Chat shows killer's mood
Chat shows killer's guilt

Minutes after Kevin Ray Underwood killed 10-year-old Jamie Rose Bolin, while the young girl's half-beheaded body lay draped over the side of his bathtub "draining,” the 28-year-old grocery stocker passed time chatting about children's movies, buying a puppy and petting squirrels.

A transcript of an online chat, obtained by The Oklahoman, includes a break of more than two hours, during which Underwood is presumed to have tried to hide Jamie's body in his Purcell apartment.

In testimony last week, Melissa Custer, Underwood's former chat buddy from California, said after she learned about the grisly murder and Underwood's bizarre cannibalistic fantasies, she noted that Underwood seemed "unusually happy” during that chat.

Prosecutors showed that the chat began at 4:10 p.m. on April 12, 2006, which they estimate was only a few minutes after Jamie came home from school and ventured into Underwood's apartment, where he bludgeoned her with a wooden cutting board and suffocated her to death despite her desperate struggle to fight him off.

"Would you like to pet a furry squirrel?” Underwood, using the moniker subspecies23, asked Custer, who answered affirmatively.

"Yay, me too, let's go find one,” Underwood responded.

Underwood then wrote that he wanted to go see the latest "kid's movie,” "Over the Hedge,” because it had a funny squirrel.

Underwood later would confess to watching children play outside his apartment and plotting to abduct one of them.

He told the FBI he planned to restrain a boy or girl and make them watch pornography before raping them.

Then after the sex, he said, "it would start turning kind of violent,” as he "kinda tortured them a little, before cutting off their head and keeping the corpse in his bed before butchering and cooking them,” Underwood confessed.

In the chat with Custer two days earlier, Underwood said some neighbors had some new puppies and he wanted to buy one.

"If the people aren't home, I'll stand there and talk to the puppies, and stick my fingers through the fence and the dogs lick them,” he said.

Underwood also wrote of a new sword he bought at a medieval fair, downloading a Duran Duran song, and a "hilarious” online cartoon that shows a stick figure turning other stick figures into a red splatter as it hacks them down with a chain saw and runs them over with a fire engine.

After more than a two-hour break in which he presumably disposes of Jamie's body, his online chat persona took a different tone.

"Ugh, I'm so hot, I feel like I'm going to throw up,” he wrote.

For the next 30 minutes, Underwood only offered short small talk answers as Custer talked about her love life.

When Underwood picked up the chat with Custer again on the day after he killed Jamie, it appears his chat had turned to paranoia about being caught, as he told her about a missing girl at his apartment complex.

Custer later testified that in retrospect, he seemed much more serious than the previous day.

"I've had a horrible 24 hours,” he wrote, adding that the girl who lived upstairs went missing.

"And I've been worried sick ever since, mainly with the worry that I was going to be named a suspect, and the police would trash my apartment searching it while I was at work.”

When Custer asked why they would suspect him, Underwood confided that he was the last person to see Jamie before she disappeared. He said that since about 6:30 the previous night, he felt like he "was only moments away from throwing up,” and could hardly eat, but that he helped keep watch for her.

As the chat continued, he complained that he couldn't sleep because of a helicopter flying around with a searchlight and the fact that Jamie's family sat outside his window, keeping watch for her.

Underwood went on to say that the girl "seems like a very nice, trusting kid, and that's probably what got her in trouble, if she's not a runaway,” and that he didn't want to tell the parents that he had talked to her because they might suspect him.

"I'm afraid the cops would come into my apartment, and see all my knives and swords and the horror movies and documentaries about serial killers on my DVD rack, and suspect me,” he wrote. "And there's always blood all over my bedsheets and stuff, but it's my own blood.”

"Man, I just don't know why I was so paranoid about all this earlier. I know I didn't do anything, but I felt like I did. I expected the cops to come in and arrest me at any minute.”

The day after the last chat, Jamie Bolin's naked and mutilated body was found in a plastic storage container in Underwood's apartment.

After his arrest, he told FBI agents that he had been having "weird” cannibalistic fantasies for a few months — about the same time he restarted taking Lexapro, an antidepressant.

He told agents that as he sat behind the young girl who was watching cartoons and playing with his rat, he "struggled with himself the whole time,” but the struggle was "kinda” about right and wrong, but also "not wanting to get caught.”

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