How The Public Learns, Feels About Crimes In The News.  Jan. 26, 2006.

By  Steve Huff

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The Crime Library — Ben Fawley made a brief appearance Wednesday in the real world. He said little as he was hauled into a rural Virginia courtroom where he will be tried later this year on a charge of first-degree murder in the death of Virginia Commonwealth University co-ed Taylor Marie Behl.

By most accounts, he seemed subdued, maybe even awkward as he stood in the dock. Perhaps that is understandable. After all, to many people who have closely followed the case, Fawley, a 38-year-old photographer and accused killer, has been largely a creature of cyberspace. To them, he is a man who has been defined by his presence as a grainy image on a computer screen and measured by the words about — and in some cases by him that continue to flicker throughout the blogosphere.

As much, or perhaps more than any other suspect in recent memory, Ben Fawley is a poster boy for a kind of revolution in the way the public learns about crimes. He is a lightening rod who draws down the public's rage over crimes, and in some ways he, and others like him, have even begun to redefine the way investigators, prosecutors, perhaps even the courts do their jobs. In short, Ben Fawley is a prime example of the ways in which the Internet is changing the way we as a people see crime and justice.

He is certainly not the only one.

On the very same day that Fawley appeared in court for the first time, lighting up the blogs, the Internet was also abuzz with news that Joseph Edward Duncan III, the convicted sex offender accused of slaughtering an Idaho family last year, kidnapping and murdering Dylan Groene and holding his eight year old sister Shasta as a virtual sex slave, has again been sharing his thoughts, smuggling them out of the Kootenai County Jail and having them posted on the Internet. The FBI is said to be closely monitoring Duncan's postings, hoping, according to an FBI spokesman who spoke the Associated Press, to get a deeper glimpse into the soul of the man who is accused of such an unspeakable crime.

There are others, of course.

They live, at least in the public imagination, in a virtual world. But they stalk the real one.

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

 

Taylor Behl & Ben Fawley Full Coverage

Joseph Edward Duncan III Full Coverage

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