Web Link To Murder

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

October 19, 1999 / 9:43 AM EDT / CBS

Amy Boyer had no reason to fear Liam Youens. The two had met only once six years ago as eighth graders.

But the reasons were there, clear as day. Youens had a Web site devoted exclusively to his obsession with Boyer, and it included detailed plans to kill the 20-year-old woman.

On Friday, Youens brought his fantasy to life, shooting Amy down as she left her job in Nashua, N.H., then killing himself, leaving friends and family to weep and wonder.

Nashua Police Det. Sgt. Don Campbell talked about the investigation with CBS This Morning's Thalia Assuras.

The detective said he first learned of the Web site when police went to the Youens home to inform his parents of the murder-suicide. They found a computer in his bedroom, with a Web link to a site called "Amy Boyer." When they clicked on it, he says, "we started to find a lot of information that was disturbing."

The Web site chronicled his obsession for Amy. It also detailed his stalking of her, and it went into great detail about how he would carry out the murder.

Equally disturbing was their discovery of an arsenal of weapons in Youens' room.

"We found six rifles," says Campbell. "He had a semiautomatic handgun we identified as the murder weapon. There was a large amount of ammunition for the weapons also."

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Liam Youens

No one, not even his parents, knew that he had any weapons at all. Campbell describes Youens as "very much a recluse. He stayed very much to himself and would stay locked in his bedroom when at home and didn't socialize with his family and had no friends to speak of."

From Youens' writings and his Web site, investigators surmise that he had been stalking Amy since they were both in 10th grade. He monitored her home and the kinds of cars she drove, often taking pictures. When he lost track of her for a short time, he was able to find her again by using search engines on the Internet.

"As far as we can tell through our investigation, nobody was aware of his presence," says Campbell. "Amy certainly made no comments to her close friends or family members. There was no indication from people on the street. There were no calls for suspicious vehicles in the area, so as far as the victims were concerned, nobody was aware of his presence."

As for the Web site, Campbell says it is impossible to monitor every page on the Internet.

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Det. Sgt. Don Campbell

"I don't know how we could have possibly come across this information," he says. "Without having found that Web page, I would have had to have started to research by name. We subsequently found other Web pages he had drafted by typing his name into some of the Web page search engines. But so far as trying to monitor that type of behavior, I'm really not aware of any way we could begin to do that."

He does, however, encourage the public to alert their local law enforcement if they discover Web sites that threaten violence.

"Anyone who would have hit on [Youens'] Web page, reading the contents of what was in there, would have seen this was targeting a specific person," says the detective. "There were photographs of her."

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