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Kevin Ray Underwood

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erynthered

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How about providing a short description?  Your links tend to lock me up because of my filters... :)

663875[/snapback]

 

I'll try.

 

 

 

"Go ahead and arrest me," Kevin Underwood said to FBI agents on Friday, April 14, 2006, "she is in there. I chopped her up."

 

"She" was a cherubic, red-haired 10-year-old girl named Jamie Rose Bolin. Jamie lived with her father Curtis, upstairs from Underwood. Jamie disappeared on April 12, 2006 while out riding her bicycle. The same bicycle was found under Kevin Ray Underwood's bed. Also found in Underwood's apartment were the remains of Jamie Rose Bolin. She'd been brutally beaten, then asphyxiated. When Jamie's body was found in a blue plastic tote in Underwood's apartment, there were saw-marks on her neck. Some reports allege that after Underwood attempted to decapitate the little girl, he raped her dead body.

 

 

 

Jamie Rose Bolin

 

 

Authorities in McClain County, Oklahoma (OK), where Purcell is located, believe that Underwood was arrested before he could complete his plans for Jamie Rose Bolin. Underwood supposedly planned to eat portions of his victim, then dispose of her organs and uneaten body parts elsewhere. A blogger named "Laura," who focuses on crime in her weblog, lostinlimaohio.blogspot.com, said that it seemed that Kevin Underwood wanted to be the horrific successor to both Jeffrey Dahmer, the homosexual serial killer from Milwaukee who ate portions of his victims in an effort to completely possess them, and Joseph Edward Duncan III, the sexually sadistic psychopath and child-rapist who allegedly murdered 4 members of the Groene family from Coeur d'Alene, Idaho in May, 2005 so he could abduct and brutally molest Dylan Groene, age 9, and Dylan's sister Shasta, age 8. Duncan also allegedly murdered Dylan Groene after more than a month of abusing the boy and his sister.

 

 

 

Marc Sappington

 

 

As horrific as Underwood's alleged crime was, it is made all the more terrifying by the simple fact that it seems to have come without warning. By all accounts, this almost invisible former stock boy had no criminal background. There is no evidence at all that he worked his way up from random sadism to this act of unspeakable evil as so many deranged killers do. Like Marc Sappington, the Kansas City youth who, in three days time, went from being an insignificant church going choir boy to cannibal and vampiristic serial killer, Underwood, it is alleged, emerged suddenly as a monster.

 

Sure, some who knew him slightly thought him odd his landlord has described him as "creepy" but for the most part, it seems, few people thought of him at all.

 

It's always easy, in hindsight, to talk about the missed signals, and that is doubly true in this case, as in the way Underwood once mused on the Internet about what a cannibal might wear to dinner. But how could anyone even those who might have read his Internet postings have guessed that they were anything other than the idle musings of a disaffected, isolated and immature young man?

 

 

 

Kevin Underwood

 

 

We now know that Kevin Underwood appeared to plan his actions with great care. He may have been nurturing a scheme of torture, rape, murder, and cannibalism for a year or more.

 

It quickly became known after Underwood's arrest that he had a presence on the internet. Underwood's writings online could be found on various web pages and weblogs "Crimebloggers" quickly began to dissect Kevin Underwood's online postings.

 

 

 

Kevin Underwood

 

 

Since Kevin Underwood apparently believed for some time that he had "social phobia," fear and anxiety of social interaction with others, he began opting for the relative anonymity of the internet while still in high school. Even if Underwood was quiet and a loner in the "real world," he was a prolific writer online, and no stranger to message boards and weblogs. A search of Google groups showed over 300 posts made by Underwood's preferred screen name, "Subspecies23," in 2003 to the alt.slack newsgroup alone. This group purports to be for "posting related to the 'Church of the Subgenius,'" a "modern parody religion" whose main icon is the smiling, pipe-smoking "Bob."

 

In his weblog, futureworldruler.blogspot.com, Kevin Underwood presented an essentially normal face to the average websurfer. Underwood showed flashes of humor, subtitling the blog, "Strange things are afoot at the Circle K," a reference to a famous line from Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, a 1989 comedy starring Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter. A casual look at Underwood's main blog page on April 13, 2006 would not have given any indication that this was a man who had viciously murdered a 10-year-old girl the night before. Unlike Joseph Duncan, whose ominous final blog posts at fifthnail.blogspot.com quickly became fodder for analysis and discussion in the blogosphere and the mainstream media alike after Duncan's arrest, Kevin Underwood's blogging since early March of 2006 was largely innocuous. He posted links to interesting news articles, usually with a single line below the quote from the article adding his own view of the story. Like the face Underwood was said to have presented to the world by many interviewed immediately following his arrest, his recent blogging called little attention to the writer.

 

Because Underwood seemed to live so much of his life on the internet, though, it was inevitable that his arrest for the vicious murder of an innocent child would invite further investigation by amateur sleuths, citizen journalists, psychologists, and the tabloid and mainstream media. In all the writing Underwood left on the internet, was there any hint at his evil intent?

 

"On Sunday June the 3 1928 I called on you at 406 W 15 St. Brought you pot cheese strawberries. We had lunch. Grace sat in my lap and kissed me. I made up my mind to eat her" Cannibal child killer Albert Fish, in an anonymous letter sent to the mother of victim Grace Budd.

 

 

 

Albert Fish

 

 

"I LIKE KILLING PEOPLE BECAUSE IT IS SO MUCH FUN IT IS MORE FUN THAN KILLING WILD GAME IN THE FORREST BECAUSE MAN IS THE MOST DANGEROUE ANIMAL OF ALL" A portion of the enciphered message sent by the mysterious Zodiac Killer to San Francisco newspapers in 1969. Spelling errors were in the original cipher solution.

 

"Society can be thankful that there are ways for people like me to relieve myself at time by day dreams of some victims being torture and being mine" Bind, Torture, Kill (BTK) Strangler Dennis Rader, in a letter left for a Wichita, KS journalist to find in a library book in October, 1974.

 

 

 

Dennis Rader

 

 

"I am scared, alone, and confused, and my reaction is to strike out toward the perceived source of my misery, society. My intent is to harm society as much as I can, then die" Joseph Edward Duncan III, writing in his weblog, Blogging the Fifth Nail, on May 11th, 2005. Brenda Groene, Mark McKenzie, and Slade Groene were bludgeoned to death at Groene's Coeur d'Alene-area home 5 days later, Dylan and Shasta Groene kidnapped.

 

"And tomorrow, when you're watching your little September 11th shows and crying and hating the terrorists like a good little American sheep, remember what Adolf Hitler said: 'The death of one is a tragedy. The death of millions is just a statistic.' For ultimately, this is how the victims of the September 11th attacks will be remembered, as just a statistic. A mere number, on the page of a history book, scribbled on by a bored child. All the loved ones lost in this attack will be reduced to merely this. And I will laugh" Kevin Ray Underwood, writing in his weblog, futureworldruler.blogspot.com. The quote is from the first entry Underwood apparently made in that weblog, on September 11, 2002.

 

When reading the writings of twisted and psychopathic minds, hindsight seems less like simple 20/20 and more like a microscopic look at an ebola virus in the lab. In his very first blog entry Underwood attacked the psyche of the general public, perhaps knowing at the time that few people were reading his writing at that point. Underwood's words seemed the very definition of an antisocial statement. In this respect, his statement about remembering September 11th, 2001 seemed to fall neatly in line with past statements by killers. His writing seems to reflect not just a cynical contempt for the widespread grief that gripped the nation in the wake of those brutal attacks, but also a deeper and more depraved understanding that in the American culture of today, the death of a single child, carefully planned and cruelly executed, can exact great publicity and inflict nearly as much pain and fear as the deaths of thousands.

 

Though Oklahoma authorities have said Kevin Underwood was planning his acts of rape, murder, and cannibalism for at least a year, he was writing strange things in his blog 4 years ago. He took an online quiz and posted it in this entry dated October 10, 2002. The test asked the question, "What mythical beast best represents you?" Underwood was "The Basilisk." Here is part of how the test result described a basilisk:

 

 

 

Kevin Underwood

 

 

" one of the lesser known of mythical bests, you are described as having the head and legs of a rooster, the body of a serpent, and the wings of a bat (although there are wingless varieties). You were the blame of hundreds of thousands of deaths in the middle ages. Your breath and even gaze was deadly () You were a potent symbol of death and in some cultures the embodiment of Death himself. In Christianity, the Basilisk was linked with Satan."

 

Underwood's response to his quiz result was, "This is great."

 

Though the media and blogosphere in general quickly caught onto Kevin Underwood's blogging at futureworldruler.blogspot.com and speakjapanese.blogspot.com, as well as his personal profile at MySpace.com, under his "Subspecies23" screen name, crimebloggers and amateur cybersleuths haunting message boards devoted to discussing high-profile crime knew from experience sleuthing the online presence of Joseph Edward Duncan III (link takes you to Jules Hammer's The Cellar, a weblog devoted to documenting the internet postings left by Duncan, as well as his past and upcoming trial), that Underwood was not new to the web if his blogging was as extensive as it appeared to be. Past experience and intuition about the apparent nature of this beast predicted that Underwood had likely left cyber-footprints in a number of places, using a variety of screen names.

 

In cyberspace, the "game was afoot."

 

Together with the pseudonymous crimeblogger "Optymyst," who writes optymyst.blogspot.com, the mysterious Shadowraiths, who blogs about criminal psychology at Shadowraiths.net, and Jules Hammer, I began to map Underwood's online posts dating back to at least 1999.

 

Underwood's first foray into posting his thoughts online may have been the following webpage - http://www.geocities.com/psycomind.geo/. Because heavy traffic will cause a Yahoo Geocities web page to sometimes be rendered unavailable, crimeblogger Optymyst and I worked together to list all the URLs linked to Underwood's "psycomind" page and Optymyst hosted "mirrors" of Kevin Underwood's original posts on her own, more web traffic-friendly server. In addition to the "psycomind" pages, Optymyst created mirrors of Kevin Underwood's MySpace profile, his Amazon Wishlist, pages 1 and 2, blog entries Underwood posted on his MySpace weblog, and a more recent but possibly less-telling Geocities page Underwood created, which was under his "SubSpecies23" moniker.

 

My part was limited to determining what pages comprised content authored by Underwood the work done by Optymyst in making mirrors of the sites mentioned above as well as each page linked from Kevin Underwood's "psycomind" incarnation was considerable, and time-consuming.

 

However, it was worth the time involved to be able to preserve whatever evidence was left of Kevin Underwood's thinking, and how disordered it may or may not have been even a year after he graduated from high school in 1998.

 

Kevin Ray Underwood's intelligence and verbal ability was evident in much of his writing, and this was somehow alarming when a man has apparently confessed directly to Federal Agents that he intended to torture, rape, murder and eat a child, one expects to see the deranged ramblings of a human monster. To find any sign of evil in Kevin Underwood through his words left behind on the internet over a period of at least 7 years could only be done with an awareness of the crimes he appeared to commit. Otherwise, his stories, poems, even his drawings were not that different from those made by many other disaffected, angry teens who seek to express themselves on the internet. (All the following links will direct readers to mirrors constructed by Optymyst.)

 

Underwood posted a "fake bio," simple black text on a white field. His "bio" read, in part:

 

"To begin at the beginning, I was born on December 19th, 1979. I am the next to the youngest of 87 children. Until I was five we all lived in a cardboard box behind the local Wal-Mart. (It was a very big La-Z-boy recliner box!) At the age of five, I ran away to join the circus. I was Jo-Jo the Idiot Circus Boy! Then, at the age of fifteen, I was kicked out of the circus after an incident involving the bearded lady, a rubber chicken, and a neon green Spandex bathing suit! (Don't Ask)"

 

In two short-short stories found on this page, titled "Moving Towards the Edge," Underwood writes of pain, depression, and suicide:

 

I spun around, and for a brief moment knew what a deer feels when he is trapped in someone's headlights. Then everything went black. I awakened to find myself in a white room. At first I thought it was Heaven, but then I saw my parents faces appear over me and realized I was in a hospital. I attempted to speak but nothing happened, and I passed back out. It is a few months later now and I am still in the hospital, I have not moved. They think I am a vegetable, but my mind works fine, I just can't do anything. I can still hear and see and think and feel. I just can't move or speak. My parents have even stopped coming as much. I heard them talking with the doctor, he told them it is hopeless, there's nothing to be done. I was really wrong, it's not Heaven, it's Hell. It won't bother me any longer however, here's the doctor, come to pull the plug

 

Another page was referenced as having been written by a friend of Kevin Underwood's named Jared. This story was titled "This is a story about a man named Kevin," and though it was mostly a self-conscious attempt to be bizarre and funny, "Jared's" story contained the following passage:

 

The story begins in the small town of Mansonville. Mr. Manson is the Mayor and spiritual leader of the town. He made all of his money in music. He hates pizza and Ho Hos, he hired Wonder Kevin to obliviate all of them. I guess you could call him an Anti-Spice Superstar

 

If another person actually wrote this story about Kevin Underwood, the statement above could be taken out of context as oddly insightful. It seemed that Kevin Underwood's plan for torture, murder and cannibalism, which according to a press conference given by McClain County authorities on April 15th involved implements such as barbeque skewers and a meat tenderizer, somehow was directed towards the obliteration of the victim, as much as anything.

 

Underwood may have revealed more about the way he thought when he was trying to be funny. The following is a quote from a "psycomind" page Kevin Underwood titled, "Meet Sir Charles, the Homicidal Butler":

 

This is Sir Charles, the Homicidal Butler. He is the caretaker of this site. He watches over it and cleans up the messes you people leave whenever you visit. And some of you do make the biggest messes I have ever seen. Sir Charles does NOT like cleaning up after you, in fact, he hates it, and it makes him very angry. Sir Charles, as his name implies, is not the kind of person you want to make angry. I suggest you people clean up your act when you are here. He has a list. He keeps it hidden in his dresser drawer. I saw it the other day. He keeps peoples names in there, people who piss him off, it's his "kill list," and you don't want to be on it. () If your name ends up in his book, you better pray to God. Pray that he finds you and gets it over with quick. If he gets a hold of you, you will wish for a quick death. He has some of the most unspeakable ways of torturing his victims. Let me warn you again, DO NOT, piss him off.

 

If you'd like, though I don't know why anyone in their right mind would want to, you can e-mail Sir Charles at sircharles12@hotmail.com.

 

Did Underwood really just start planning to murder and eat another human being only a year ago? Or was he plagued by such ideas long before he met little Jamie Rose Bolin?

 

"[M]urder isn't just a crime of lust or violence. It becomes possession. They are part of you ... You feel the last bit of breath leaving their bodies ... You're looking into their eyes ... A person in that situation is God!" Theodore Robert Bundy, in an interview he gave to FBI Agent Bill Hagmaier.

 

 

 

Ted Bundy

 

 

"I am now in control of all things." A letter sent to the San Francisco Chronicle in April, 1978, allegedly by the Zodiac Killer. The authorship of this letter is in dispute.

 

"For Halloween, Samhain, whatever, I'm dressing up as God, and Alicia is dressing up as Jesus. Most likely, though, we're just going to take the easy way out and get a couple of those "Hello, my name is" name tags and write God and Jesus on them. I may get a whole bunch of them, and write different names of God on them, and stick them all over myself. "Hello, my name is God, Jehovah, Yahweh, Wotan, Odin, Ra, Pan, Bog, Iah, AFFA, Mammon, Shiva, Adonai Molach, Abulldad, Shamash, Iadabaoth, Crom..." Kevin Underwood, writing in a blog entry at futurworldruler.blogspot.com on October 20, 2002.

 

Kevin Underwood's landlord said in one interview that Kevin was creepy. He would stare at children playing around the apartment complex. But Underwood worked a low-level job as a stocker at a local supermarket and before that he worked at a local Carl's Jr. He did not have a vehicle of his own. He claimed in more than one post online that he had social phobia, and often made statements about feeling depressed, that there was something "wrong" with him. No one knows at the moment when his fantasies began to take a turn towards the dark, violent and brutal. But his Geocities posts as "psycomind," made prior to the advent of blogging as a pursuit for even beginning computer users, seem to show that he already found amusement, maybe even excitement in fantasies of power and control.

 

Was Underwood consciously trying to become a serial killer? There is still a great deal more to learn before anyone draws such a conclusion about the 26-year-old from Purcell, OK. But even in 2002, Underwood was joking about being "God" on Halloween using all the names he could think of that stand for "God" in various cultures and myths.

 

Did Kevin Underwood have what he thought was a moment of self-realization, when he decided that his path to infamy would have to involve murder? Not just murder, but a slaying so vicious that within a day of his arrest, District Attorney Tim Kuykendall had concluded he would seek the death penalty.

 

If Underwood did have such a moment, can it be found online, in his voluminous writings? It seems he left enough for many of us to research the answer to that question and come to our own conclusions.

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