Long Islander Brendan Murphy (pictured above), 34, was on holiday in the Virgin Islands with his girlfriend last December when he heard police had discovered a slew of bodies [...] Murphy's father had been a homicide prosecutor for the Suffolk County district attorney's office and now worked as a criminal defence lawyer for one of the biggest law firms on the island.When he returned home, Murphy decided to visit the locations where the bodies had been found. He trawled the internet for more information and stumbled upon Websleuths - an online community devoted to true crime. Websleuths was born 15 years ago, following the JonBenét Ramsey murder - the disturbing and still-unsolved case of the six-year-old pageant star found dead in the basement of her parents' Colorado home. Websleuths' owner Tricia Griffith describes the site as a "big spitballing session" and says police, retired detectives, lawyers and private inves*tigators pitch in to the discussions as well.
I meet Murphy in nearby Gilgo Beach late one afternoon in May and we stand looking out over the bay. He tells me he was a "lurker" on the site initially; he'd never contributed to an online forum before but he was surprised at the level of intelligent discussion about the investigation into the murders. "They seemed really on top of it; people were making valid points," he says.
Unlike many of the contrib*utors, though, Murphy actually lived on Long Island and knew the area where the bodies had been dumped. His grandfather had built more than 80 homes there and Murphy had spent his youth building docks for him. He knows the geography and ecology of the area intimately.
Someone on the Websleuths forum wanted to know who patrolled the barrier island aside from the police. The state's Department of Environmental Conservation, Murphy told them; they drive round in white trucks and fine residents if they build anything too close to the water. Then there were the parks police, state police and county police.
Another contributor wanted to know what burlap was used for; maybe the murderer worked with the sacking he'd used to wrap four of his victims. On Websleuths, people speculated it could have been a clammer or fisherman, but Murphy corrected them: around here it was used more to make sand*bags for erosion control projects. This also followed on from his theory that the Long Island serial killer was a local. In fact, he even had his eye on a potential suspect - someone who police, apparently, had ruled out.
Perhaps it was because his father was a lawyer, but Murphy, who has a background in programming and now works in IT for a financial firm, was tenacious in his research - and he wasn't content with joining the other amateur sleuths online throwing around conjecture. He knew that if he simply googled the name of the suspect, it would just throw up pages referring to his recent questioning by police, but if he altered the date parameters, he could find out if this person had form. "I discovered he'd been in trouble with the law before," Murphy says. "He had a record for gross negligence and he'd been in alcohol rehab. I found the index numbers of the court cases and punched them into the Nassau County court website to get the details."
He knew having previous form didn't mean this person was guilty of the Long Island murders, but Murphy was keen to at least add something of substance to the discussions online. He posted the court transcripts on the forum and recalls everyone saying, "Great find; how did you get this?" "The TV news networks weren't digging through the public records like I was," Murphy says. "And I was just some guy sitting on the internet."
In addition, Murphy had been using a tool to assist in his sleuthing that he was keeping quiet from the virtual community. A few years before, he had been looking for a car for his girl*friend when he came across an ad for a decommissioned Drug Enforcement Administration surveillance van on Craigslist. The DEA van was a 1989 Ford Econoline with only 30,000 miles on the clock. It was bullet-proof, naturally, had two fuel tanks, a separate propane tank that fuelled a heater and an air condi*tioner that ran on dry ice pellets. But the clincher, as far as Murphy was con*cerned, was an on-board periscope.
From the outside it looks like a normal van but Murphy says if you tap on the side you can tell it's far from normal. "It's amazing," he says. "It has a well of six car batteries that runs everything so you can power it up without the ignition. You could sit there for hours being fired on by the bad guys and you'd be OK." The periscope, cranked by hand, pokes out the top of the air vent on the van's roof so as to be inconspicu*ous. Murphy and his girlfriend call their vehicle the Land Sub.
