Dayton shooting suspect Connor Betts sang about raping and killing women in 'pornogrind' metal band

The suspected gunman in the Dayton mass shooting was a member of a “pornogrind” heavy metal band which sang about extreme sexual violence against women.

Connor Betts, who was shot dead by police after allegedly murdering nine people in just one minute near a city centre bar, was a singer for the group Menstrual Munchies. The band performed across America’s Midwest.

Although its output has been mostly removed from the internet after it emerged Betts was the suspected shooter, a reporter for Vice News found archived versions of the groups’ Bandcamp page.

Preteen Daughter P***y Slaughter, 6 Ways Of Female Butchery and Tilt Bench for Gynecology Or Total Rape are among the names of the albums produced by Menstrual Munchies.

All the artwork on the album covers depicts highly graphic, sexualised and bloody violence against women.

One of Mr Betts’ bandmates in Menstrual Munchies, Jesse Creekbaum, started removing all recordings of the group from the internet after he found out his friend was believed to be responsible for the massacre in Dayton.

“I feel s****y having let him be in the band, doing those lyrics,” the 25-year old told Vice News.

“Because I know, like, whereas I saw it as a joke — like, ‘Let’s play this and we’ll shock some people,’ and then the people that we know laugh — he didn’t see it as a joke. He was like, ‘F***, yeah. We’re gonna do this.’

“It’s like, Jesus Christ, how much of this was like real life for him?”

The revelations are not the first disturbing information to emerge about Mr Betts’s background.

Former high school classmates of the 24-year-old have said he was investigated while at school for having a “hit list” of pupils he wanted to kill and a “rape list” of girls he wanted to assault.

Although the motive for the shooting is not yet clear, Mr Betts’s sister Megan and her boyfriend were among the nine people killed in the attack.

Social media posts by Mr Betts, which have since been deleted, appear to show he identified as an anti-fascist, but another extreme metal band, Neckbeard Deathcamp, who had come across him before, said he was not a “progressive”.

“I DON’T KNOW IF I WOULD USE THE TERM LEFTIST TO DESIGNATE ONE OF THE DUDES IN MENSTRUAL MUNCHIES. ANTIFASCIST SURE. BUT NOT GREAT WITH WOMEN,” the band tweeted.

“Pornogrind” is a small offshoot of the more mainstream extreme metal scene and bands popular in the subculture around America’s Midwest – including Cannibal Ass Grinder and C*** Torch – typically sing about misogynistic and pornographic themes.

Menstrual Munchies, the band Mr Betts sometimes sang with, often performed naked, wearing nothing but Santa Claus hats and beards or an executioner’s hood.

But even in this world, Mr Creekbaum said the alleged murderer stood out as a loner, recalling how he had told the band about the kill and rape list incident and disturbed them by speaking about the violence depicted in their lyrics as though it was real.

Another devotee of the pornogrind scene, Zach Walton from the band Groin Mallet, said Mr Betts’s actions in Dayton would give the music a bad name.

“It’s just the music we love, you know, like, it’s fun to play,” the 29-year-old told Vice News.

“And then we get people like this, who, you know, are f***ing sick in the head, who get into our scene and ended up killing nine people and almost, you know, putting a bad name on our scene. And that’s not fair for the rest of us.”

Another singer from the Ohio-based C*** Torch band agreed: “Our songs aren’t prophecies, you know, like, they’re not f***ing, ominous f***ing messages that are supposed to come true. They’re just songs.”