Gilberto Valle III. (Facebook)

Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara announced the Halloween-worthy arrest of 28-year-old NYPD officer Gilberto Valle III today. Mr. Valle, who was stationed at the 26th Precinct, has been charged with kidnapping, conspiracy and illegal use of a federal law enforcement database.

Those charges aren't strange at all, considering the crimes were allegedly committed as part of a plot with co-conspirators to kidnap and cannibalize as many as 100 women.

According to U.S. Attorney Bharara, Mr. Valle's plans were detailed and gruesome. In a press release, Mr. Bharara said that Mr. Valle "planned to kidnap women so that they could be raped, tortured, killed, cooked, and cannibalized."

The officer's plans "shock the conscience," said Mr. Bharara.

In the complaint against the officer, investigators detailed plans that allegedly went far beyond the talking stages. Mr. Valle may have thoroughly investigated targets and meticulously studied their lives.

In chat sessions held in July 2012 with someone referred to in court documents as CC-1 (Co-Conspirator 1), Mr. Valle and his associate allegedly discussed the best ways to kidnap, cook and eat an unnamed victim.

Authorities say the cop even created a document titled "Abducting and Cooking [Victim's name]: a Blueprint." The document contained the woman's name, birth date and physical details like height, weight and bra size. Investigators allege Mr. Valle even included a list of items needed, which read,

• Car (I have it)
• Chloroform (refer to website for directions)
• Rope (Strongest kind to tie her up)

Creepier still, Mr. Valle allegedly agreed with another co-conspirator to kidnap a different woman whom he would deliver bound, gagged and alive. Court documents contained a chilling transcript of an online exchange regarding the second would-be victim:

(Co-Conspirator 2): I definitely want her and how much again, I'm sorry to ask but I don't remember.
VALLE: $5,000 and she is all yours.
CC-2: Could we do 4?
VALLE: I am putting my neck on the line here. If something goes wrong somehow, I am in deep shit. $ 5,000 and you need to make sure she is not found. She will definitely make the news.

The U.S. Attorney says federal investigators found evidence of how closely Mr. Valle may have watched intended victims--cellphone data allegedly revealed the cop made and received calls while very close to the second target's Manhattan apartment. Investigators say interviews with "victim 2" revealed that she'd never had Mr. Valle over to her place and didn't know him very well.

In a statement about the arrest, NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly said, "This is a bizarre case. We suspended the officer immediately upon his arrest, and a review is now underway to determine whether there was anything in his background that should have alerted the department to his alleged proclivities."

The complaint and warrant for the arrest of Gilberto Valle III is embedded below.

Seyfried's amateur performance kidnapped an hour and a half of movie-goers' time.

Amanda Seyfried is not well. So much potential and Star-of-Tomorrow hype has failed to pay off. Her career looks anemic. Her screen presence has turned her pallid—and me, too. It’s hard to believe, but she walked out of her leading role as the most sensible Mormon in the hit HBO series Big Love after 45 episodes to play Meryl Streep’s gooey daughter in the nauseating Mama Mia and then fall in love with a werewolf in the idiotic Red Riding Hood. Now she gets star billing in a latent snooze called Gone, which will be exactly that before you can even find out where it’s playing. Beware of movies that are not screened in advance for the critics. The reasons are usually manifest. Now that I’ve seen Gone, I know why.

Gifted and sincere as she always is, there’s not much Ms. Seyfried can do with this tripe. She is Jill, a deeply disturbed young waitress in Portland, Ore., still struggling to get back to normal after being raped, kidnapped and thrown into an underground pit occupied by human bones of other victims buried alive. The cops, played by Daniel Sunjata, Wes Bentley and Michael Pare, don’t believe her story. So she takes self-defense classes, eschews a social life and carries a loaded .38 caliber pistol in her purse. Before she can make any progress, her sister Molly disappears, too, in the middle of the night, leaving no trace. Once again, the cops think she’s making the whole thing up. Convinced there really is a maniac on the prowl who once abducted her and goodness knows how many other victims, and now he’s back, Jill turns detective, committing a series of crimes herself in a barbed wire tangle of red herrings and false-alarm clichés borrowed from every girl-in-jeopardy thriller on The Late, Late Show.

Following clues so dangerous Jodie Foster would carry a flame thrower, she tracks down match books and hardware store receipts in stolen cars, breaks into locksmith vans and seedy hotel rooms, and introduces a coven of contrived and sinister weirdo suspects whose sole purpose is to distract the audience from the fact that Gone is another in a long line of thrillers without thrills. With more moxie than good sense, Jill turns into a sexy Nancy Drew with no respect for a good manicure. By the time she foolishly telephones the serial killer for a rendezvous in the same woods where she was once dumped, and ends up in the same hole she once crawled out of with her bare hands, all credulity has left the room. It takes a while to discover she has a history of mental breakdowns herself and did some time in the nut house. No spoilers about how it all turns out. You won’t believe that, either. As capable and appealing as Ms. Seyfried was as Bill Paxton’s daughter on Big Love, she comes off in this mess looking like a hysterical, bug-eyed amateur. Allison Burnett’s careless screenplay jumps back and forth from flashbacks in the wooded graveyard to present-tense car-crashing chases through the filthy Portland underworld after midnight without the slightest attempt at character revelation or narrative coherence, and to director Heitor Dhalia (say who?) the word nuance might as well be a French deodorant.

rreed@observer.com

GONE

Running Time 94 minutes

Written by Allison Burnett

Directed by Heitor Dhalia

Starring Amanda Seyfried, Jennifer Carpenter and Wes Bentley

1/4