US shooter’s novels contained ‘spoilers’ of his future real murders

A man who allegedly killed five people in Denver earlier this week, had ‘previewed’ the murders, in a trilogy of criminal novels called ‘Sanction.’

47-year-old Lyndon McLeod is charged with killing two people at a tattoo salon and one man at an apartment in Denver, and then, in Lakewood, of killing a man at a tattoo salon, then a hotel employee, all on December 27. Eventually McLeod was shot by a police officer, Ashley Ferris, who returned fire after he injured her.

Law enforcement later confirmed that the victims were known to the suspect. But even more chilling details have since come to light: it turned out that McLeod, who had been investigated twice by the police but never charged, not only knew his victims but has actually prophesied many details of his massacre plans in a series of novels, self-published under the pseudonym Roman McClay.

“We are aware of the books written by the suspect under a pseudonym, which are a component of our investigation,” a spokesperson for the Denver police department told AFP.

A trilogy, ‘Sanction’ was written by McLeod between 2018 and 2020. The books were available on Amazon until Wednesday evening, when they were finally removed.

Media reports say that the main character’s name differs from its creator’s name by only one letter. In the first novel Lyndon MacLeod kills 46 people in one night, with the first person on this list being a former colleague, Michael Swinyard, who gets killed in his apartment in Denver. One of McLeod’s victims was called Michael Swinyard and he lived at the address, which was mentioned in a book.

Tattoo salon owner Alicia Cardenas was also killed, both in a novel and in real life.

‘Roman McClay’ had previously explained that he’d often used real names and described real events along with the fictional ones, to “blur the line between what is and what is possible.”

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