Dennis Markuze aka David Mabus in the news again

Everyone's favorite death threat dealing, stalking, psychotic nutjob has been in the news again.

It all started when long time target of Markuze aka David Mabus threats posted the blog entry Time to institutionalize Dennis Markuze. In it he noted:

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.

You know what? This is wrong. I shouldn't have to do this. Over the years — I've been getting these threats from Markuze since 1993 — it's gradually grown from an occasional deranged message on usenet to part of my daily routine, where I'm dealing with hundreds of ranty messages every day from one disturbed individual in Montreal, Canada. And I'm not even his sole target: he has a hate-on for Shermer, Randi, and Dawkins, and this is all he does with his life: he sits in his bedroom in his parent's house and sends out shrill, incoherent messages to the world, all day long.

In the body of the post, PZ linked to a petition demanding that the Montreal city police take the "Mabus" death threats seriously. What the survey didn't disclose was that every signature generated an e-mail to the Montreal police. After a few thousand signatures were added to the petition they plaintively tweeted:

@SPVM Police Montréal
@rebeccawatson Please stop sendind e-mails to our media adresse by signinig the petition.We are investigating the case. Thank you.

The next day the Montreal Gazette ran the article Montreal police start probe of Twitter threats. Predictably the Montreal Police come off looking like idiots. Some people are claiming to have never heard of Mabus, others are claiming there's an ongoing investigation. It all comes across as a lazy, incompetent force trying to circle the wagons and pretend to be doing something.

Then there's the conspiracy theory that Markuze / Mabus is a Deep Cover Liberal and the Montreal Police are in on it.

During all of this Twitter users have been asked to retweet screen captures of any threats that Mabus makes to @SPVM so the Montreal Police get a copy of the tweets before Twitter deletes the latest account used by this nutjob.

Markuze / Mabus is crazy, no bones about it. He's been stalking people and making death threats for a while, and it's only a matter of time before he hurts someone. Even psychics think Dennis Markuze aka David Mabus is a threat to the life of PZ.

I wonder if the Montreal police ever use psychics.