Kevin Underwood

I was discussing the case of Kevin Underwood yesterday after reading the transcript of his interrogation, now if you're unaware of Kevin he was a kid from oklahoma who killed his neighbors 10 year old daughter, tried to have sex with her and as a final act wanted to cannibalize the corpse. Now why should i care about another nutbag in a world full of people hellbent on killing themselves. Well he happened to occupy some of the little parts of cyberspace i did (somethingawful, kingdom of loathing). This guy was your typical net hermit as anyone reading this probably knows all about what that entails his only real outlet to the world was the internet. This hit way to close to home to be comfortable about. Good god was i a serial killer waiting to happen? Had the media been right and had all those years of playing quake turned me into a killing machine? I needed to enlist some sort of guidance to sort this out.

Before i go any further i need to make it clear i didnt know kevin and from the description i've read we wouldnt have had interest in each other not because he's a fucking pedophile and child murderer but simply because we dont share much commonality.

So i enlisted the aid of Frau Irene to make sense of all of this. When somethings meaningful in a higher sense i can count on her to make sense of it, to turn the abstract into the logical and vice versa. Im not even sure if she's quoting lyrics to some obscure 80s french new wave band or addressing whatever im babbeling about half the time but it all works out in the end. It didnt take very long for an agreement to be made that isolation and an escalation of pornographic fantasies plays into how one decides one day that its allright to murder and try to fuck a 10 year old girl. At a certain point these fantasies and images this person is obsessed with crosses that mental barrier that says "this is real" "this isnt real". Is this true psychopathy? I mean im intimately familiar with psychosis brought on by psychoactive substances but in the end i knew none of it was real. But some how in a sober state of mind this person can bypass this mental buffer without realizing it and just go on their jolly way working their shitty day jobs thinking about dismembering and eating people.

Kevin describes in his interrogation that he was into amateur anime that depicted cannibalism and visited some forums where it was discussed in great detail. Im pretty sure this is some offshoot of vore or whatever the otaku kids call it, they have a name for every sexual fetish under the sun involving cartoon characters. This brings to question was his involvement in this form of negative renforcement the thing that eventually pushed him over the edge or was he simply predisposed to psychopathy and possibly this outlet kept him from acting out for a while? I guess this depends solely on the psycho in question on an individual basis.

He also tried to scapegoat his actions on antidepressant drugs which is just silly and while i can personally attest to the fact that psychiatric meds can certainly warp your perceptions at no time have i considered violent or insane acts rational. I realize ancedotal evidence isnt empirical evidence but i've never seen a control group study by GSK that says celexa makes you fantasize about canniablism and murdering children im pretty certain that wouldnt go over well with their PR department. His defense that the happy pills made him do it is about 10 years to late, the prozac nation nonsense doesnt fly in this day and age. Its possible that he had some neurlogic defect that made this all possible as i recall they did some mri imaging of murderer brains back in the 90s and discovered a great difference in how certain neurotransmitters are disseminated around the brain and there was obvious physical differences in their brains.

Am i a future kevin underwood? Absolutely not. Is the internet harboring future Kevin Underwoods allowing them to run and play in their delusional little worlds like fanciful unicorns? Yeah probably and i imagine theres plenty of them. So keep in mind the next time you go to the grocery store that the quiet bag boy may just be imagining strangling you with your own intestines while doing horrible things to one of your orifices.

- Capgras