First, a bit of context for folks who don’t know. Dennis Markuze of Montreal is a fully certified 100% solid gold kook who, using an assortment of pseudonyms when online (including David Mabus and Hebert Marxuxe) has been issuing a torrent of threating emails and tweets to many skeptic bloggers. When I say “torrent”, I’m not being poetical, its a factual description. To give you a feel for what its like, PZ wrote the other day …

Every morning when I get up and get on the computer, the first thing I do is delete the pile of spam from Dennis Markuze, each of which is usually cross-posted to 50 to 100 other people. Every time I fire up Twitter, the first thing I do is clear the garbage Dennis Markuze has left there; yesterday I blocked and reported spam from over 25 Markuze accounts, amounting to several hundred messages.

All he does all day, every day, is sit at home (he lives with him mother) and tweet and email abuse and death threats. Its stuff like this …

“We have orders to EXTERMINATE you and your entire family if continue to talk about GOD and RELIGION the way *you do* do you got the msg, you stupid little fucker?”

You get the idea, I need not repeat too much. “Oh come on now”, you say, “there will always be cranks out there sending stuff like this, so just ignore it”. Well, yes that is true, but this nutter is in a different league. For example, here is a blogger (Tim Farley) who has been getting this stuff every day for the past three years.

Well, folks have been getting worried. This guy felt very much like a ticking time bomb ready to explode any day now and do some actual harm. Complaints have of course been made to the police by many, but so far they had taken no action. However, one wise soul (Kyle VanderBeek of San Francisco – yea) got a petition started demanding that the Montreal city police take his threats seriously, and so many of the harassed signed up.

The latest news now is that DM is under investigation by the police – finally. There is still a worry that nothing will actually be done, but at least its a step in the right direction.

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