This image was lost some time after publication.

Maxim publisher Felix Dennis, who grimly admitted to a murder during an interview, keeps trying new and various ways to backtrack. He was drunk! He only kills magazines, ha ha! His latest claim, at a Columbia Journalism event last night: it was all a big prank to sell books! Dennis said it was an April fool's joke. "What [the press] didn't notice was the date," he said. Of course, that disregards the fact that the story actually ran on April 2, and that the interview the story was based on took place months earlier. Quite a bit of forward planning for a raving drunk and possibly murderous lad mag mogul. [BW]. Here's the original passage that started it all:

He looks so intense that I ask him whether he's ever fought with a man over a woman. "I've killed a man," he says. What? "I've killed a man." What do you mean, you've killed a man? "I killed him." Does everyone know you've killed a man? "No, and they'll never find out, either." Are you kidding me? Are you winding me up? Where? In what country? "I killed him. That's all you need to know. I killed him."

Oh Felix, you're having me on. "No." Promise me. Swear to God... "He hurt her and I told him to stop and he kept on." What did it feel like, then? "He hurt her." What did you do? "Pushed him over the edge of a cliff." In the Caribbean? "Don't matter where it was. He wouldn't let her alone. She told him to stop. I told him to stop. Many people told him to stop. Wouldn't stop. Kept on and on and on. Made her life a living misery: beat her up, beat up her kids, wouldn't let her alone, kept on, kept on - weren't even his kids, so in the end, I had a little meeting with him, pushed him over the edge of a cliff. Weren't 'ard."

Are you sure you want to be telling me this? "Don't care. Anybody harms one of mine... if they harm one of mine, they'd better know what they're doing. And they'd always be warned. I wouldn't attack anybody without reason. I'll attack nobody without reason. Without trying again and again to bring this thing to a much more satisfactory and sensible, more rational conclusion. But if they keep harming one of mine, then I have no option."

[Times Online]