The Exploitation of Bianca Devins: How Her Life & Death Played Out on the Internet (Part 1)

Background:

Bianca Michelle Devins was born on 10/2/2001 in Utica, NY, an upstate community of about 60,000. This area is known for college hockey, a large Italian population, and a higher than average crime rate.
She was very close with her mother, Kim, who was only 17 when she got pregnant with Bianca. Her father, Mike, was Kim’s boyfriend her junior year in high school.
Bianca was big sister to her sister Olivia, who was born 2 years later.
The relationship between Bianca’s parents Mike & Kim didn’t last, even after they married. Their relationship was described as emotionally abusive.
Kim & Mike split up for good, after a couple temporary separations, in 2015, and Bianca did not see much of her father afterwards.
As a result, Bianca did suffer from separation anxiety when she was about 8 yrs old. Although, on the flip side her relationship with her mother strengthened.
By the time Bianca was middle-school aged, she began showing signs of mental illness.

Bianca Devins (Source: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/bianca-devins-viral-death-murder-926823/)

Teen Years:

Whereas Bianca used to be viewed as popular in school, she began to retreat, was less engaged in school, and only seemed to trust a select few of her friends.
She was interested in drawing, anime art, would sing on the Japanese app Vocaloid. But none of these things seemed to help with the issues she had going on.
Her mother took her to a number of mental health specialists, but none seemed to have the answers needed to combat Bianca’s mood and seclusion.
Her behavior was becoming more & more erratic.
Kim, after her divorce from Bianca’s father could no longer afford the tuition for Bianca’s school, so add to all her other feelings, Bianca had to get adjusted to a new school.
Bianca Devins with her family. (Source: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/bianca-devins-viral-death-murder-926823/)

Social Adjustment:

Bianca was tall, pale, lanky, short hair, standing 5’10”. This was not the stereotypical look for Utica teen females. Many were 5’4” – 5’5”, Italian olive skin, with long brown hair.
Bianca was changing, not just her physical appearance, that included cutting and dyeing it different exotic colors. But, she began lying about insignificant things, like her ethnicity, religious affiliation, and that she was autistic.
She began dating a guy by the name of Derek Ward, in her freshman year. He was described as “a soft-spoken, tattooed Robert Pattinson look-alike”. They took comfort in one another, and were essentially each other’s therapists.

Bianca Devins. (Source: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bianca-devins-murder-violent-images-psychological-terrorism-48-hours/)

Friends and Relationships:

Their relationship wouldn’t last, as they would often argue, with Bianca accusing him of cheating on her, according to Derek w/o basis. In fact, Bianca decided to “ghost” him and sometimes her friends, for what could be weeks at a time.
Bianca suffered from panic attacks, that would occur randomly, sometimes before or even during school, and because of them, she would miss classes often.
Bianca recognized her behavior and for this reason she didn’t want to leave her house.
Bianca’s mom, Kim, decided it was best if she enrolled Bianca in a home education program halfway thru her sophomore year.

Bianca Devins (Source: https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/justice-for-bianca-man-accused-of-brutally-murdering-bianca-devins-pleads-not-guilty/)

Introduction to the online world:

Now although this helped academically, it also provided Bianca with the means by which to isolate herself from people “IRL” – or, in real life.
Bianca became fascinated with different social media outlets, the online communities of people that existed there, and how on each platform she could be whomever she wanted to be.
She was either on her phone or her computer constantly. She created different personas on: Instagram, Discord, 4chan, Tumblr, and Snapchat just to name a few.
On Insta, she was “escty” and “beegtfo”, both had very different personas.

Bianca Devins’ Instagrams (Sources: https://www.instagram.com/escty/ –
https://www.instagram.com/beegtfo/)

(Source: https://www.instagram.com/oxiecontin/)

Online personalities:

Another handle on Instagram was “Oxiecontin”, her version of the controlled substance Oxycontin. Used as a narcotic, Oxycontin, or Oxy for short, numbs pain for an extended period of time.
Under this persona, her pain was evident. Her posts are more dark, shrouded in black. In one pic she posted there’s blood in a sink. In another, her knee and leg appear bandaged and scraped. She posts about being hospitalized, which goes back to suffering from mental illness.
In 2018, Bianca was properly diagnosed as having Borderline Personality Disorder. (1)
She took medication to help with the emotional instability, and would sometimes need to be hospitalized when her behavior became too unstable.
It’s not surprising, given the diagnosis of having BPD, that Bianca would “test the waters” with different online personalities, to see how people would respond to them.

UwU pic (Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uwu)

Online terminology:

In addition to the few Insta personalities I mentioned, Bianca was “switchblades” on Tumblr, “virgovenus” on Snapchat, “bia” on Discord, and on 4chan, she was “Oxy”. (Bia or bee is what her friends and family would call her)
Bianca became known as an “e-girl” or UwU girl, and had many followers known as “orbiters”. An orbiter is a person who follows an e-girl with the hopes of one day meeting up and having sex with her. They will often send gifts, money, and drugs, and at the very least want to be the central focus of that e-girl’s attention.
Now remember, Bianca, was a sophomore in high school, more or less about 15 years old, when she is creating these personalities and attracting the attention, be it positive or negative from these guys, many of whom are many years older than her.
Some guys, known as “incels”, which stands for “involuntarily celebate”, take it upon themselves to try to tear down, threaten, or humiliate e-girls, as they know they never have any hope of ever being able to hook up with them.
Some will go so far as “doxxing” or “swatting” another person because they believe that person has wronged them in some way.

Online Relationship:

In 2017, when she was 15, Bianca met a man, who was 18 and lived in Long Island. He was an orbiter, who she met on 4chan’s /soc/ board. Within a few weeks, their online relationship moved offline, and became sexual. Bianca wanted him to be her boyfriend.
This man, who wanted to remain anonymous for obvious legal reasons, suffered from mental illness as well. He was diagnosed as bipolar and had substance abuse issues. When their relationship grew too toxic, and they broke up, he allegedly stalked Bianca. He doxxed her by posting sexually inappropriate content on Discord, showing the two of them together. Only he didn’t bank on Bianca showing it to her mother, and Kim calling the cops, and reporting him for it, since Bianca was a minor.
He became suicidal and Bianca didn’t want to cooperate with the investigation. In fact, between Aug. 2017 and June 2018, Bianca ran away 3 times to be with him, and Kim had to report her as a runaway to the police.
When asked why he thought Bianca kept coming back to him, in a Rolling Stone interview, he said “She was very lonely, and she didn’t really have anybody at the time. I was like the only option, lesser of two evils. She could be alone or be with me.”

Out of Control:

After finally returning home, Bianca continued to spiral out of control. Fearing for her life, and after Bianca told her therapist she had thoughts of jumping off the roof of a parking garage, Kim had Bianca placed into a psychiatric facility in Utica, called Pinefield. Bianca would be there for the next month.
Unfortunately, as soon as Bianca was released, she went right back to her ex-boyfriend in Long Island. Feeling like she had no other option, Kim went to the court and obtained a PINS, or Persons In Need of Supervision hold on Bianca, and with it came an ankle monitor and house arrest.
Even this wasn’t enough to keep Bianca home, as she cut the monitor and once again went back to her ex. This was in June of 2018.
By October of 2018, Kim decided she could no longer control Bianca, and placed her into a residential facility called, St. Anne’s in NY’s state capital of Albany.
According to Kim, Bianca flourished at St. Anne’s. A new form of therapy was being used to combat Bianca’s suicidal tendencies, rash decisions, and self-destructive behaviors. This approach was CBT, better known as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.

Bianca Devins artwork. (Source: https://www.syracuse.com/crime/2019/12/bianca-devins-murder-i-saw-the-internet-worlds-heart-and-evil-mother-reveals-exclusive.html)

A New Beginning?

In February of 2019, Bianca returned home, went back to Proctor High School and graduated, receiving her high school diploma. Bianca decided she was going to attend Mohawk Valley Community College in the fall, and wanted to study Psychology. This was due to many of the things she went through herself, and she wanted to be able to help others, as those that had helped her thru the darkness she experienced. She dreamed of moving to NYC to continue her education after graduating from community college.
Bianca was settling back in with her family, her old friends, and even her ex-boyfriend, no not that one. The one more age appropriate, Derek Ward. They were constantly “orbiting” one another, and they both seemed to be happy.
Spring of 2019, Bianca, now 18, met Brandon Clark, who was 21, on Instagram. He was from the Syracuse area, about an hour away. They seemed to share similar interests and hit it off. Brandon even met Kim, and the rest of Bianca’s family, and would come over for dinner and to hang out. He told them about how he grew up in the foster care system, and Kim said he seemed to think of himself as Bianca’s boyfriend. When Kim asked Bianca about this, she said he was not.