow Cuadra and Joseph Kerekes, the gay porn stars/boyfriends who had the gavel come down on them last year for the murder of producer Bryan Kocis? Both have only been indicted as of this date, but the evidence against them isn’t actually of the flimsy circumstantial variety.

It’s not exactly unheard of for porn stars to end up on either side of the chalk outline, but porno pair slayings seem culled right out of a sexploitation movie plot. Suggested titles: The Ganbang Killers? Smut City Stalkers? Deadly Doings, Dirty Movies: The Porn Star Murders?

The crime itself is grisly, amateur sleuths. Abrahamsen was found riddled with stab wounds and a caved-in skull (the overkill came courtesy of a sledgehammer) atop a massage table. The prosecution’s case is, at least in terms of the crime’s execution — fairly pat: Abrahamsen had hired Logue for a night of recorded at-home kink (another couple was in on the action as well, but not present at the time of the crime), Andrews showed up as an uninvited third wheel, and Abrahamsen ended up with the unhappiest of endings while his cash, credit cards, and camera equipment were swiped by the duo.

Intent is key here, because based on text messages exchanged via Blackberry between Andrews and Logue hours prior to the killing, the victim was as good as dead the second he opened the door. “I’m so glad you’re really commited to this take. Keep eyes for a knife, etc for me! You badass. Sunrise comes quick round here,” Andrews encouraged, while Logue replied “I want to have sex after we kill him. K I’m horny! I’m getting him to play music,” just mere feet from where the intended victim’s last hours of life were counting down in the early hours of May 16th. Police ultimately set their sights on the pair when they attempted to use Abrahamsen’s Home Depot credit card just two days later.

If you’ve read or seen enough True Crime coverage, you know that Pair and Spree Killing (the phenomenons can overlap) are all about the anticipation and rush of the act; the jolt comes from shared collusion, and the giddy expectation that Andrews and Logue shared is indicative of that. Their dichotomy in particular is also intriguing and in some ways against against type.

Andrews is the more glamorous of the two: the British expat, something of a minor club scene celebrity, player in upmarket Internet gay porn. Logue embodied the tattier, down-at-heel side of the coin — the Southern gal/hooker taken up with a dashing hustler she met on a porn shoot, her looks definitely on the slide while her gay-for-pay beau still had some time left on his expiration date.

Anyone can kill — it just takes the right stressors and enough of a threat to your self-definition — but pair killing is contingent upon finding just the right special someone who can give themselves over to your fantasy. It begs the question: had these two specific personalities not met, would they commit the same crime separately, or is the perfect cocktail of infatuation and psychopathy required to set the stage?

It’s debatable whether love can really conquer all, but self-interest always wins out and is the undoing of even normalized unions. It’s characteristic of your typical romantic murder duo for the female complement, upon being apprehended, to claim she was coerced or abused into committing the crime by the male half. Logue played true to form and put the onus of the crime on Andrews, claiming he fell into a jealous rage and offed her trick.

The pair’s Twitter (!) alibi that attempted to place them out of town on the night of the slaying was easily shot through and the text messages are evidence of obvious deliberation, so it appears that the justice system has finally caught on that women can be just as sadistic as men and are often the motive masterminds behind this pattern of murder.

The warrant for Logue’s arrest explicitly references her as the wielder of the hammer — Andrews’s warrant similarly places the sledgehammer in his hand — and also charges she wore gloves taken from the victim’s residence. Which one first suggested the killing, and how long did it take the other to sign on? Did they both inflict the stab wounds and the hammer blows? Did they go at right there after it was all finished? The truth will out, and though the moral of the story has played out countless times through the ages, few are the lovers who ever see it coming:

Be wary of the love that you find.

© 2010, Shawn Baker. All rights reserved. Nightcharm.com