26. Bianca Devins: Everyone Covered Her Murder. Nobody Covered Her Life.

Bianca Devins was seventeen years old when she was killed in Utica, New York on July 14, 2019. You probably already know how she died. What you probably don't know is who she actually was — the ukulele, the anime art, the YouTube videos she made at eleven where she hated being on camera, the way her grandfather sang "Puff the Magic Dragon" to her and she passed it down to her baby sister. The fact that she had been through depression, anxiety, borderline personality disorder, and PTSD — years of it, in and out of hospitals — and came out the other side with a plan. She was going to study psychology. She was going to help adolescents who had been failed by the same mental health system that had failed her. She was seventeen years old and she had a plan. Every piece of coverage about this case starts with the internet. This one starts with Bianca.

Before we talk about how they died, we talk about how they lived.

Sources: Rolling Stone — Bianca Devins: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/bianca-devins-viral-death-murder-926823/ CBS 48 Hours — Bianca Devins: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bianca-devins-murder-violent-images-psychological-terrorism-48-hours/ Wikipedia — Murder of Bianca Devins: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Bianca_Devins WKTV — Brandon Clark sentencing: https://www.wktv.com/archive/brandon-clark-sentenced-in-murder-of-17-year-old-bianca-devins/article_d1bdf090-7932-11ec-8d73-77f82ffcca9c.html Rome Sentinel — Appeal denied: https://www.romesentinel.com/news/utica-devins-clark-appeal-denied/article_b6b933bf-d166-441c-98b9-368614a40fe8.html Observer-Dispatch — Sentencing hearing: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/man-sentenced-for-murder-of-utica-teen-bianca-devins/ar-BB1eEeso

Transcript

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Hello everyone and welcome to a brand new episode of I Fear You Babe. My name is Dino Malvone, and I'm your host. Okay, so I need to say something before we go anywhere near July 14th, 2019. So I've been doing this show for a couple months now, and I've read a lot of coverage from a lot of different cases and the Bianca Devons coverage specifically, it just keeps bothering me. Like I kept asking myself, like, why is this so on my nerves? And I think I finally figured it out because it seems like every single piece about the case that I've seen, you know, with podcasts or the YouTube deep dives, you know, there's like documentaries. There's a 48 hours special. Obviously, you know that I watched that. And then the episode that dropped this week from one of my biggest true crime shows in the country, for me at least, and for everybody. Every single one leads with the internet when it comes to the telling of the story. So there's always like the viral photos and discussion of the Discord. There's the incel angle. And I mean, I get it. I really do. Because like that part was new, and that part had never happened before in quite this sort of way. You know, and of course the media covered what was new, which is fine. But here's the thing that nobody seems to notice, which is Bianca rarely shows up in her own story. Like she's the thing that happened to the internet, you know? And for whatever reason, I just can't get past that. Because here's what I know about her. She seems like she had been through depression and some anxiety. She had borderline personality disorder. There was PTSD. She said she'd been in and out of hospital since she was a teenager, and I think they verified that too. She had sat in an office after office with like therapists who didn't know how to help her. Like she had what it felt like from the inside over years, like when you reach out and the system that's supposed to catch you doesn't. So, you know, she decided she was going to fix that for other kids. She was going to study psychology and she was going to be the person who actually showed up for teenagers with mental illness because she knew, you know, she knew from the inside what it felt like when nobody did. Her mother Kim said something in an interview that I thought about ever since I read it, which is she said the internet gave Bianca a place to be safe. She could just be Bianca. And, you know, the internet that gave her that safety is the same internet that was weaponized against her family after she died. And like you can hold on to that. We'll come back to it in a little bit. But her grandfather Frank put it in a different way. He said, We all said, Bianca's back. That's our girl. And there was this glow in her eyes when she talked about going to college and what she was going to do with her life. You know, and like that glow and that plan, and that that is who got in the car on July 13th. And of course, always before we talk about how they died, we talk about how they lived. I'm Dino Malvone, and this is I Fear You Babe. Now, Bianca was born in Utica, New York, which is a mid-sized city in the Mohawk Valley, about an hour and a half east of Syracuse, and about two and a half hours from the city. It's had a hard few decades economically, the way a lot of upstate cities have, but it's also a place where families stay, where people know each other, you know, where community means something because it kind of has to. Bianca Michelle Devons was born there on October 2nd, 2001. She grew up in a house with her mom Kim and her dad, Mike, who separated from Kim in 2010 and left the family in 2015. And her younger sister, Olivia, who was born in 2003. Extended family was around too. There was also a babysitter, Maddie, who would come later. Um, it wasn't a perfect childhood, but it was like a, you know, a real one. Kim had described her daughter in a lot of interviews over the last few years, and every single time you get a slightly different angle on the same person. A bright light, her best friend, a girl who was very smart and very intuitive and very self-aware, um, who always knew something was off, always knew when she needed help. Kim said that self-awareness was both a gift and a weight. Bianca could see herself clearly. She just couldn't always fix what she saw. So, you know, the girl before all this went down, nobody really talks about this, but Bianca was not always the girl that the internet knew, you know, with the pink hair and the e-girl aesthetic with the big Discord following. That always came later. Before that, she was, you know, someone else. Obviously, when she was small, Bianca was actually really extroverted, very social. It appears that she was the kid who would run up and down a hill on a playground just because she felt like it. There's a YouTube video from when she was about 11. She made it with Olivia and her best friend Gianna. She hated being in front of the camera. So mostly she held it. She let the other two be the ones who were a scene. That is like kind of specific for a kid, I guess, too. Like the one who makes everyone else look good and just stays like out of the frame herself. But so then adolescent hits. And for Bianca, it hit hard. Not in like the vague way, it's hard for everyone, but like in the specific clinical isolating way when it's hard when your brain is working against you. So I guess she lost interest in things and pulled back. And like the girl who had been outgoing became someone her school friends described as shy, anxious, and kind of on her own. Kim took her to therapist after therapist. Most of them she says couldn't help. And that experience of like reaching out to a system that was supposed to catch you and falling through it anyway, over and over, is I think something Bianca would carry on for years and eventually decide to do something with. But so I want to stop here for a second because every other episode about this case basically skips past Bianca's sisters, which I think is weird. But so Olivia was born in 2003, which was two years after Bianca. She grew up next to her sister through everything, like the hard years, the hospitalizations, the therapist after therapist, the online communities that eventually became a refuge. Like she knew the real girl, the real Bianca, not the like persona. She was 13 years old when Bianca died. At Brandon Clark's sentencing in 2021, Olivia stood up in the courtroom and spoke. At that time, she was 17 years old, which was the exact age that Bianca was when she was killed. And I you have to sit with that for like just a second because like her little sister stood up at 17, which was the age that she died, and described what the two years since her sister's death had actually been like. And, you know, she talked about having nightmares and how it was difficult to trust anybody. The fact that she had been forced to debate every single social media account she had because strangers kept sending her photos of her sister's body. So she ended up having just to delete everything. She said, you know, many random people set their profile pictures as my sister's death photo and I and went on my page knowing I would without a doubt see it. And, you know, she said that at 17, that, you know, the same age her sister was when she died. And she, but you know, she she still got up and and said what she had to say. You know, she spoke up. And then there's Maddie, Bianca's baby sister, the one she sang to. Bianca's grandfather, Frank, used to sing Puff the Magic Dragon to Bianca when she was just like a little girl. It was their song. The the specific and private, irreplaceable song became like a grandfather and a, you know, it was between like grandfather and granddaughter. And at some point, Bianca started singing it to Maddie, her little sister, you know, in a way to like pass it down. And that chain, you know, grandfather to Bianca to baby sister is one of like the nicest specific things I know about who she was. She took something that had been given to her with love, and then she gave it to someone smaller who needed it, which is so cute. And that's not a small like little thing. I think that's a big piece of her character. So Frank talked about that song when he spoke at Clark's sentencing. This guy was barely holding it together. So this is what she was actually dealing with. You know, most coverage says she struggled with mental illness and moves on. But, you know, and that sentence does almost like literally nothing for me. It tells you nothing about what her life actually looked like. Because Bianca was diagnosed with depression, anxiety, borderline personality disorder, and PTSD. She got her BPD diagnosis at 16, and she had been in and out of hospital treatment for much of her teens. Okay, so BPD for people who haven't lived it or you know loved anybody who has. It's a condition that affects how you experience, how you experience emotions and how you relate to other people. So intense shifting, rapid mood swings, fear of abandonment. There's a real difficulty with self-image. Like things hit really hard. They last longer. They're, you know, it's hard to read, it's hard to regulate. And it's not just a personality flaw, it's a brain that works just a little bit differently. And in 2019, a lot of clinicians didn't know how to treat it well. So, you know, and Bianca knew this from experience. So Kim described her daughter this way: like even in the darkest times, she would help others. Sometimes when she was struggling, she wouldn't follow her own advice, but she always gave good advice to her friends. Very relatable. So think about that, what that actually means for one second, because Kim remembered nights when Bianca would be curled up next to her crying. And then she would log onto Discord and post cheerful messages to comfort people in her circle who were also struggling. So, you know, she couldn't always help herself, but she always tried to help them. And the girl who held the camera so everyone else could be seen, you know, and that impulse never really left her, it seems. It seems she also loved anime. She drew anime-inspired art. It was really detailed. It looked like patient pieces of work, you know, that were really beautiful that she shared online that her family would later display at the annual gala that they hold for her in memory. It wasn't, it didn't feel like it was dabbling. It felt like it was a you know, developed, you know, what would you say? Like a developed visual language that she was like, it was fully hers, you know, it didn't seem like it was borrowed. The ukulele, not for an audience, but and not for content. I think she just played it. She, the vocaloid, the Japanese virtual singing software with its own like ginormous community, especially in anime and digital art spaces. She seemed like she was a part of that world. What else? The Breakfast Club, kittens, babies, chocolate fudge brownies, pastel wigs, cosplay. Like these are these are not the interests of a mysterious internet figure. You know, these are interests of a, you know, any 17-year-old girl from Utica, New York who found her people in online spaces because you know, offline spaces have been like a little bit harder to navigate. What else? And music. Specifically, Nicole Dolinger, Dolenganger, a Canadian singer, songwriter whose work sits in the dark, tender, almost like this is like they said it from what I gathered, almost spectral space. That it seemed like I clearly meant something to Bianca. The concert on July 13th, 2019, was Bianca's first adult show. It was like her first concert without her mom. And and Kim said she took comfort knowing Bianca was going with someone she trusted. So okay, the internet and like what was actually true. And so I want to like clear something up because this gets misrepresented all the time. It seems you're gonna notice this story now that you've heard it. If you're if you're hearing it here for the first time, you're gonna see it covered in so many other podcasts. So when Bianca died, Outlets called her an Instagram celebrity. And I don't think that was accurate. She had about like 2,000 followers, like, you know, not nothing, but not like celebrity. She was known and like really valued in the the the small communities that like the anime art community, certain uh Discord servers. You know, there's like niche online worlds, but she was not famous. She was, it seemed like that's real. And that realness is, I think, what people responded to. A friend described it like this she would create a version of herself that would best suit whoever she was talking to, make them feel like they had a really cool best friend who just got them. But the version that got the most attention was the one that was very close to who she actually was, which is a sweet, shy, you know, nerdy girl who was young and beautiful and honest about being sad. Kim said it a little bit more simply. She said the internet gave Bianca a place to be safe. She could be Bianca. And that meant something specific to a kid who'd spent years not quite fitting in offline. A kid who'd been in hospitals and therapists' offices, and you know, who found more genuine connection in online communities than she had in the hallways of any school she'd been in. So she did deal with harassment at least for two years before her death. She'd been targeted by what gets broadly called the incel community. That's real and pretty documented by now, but like investigators were pretty explicit that the uh the dude that killed her was not an incel. He was something specific and separate that we'll and we'll come back to that. But so she had a plan, right? So in the spring of 2019, Bianca Devons graduated from Thomas R. Proctor High School in Utica. She was 17, and she, you know, was gonna go to Mohawk Valley Community College in the fall, study psychology. And the reason she chose psychology was is that she was no other coverage sits with long, you know, nothing that I've seen so far or coverage sits with this story long enough, but like she spent years navigating a mental health system that she felt failed her. She'd been in offices where people like didn't where they didn't know how to help her, and she felt like she needed to do something. So, you know, she decided she was gonna fix that for other kids and teenagers who were struggling the way that she had struggled, you know, who needed someone who actually understood what she was going on, what she was going on with from the inside. Kim said, like Bianca's goal was to become a psychologist to help kids with mental health issues. From her own experience, Bianca knew how important this work is. So, you know, that's like not a vague teenage aspiration. That's like a pretty specific plan born from you know some pretty specific pain, which seems aimed at a specific problem. Like, you know, a kid that is a kid who took the hardest thing about her life and decided to make it, you know, turn it around and make it useful. And that glow in her grandfather's eyes, that's you know, that's what it is. So Brandon Clark, this dude, who was he? What was he planning and how did he hide it? So his background is all right. Well, his name is Andrew, Brandon Andrew Clark, and he was born October 6th, 1997. He was 21 years old when he killed Bianca. And he grew up outside Syracuse. I think it's called the Cicero era area, which is about an hour away from Utica. His childhood was genuinely traumatic. Apparently, his father held his mom at knife point for a couple hours, and Brandon saw it, and then his father went to prison. His mother was later arrested on a separate charge, and then Brandon spent time in foster care. The people who were supposed to protect him, you know, obviously had a history of not. And, you know, I say that not to excuse anything that he did. It's just like not to because nothing does that, but because it does the Shawan just to show to be honest, to give it the full picture. You know, they say Brando was shaped by specific experiences that produced someone prone to fixation and violence. By 2019, he was working as a lift driver living in the Bridgeport area. And friends had noted signs of obsessive behavior, particularly around women he was attracted to. And here's the piece about like his little double life that he had going on. And I think this is like the part that is most underplayed in most of the coverage, but it's the most weird part to me. Because it's not about what Clark did on July 14th, Brandon Clark. It's about what he was doing and who he was pretending to be for the two and a half months before all that. Because he started following Bianca on Instagram in April of 2019. They like connected online and then moved it to in-person. And he came to her high school graduation. He seemed like charming and polite and like a little nerdy and totally harmless looking. And then he started coming around the family house regularly. And Kim's first impression was that he was nice and totally personable, like nerdy boy next door. He gave off no red flags. You know, he was around enough that Bianca's sister called him like a family friend. And Kim trusted him enough that when Bianca said she was going to a Nicole Dolinger concert in New York City with him, Kim felt okay about it. She took comfort in even, like she let Bianca be fine. You know, like it's all good. So then here's what's happening at the same time. When while Brandon was coming around the family house, and while Kim was forming her impression of him as like, you know, the good nerdy boy next door. You know, while Bianca's sister was calling him a family friend, Brandon was searching online for how to find the carteroid artery. Carteroid artery. How to incapacitate someone. How to kill. He also purchased a big long knife and he had it hidden in his car. And there were also reports that he had been supplying Bianca with drugs to spend time with her. And she had told at least one friend that some of his messages felt creepy and obsessive. She was navigating something whose full danger she had like literally no idea. But Brandon saw it pretty clearly. I think he had a pretty clear plan. The graduation, the house visits, the concert, definitely all part of the plan. So here's the night of July 13th. So it was a Saturday, 2019. Bianc, Brandon, and a mutual friend of theirs named Alex went to a Nicole Dolinger concert in New York City. It was her first adult show, like her first concert without her mom. You know, she got dressed up for it with some like dark eyeliner, and she had a sheer black lace shirt, her signature pink hair, like, you know, she was excited. And at the concert, Bianca and Alex kissed. Brandon saw it or found out about it, and like something happened. So after the show, Alex went on his way, and Brandon and Bianca drove back toward Utica together. And several hours on the road, at some point during the drive, Bianca fell asleep on the back seat. And in the early morning hours of July 14th, Boilermaker Sunday in Utica, the morning of the city's famous road race, Brandon pulled over on Poe Street in East on East Utica, or in East Utica, a dead end road not far from Bianca's house. Bianca was asleep in the back seat, and Brandon took the knife he had hidden beside her seat and he assaulted her. He cut her neck and the wound supposedly was nearly decapitating. I'm not going to describe what Bianca looked like when she died because I'm not going to describe the photographs, but I will tell you, because it's the reason the next part of the story exists, is that Brandon documented it because he posted it online. He took a picture and posted it to Discord, and he called family members in what amounted to a suicide note. He posted a photo of the New York State throughway as he drove with the caption, Here Comes Hell. It's redemption, right? He called 911 himself. What he said to the dispatcher is my name is Brandon. The victim is Bianca Michelle Devons. I'm not going to stay on the phone for long because I still need to do the suicide part of the murder suicide. End quote. So he built a bonfire. He listened to Test Drive by Joji. He laid a green tarp over Bianca's body. And he lay across it and kept posting. So at 7 a.m. or by 7 a.m., Discord users had been calling police for a couple hours. The first 911 call came from Tennessee. Someone saw the post, saw the name Utica, and called. And the police received a bunch of calls. Bianca's family even started receiving screenshots before officers even arrived. When police reached Poe Street, Brandon stabbed himself in the neck as they approached. He did survive and was charged with second-degree murder. Investigators found the knife, rope, and multiple other tools at the scene. They said clearly he had a plan. I mean, no doubt. And the only thing he wasn't able to accomplish was taking his own life. So online, and I said this at the top, and I'll say it here again: the online response is like not the story. It's like what happened to Bianca's family after she was already gone. It just matters hugely. And this it's just not the lead, you know. But the images Brandon posted spread from Discord onto Instagram, onto Twitter, and Facebook, and like fast. Some people thought they were fake. And when it became clear that they were real, the response like split. You know, some people called the police, tried to get the images removed, and other people shared them, like they made memes and sent them directly to Bianca's family multiple times a day, literally every day, with messages blaming Bianca for what happened to her. And Kim said several times a day, every day, tagged in photos of her daughter's body with nasty, vile images was just too much. Olivia was forced to delete every social media account she had because strangers kept sending her the photos. Can you imagine? She said people would set the death photo as their profile picture and continue to her page so that she would see it. She said, you know, to this day, the picture continues to be sent to me. It's fucking wild. Bianca's stepfather developed PTSD from what was sent to him, and like he has flashbacks and still has them. A behavioral scientist who worked with the family called it psychological terrorism. That feels like not too much of an exaggeration. It's like the precise description of like sustained, deliberate campaign to cause maximum pain to a grieving family. Awful. So Instagram and Facebook removed Brandon's accounts. Facebook also added the images to a digital fingerprint database. They did things, you know? But here's the thing I keep coming back to is that people who tried to report the photos through Instagram's normal reporting system were told over and over again that the images did not violate community guidelines. Do you ever get those? There was like no person to call, no like escalation path. The system wasn't designed to say like this is a real murder and this is being weaponized against a real family. Make it stop. So Kim said she couldn't get on Instagram to respond until she went to her congressman. She needed a congressional office to get social media companies to take down the photos of her murdered daughter. The internet gave Bianca a place to be safe. She could just be Bianca. And then obviously, right afterwards, the internet had no mechanism to protect what was left of her, which is wild. Now, let's get back to the case. So Brandon was charged with second-degree murder. He initially pled not guilty. In February of 2020, seven months after killing Bianca, he pled guilty. And then he tried to take it back. So five months after the guilty plea, he filed a motion to withdraw it. He claimed his attorney had pressured him. Okay. He got a new attorney. A hearing was held in late 2020. In October, the judge denied the withdrawal. I should hope so. Judge Michael Dry. God. Judge Michael Dwyer said, it seemed like in the beginning you were focused on the family, the pain you caused the family, but somewhere in the interim, you started to focus on yourself. And that was what was confusing to everyone. You were more worried about yourself than Bianca. He was sentenced in March 16th, 2021, 25 years to life, not eligible for parole until 2044. He is at Attica Correctional Facility. So he Brandon spoke before sentencing. And he said, quote, how do you meaningfully apologize for doing something so horrible, so irreversible? That's the part. End quote. And we saw her fight desperately for her life. So Kim asked the judge to keep Brandon in prison for the rest of his life. She said she and her family were haunted by the images of her daughter's murder. She said the worst part of the thing that she can't escape is that there's no more hugs or kisses and, you know, no more I love you from her daughter, which is heartbreaking. Olivia spoke at 17, again, Bianca's age. She talked about the nightmares and the inability to trust new people and having to delete all of her social media. And like that, that photo keeps coming back up and she's got to go through it every day. And Bianca's grandfather, Frank, told Brandon directly, if he ever comes up for parole that the family is going to be there, that they will represent Bianca and that they will ask the board to keep him inside. And then Frank talked about the song Puff the Magic Dragon. He could barely get through it, but that song that went from him to Bianca to Maddie and then, you know, obviously stopped. They wore pink to every hearing because Bianca's favorite color was pink. So okay, so here's the incel framing, and then we're going to wrap this up because almost every single single piece of coverage about the case, I think it actually does Bianca a disservice. And I kind of want to tell you, see, explain why. Because, you know, she had been targeted by incel communities for at least two years before her death. Like it's real and documented, like threatening messages, you know, harassment, fixation, all you know, all that stuff. And that I think that context matters and it's worth figuring out, understanding more. But investigators were explicit. They found no connection between the incel movement and Brandon Clark's murder. Because Brandon was not an incel. He was a specific man with a specific obsession with a specific woman, you know, who didn't choose him. You know, he had a traumatic history that produced someone that was like fixated and prone to violence. So, you know, he planned a murder over a bunch of months, calling it an incel killing, I think flattens something really particular into a symbol of a broader cultural thing, you know? And then more than that, the incel framing turns Bianca's story into a case study. It's like a symbol of, you know, or example of something that happened to the internet. You know, and I think if she was a person with a, you know, a specific person, you know, the girl who would hold the camera and the one who sang puff the magic dragon to her baby sister is like, you know, the one that wanted to help kids that were like her. And, you know, the broader conversation about online harassment of women, I think is real, and that matters too. But Bianca is the lead, right? I think Bianca's always been the lead. And the second she becomes a symbol of something bigger, you know, she disappears again. And if she's been, I think she's probably been made to disappear enough. Anyway, this was Bianca's story. Born October 2nd, 2021, in uh in Utica. She loved anime and a ukulele and Nicole Dolinger and The Breakfast Club and pastel wigs and chocolate French brownies. But then again, who doesn't love those? She held the camera so her friends could be the ones who are seen. She lay next to her mom and cried and then logged on to comfort people in her circle who were struggling. And, you know, she sang Puff the Magic Dragon to Maddie because her grandfather sang it to her first. And, you know, she had a specific, purposeful, earned plan for what she was going to do with her life. She was 17 years old, and everyone covered her murder, but I think we did a little bit better at covering her life. Because before we talk about how they died, we talk about how they lived. I'm Dino Melbone, and this was I Fear You Babe. Talk to you guys soon.