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I am probably not up to the task of this post for it invovles a deeply involved murder mystery. A mystery, I might add, that is still at its height. I got tipped off to this situation by one of those annoying bulletins that you quickly disregard. This one read, “Girl killed by man she met on myspace”. I read that thinking, “god, the shit people you like send you.” But I was curious. So I checked out the link to find…. that it was kind of true. I never really assesed whether the 17 year old victim, Taylor Behl, actually met her alleged murderer, 38 year old amateur goth skateboarder Ben Fawley on myspace, but it was a bonafied internet murder.

Now, I am not one that typically is drawn in by this sensationalist macabre trash, but I am in now. I’m deep. At this point, I may be one of the leading experts on the case in my opinion. Here is the thing with this murder. Many of the key witnesses involved were all these internet folks who posted incessently on live journal and myspace. As such, a lot of clues are all over the net. So, you can actually go to their live journal pages and read up until the point of Taylor Behl’s disappearance. It’s an entirely new form of Hercule Poirot!

I can not go into all the sordid details, but this story is amazing. This guy, Ben Fawley, is such the epitome of internet goth. Question: are a majority of internet folks goth in some manner? Is goth the default internet identity? Anyhow, he has a variety of screen names many of which contain the word skulz. He collects skulls by the way. Hooray. He’s also an amateur photographer! of course! and skateboarder! huh! This all takes place in Richmond Virginia I might add. Did I also add that this Laura Palmer-like 17 year old girl’s screen name was tiabliaj which is jailbait spelled backwards.. woe!

Her young innocence fades in the face of the porn infested juvenalia that is myspace. Well, here are some good sites:

http://www.crimelibrary.com/criminal_mind/forensics/taylor_behl/

here is a great one where you see Ben Fawley looking like Johnny Depp

http://www.crimelibrary.com/criminal_mind/forensics/taylor_behl/6.html

here is Ben Fawley’s livejournal page

http://www.livejournal.com/users/skulz67/

here is Taylor Behl’s myspace link

http://www.myspace.com/doowop

There are a ton more and if anyone starts fishing around in this let me know. See, what this really is about in my opinion, is that a threshold has been crossed. It’s one of these moments where you realize yet another strange world is opening up. Like the moment you noticed cell phones were growing, or the moment that the impact of email really hit you, or the moment where you understood the soviet union had just disappeared… now, what is this moment… it’s the moment where you realize that increasingly people’s lives are recorded on the net (particularly in the younger,up to their ears in livejournal folks) and that we can start playing detective with these pieces. Hypertext was always a sort of wierd unrealized literary endeavor, but now we have hypercrime. you can click from one piece of evidence to the next. There is even this annoying dude named Steve Huff who fancies himself the sherlock holmes of the internet sleuth variety. he does get a lot of info, but he’s not very good. i suspect any of you could do a better job. get on the case! tell me how it goes!

This entry was posted on Friday, October 14th, 2005 at 7:39 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.