By Steve Huff
(Continued)
The story of Kevin Underwood's arrest for Jamie Bolin's murder has been true to its internet element — it seems a crime ready-made for bloggers, no matter the focus of their weblogs, to parse and discuss. Kevin Underwood troubles many who see a bit too much of themselves in the majority of his blogging. In a post made on the community weblog, Metafilter.com, someone using the screen name "Alvy Ampersand" wrote, "Not that the 'Monster is in reality a banal and insignificant speck' phenomenon is news to me or anything, but I can actually relate to a lot of what he wrote. I feel some empathy for him. Freaky."
A comment from "digaman" offered up this observation in response, "I know. It's like he's Everyblogger"
That may be the thing about Kevin Ray Underwood's allegedly having confessed to his plan for little Jamie Bolin that upends the reality of those who encounter the story. He really seems like someone the reader knows. Worse, the reader may find common ground with Underwood.... he reminds some of them a little of the person in the mirror.
Underwood participated in the same kinds of "memes" that get posted to weblogs world-wide daily: surveys asking sometimes random, sometimes pointed questions to tease out more information about the blogger, introduce them to whoever may be reading. He filled out a particularly long survey on August 31, 2004. Reading Underwood's blog after seeing a photograph of Jamie Rose Bolin was eerie. He answered the survey's question about his "big turn-on" in part:
" Oh, my biggest turn on would probably be glasses. I love girls with glasses. I also have a major "thing" for Asian girls, especially Japanese"
Bloggers who specialize in commentary on crime stories in the news have had something of a field day with this story, as Underwood left behind so much to uncover. In the days after police included a few details of Underwood's life online websleuths from Georgia to Japan were entering variations on his name and his known screen names like SubSpecies23 into search engines, some even cataloging and preserving what they found. Optymyst, a crimeblogger who worked to preserve Underwood's "psycomind" (sic) Yahoo Geocities pages, received an alleged chat transcript from a one-time friend of Underwood's in the days following his arrest.
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