Kevin Bacon Cannibal Sentenced To Life In Prison
A Michigan man named Kevin Bacon was killed by a cannibal named Mark Latunski, who has been sentenced to life.
Mark Latunski, who was convicted of murdering and mutilating 25-year-old Michigan man Kevin Bacon earlier this year, has been sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. According to PinkNews, Latunski connected with Kevin Bacon in 2019 on Grindr, a common hookup app, and invited him to his house, where he brutally murdered him and engaged in gruesome cannibal behavior. The late Kevin Bacon in question was not related to the Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special and Mystic River actor of the same name.
Michigan Circuit Court Judge Matthew Stewart ruled that the Kevin Bacon cannibal understood what he was doing and was thus culpable, saying “The court finds that this is a crime of cold calculation. Kevin Bacon’s death was Mark Latunski’s design.” Latunski was convicted of first-degree murder and disinterment and mutilation of a dead body; the murder charge carried the life penalty, while the disinterment earned a 10-year sentence to run concurrently. Latunski had previously pled guilty to the murder.
Reports indicate that the Kevin Bacon cannibal lured his victim to his home on Christmas Eve, 2019; his body was not discovered until four days later. His family had Bacon declared missing after he had not appeared at their Christmas celebration. In the courtroom, Bacon’s mother read a statement directly in part to Mark Latunski, in which she said “Even though we will finally get justice for Kevin, it still doesn’t feel like enough, and you still get to live and do things because a pig like you can never have remorse.”
Authorities were led to the Kevin Bacon cannibal after Bacon’s family declared him missing and his roommate told Shiawassee County investigators that he had met a man on Grindr and gone to his home. Various reports indicate that there had been several disturbances around Mark Latunski’s home in the months prior to the murder, including a neighbor encountering a bleeding man screaming “’he wants to hurt me, he wants to hurt me” before the eventual Kevin Bacon cannibal appeared. That particular man was taken into Michigan State Police custody and it appears no charges were filed.
In several ways, the case of the Michigan Kevin Bacon cannibal is oddly similar to that of Jeffrey Dahmer, the Wisconsin serial killer who murdered 17 people between 1978 and 1991. In both cases, the murderers appear to target LGBTQ+ men and boys and both appear to have partially cannibalized their victims. Very notably, in Dahmer’s case, a neighboring woman named Glenda Cleveland repeatedly tried to bring police attention to his activities to no avail, which is at least somewhat reminiscent of Latunski’s circumstances.
While morbid interest in serial killers and their activities has always been popular, a 10-part Netflix series titled Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story starring Evan Peters become an unexpectedly huge streaming hit in the last year. It is now being turned into an ongoing anthology series, which very possibly could include Mark Latunski, the Kevin Bacon cannibal, someday.
