‘Boring’ suspect has dark side

PURCELL, Okla. – The man accused of killing a 10-year-old neighbor girl for an elaborate plan to eat human flesh joked about cannibalism on his online diary, discussed the effects of not taking his antidepression medication and mentioned “dangerously weird” fantasies.

All he wanted in life, Kevin Ray Underwood wrote in his blog, was “to be able to live like a normal person.”

People who knew Underwood described him Sunday as a quiet, “boring” and seemingly trustworthy young man. His mother who lived across town called him a “wonderful boy.”

“This is something that I don’t know where it came from,” Connie Underwood said through tears. “I would like to be able to tell her family how sorry we are. I just feel so terrible.”

Kevin Underwood, a 26-year-old grocery store stocker in this small community 40 miles south of Oklahoma City, was arrested Friday. Investigators searched his apartment after he drew their suspicions at a checkpoint, and they found a large plastic tub in a bedroom closet.

According to a police affidavit, Kevin Underwood confessed that he killed Jamie Rose Bolin, telling FBI agents: “Go ahead and arrest me. She is in there. I chopped her up.”

Jamie’s unclothed body was inside the tub, along with a towel used to soak up blood, officials said. Police said that while there were deep saw marks on the girl’s neck, she had not been dismembered.

Underwood, who is to be formally charged with first-degree murder today, lived alone in an apartment downstairs from the one where Jamie lived with her father.

Authorities believe Underwood killed the girl Wednesday, when she disappeared after going to a library, by beating and smothering her.

Investigators found meat tenderizer and barbecue skewers that he planned to use on the body, McClain County District Attorney Tim Kuykendall said.

On his blog, an online diary that he had kept since September 2002, Underwood described himself as “single, bored, and lonely, but other than that, pretty happy.”

He mentions cannibalism, asking, “If you were a cannibal, what would you wear to dinner?” and responding: “The skin of last night’s main course.”

In an entry dated Feb. 4, 2006, Underwood wrote that he struggled with depression and social interaction.

“Pretty much the only time I believe in God is when I blame him for something,” he wrote. “Or, when I’m really depressed, to cry and beg him to make me better, to make whatever is wrong in my brain go away, so that I can live like a normal person.

“That’s all I want in life, is to be able to live like a normal person.”

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 had 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.”

Underwood worked for nearly seven years at a Carl’s Jr. restaurant, where shift leader Bill Berdan described him as a quiet person who kept to himself. “He did a good job,” Berdan 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,” Berdan said. “Trying to get a smile out of him took an act of Congress.”