Forensic Transmissions Episode 64: Kevin Underwood confession
On April 12, 2006, a ten-year-old girl named Jamie Bolin went missing from her home in an apartment complex in Purcell, Oklahoma. Five days later, her naked and mutilated body was found in a plastic storage container in the apartment of her downstairs neighbor, 29-year-old Kevin Ray Underwood. After his arrest, Underwood was interviewed by two Oklahoma FBI agents.
His confession is disturbing not only for its bizarre content, but for the nonchalant way in which he recounts the crime. “It started off with cannibalism-the thought of eating someone was appealing to me. It kept evolving from there,” he admits, going on to explain in considerable detail how he attempted to carry out this plan on Jamie Bolin, whom he had decided was a convenient victim.
The FBI interrogators do a fine job of remaining unperturbed while drawing Underwood out and encouraging him to make it clear that he was in his right mind when he committed the crime–he knew right from wrong, and was thinking about how to avoid detection. But, as his confession reveals, his plan went wrong from the first, and his confession belies his claim that he “didn’t, believe in violence, or hurting anyone.”
His plan was to abduct a child, and “while they were still alive and gagged, I was going to drape them over the bathtub and cut off their head, and then hang them and let the body all drain out. I was gonna keep the body around for a couple of days, I was going to set the head on my desk so it could watch me, and keep the corpse in my bed, sleeping with it, having sex with it for a day or two, and then I was going to start butchering them and cooking them.” When asked whether he bought any special equipment for the job, Underwood replies, “Just the barbeque skewers, some meat tenderizer, and a hacksaw to cut open the head to get to the brain, because I wanted to eat the brain and the heart and some of the organs.”
The confession is notable for Underwood’s robotic delivery (he was later diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome), his lack of remorse and empathy, his admission that he took a break from mutilating the corpse to chat with a girl online, and, finally, his loud fit of vomiting. On February 29, 2008, Underwood was found guilty of first degree murder and sentenced to death. He is currently on Oklahoma’s Death Row.