Kevin Underwood is a scumbag from Purcell, OK who abducted and murdered his upstairs neighbor, 10-year-old Jamie Rose Bolin. According to police, Underwood had a longstanding plan to abduct, rape, kill, devour and dismember someone. If you really want the details, see this article in the Norman Transcript.
Underwood was also a blogger with a blog on Blogspot. Kevin at Wizbang notes Underwood’s Blogger profile:
About MeSingle, bored, and lonely, but other than that, pretty happy.
If you were a cannibal, what would you wear to dinner?
The skin of last night’s main course.
Amazon has removed Underwood’s wishlist, which included Meat is Murder!: An Illustrated Guide to Cannibal Culture.
Most interesting to me was Underwood’s entry from September 8, 2005, where he appeared to recognize that he had mental problems:
Then, it all came to a head at once. The strain of all these problems, especially the social phobia, was too much to bear. I was in danger of having a mental breakdown at any moment. So I finally decided that I would have to drop out of college. I went to my mom, and told her for the first time, about my depression and social phobia, I’d never told anyone before, not even my best friend Chris. I told my mom, and told her about my social anxiety problem, and that I was going to drop out of college and start going to a psychiatrist. She didn’t really understand my problem, and still doesn’t (whenever I try to talk about how shy I am around people, her answer is, “Just stop, don’t be that way.”), but she was supportive anyway. So I dropped out of college, this was in early November. I never did see a psychiatrist, because as soon as I dropped out, I started feeling a little better, and I hated the idea of going to one because I knew all they’d do is give me pills.
This was in November 1998. Had this guy seen that psychiatrist, would Jamie be alive today? Maybe not - there’s no pill for evil. So Underwood doesn’t see the doctor, and then the coworker at Carl’s Jr. for whom he had an unrequited thing and her boyfriend are in a car accident. The boyfriend dies, but unrequited love interest pulls through:
I went to Tim’s funeral, and I also went to see Genie in the hospital every day. She did make it through, but she was in the hospital until December 18, the day before my birthday. I went and saw her every day, and I would sit there for hours. Even the days she was unconscious, or so doped up on morphine she barely even knew who she was. Even when she was conscious, she’d still be so doped up I had to help her eat. Most days I was the only visitor she had, her family hardly ever even came to see her. Partly because it was about an hour’s drive to even get to the hospital she was at. But I drove it every day, and sat with her every day.
I felt like a horrible person. Because in the back of my mind, a voice kept telling me, “Hey, she’s single now, just give her a couple of months to get over the loss of Tim, and then make your move.” I’d tell that voice to shut up, and stop thinking things like that, but it kept coming back.
Is this the event that turned Underwood from pathologically shy loner to psychopath? Because it can be a seemingly benign, if traumatic, moment that pushes one over the edge. In any event, Underwood was suicidal after that, though he never acted on the impulses. Eventually he returned to his life of Carl’s Jr. and video games, only to deteriorate again:
Over time I started getting a little better, but I battled depression for a couple of years. I still have the social phobia, and very occasionally small bouts of depression, but I’m much better than I was then, at least when it comes to the depression.
But still, over the last year or so I find myself becoming more and more detached from the world. I almost never leave the apartment except to go to work or my parents’ house, and when I do leave the apartment, I walk around like a zombie, with a blank expression on my face, not looking at anything or anyone. In fact, the last couple of months, I’ve noticed that my eyesight is going, probably because my eyes are getting weak. Whenever I’m out of the house, I never focus on anything, I stare blankly ahead, operating on a sort of fuzzy peripheral vision. The only things I ever really focus on and look at are books or computer screens for hours on end, which strains my eyes further. When I’m not safe in my apartment, I am silent and expressionless, looking at nothing. I have no personality. If someone says hi to me, I either ignore them, or grunt out a small “hi,” or “ok,” if they ask me how I’m doing. It gets worse every day, I withdraw farther and farther into myself with each passing week.
My spirit has been totally crushed. Anyone who looks into my eyes can see this.
I wish I could be like I used to be. I wish I could be like Melissa.
I wish I could be human.
This guy is an evil scumbag. He killed a ten year old and planned to decapitate her and eat her. But either he recognized that there was something wrong with him, which means that other people could have, too, or he’s a total sociopath who made the whole thing up. It makes the whole story more tragic - could something have been done in 1998 or 2005 to keep him from acting on his evil impulses?
