BIG BEAN LAKE, CALIFORNIA — Heath Smalley is a self-described “hardcore, super-duper geek” about two things, Game of Thrones and the Marvel Cinematic universe. After the events of this weekend, Smalley is also an incarcerated man, facing more than 700 individual counts of murder.
“I’m sorry, but I put it out on ALL my social media accounts — you spoil GoT or Endgame for me, and I will murder you,” Smalley told us in a telephone interview conducting with his attorney present. “But no one took me at my word I guess, because my friend Billy decided he was going to troll me, and he posted Thrones spoilers on my damn Facebook post telling people not to spoil Thrones or Endgame! What the hell other choice did I have but to murder him?”
Heath didn’t stop at just murdering Billy, though. Over the course of the next two days, he began to systematically kill every one of his friends, his family members, and all the residents of his small California mountain. None of them spoiled either Game of Thrones or Avengers: Endgame for him, but he said he “simply could not take the risk” that one of them would do what Billy did. So while he dismembered and prepared a shallow, but respectful grave for his body, Heath decided he had to take matters into his own hands and insulate himself from spoilers in an even more dramatic, and holistic manner.
“I couldn’t just kill Billy. I had to kill his entire family, just in case a) they knew I killed Billy but, more importantly, two, in case they wanted to spoil GoT for me,” Smalley told us. “So, that’s the next thing I did. I killed all his family, extended family too. You know, just to be on the safe side. I’m sorry, but literally the worst thing you can do in a person’s life is spoil a piece of fiction for them, especially if you’re both middle-aged adults with middle-aged adult things to worry about. So, regrets? I have none.”
It quickly hit Heath, though, that there were a lot more people who could spoil moments from the Marvel movie or Game of Thrones for him. So, he set himself to killing more people, “just to be on the safe side.”
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“I killed my family, all of them. Some of them had seen Avengers before I could, so I was like, yeah, gotta do them too,” Smalley said. “Then, I killed the rest of my friends. You’ve got to. What if one of them spoiled something on accident, because they didn’t realize I hadn’t seen them yet, and they just casually drop something in conversation that I have to murder them for? I’m sorry, but it seemed much more humane to pre-murder them, just to be on the safe side.”
But soon, Heath found that he was going to have to widen the circle of victims even further.
“There was an entire town full of people who might have seen them before I did. I had to kill them. All of them. I take being spoiler free very seriously,” Heath explained. “Maybe it’s geeky, but it’s my life.”
Heath has “absolutely zero regrets” about murdering dozens of people, because he says that “some sins are worse than others.”
“Maybe you’re mad at me for murdering so many people, maybe you’re not. But this is America, and I have a right to keep plot points secret until I see them,” Smalley said. “Besides, what’s worse, I ask you: killing everyone around you for a few square miles, or telling someone a piece of fictional information that will become common knowledge within a few weeks anyway?”
Once he’d murdered everyone, Heath took himself to the local duoplex and watched Avengers: Endgame, then went home and queued up Game of Thrones’ latest episode on HBO. After he’d watched them both, he was so excited he wrote a four-thousand word essay describing the plots of both in great, exquisite, painstaking detail.
“I figured that once I saw it, that meant I was good to post about it,” Smalley says. “Hey, it’s not my fault if people hadn’t seen it yet. Lighten up, everyone!”
Heath was arrested hours after his review posted. He’s currently awaiting trial.
Writer/comedian James Schlarmann is the founder of The Political Garbage Chute and his work has been featured on The Huffington Post. You can follow James on Facebook and Instagram, but not Twitter because he has a potty mouth.
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