Mathews County Grand Jury Indicts Ben Fawley; First-Degree Murder. Jan. 17, 2006.

From the Beginning, the Internet has played a critical role in the Taylor Behl Case

advertisement

By  Steve Huff

As The Crime Library's Seamus McGraw and Mike Wild reported on January 17, 2006, a grand jury in Mathews County, Virginia (VA) on Tuesday handed down an indictment against Ben Fawley, age 38, for the September, 2005 murder of Taylor Behl.

Behl's disappearance from the campus of Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) in Richmond, VA became national news as family, friends, and fellow students, including Fawley, set out to search for the 17-year-old. Early suspicion focused on Fawley as he told odd and inconsistent stories about his own activities the night Behl disappeared. Suspicions were heightened as it became apparent that Fawley had, at one time, a sexual relationship with the teen, and had (non-sexual) photos he'd made of her posted on some of his many webpages.

Ben Fawley

All along, the internet has played a role in both the search for Taylor Behl and the analysis by both law enforcement and the media of the relationship Behl may have had with Ben Fawley. Taylor's myspace.com profile, http://www.myspace.com/doowop, was known to the general public almost immediately. From there, the Internet quickly began to give up not just Taylor Behl's secrets, but Ben Fawley's, as well. An entire network of friends from Taylor's home in Northern VA down to Richmond had parts of their lives teased out of myspace profiles and Livejournal-based weblogs.

Fawley's Long Road Home

Until he was jailed, Ben Fawley was doing damage control on his several Livejournal blogs Yahoo Geocities websites. He either locked them or deleted entire entries and pages. It may not have been Ben Fawley's words that did him in, but his photographs. Through the identification of a number Mathews County locations made by an ex-girlfriend of Fawley's, from photos Fawley had posted on his now-deleted deviantart.com site, Taylor Behl's remains were eventually discovered — very close to the ex-girlfriend's family home.

Fawley's former girlfriend Erin Crabill

Next Page

Steve Huff can be reached via his web site http://www.HuffCrimeBlog.com/.

Full Taylor Behl news coverage

See our full list of information on Taylor Behl - Ben Fawley

See Crime Library's background information on Taylor Behl case

For more daily crime news