‘Bored, lonely’ man charged in horrific crime

updated 10:21 a.m. ET April 17, 2006

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 anti-depression 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.”

The 26-year-old grocery store stocker was arrested Friday. Investigators searched his apartment after he aroused their suspicions at a checkpoint, and found a large plastic tub in a bedroom closet. According to a police affidavit, he 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.

Elaborate plan
“Regarding a potential motive,” Purcell Police Chief David Tompkins said Saturday, “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.”

Investigators found meat tenderizer and barbecue skewers that he planned to use on the body, McClain County District Attorney Tim Kuykendall said in this small community 40 miles south of Oklahoma City.

Underwood, who is to be formally charged with first-degree murder Monday, 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.

Underwood’s family was shocked.

‘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.”

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.

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