An American Vampire In La Paz

Have you ever stopped by the site People You'll See In Hell? (I don't intend to see any people in Hell myself, but it's still an interesting site to visit, full of briefs on some of the most heinous humans imaginable.)

If he's not already there, let's add Lestat Claudius de Orleans y Montevideo (aka Tristan Jay Amero of Placerville, CA) to the list over at PYSIH.

LA PAZ Bolivia (AP)-- A convicted hotel bomber from California who modeled himself on a fictional vampire has died after becoming ill in prison, officials said Tuesday.

Twenty-six-year-old Tristan Jay Amero was serving a 30-year sentence for bombing two low-rent hotels in the Bolivian capital of La Paz in 2006. Two Bolivians died in one of the attacks. ...

According to U.S. court documents, Amero received psychiatric treatment off and on since age 7, spent years at a juvenile detention center and often made threats of suicide and violence against authorities.

He was serving his sentence at the grim, maximum-security Chonchocoro prison on the wind-swept outskirts of La Paz. ...

Prison officials said Amero last year was caught hiding gasoline in his cell and admitted plotting to immolate prison officials, fellow inmates and even a U.S. diplomat sent to visit him.

In earlier travels through South America, Amero had described himself as a Saudi Arabian lawyer, a pagan high priest, a public notary and even a vampire. At one point, he was jailed for allegedly bombing an automatic cash machine in northern Argentina.

It would have been much cooler if Amero had let someone drive a wooden stake into his heart instead of just going off and dying of natural causes, and much cooler still if he had finally found peace and salvation in prison. C'est la morte.

Had he committed his crimes here instead of Bolivia, lawyers would have been lining the halls, fighting each other to represent him. His tragic life story is defense attorney fodder made of pure gold.

But for every Amero there are a thousand, ten thousand, kids who sorted it out, got it together no matter how dire their circumstances, and never became pseudo vampires on a killing spree. So off you go to the Great Beyond, Tristan, old boy. God have mercy.