Manhunt made my son a killer", Says English Mother
THE parents of Britain's most violent teenage murderer has revealed how computer games dripping with bloodlust and death turned their son into a twisted killer.
Stuart Harling — who'd seemed a normal loving boy — got life for stabbing nurse Cheryl Moss to death while she was on a cigarette break.
In a sickening random attack the 18-year-old trainee accountant slashed and hacked her 72 times — just like he'd PRACTISED on the PlayStation in his bedroom.
Now, two weeks after he was convicted at the Old Bailey, heartbroken mum Lorraine Harling has confessed she and husband David had NO IDEA of the well of savagery that had quietly built up in their son.
School attendance officer Lorraine said: "Stuart never gave us any reason to think he was violent at all. He was a very normal boy—quiet and reserved. I used to call him ‘my little professor'.
"I knew he was playing the video games but we didn't really know what went on in them, how brutal and graphic they were."
Her words will resonate with anxious parents all over Britain. For the most chilling fact about Harling—who was grooming himself as a serial killer—is how ORDINARY he was.
The mild-mannered schoolboy gained 10 good GCSEs, excelled at maths, led a scout troop and had a bright future.
But every night he would retreat into his darkened bedroom at home in Rainham, Essex, and enter a grisly virtual world that revelled in sadism, ritual blood-letting and death. Just like millions of other youngsters.
One of baby-faced Harling's favourite games was the notorious Manhunt, where players SLASH and SLICE their victims with meat CLEAVERS, cheese WIRE and CHAINSAWS, or suffocate them with plastic bags.
It was banned in New Zealand in 2004 but allowed onto the UK market uncensored.
Lorraine, 45, said: "I know these games are played by kids across the world, but some are truly horrific.
"And if they can cause a trigger to be pulled in someone's head they should be banned.
"Now I feel like people are looking at me, as if I should have read the signs. But I had no idea."
It was on April 6 last year that Harling's dark fantasy life became terrifyingly real. With his parents on holiday in Spain, he donned a long dark wig, sunglasses and jacket from the ‘killing kit' he had spent 10 months amassing on eBay. He then headed out with a large hunting knife.
At 10.30am, he spotted 33-year-old nurse Cheryl, having a smoke in the grounds of St George's Hospital, in nearby Hornchurch, and pounced — plunging the blade repeatedly into her back, neck, face, chest and skull.
Police soon captured Harling after he dumped the ‘kit', which had his address on the mail-order packaging. In Spain his stunned parents could not believe the news.
"I thought there'd been a mistake," said Lorraine.
"For an hour David and I didn't move. We sat there in shock. When we got back and saw him in his cell it was like talking to a stranger. He looked straight through us and gave one-word yes and no answers.
"When I cuddled him, he hardly responded and didn't kiss me. I still didn't want to believe he'd done it, but I think I was trying to kid myself. He was just so cold."
The couple then did not see their son for over a year — until his trial last month. Lorraine said: "He looked the same old Stuart, only he had a beard.
"But the way he was acting wasn't Stuart. I think there are two Stuarts — the one I knew before all this happened, and the one that's there now.
"They're two different people. He's not the Stuart I know."
The trial was told how police discovered that, before the murder, Harling spent days on the internet talking to paedophiles and researching serial killers such as the infamous Dennis Nielsen.
But none of this was known by his parents. They never suspected a thing. Throughout the trial Harling misbehaved. He snarled at the prosecutor: "I'm going to cut your f***ing head off and s*** down your neck!"
Harling had learned the foul threat from a computer game. Lorraine said: "Stuart was 11 or 12 when I bought him the PlayStation. For a long time I didn't even realise games had age limits on them. We'd just buy him the game that all the other kids had.
"I didn't really know what they were about. I think most parents are the same. But Stuart wasn't in his room on the PlayStation all the time. He was a normal boy. He wasn't that outgoing, but he had friends. He never did anything that made us worry.
"I was his mother, but I'd no idea what was happening."
It Would be very bad press for nintendo if this happened with manhunt 2!!!!!
Could this be one of thew reasons manhunt 2 was banned???
Source: http://www.n4g.com/wii/News-52031.aspx