Kevin Ray Underwood: Cannibal

On April 17, 2006, FBI agents found 10-year old Jamie Rose Bolin’s body in a plastic tub in Kevin Ray Underwood’s bedroom in Purcell, Okla., along with skewers and meat tenderizer. Underwood, a shy 26-year old grocery store clerk, had long lent his sick thoughts free range to ramble on MySpace and on Blogger, under the now-eerie motto, “Like what you like, enjoy what you enjoy, and don’t take crap from anybody.”

“If you were a cannibal, what would you wear to dinner?” he once wrote on his blog, Strange Things Are Afoot at the Circle K (http://futureworldruler.blogspot.com/).

He answered himself: “The skin of last night’s main course.”

If his sickness was a deep and lengthy one and his verbalization extensive, young Jamie Rose’s involvement was accidental. She’d been missing just a few days when the FBI found her and arrested Underwood. She had gone to the library and never come home. Her only involvement with this twisted young man? She and her father happened to reside upstairs from Underwood in the apartment complex where Underwood lived alone with his pet rat. Among Underwood’s neighbors—he’d also considered an adult woman and an older child as his targets—bespectacled Jamie Rose had been the smallest and weakest, the easiest target in his sights as he prepared to explore his obsession with human flesh.

This old railroad town, perched on a bluff above the Canadian River in central Oklahoma, is known, if at all, for its horse farms and its proximity to Norman and the University of Oklahoma. Needless to say, this gruesome killing shook the town. County officials responded quickly.

Prosecutors at trial demonstrated how Underwood abducted the girl, bludgeoned her with a wooden cutting board and strangled her with duct tape and his bare hands. He sexually assaulted the girl after killing her, and authorities believe that he planned to dismember her, drain her blood and eat her corpse.

Underwood described himself on his blog as a “single, bored and lonely” man with “dangerously weird” fantasies. He recognized that he was depressed and socially incompetent, noting that his days off were spent in front of his computer, blogging or playing the computer role-playing game, Kingdom of Loathing.

Reports say Underwood had no prior history of serious mental illness. But on his blog he discussed his social phobia, medication and therapy at length. He also acknowledges crippling periods of depression when starting college and when an unrequited crush died in car accident.

Off his medication, Underwood seems to have recognized that his thoughts were growing more bizarre. Along with posting links to odd news stories or the results of an online test on “How Evil Are You?”, he considered seeking another prescription for Lexapro just weeks before the killing, but did not.

Instead he simply wondered what he might do and what others would think. The Silence of the Lambs fan wrote, “I’m afraid the cops would come into my apartment and see all the knives and swords and horror movies and commentaries about serial killers on my DVD rack and suspect me.” But no one—not his readers, his mother across town, his neighbors, nor his managers at Carl Jr’s burger restaurant or Grider’s Discount Foods (where he worked with his aunt)—seems to have recognized a real problem in this quiet man or done anything about it.

Underwood’s defense would contend in his March 2008 trial that he suffered from bipolar disorder, sexual problems (his blog revealed that he was nearly a virgin) and social phobia. Grisly photos of the crime scene admitted as evidence along with sex toys and a ceremonial dagger couldn’t have helped Underwood; and, unlike fellow blogger, Rachelle Waterman, Underwood’s videotaped confession was beyond question.

Neither mitigating factors nor the defense’s call for mercy nor Underwood’s remorse had much of an impact on the public, broad swathes of which called for the death penalty, or on his jury, who took less than an hour after a comparatively short trial to convict him of first-degree murder and sentenced him to death, rather than life imprisonment without possibility of parole.

On April 3, 2008 McClain County District Judge Candace Blalock ordered Underwood’s execution by lethal injection. Underwood’s defense attorney, Matthew Haire, plans to appeal the conviction.

Months of strategic planning and preparation led Kevin Underwood to invite in, kill, attempt to dismember and sexually assault his upstairs neighbor, Jamie Rose Bolin, District Attorney Tim Kuykendall said Saturday.
“It is our belief that though she was chosen to be the victim of this particular crime, other people, children and adults, had been targeted,” said Purcell Police Chief David Tompkins.

Bolin, 10, was found dead in a plastic tub in the closet of Underwood’s apartment Friday afternoon. Police began searching for the girl Wednesday night, originally hypothesizing she may have been abducted by an online predator.

Saturday, Chief David Tompkins and Kuykendall said a number of items seized from Underwood’s apartment over the weekend indicated he was planning to consume part or all of Bolin’s body after he killed her and removed her head. He allegedly killed Underwood by beating her head three to four times with a wooden cutting board and smothering her with his hands and duct tape, said Tompkins. Additionally, it appeared Underwood had attempted to remove Bolin’s head with a decorative dagger, which was also seized.

“Regarding a potential motive, this appears to have been part of a plan to kidnap a person, rape them, torture them, kill them, cut off their head, drain the body of blood, rape the corpse, eat the corpse, then dispose of the organs and bones,” said Tompkins. Quietly collecting a number of items seized at the apartment, including a hacksaw, meat tenderizer, barbecue skewers, and a duffle bag, Underwood told investigators he’d “fantasized about cannibalism for about a year now,” Tompkins said Saturday.

‘Always a wonderful boy’
“This is something that I don’t know where it came from,” Underwood’s mother, Connie, said through tears in a brief telephone interview Sunday with The Associated Press. “He was always a wonderful boy.

“I would like to be able to tell her family how sorry we are. I just feel so terrible.”

He wrote that he rarely left his apartment for long stretches, except to go to work and to buy food. “I just sit here at the computer every minute of the day, when I’m not at work. A week or so ago, I spent my day off sitting here at the computer, barely moving from the chair, for 14 hours.”

He said one of his main interests was the online role-playing game “Kingdom of Loathing,” in which stick figures battle one another.

In September 2004, he wrote that his depression deepened after several months without taking the medication Lexapro, an antidepressant also used in the treatment of anxiety disorders.

“For example, my fantasies are just getting weirder and weirder. Dangerously weird,” he wrote. “If people knew the kinds of things I think about anymore, I’d probably be locked away. No probably about it, I know I would be.”

Dutiful but ‘boring’ worker
Underwood worked for nearly seven years at a Carl’s Jr. restaurant, where shift leader Bill Verdan described him as a quiet person who kept to himself. “He did a good job,” Verdan said Sunday.

However, he said Underwood, who quit about a year ago, was a “boring” man who rarely smiled.

“Just his tone of voice, he just sounded dull,” Verdan said. “Trying to get a smile out of him took an act of Congress.”

Verdan said he and his wife and young daughters never suspected anything unusual. “He gave my wife rides home from work numerous times,” he said. “We never felt uncomfortable. I talked to my girls after this happened, and they said they felt comfortable around him.”

His most recent job was as a stocker at a Griders Discount Foods grocery store in Oklahoma City, where he arrived early for his shift Friday, said a manager at the store, Jerry Castro.

“He was the same as always,” Castro said. “He was quiet and kept to himself. He didn’t interact with people. It just didn’t dawn on you that this was something he’d do.”