Last year when Kevin Underwood murdered little Jamie Rose Bolin I stayed up half the night reading his blog.  I was completely captivated with the seemingly normal existence of this young fast food worker turned psychotic killer. All anyone had to do was put his name in a search engine and you could find his fingerprints all over the web. Since then, every time there's a high profile murder, I do a bit of web-sleuthing to see what I can pull up about the victim or the suspect. Nine times out of ten, there's something out there. That's another aspect of our culture that the world wide web has completely revolutionized. We now have the opportunity in many cases to see the human side of people before they are overcome with evil or insanity or whatever it is that makes people kill people.

Today, I spent a good hour reading the MySpace blogs & other postings of Tess Damm and Bryan Grove, the two teens recently arrested for murdering Tess's mother and carrying her around in the trunk of a car for the past month. I don't know why I find this stuff so interesting, but I'm definitely not alone in my morbid curiosity. There is no shortage of blogs devoted to this sort of thing. (The True Crime Blog is my personal favorite.)  Lately, there has been a lot of fodder for them, too. Hardly a day goes by that you don't hear of another bizarre murder case. The Tara Grant murder was a really hard one to swallow for me. She's the mother of two & career woman who was murdered and dismembered by her husband. It's one thing to snap and murder someone, but he chopped her up and kept her torso in his garage.

There's even a story coming from my old hometown, which rarely ever has even a manslaughter case. A woman has been missing for several weeks, and the authorities were recently digging up her ex boyfriend's property where they believe he may have buried her. It's just absolute lunacy.

So anyway... I was going to do this big long involved post about crime and try to be all Patricia Cornwall, but I'm over it. I'm going to bed. If nothing else, there are some interesting links here, and also something for the crime blogs if I ever end up on either side of the equation.