Bianca Devins was a 17-year-old up-and-coming Instagram model when her follower Brandon Andrew Clark murdered her in a jealous rage on July 14, 2019 — then documented the entire crime on social media.
Kim DevinsBianca Devins, left, with her mother at her high school graduation in 2019.
In July 2019, 17-year-old Bianca Devins drove to a concert in New York City with her “friend” Brandon Andrew Clark — but she never came home. Consumed with jealousy, Clark had meticulously planned Devins’ murder. He filmed her death, photographed her body, and tried to take his own life when police arrived on the scene.
Before his attempted suicide, however, Clark posted the photos of the murder online — and they quickly went viral.
In the aftermath, Bianca Devins’ family was tortured with the images of her body that spread on social media, and Clark was celebrated online by the “incel” community for killing a woman who had rejected him.
This is the gruesome story of Bianca Devins’ murder at the hands of Brandon Andrew Clark.
Becoming An Internet ‘E-Girl’
Born on Oct. 2, 2001, Bianca Michelle Devins grew up in Utica, New York, a small city about four hours north of New York City. She loved the color pink and her cat, Belle, but she’d had a difficult childhood. According to a 2022 report by CBS News, Devins struggled with mental illness from a young age.
When she was nine years old, Devins started seeing a therapist for separation anxiety. At 13, she began struggling with depression. At 16, she was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder.
According to her mother, Kim, Bianca Devins also started spending more time online, where she “could just escape her own mental struggle.” She became what’s known as an “e-girl,” a sort of edgy internet aesthetic. Devins created different profiles on platforms like Tumblr, Snapchat, Instagram, Discord, and 4chan and began to build a modest following.
Online, Devins attracted a number of male followers, known as “orbiters,” according to a 2019 article from Rolling Stone. She met at least one of them in person, which led to years of her running away from home and receiving mental health treatment at different institutions.
Instagram/Bianca DevinsA photo of Bianca Devins from her Instagram page. She had about 2,000 followers on Instagram and was active on other social platforms as well.
Despite these tumultuous years, things had started to settle down for Bianca Devins and her family by the time she was a senior in high school. Then, in the spring of 2019, she met another “orbiter” named Brandon Andrew Clark.
The Murder Of Bianca Devins By Brandon Andrew Clark
Brandon Andrew Clark and Bianca Devins met on Instagram in 2019 and became fast friends. They briefly dated, but Bianca was about to go to college and wasn’t interested in a relationship. Though Clark continued to refer to himself as her “boyfriend,” Kim Devins didn’t see him as much of a threat.
“When Brandon came around, and he came around pretty often, he just looked like a goofy, nerdy, boy next door,” she recalled to CBS News.
In fact, Kim Devins was glad that Clark would accompany her daughter to a Nicole Dollanganger concert in New York City in July. It was the first time that the 17-year-old would be going to a concert by herself, and her mother “took a little comfort in knowing that she would be with Brandon ’cause I trusted him.”
Kim DevinsBianca Devins and Brandon Andrew Clark at her high school graduation party in 2019.
But Clark, then 21 years old, had already started to plot Devins’ murder. According to CBS News, he’d made a “to-do” list and googled questions like “how to choke someone out?” and “how do you hit the carotid artery to kill someone?” After the concert on July 13, 2019, he put his chilling plan into action.
Resentful that Devins refused to be with him and enraged that she’d kissed another man at the concert, Clark drove her to a dead-end road near her house. As Devins slept, he clipped a camera to the front vent of the car and hid a knife beside his seat.
Then, Clark woke Devins up and confronted her about the kiss. When she apologized, Clark told her, “Sorry is not enough.” When she asked when he was going to take her home, Clark grabbed the knife — and killed her.
After murdering Bianca Devins, Clark set the scene as he had apparently planned. He played a song on repeat, “Test Drive” by Joji, which is about a relationship in which one person is more invested than the other. He spray-painted “May you never forget me” on the ground — a reference to a series of dark Japanese comic books that he and Devins had read together — and at 6:03 a.m. on July 14, he posted a disturbing image to Devins’ Discord.
“Sorry f—kers,” the message read, along with a gory photo of Devins’ body, “you’re gonna have to find somebody else to orbit.”
‘Psychological Terrorism’: How Bianca Devins’ Murder Spread Online
As the images of Devins’ body went viral on social media, the Utica Police Department started to receive a number of concerned calls about the pictures from all over the country. Then, they got a call from Clark himself. He told them where he was and added: “I have to do the suicide part of the murder-suicide.”
By the time officers got to the scene, Clark had posted several more photos of Devins’ body online — some of which had already been shared with Devins’ family before police had a chance to notify them. He even tried to post a picture of his suicide attempt. As an officer approached, Clark slashed himself with a knife, took a selfie, and posted it to his Instagram story with the caption: “Ashes to ashes.”
Oneida County Sheriff’s OfficeBrandon Andrew Clark tried to slash his own throat to make the murder of Bianca Devins a murder-suicide, but he survived.
Clark survived. But grisly images of Bianca Devins continued to spread.
The hashtag #ripbianca first emerged on Twitter, and images of her body were shared from Discord to Instagram to TikTok to Snapchat. Some made her murder into cruel memes. One user posted a poll about whether or not Devins deserved to die, with one response being “HELL YES” and the other being “No (I am a simp).” Others continued to share the image of Devins’ body with her family, including her younger sister. Someone even posted it as a comment on her mother’s Facebook page.
“They were sent to me. They were sent to various family members that were close to Bianca,” Kim Devins told CBS News. “It’s horrifying. It’s traumatizing to see people saying that your daughter, your, you know, this is my baby, that she deserved such a cruel end to her life.”
This, experts said, is a form of “psychological terrorism.” And Kim Devins told Rolling Stone that the response from social platforms like Instagram was “inadequate.” The images stayed up for weeks. When they were removed, they were quickly replaced with others.
“[The social platforms are] overstating what they did and how fast they had it taken down,” Kim Devins told CBS News.
A few weeks after Bianca Devins’ death, her family arranged her funeral. There, they remembered her as a girl with a bright smile who loved the color pink and her cat. Having struggled with mental health issues herself, she had planned to go to college and study psychology so she could help others.
Devins FamilyImages of Bianca Devins’ body spread quickly online. Her mother says that the response of social platforms like Instagram was “inadequate.”
All the while, photos of her continued to spread. And her killer prepared to go to trial.
Where Is Brandon Andrew Clark Today?
In February 2020, Brandon Andrew Clark pleaded guilty to murdering Bianca Devins. Though he said he wanted to spare Devins’ family from seeing images and video of her death at trial, he later tried to switch his plea to “not guilty.” Kim Devins thinks he wanted the added publicity of a trial.
However, his request was denied. On March 16, 2021, he was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.
“I hate myself for what I did,” Clark said at his sentencing hearing. “I am so sorry that I put everyone through this. I’m so sorry that I put Bianca through this. I — I wish I could apologize to her and just apologize and apologize and take it back, but…”
YouTubeKim Devins speaking at Clark’s sentencing hearing. She’s since campaigned to change the internet laws that allowed photos of her daughter’s body to spread online.
Bianca Devins’ family can’t do much about Clark’s sentence, which leaves open the possibility that he’ll be released from prison when he’s in his 40s. But they can try to change internet laws.
According to a 2023 article in the Independent, Kim Devins hopes that no other family will ever have to experience what happened to her daughter. She’s campaigned for Section 230 to be overturned, an act which established that social platforms aren’t responsible for what’s published on them. And she pushed for the passage of Bianca’s Law, which made sharing graphic images of crime victims on the internet illegal in New York. It passed in December 2022.
“I guess I just had an immediate mother’s instinct of, like, we need to fix this,” Kim Devins told the Independent. “And my first thought is I need to protect my daughter’s dignity. She was being exploited all over the internet after her death. And that just wasn’t okay with me.”
After reading about the murder of Bianca Devins by Brandon Andrew Clark, discover the story of 16-year-old Erin Caffey, who orchestrated the 2008 murder of her entire family. Or, see how 12-year-old Shanda Sharer was gruesomely murdered by a group of older teenage girls in 1992.
