Of Taylor Behl, Joseph Duncan, and the Darker Corners of the Web
By Steve Huff
(Crime Library) "When you can see the strings that control your life, you tend to wonder." ~ accused serial murderer Joseph Edward Duncan III, in his weblog, Blogging the Fifth Nail.
"It's enough to make you wonder sometimes if you're on the right planet..." ~ webmaster and blogger Benjamin W. Fawley, alleged murderer of Taylor Behl.
Children, young people disappear in the middle of the night. Later, they are found, perhaps alive, perhaps not, and an older male is accused of the crime. The 'blogosphere' is now where many high-profile crimes in the news seem to overlap.
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The media, when addressing the role the internet sometimes plays in high-profile crimes in the news, like the murder of Virginia Commonwealth University freshman Taylor Marie Behl, often stumbles in explaining the phenomenon that is weblogging. A number of journalists seem to approach the phenomenon as if they are biologists explaining a newly-discovered and bizarre species of animal. They might as well be informing the public that their children are licking the backs of hallucinogenic toads.
A weblog is basically a diary. There are people who have been blogging since the late 90's, before anyone outside IT specialists had even heard the word 'blog.' As the weblogging concept spread into the mass consciousness, it took on an additional element for people who were comfortable with the internet, both young and old — but mostly young. A weblog has become a key component for many younger people, from the mid-20's to early teens, in forming and maintaining a social network.
Many domains on the internet make blogging their primary focus and offer free webspace and individualized URLs — they are aiming at the internet diarist, the pure blogger. Two of the most popular domains for teens are www.livejournal.com and www. xanga.com. Both offer easy-to-use interfaces that allow even an inexperienced websurfer to put their thoughts, feelings, fantasies, rants, and dreams online in a matter of minutes.
Taylor Behl had a Livejournal, under the screen name "tiabliaj" — "jailbait" spelled backwards. Through her Livejournal, she could keep friends in other cities and countries apprised of what might be going on in her life, and vice-versa. Erroneous speculation in at least one news story written shortly after Behl's body was found in rural Mathews County, VA in early October, 2005 had her meeting Ben Fawley, the man now jailed in Richmond, VA on child pornography charges who has admitted that he was present when Taylor Behl died, through one of her personal sites.
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| Ben W. Fawley |
Taylor Behl met Fawley offline, through mutual acquaintances living in Richmond, Virginia. It was through her online presence, in particular her Livejournal, that she and Ben Fawley kept up what appeared to be a fairly frequent communication during the months of March and April, 2005. A week after Fawley is alleged to have slept with Behl as she visited Richmond, she stopped posting in that journal.
Taylor Behl's blogging didn't bring about her meeting 38-year-old convicted ex-con and death fetishist Ben Fawley, but it certainly seemed to facilitate their relationship, at least for a while.
In August of 2005, for my weblog devoted to writings about crime, The Dark Side, I did research into just what an opportunity the explosion of blogging as a pursuit, passion, past-time for people age 13 and up may have provided for the predators among us.
Ben Fawley seemed to understand the opportunities the internet might provide him to have windows into the lives of others. Fawley's pages at the free image host photobucket.com show, along with his 'artistic' photography, screen captures taken of his web-tracking software — code a blogger or webmaster can easily embed in their page to track key information about visitors to their sites.
In my research I discovered that one blogging domain that appears to be popular with teens and twenty-somethings had not only blogs written by men who openly expressed that they were pedophiles, there were entire blogrings (blogs linking one another with a common theme, in this instance, pedophilia), devoted to what they euphemistically called "boylove," or "girllove."
Anonymity is just as crucial to sexual predators as their compulsion to make some sort of record of their desires, or worse, their acts. I was able to find weblogs under every commonly-used blogging domain wherein a blogger at least expressed that they were attracted to children; often with a complete lack of self-consciousness or remorse.
While I would probably be the last person to discourage someone with an interest in expressing themselves from writing, I did feel it was necessary to point out that just as has been known about other aspects of internet communication for years now — chat rooms, message boards, etc. — blogging, while providing the opportunity for anyone to develop an individual voice, also gives the predators among us a figurative window into the minds, hearts, and lives of others.
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| Joseph Edward Duncan III |
This is where the story of Taylor Behl and Ben W. Fawley resonates with the horrific story of Joseph Edward Duncan III and the murder of the Groene family in Idaho. My research began with a simple question based on being familiar with Joseph Edward Duncan's weblog, Blogging the Fifth Nail, kept in the year before allegedly launched his homicidal spree. If Duncan had been there all along, then how many other, similar predators could there be out there in the blogosphere? How many other predators, just like Duncan, speaking boldly for anyone who happens to read, of their need to strike back 'at society?'
I found that there were many more — too many. In a way, the alleged murder of Taylor Behl, and the possibility that Ben Fawley may have used the internet and a mutual interest in weblogging to reinforce his connection to her, only proves Joseph Duncan was never as lonely a voice as he seemed to think he was.
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