Aug 29 2025, 02:13 AM, updated 4 months ago
In late July, a video that has become known as The Vietnamese Butcher began circulating on Telegram and other encrypted messaging apps, showing a man lying on his back in a tiled room, masturbating. At the point of climax, a second man decapitates him with a meat cleaver in a few expert strokes, then drags the head off the body. Further footage shows alternate angles of the killing and its aftermath: professional butchery of the corpse. Finally, a montage shows body parts stacked up, intestines separated, followed by images of some kind of traditional Asian dish containing an unidentified meat. A longer version doing the rounds on gore sites is preceded by what appears to be a dry-run. The executioner, wearing Adidas and a cheap Anonymous mask, caresses the victim’s neck with a cleaver, then mimes landing a couple of blows. Already kneeling with his head on a block, the victim straightens up and is hugged by his killer.
As you’d expect, online sleuths have been working overtime to put names to the victim and the killer. They’ve so far deduced that both speak with regional Vietnamese accents and have identified which shop sold the floor tiles upon which the victim lay masturbating, as well as the brands that made the executioner’s meat cleaver and the chopsticks seen laid out next to the ominous dish of meat. The current consensus is that the killing took place in central or northern Vietnam, or possibly Cambodia. The detectives point to distinctive moles and tattoos as proof that the footage features the same two people throughout. There is even a photo of a severed erect penis doing the rounds, though after considered analysis severed penis experts have subsequently debunked its links to the film.
As of today, the theory is that the victim—who appears to have been a willing participant in his own demise—was Nguyễn Xuân Đạt, a Vietnamese man who frequented extreme fetish message boards like Motherless for several years, using aliases like “Dat Beheading.” Somewhat of a twink, he’d also had an account on Watch People Die, a cutesy gamified community of anons who gather to share… you guessed it: footage of people dying. Almost all of Đạt’s known accounts make reference to his beheading fetish. On hookup sites, he spoke freely to both men and women about his death wish, a topic of conversation not unusual in the kind of circles Đạt was moving in. Screenshots show him asking someone for a translation of an ero guro called Applicant for Death, which features a plot similar to his own demise with the notable additions of incest, a guillotine, and a talking decapitated head.
The internet has, of course, gone to great lengths to identify the killer in the video. Using slightly spurious face-merging techniques, posters at WPD, Reddit, Facebook, Tam Tan Luong Tam, and XAMVN have arrived at a theory that the “butcher” is in fact a Buddhist who had previously interacted with Đạt on various message boards. Yet the Buddhist in question has denied any involvement, leaving the mob of online obsessives to fixate upon the sole identifying mark in the movie: a tattoo that reads “13-9” on the executioner’s arm. (This has led to the case being known by the shorthand “13K,” a hashtag that somehow relates to the prices of butchered pigs on Vietnamese social media.) Meanwhile, someone claiming to be the executioner currently has control of Đạt’s Facebook account. If The Vietnamese Butcher was made with commercial gain in mind, it’s already ‘succeeding.’ Eleven clips and 98 photos of the beheading have been available to buy as a pack on the dark web and in Telegram channels since February. This footage shows the execution from multiple different camera angles, so it seems likely that the victim at the very least consented to the retail of his death. It is also possible that he actively encouraged it. At the time of writing, other similar cases have started to surface. Although identities and details are currently unknown, the footage again features butchered Asian men, and was shared on the Chinese messaging app Baidu Tieba, which is often used for criminality.
In the process of researching this story, VICE spoke to a Chinese distributor of hardcore clips on Telegram; they offered to sell us access to groups in which tens of thousands of users share thousands of image packs with themes including heavy necrophilia, mortuary footage, drugged rape, and worse. While The Vietnamese Butcher may be the first authentic snuff movie, it is unlikely to be the last.
Source - The Vice
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