By Steve Huff
(Continued)
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.
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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?
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