17-Year-Old Instagram Model Bianca Devins Was Murdered By One Of Her Followers — Then He Posted The Photos Online

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.

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 her murder. He filmed Bianca’s death, photographed her body, and tried to die by suicide.

In the aftermath, Bianca Devins’ family was tortured with images of her body which 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 by 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 five hours north of New York City by car. She loved the color pink and her cat, Belle, but had a difficult childhood. According to CBS News, she started to struggle with mental illness at a young age.

At the age of nine, Bianca started seeing a therapist for separation anxiety. At thirteen, she started struggling with depression. At sixteen, Bianca was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder.

According to her mother, Kim, Bianca 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 Internet aesthetic. Bianca created different profiles on platforms like Tumblr, Snapchat, Instagram, Discord, and 4chan and began to build a modest following.

Online, Bianca attracted a number of male followers, known as “orbiters,” according to a 2019 article from Rolling Stone. Bianca met at least one of them in person, which led to years of her running away from home and receiving serious mental health treatment at different institutions.

InstagramA 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. 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 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 was glad that Clark would go with Bianca to a Nicole Dollanganger concert in New York City in July. It was the first time that Bianca went to a concert by herself, and Kim “took a little comfort in knowing that she would be with Brandon ’cause I trusted him.”

Kim DevinsBianca Devins and Brandon Andrew Clark at Bianca’s graduation party.

But Clark, then 21 years old, had already started to plot Bianca’s 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, he put his plan into action.

Resentful that Bianco 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 Bianca slept in the back seat, he clipped a camera to the front vent of the car and then hid a knife on the right side of the car.

Then, Clark woke Bianca up and confronted her about the kiss. When she apologized, Clark told her, “Sorry is not enough.” When Bianca 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 where 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 Bianca had read together — and at 6:03 a.m., he posted a disturbing image to Bianca’s Discord.

“Sorry fuckers,” the message read, along with a gory photo of Bianca’s body, “you’re gonna have to find somebody else to orbit.”

‘Psychological Terrorism’: How Bianca Devin’s Murder Spread Online

As images of Bianca’s body spread online, the Utica Police Department started to receive a number of concerned calls about the picture from all over the country. Then, they got a call from Clark. He told them where he was and added: “I have to do the suicide part of the murder-suicide.”

By the time police got to the scene, Clark had posted several more photos of Bianca’s body online — some of which had been shared with Bianca’s family. 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 social media 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 images of Bianca Devins continued to spread.

The hashtag #ripbianca first emerged on Twitter, and images of her body spread from Discord to Instagram to TikTok to Snapchat. Some made her murder into cruel memes. One user posted a poll about whether or not Bianca 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 Bianca’s body with her family, including her younger sister. One 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 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 told CBS News.

A few weeks after her death, Bianca Devins’s family arranged her funeral. There, they remembered her as a girl with a bright smile who loved the color pink and her cat, Belle. Having struggled with mental health issues herself, she 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, images 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 Bianca’s 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.

“I hate myself for what I did,” Clark said at his sentencing. “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 trial. She’s since campaigned to change the Internet laws that allowed 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 in his 40s. But they can try to change the Internet.

According to The Independent, Kim Devins hopes that what happened to Bianca and their family can never again to anyone else. She’s campaigned for Section 230 to be overturned, 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.