The following content contains disturbing accounts of violence. Discretion is advised.
For single people, the holidays can often feel painful, when loneliness is amplified in the face of everyone else’s togetherness. But for 25-year-old hairdresser Kevin Bacon of Swartz Creek, Michigan, Christmas Eve 2019 brought a different, and unfathomable, level of pain.
On that night, Bacon used Grindr—a dating app for the LGBTQ+ community—to connect to Mark Latunski, a 50-year-old man living in nearby Bennington Township.
Bacon left home around 5:20 p.m. that night in the hopes of a holiday hookup. He texted his roommate Michelle Myers less than an hour later, saying he wasn’t sure when he’d be coming home.
He was reported missing on Christmas Day and never seen alive again. But when his vehicle and cellphone were recovered in a store parking lot later that day, police soon found their way, through the app, to killer Mark Latunski’s home.
Bacon’s murder was the subject of a 2023 episode of Interrogation Raw on A&E, “A Christmas Nightmare.” [Stream the episode in the A&E app.]
Who Is Mark Latunski?
On first blush, Latunski seemed normal—high-functioning, even. A chemist by trade, Latunski was a married father of four children who earned a salary in excess of $100,000 at the time of his divorce in 2013. After that separation, he remarried to a man, who expressed shock when talking to the press after Latunski’s arrest, saying, “I didn’t think that he would ever hurt me.”
But there were also signs of Latunski being unwell well prior to Bacon’s slaying.
He was diagnosed in 2010 and 2012 with “severe, recurrent and chronic major depression with psychotic features, adjustment disorder with depression and anxiety with paranoid schizophrenia, and borderline personality traits,” according to the Des Moines Register. And his ex-wife claimed when he failed to take his medication, he would watch “torture movies.”
Victor Petreca, a psychiatric nurse practitioner and assistant professor at Boston College, says it’s rare for these multiple, sometimes conflicting y diagnoses to occur in the same patient.
“It’s a very complex case that [psychiatrists] were clearly having a hard time nailing down,” Petreca tells A&E True Crime.
But once Bacon’s body was recovered, some of the past accusations against Latunski began to paint a clearer picture.
Latunski’s Other Kidnap Victims
On October 10, 2019—just two months before Bacon’s murder—48-year-old James Carlsen called 911, saying that he had escaped from Latunski’s basement after cutting himself free from his chains with a butcher knife. According to Carlsen, he had traveled from New York to Michigan to meet Latunski for sex.
The following month, one of Latunski’s neighbors said he encountered a man covered in blood on his front porch, saying “he wants to hurt me.” Latunski arrived shortly thereafter, as did the Michigan State Police, who tended to the bleeding man but made no arrests.
A spokesperson for the Michigan State Police declined to comment for this story.
The Discovery of Latunski’s Murder Victim
After Bacon didn’t show up on Christmas Day to spend time with his parents, a search went out. When the recovery of Bacon’s car, wallet and cellphone led investigators to the Grindr app (and subsequently to Latunski’s doorstep), the perpetrator let them in without complaint.
There, on December 27, they found Bacon’s dead mutilated body hanging upside down from Latunski’s ceiling.
Latunski freely admitted to investigators that he had stabbed Bacon to death and then castrated him and eaten from his remains.
Doug Corwin, the public defender for Shiawassee County who served as Latunski’s attorney, says Latunski suffered from severe delusions about his identity.
“He was claiming he was of royal family lineage,” Corwin tells A&E True Crime.
According to Corwin, he and Latunski spoke repeatedly in the time between his arrest and trial. Never, Corwin says, did he express remorse.
Insanity Defense
Latunski was charged with open murder—a charge used in some states, which is a combination of first-degree and second-degree murder, that allows a jury or judge to determine the appropriate degree of homicide—and mutilation of a body.
Latunski originally pleaded insanity. This was not, Corwin says, in the hopes of returning Latunski directly into society but rather to have him housed and treated at a “locked down hospital.”
After being found competent to stand trial, Latunski pleaded guilty to his crimes. He was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.
With regard to his level of mental illness, Petreca—who has researched cannibalism—is cautious to not pronounce a specific diagnosis for Latunski, who he has never met personally. But he says criminal cannibals are different from many other killers in the way they dismember their bodies.
“If someone has a major mental illness, disorders like major depression or psychotic disorders—they generally have an ‘aggressive style,'” Petreca says, viciously mutilating their victims in an “overkill” fit of rage. But cannibals tend to be more methodical.
“It’s more psychologically or psychosexually driven,” he says. “You may call it even foreplay. And it’s more organized.”
For his part, Corwin says he was shocked in providing criminal defense to Latunski.
“This was the oddest, and most shocking case I’ve ever worked on,” he says. So much so that it prompted Corwin to reconsider his work as a public defender. He ran unsuccessfully in the 2024 election for a Michigan judgeship.
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