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Please be warned that this case discusses the mutilation of a body as well as cannibalism.
Christmas can be a magical time of the year when the world feels more hopeful & more generous than it usually does, even if just for a little while. But for some, it can be a painful time of year when loneliness & loss is amplified in the midst of everyone else’s togetherness. For 25-year-old hairstylist, Kevin Bacon, Christmas 2019 brought an unimaginable level of pain that led to his shocking murder.
Kevin Bacon was a college student living in Swartz Creek, Michigan, about 70 miles northwest of Detroit. When Kevin didn’t show up for Christmas Day brunch with his family as planned, they immediately knew that something was wrong. Rather than breaking bread together & making new memories as they all expected, Kevin had tragically died a horrific death & his body was later found murdered & mutilated.
Kevin Richard Bacon was born on November 28, 1994 in Lansing, Michigan to parents Karl & Pamela Bacon. He had an older sister by 13 months named Jennifer, who remembers her brother as a generous man who had a passion for animals, especially his cats, Smokey & Fuzzy. He was also the person who introduced her to Taylor Swift.
Not only was Kevin Jennifer’s younger brother, but after she was diagnosed with motor skills dyspraxia, a neurodevelopmental condition that impairs her motor skills & movement, he also became her advocate.
Jennifer sometimes struggled with walking & as a result, she often fell. While some who were cruel made fun of her condition, Kevin was always outspoken against these people. He also made sure to include her in things he was doing.
According to his obituary, Kevin was a graduate of Swartz Creek High School & later Sharp’s Hair Academy in Grand Blanc. At the time of his death, he was working as a hairstylist at Uniquely U Salon in Swartz Creek while attending the University of Michigan – Flint where he was studying psychology.
Kevin was very active on campus, working as a peer educator at the Center for Gender & Sexuality. He was a proud member of the LGBTQ+ community & according to Kevin’s classmate, Marcus Williams, Kevin was always an inspiration to others on campus. He gave people the confidence to truly be themselves. He never shied away from discussing important topics such as sexual violence prevention.
According to Michelle Myers, Kevin’s roommate & close friend, he never hesitated to put the needs of others before his own & he was a caring soul. After graduation, he hoped to move to a bigger city, possibly Chicago.
It was highly out of character when Kevin failed to show up for brunch with his family on Christmas Day 2019. When they were unable to reach him moving forward, his parents reported him missing that evening. They told authorities that they feared something was terribly wrong.
According to Michelle, Kevin’s roommate, she last saw him one day earlier at about 5:23 pm on Christmas Eve. Footage from their doorbell camera depicted him leaving their home & never coming back.
About 45 minutes later, he texted Michelle at about 6:12 pm, to let her know that he’d met someone on a dating app & since he was having fun, he might not make it home that night.
Friends & family continued to call his phone over & over as they were all wracked with worry over where he could be. They hoped & prayed he would just pick up the phone & offer an explanation, but that sadly never happened.
Detectives listed Kevin as a missing person & put out a broadcast for him. Within the hour, they were notified that his family had found his white Saturn sedan in the parking lot of a Family Dollar store in Clayton Township, near Swartz & Flint, less than five miles from his home.
Investigators not only found everything he’d left his house with on Christmas Eve inside the car, including his cellphone, wallet, ID & cash, but they also found the clothing he’d been wearing. According to Michelle, since he hadn’t brought a change of clothes with him when he left, he would have been either unclothed or wearing someone else’s clothing at that point.
Kevin’s phone had been powered off by 6:20 pm on Christmas Eve, only eight minutes after he texted Michelle. She indicated that it was very unusual for him to turn his phone off when he was out. It was also unlike him to be without his car when he was meeting someone from a dating app since he wanted the freedom to come & go as he wished. Right from the start, she felt that he wasn’t safe & was likely trapped somewhere.
On Friday, December 27, when Kevin had been missing for three days, the Metro Police Authority of Genesee County reached out to the Michigan State Police for their assistance.
After Kevin’s phone was given to the Michigan State Police Computer Crimes Lab, they saw that he utilized various dating apps to meet men including, Grindr, Tinder & Scruff.
There was a chat log on Grindr, which is a dating app for the LGBTQ+ community, that indicated Kevin had been chatting with a man prior to his disappearance. They were setting up a date so they could have a sexual encounter. When they discussed where they were going to meet, the man suggested that he pick Kevin up at a strip mall on the west side of town & they go back to his house together.
In a tragic twist of irony, Kevin asked the man if he would keep him safe & he responded, You will see that I am concerned about your safety.
Investigators determined that the man he’d been chatting with was 50-year-old Mark Latunski, a former chemist & married father of four. At the time of his divorce from his wife in 2013, he’d been making more than $100,000 per year working as a chemist. After that divorce, he remarried a man three years later who he was estranged from at the time of Kevin’s disappearance.
Mark’s husband, Jamie Arnold, told the media that he separated from Mark since he could no longer tolerate his habit of bringing strangers back to their home for sex.
He had also begun acting strangely & saying things that didn’t make sense, once telling him that their neighbor was polluting their water. He claimed that neither his biological family nor his children were his actual family & that he could no longer bathe in the house because it was toxic.
Jaime indicated that he had been unaware of his husband’s mental health history until he was arrested for failing to pay his ex-wife child support in July 2019, a time when he spent four days in jail. The following month, in August 2019, Emily Latunski filed a motion to suspend her ex-husband’s parental rights since she believed he hadn’t been taking his medication after he accused her & her brother of poisoning the water supply.
Mark was arrested when he showed up for a child custody hearing on December 10, 2019, two weeks before Kevin’s murder, but he was released the following day.
Jamie last saw Mark on Christmas Day, one day after Kevin was last seen. He had some friends over at his home & since he didn’t want Mark to be alone for the holiday, he invited him as well. He told authorities that during his visit, he seemed to be acting normal.
Investigators came to learn that Mark was linked to a gay escort site, Rent.Men where he attached nude photos of himself under the name of his alias, Olykos.
When they ran a background check on him, his name came up in connection to two recent police reports from the last three months. According to the reports, he invited two different men to his home in October & November 2019, each of which had called 911 in a state of panic.
On October 10, 2019, a 48-year-old man called 911 after he scaled a fence, saying that he had escaped from Mark’s basement after he cut himself free from his chains with a butcher knife. He’d traveled from Michigan from his home in New York to meet Mark for sex.
A little over a month later, on November 25, 2019, the Monday before Thanksgiving, a 29-year-old male caller told the dispatcher that he was trying to get away from a creepy guy who had him chained up in his basement. He made the call while he was shoeless, wearing only a leather kilt, fleeing down a road that he wasn’t familiar with.
He began pounding on Mark’s neighbor’s door, screaming for help at about 4 pm. When Michael Parks opened his door, he found the man with his face covered with a rag while he held a phone to his ear. He was bleeding from his mouth, covered in blood, standing on his front porch yelling, Help me! Help me! He’s after me. Despite the 40 degree temperatures, he wore nothing but a leather kilt while he told Michael that he had been chained up in Mark’s basement.
Mark arrived in his SUV shortly thereafter, also wearing nothing but a leather kilt. Before the Michigan State Police arrived, Mark drove back to his own home a few doors down. Officers tended to the bleeding man while Mark claimed he’d only chased him because he wanted his $300 leather kilt back.
Both men who had called 911 & spoken with police in regards to these incidents, had similar stories. They had each been at Mark’s house for a sexual encounter that involved role playing, but things had gotten so intense that they fled from his home.
Both men chose not to press charges against Mark & the man in October ended up spending several more days with him. The man in November agreed that the activity had been consensual & he also returned Mark’s kilt.
Based on Kevin’s Grindr app, he apparently went over to Mark’s house on his own accord after they had conversations about the things they wanted to happen while they were together during a sexual encounter.
At 12:48 am on Saturday, December 28, 2019, four days after Kevin was last seen, Michigan State Police Sergeant Terry Berdan received a call for assistance from the Clayton Township Police Department. They were on their way to Mark’s home at 703 West Tyrell Road in Morrice, Michigan for a welfare check for Kevin.
As they pulled up to the home, the porch light was on & the roofline was adorned with red & green Christmas lights. After state police troopers knocked on the door & Mark answered, they were met with a man with a very long scraggy beard. After they explained that they were there because Kevin Bacon was missing, Mark agreed to allow them to come inside to search the home. What officers ended up finding will no doubt be images that will forever haunt their minds.
Some officers stayed on the main level with Mark, who seemed calm & collected. His Christmas tree was still cheerfully decorated & lit for the holidays as other officers began to make their way through the house. They found nothing of concern as they searched the second story, but as they walked down the stairs to the unfinished basement, they got the shock of their lives.
Kevin was naked & hanging upside down from his feet from a wooden beam on the ceiling with an attached O-ring. The room where he was found was described as a secret room in his basement.
As Mark was placed in handcuffs he said, you’re making a mistake. He was immediately taken into custody & as he sat in the back of the patrol car, he let out an evil chuckle, sometimes maniacally laughing while he was alone in the car.
He asked the officer who was transporting him to the police station if his dog would be taken care of. Although he indicated that he knew why he was detained, he wondered how he would get back home after speaking with a detective. As he drove to the station with two officers, he was exceptionally calm & casual, talking about how precious his dog was, helping the officers with directions back to the main road.
Once in an interview room, he said that his name, Mark David Latunski, was actually a stolen identity, but he wasn’t sure what happened to the true Mark David Latunski. He went on to say that his preferred name was Olykos.
He admitted that he had been chatting with Kevin & they met for the first time on Christmas Eve when he picked him up in Swartz Creek. While they were still in the parking lot of Family Dollar, Mark sat in the front seat while Kevin changed into what he described as the gear he’d selected for his fetish fantasy in the back seat.
He said that Kevin was wearing handcuffs, earmuffs & blinders as well as leather wrist & ankle straps. He left the clothing he previously wore in his car before they drove the 24 miles west together to Mark’s house in Benington Township.
The detectives asked him who the man was who they found hanging in his basement & he acknowledged that it was Kevin Bacon. He said he had never done something like this before, but when they got back to his house, they chatted for a while & Kevin described the things he wanted to do before they made their agreement.
In the agreement, Mark said he was going to make Kevin’s body disappear. He would turn his body into something that would produce life, such as turning his bones into bone meal that could grow tulips for his family.
It was clear to detectives that he was suggesting that Kevin wanted to die in an assisted suicide. He claimed that after Kevin laid down in his basement, he told Mark that he was ready, but Mark worried that he might do something that would cause Kevin to suffer.
In the end, he felt it would be best to stab the knife through Kevin’s spine. When Kevin reassured him that he was ready, Mark said he stabbed him in the back with the knife. He claimed that Kevin was still conscious at this point & felt no pain at that moment. When he did complain about pain, Mark said he slit Kevin’s throat.
He then wrapped a rope around his ankles & hung him from the rafters. He claimed that he did what he agreed to. Since it was the new moon, he used the knife to remove Kevin’s testicles before he took them upstairs & ate them, even describing how he prepared them. He told the detectives that he planned to use his dehydrator to turn Kevin’s remains into jerky.
The room in question where Kevin’s body was found was concealed behind a sliding barn door at the far end of the room that only locked from the outside. There was an open trap door directly beneath his body that exposed sand & dirt that held a dried pool of blood. Officers were able to identify Kevin based on his distinctive tattoos.
Mark went on to say that he used a hunter’s knife with a black & gray handle. After Kevin was deceased, he cleaned the weapon & put it in an upstairs dresser drawer. When officers back at Mark’s home found it exactly where he said it would be, it still had dried blood on it.
Mark felt he had done nothing wrong, telling detectives that it had been an honorable death. Afterwards, he texted a friend, I killed Kevin Bacon. Kevin Bacon is my hero.
He showed zero remorse whatsoever, maintaining that what he had done was honorable. The detective couldn’t help but wonder if Kevin had been his only victim, especially factoring in the two 911 calls that had come through in the two previous months from frantic men fleeing from his house. However, Mark maintained that he had never done something like this before.
In the months following, Michigan police reached out to the FBI, who ultimately came to the belief that he had likely not killed before, but had he not been caught, he absolutely had the capacity to harm others.
After the interview, he was taken to the Shiawassee County Jail where he was initially charged with one count of open murder & one count of disinterment & mutilation of a dead body in Kevin’s death. Open murder is a broad, umbrella accusation used in Michigan & Nevada where the specific degree of homicide has yet to be finalized.
During his arraignment, he told the court that his name was Edgar Thomas Hill & he was of Welsh nobility.
There were definite signs that Mark had been mentally unwell prior to Kevin’s murder as in 2010 & 2012 he was diagnosed with severe, recurrent & chronic major depression with psychotic features, adjustment disorder with depression & anxiety with paranoid schizophrenia as well as borderline personality traits.
Court records indicate that Mark was known to stop taking his medication & according to his ex-wife, when he didn’t take it, he would watch torture movies.
In 2013, he was charged with custodial kidnapping after he took two of his four children without permission. At that time, he was deemed incompetent to stand trial & underwent eight months of outpatient treatment before being found fit for trial in January 2015. These charges were dismissed a few weeks later at the request of his ex-wife.
In the months leading up to Kevin’s murder, Jamie Arnold, who married Mark in December 2016, said that Mark had gotten increasingly delusional. He was fired from his longtime job as a chemist in February 2019 when he accused his employers of contaminating the products he was making.
For Kevin’s murder, Mark initially pleaded insanity & according to his public defender, Doug Corwin, he was suffering from severe delusions about his identity, claiming he was of royal lineage. However, Kevin’s parents believe he may have been trying to use his mental health problems to escape justice.
He was initially deemed incompetent to stand trial, but was deemed restored to competency in late 2020.
Nearly two years after Kevin’s murder, at his attorney’s advice, 52-year-old Mark pleaded guilty to all charges on September 22, 2022 before a degree hearing when the judge ruled it first-degree murder the following month in October 2022.
On December 15, 2022, he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for first-degree murder with a concurrent sentence of 11-20 years for the dismemberment & mutilation of a body.
In November 2024, five years after her brother’s murder, Jennifer Bacon self-published the book, The Life of Kevin Bacon with the goal of people getting to know how he shined as a person rather than how he died.
After Kevin’s death garnered national headlines, his case caught the attention of several celebrities, including actor Kevin Bacon. He posted a picture of Kevin on his Instagram page on December 30, 2019, writing that, for obvious reasons, he was thinking of the young man’s family & friends. He went on to write, His life was taken from him much too soon. His love was hair dressing. I bet he would have done a great job on this mess on my head. RIP KB.
A friend of Kevin’s posted on Facebook that she used to joke around with her friends about whether the famous Kevin Bacon knew their Kevin Bacon. Seeing his post on Instagram was oddly comforting for her.
After learning that Kevin was a fan, Jeffree Star, who is a makeup artist & founder of Jeffree Star Cosmetics, donated $20,000 to Kevin’s family through a GoFundMe page set up by his sister to cover his funeral services. He also posted to social media, encouraging others to help his family through this horrible time.
Karl Bacon, Kevin’s father, believes that his son was not at all prepared for what awaited him when he arrived at Mark Latunski’s home on Christmas Eve. The grieving father said that throughout his short life, Kevin was able to touch so many lives as he deeply cherished those that he loved & fought for what was right.
Kevin was notorious for making the people around him feel seen. He believed deeply in individuality, in people being honest about who they are, embracing what made them different & living without apology. There is something especially cruel about the fact that someone who encouraged others to celebrate their true selves had his own future stolen from him so violently.
Kevin’s legacy is not the man who killed him. His legacy is the way he made people feel, the way he encouraged others to be authentic & the way he reminded people that being different wasn’t something to hide, but instead, something to own & celebrate.
As we close Kevin’s story, maybe the best way to honor his life is to carry that message forward & remind those in our lives to be yourself fully, loudly & honestly.
References:
- Sharp Funeral Homes: Kevin Bacon
- Fox 66: U of M – Flint has celebration in honor of murder victim Kevin Bacon’s life
- Fox 23: Married father of 4 accused of killing, cannibalizing Grindr date on Christmas Eve
- Facebook: Friends Community Shiawassee breaking news
- Meredith Mochel: What does an open murder charge mean?
- YouTube: Crime 360: First date goes tragically wrong: A Christmas nightmare (S2, E2) – Interrogation Raw
- WNEM 5: ‘The Life of Kevin Bacon’: Sister publishes book in memoriam of brother who was murdered
- A&E: The cannibal killer who met his victim on Grindr on Christmas Eve
- WILX 10: MSP: Bacon’s cell phone gave clues on where to find body
- Oxygen True Crime: Michigan man accused of Christmas cannibalism pleads guilty to murder
