By  Katherine Ramsland

April 24, 2006

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Purcell, OK (Crime Library) — When children disappear, what often comes to mind is the monster of our nightmares and horror movies: the person who grabs them to kill and mutilate. And sometimes it does happen.  Jamie Rose Bolin, age ten, failed to come home after being at the library on April 12 in Purcell, Oklahoma.   Her father reported her missing, but by that time, allegedly, Jamie Rose's neighbor had already ended her life.

Kevin Underwood

Kevin Ray Underwood, 26, had no record for sex crimes, or any other crimes for that matter, but when the car in which he was riding was stopped at a checkpoint near the apartment building where Jamie lived with her father, a highway patrol officer noted his suspicious manner.  Since he lived in the same building, he was taken in for questioning.  Soon after, a search of his apartment turned up the missing girl, her nude body sealed with bloody towels inside a Rubbermaid tub.   At that point, Underwood claimed he'd cut her up, but he hadn't.   Still, from saw marks on her neck, it was clear that he'd attempted to behead her.   There was also an indication from items in his apartment and from statements he made that he'd intended to consume some of her flesh.  The quick discovery of her body at least prevented that. Could anyone have foreseen this tragedy?

Joseph Edward Duncan III

Underwood's mother and fellow employees where he worked as a stocker in a grocery store perceived him as a regular fellow who kept to himself.  Yet he was an avid Internet cruiser, gamer and blogger, and he confessed to having had terrible thoughts and fantasies.  Like Joseph Edward Duncan III, who kept an online blog and confessed to a gripping compulsion before he murdered the family of Shasta Groene in Idaho in May 2005, and kidnapped her and her brother with the intent of assaulting them and killing them.  She escaped but her brother was not so lucky. 

The Internet seems to have provided an outlet for people who mentally rehearse crimes against others, and these blogs have been entered into evidence in some trials.  They give us a peek into the mind of a potential offender, although we don't want to go so far as to predict dangerousness from the types of games people play or the musings they post —especially predictions from those with no training in behavioral analysis.  Nevertheless, even when these offenders try to hide it, at times such bloggers or chat room participants do send out signals of their dangerous frame of mind.  Let's look more closely at Underwood and the nature of sexual fantasies.

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