DEANNE BAYS WAS WORRIED about her kid brother, Daniel. His girlfriend hadn’t heard from him for a day and a half. There was no sign of him online, even though he usually spent hours a day on MySpace. And he’d been hanging out a lot with that drug dealer. Bays hoped that didn’t mean young Daniel Varo was back in jail. All day long on February 7, even as Bays crammed for Accounting 211 and Spanish 102 and took her daughter to the dentist, she wondered where he could be. That evening, two hours into her 4-to-10 pm shift at the Norm Thompson catalog company, just outside Portland, Oregon, Bays finally got a chance to check her own MySpace page for messages. There was one from her husband, frantic, telling Bays to phone right away – even though he knew that she wasn’t allowed to make personal calls on the job. Bays’ inbox also had emails from two of Varo’s ex-girlfriends. "What did he do now?" she groaned to herself, clicking on one of the notes: im freekin out i cant stop crying and i dont want to believe its true. he cant be gone … please call me or someone call me please.
Bays, a petite redhead with a broad, smooth face, walked into the Thompson break room. She called her husband. "You have to come home," he whispered.
Varo, 22, was dead – shot in the head as he sat at his computer. Varo’s friend Darren Christian, 28, and one of Christian’s friends, 21-year-old Lindy Cochran, had also been killed in the same gangland style.
In the days and weeks that followed, Deanne Bays followed a path familiar to families involved in a violent crime – she sobbed in grief and anger, numbly arranged a funeral, turned to friends for comfort. But Bays did it in two worlds at once – the virtual and the real. Bays suffered in private, but she also shared her pain on MySpace. The aftermath of the murders resonated through the social network – touching the investigating detectives, the lawyers and even the victims. Daniel Varo was dead, but he didn’t disappear. He had lived so much of his life online that pieces of him lingered on the Web – a ghost in the machine.
PEOPLE DROVE FOR HUNDREDS OF MILES to have Daniel Varo work on their cars. It was easy for him, and he loved it – he’d do it for strangers stuck on the side of the road, in the rain, in the middle of the night. And good luck getting him to charge for the work; maybe instead of cash he’d take parts for his Acura Integra Type R, a street racer he drove on the twisting roads of suburban Portland at five times the speed limit – holding his cell phone against the dashboard so a buddy could hear the engine growl. He was a 6’2", 220-pound overgrown kid, a mile-a-minute goofball talking at hurricane speeds, hoovering up fast food, bopping around raves like a noodle-armed maniac.
But Varo was also a "magnet to trouble," his sister says. "All the cops knew his plates." He rolled with a tough crowd. He had served six months in the Shutter Creek Correctional Institution for intent to sell 76 hits of ecstasy. He had even managed to get busted for jaywalking. The threat of parole violations always loomed. i need to get on the ball, he once posted on his sister’s MySpace page. i am getting old already haha.
Then in January 2005, intent on making a clean start, Varo and his girlfriend – a sinewy, 18-year-old blonde named Ashley Foley – moved from Portland to a secluded suburb 30 miles north of Tacoma, Washington, to live with Varo’s mother. Away from friends, they started spending more and more time on MySpace, uploading their personalities, preferences, and relationships to the social network. She’d post flirty comments and decorated her page in pink, with pictures of herself in garters and thongs; he posted an online kissing test and a picture of a Type R.
They spent the better part of a year keeping to themselves, mostly. Foley danced at Fox’s, a local strip club. Varo delivered pizzas and prepped for computer science classes – he rebuilt computers almost as well as cars. But on New Year’s Eve, Varo and Foley went to a rave called Apocalypse 2 at a club in a trashy little exurb southeast of Tacoma. Varo was excited; he kept telling Foley that he was hoping to run into an old Seattle rave buddy, "DC." They met up with drug dealer and party promoter Darren Christian just after midnight.
Six feet tall, with sculpted shoulders and pale-green eyes, Christian was charismatic, oozing confidence. He’d drop three grand at a bar without blinking and bought a motorcycle before he knew how to ride. One time, about to go snowboarding, he handed a friend a 4-inch wad of beer-soaked cash to hold while he was on the slopes. Christian hadn’t bothered to count it, but his friend did: $28,000. Fueling all this was an ecstasy business with hundreds of thousands of pills in inventory. "He got the most ass, kicked the most ass, drove the fastest car, had the coolest dog and the dopest house," says Sherri Jensen, another Fox’s dancer. "Everything about him made you want to hang out with him, all the time."
Christian and Varo had a bond that was almost chemical. "A little match made in heaven," Foley says. "Both really loud, always going-going-going." The pair partied for a full day after the New Year’s rave. Within days, Varo was crashing at Christian’s rental house, a white stucco place on Sixth and South Union avenues in Tacoma’s emerging-from-seedy Hilltop neighborhood. Foley built Christian’s MySpace page; he used it to promote his parties and hook up with girlfriends. Christian decorated the page like his house, with pictures of Japanese motorcycles and Al Pacino in Scarface. Soon after he started his online life, girls were leaving notes, telling him, I can’t wait to touch you!
Through a fellow car junkie, Varo met Ulysses Handy III. Known on MySpace as Lucifer – he had hellraiser tattooed across his back and 666 on his caramel-brown abdomen – Handy had just finished serving nearly eight years in jail for beating a guy with a baseball bat. Since his release, Handy had been suspected of shooting two people and molesting his 14-year-old cousin. A 1998 hospital psychological evaluation mentioned past diagnoses ranging from "impulse control disorder" to "Jekyll/Hyde personality shifts."
The first time Handy went over to Christian’s house, he figured he’d rob the place; Christian kept a safe in the bedroom, supposedly packed with drugs and money. But Christian was "so cool," Handy told friends, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. In fact, he could barely bring himself to leave Christian and Varo at all.
The three became inseparable. It was an unusual trio – Handy was the only African-American in an extended clique of white and Asian kids. At Sixth and South Union, the guys would play videogames, Taser one another, and clown around with Foley and the strippers who always seemed to be glomming onto Christian. The computer was always on, and MySpace was always booted up. Late one night, Varo hopped on the PC and clicked over to Handy’s page to tease him about his "Lucifer" persona – wasn’t that the name of the cat in Cinderella? Handy wrote Varo back: u assholes are stupid!!! but I love yall 2 death!HAHAHAHAHA.
Varo fired back with a picture of the cartoon cat Photoshopped with Handy’s face. Christian put up a slide show of pictures that had been taken in his living room. In one shot, Handy is whipping Varo with a belt. In the next, Handy is on his knees, hands tied behind his back. Christian has a gun to the back of his head.
Handy’s history of violence worried some of Christian’s and Varo’s friends, who kept asking why they all continued to hang out together. "Karma," Christian would answer. Treat people right and they’ll be good to you. But in early February, for some reason, the goodwill started to dissipate. Christian lost an expensive jacket with some drugs in a pocket and asked Handy if he knew where it was. To Handy, that sounded like an accusation. Tempers flared. Until I get that jacket back, Christian told Handy, don’t bother coming to Sixth and South Union.
Handy couldn’t let the slight go. He had his buddy Sirree Muhammad get him a .357 Magnum for a "lick" – a robbery. Handy swore he wasn’t planning to hurt anyone, but "if they try to fight or something," he said, "I’m gonna kill ’em." At 12:56 am on February 7, just before he, Muhammad, and two others headed out, Handy logged onto MySpace and posted an entry titled "The Nature Of The Beast!!!" It had only one line: A tiger Cant Change its Stripes!!! So STOP trying to change ME!
POLICE FOUND VARO half-curled against the wall of the spare bedroom at Sixth and South Union. Head tucked in, arms folded across his chest, Varo looked like he’d been stopped mid-somersault; more likely, he had fallen off the office chair just in front of the PC. His head was pierced by a single hole about 2 inches behind his left ear. His hair was matted with blood; a dark halo of it spread around him.
In the living room, Christian lay facedown, his driver’s license and a crumpled scrap of paper tossed on his back. His wound was almost identical to Varo’s. Perpendicular to him was Lindy Cochran’s body, her painted toenails nearly touching his hand. She, too, had been shot in the head. Pepsi bottles, noodle-soup containers, and PlayStation controllers lay on the table beside them. Christian’s safe was gone.
Detectives investigating the case couldn’t help running into Handy. He rented a room nearby with his fiancée. He was a suspect in several other cases, including shootings in October and January. And he was one of at least three people who had been in the Sixth and South Union house after the murders but before the police arrived. On February 8, he told detectives that he’d gone in to pick up any drugs, so the victims’ parents wouldn’t be upset when police found them.
Soon after, police formally charged Handy – not for the Sixth and South Union murders, but for the other shootings he was allegedly involved in. The charges were two counts each of assault in the first degree and unlawful possession of a firearm. Foley posted a note to Varo’s page: We caught ’em baby! Fuck that nigger.
MYSPACE STARTED OUT as a way for indie bands to connect to new fans. But the network and others like it made it so easy to create communities that before long all the halfway-cool teens and early twentysomethings had to have pages of their own. Their relationships now exist as much online as in reality.
With more than 120 million registered users on MySpace, odds dictate that some of them will die by violence. The ghoulish, encyclopedic Web site MyDeathSpace chronicles about 600 victims and more than 35 accused, convicted, or executed murderers with MySpace profiles. A year after Virginia Commonwealth University freshman Taylor Behl was found murdered in September 2005, friends were still posting messages to her page saying how much they missed her. Ryan Dallas Cook’s crew still write him notes about their trips to Vegas and Disneyland; he died in a hit-and-run motorcycle accident in October 2005.
Other social networks are quickly piling up their own tragedies and online afterlives. Classmates of 23-year-old Jason Shephard, strangled to death in September, share memories and pictures on Facebook, as do friends of John and Kevin Frazza, whose father shot them to death and then killed himself in July.
Law enforcement authorities across the country turn to MySpace for help with roughly 150 criminal probes a month. In the Varo case, police spent hours on the victims’ MySpace pages. All those comments and pictures posted from the Sixth and South Union PC gave officers a map of the victims’ interconnected social landscape. On February 9, two days after the murders, detectives asked MySpace to freeze the accounts of everyone involved to help in "determining possible suspects as well as assist in determining the time frame for the crime."
Varo’s family and friends reached out to him in the digital netherworld as soon as they found out he was dead. They flocked to his MySpace page to express their sorrow and vent their outrage. You were supposed to be here this weekend, Bays wrote. DAMMIT! Why didn’t you just go home?
It went this way for months. Varo’s circle kept leaving messages on his page as if he were still replacing engines and dancing silly at raves. Foley was especially forlorn: I slept in your bed last night … and sprayed armani cologne everywhere so it smelled like you.
They told him about their vacations, asked him car repair questions, even described the sunny weather outside and the cheese eggs they cooked for breakfast. "Darren and Daniel put so much of themselves into those pages – ’This is who I am, this is the music I like, these are my friends’ – that it’s like a little piece of them is still here," Bays explains. "That’s how we talked, anyway, the last few months. I’m just picking up where we left off."
Maybe Bays was trying to avoid grief by holding on to her brother’s digital shell. So what if she was? "That ’get on with life,’ ’get rid of it’ stuff? The whole concept doesn’t seem to work anymore," says Connie Saindon, founder of the San Diego-based Survivors of Violent Loss Program. "If there are statues of George Washington, why can’t we keep these people around, too?"
DEANNE BAYS had been through tragedy before. In July 2001, Lydia Braschler-Varo, Deanne and Danny’s 13-year-old sister, was kidnapped. The following April, a man in search of wild mushrooms found her body dumped down a 70-foot ravine; she had been beaten and strangled with a telephone cord. The horrible events made headlines, but there was hardly anyone to share Bays’ pain. "I had a baby, still nursing," she remembers. "I just clung to her."
Sitting at a desk festooned with Christmas lights, fairy prints and half-moon candle holders, Bays says she discovered that this second heartbreak could be different. Condolences poured in online – Honey we are here for you – and not just from her inner circle. Varo’s old neighbor emailed to say he had set up a new MySpace group for people to share memories and pictures. Hollie Arrell-Nothwang, one of Varo’s friends, announced she was planning a memorial at the Portland International Raceway. "She just sort of appeared out of nowhere – in my face, insistent," Bays says. "When I couldn’t handle things, she did. She just understood." Two weeks later, at the raceway, a DJ pounded techno beats through the night. Candles were lit, engines gunned, and tears shed. At the climax, Varo’s black Type R, decorated with baby-blue teddy bears and ribbons, peeled out onto the track with a deafening howl.
The flood of newfound friends sometimes made Bays uncomfortable. Who were all these people? I was having a decent day today until I came on here. I didn’t cry once. I was scrolling down my page, and saw all the comments my brother put on my page. I keep pretending to everyone that I’m okay. When I sit all alone as I am right now, the pain comes over me. I don’t feel like I will ever heal.
Over the weeks that followed, Bays cataloged her grief: the decision to put school on hold, the endless questions from her kids, the days spent smoking and absent-mindedly staring at the TV. She dyed her hair pink and got a tattoo of a fairy across her china-white back – its design includes the initials of her baby brother and sister. And knowing who was responsible for her brother’s death did little to help her sort out her feelings; after all, nothing would bring her brother back.
Foley, Varo’s girlfriend, kept a blog, too. And her feelings were intense. Foley knew Handy; he even called her from jail to deny his involvement in the murders. Foley poured her anger onto Handy’s MySpace page. I was fuckin nice to you, i hung out with you, i bought you shit, you called me … and then you fuckin MURDERED my boyfriend you piece of shit. 666? Hellraiser? I thought you were a fuckin freak when i saw that shit, and this just confirms it. Have fun playin with the devil now.
But Handy had defenders, too – especially since the papers continued to report that police had no suspects in the case. HEY I KNOW U BOUT TO BE OUT SOON. AND BUST A CAP ON THESE DUMB ASS MUTHAFUCKAS!!!!!!
In many murders, victims and their killers are acquainted: wife shoots husband, crack dealer stabs customer, pimp strangles streetwalker. So you would expect some interaction among the friends and relatives of the perpetrator and the victim. In fact, typically there’s little. Even after intra-family crimes, relatives tend to choose sides and stay on them. "People distance themselves," says Charles Figley, head of Florida State University’s Traumatology Institute. "The ties that bind people – births, marriages – split apart because of a catastrophe."
On social network sites, those sides interact. Victims’ buddies can howl at killers’ cousins, and the cousins can scream back. "All the old social relationship models and theories don’t apply anymore," Figley adds. "We’re rewriting textbooks here."
TWO WEEKS AFTER FOLEY announced that Handy had been "caught," police still hadn’t charged him with the Sixth and South Union killings. But after interviews with Handy’s roommates, relatives, and MySpace friends, the detectives were closing in. On February 22, they brought Sirree Muhammad in for questioning.
He began to cry almost immediately. "No one deserves to die like that," Muhammad sobbed. Yes, he had been at Christian’s place that night, along with Handy and two others. Yes, he gave Handy a gun. As Muhammad drove around the neighborhood looking out for cops, Handy went inside – he later told reporters the full story.
Handy hugged Cochran and turned down her offer of some leftover ribs. He greeted Varo, who was sitting at the computer, and then glanced out the back door to make sure no one was there. Then he walked into the living room where Christian was. They spoke briefly; Handy gave Christian a kiss. Then he took out the gun. About 20 minutes later, Handy emerged, handed Muhammad the .357, and said, "Get rid of it." When they got back to Handy’s apartment, he said: "Their heads are gone."
The people who’d been with Muhammed outside the house confirmed much of that chronology. Police recovered the safe and charged Handy on February 24, hours before Varo’s memorial.
On Handy’s MySpace page, Varo and Christian’s crew ranted against the accused killer. Even though the evidence was lining up against Handy, his defenders kept posting. He didn’t kill them, they said. Handy had gone back inside the house after the murders, but so had several others. Duy Nguyen, a friend of Handy and Varo, stopped by around 1 pm after receiving a call from Foley asking if he had seen her boyfriend. He knocked on the door, then looked through the window blinds. Nguyen saw the bodies on the floor and went inside the house. After trying to call 911 and failing, he called Foley, who was then living back home in Oregon. He says she told him to wait for her; Foley says he misunderstood. Either way, when she arrived three hours later, she called the police.
Other accused murderers have found themselves defended on social networks, too. Hours after police arrested 21-year-old Brandon Menard on suspicion of stabbing his parents and sister to death in August, friends were vehemently proclaiming his innocence on his MySpace page. Laura Rangel, the mother of a 23-year-old murder suspect in Oakland, California, posted police reports and transcripts of witness interviews on MySpace, which seemed to weaken the case against her daughter. The local prosecutor fought to have the page shut down. But that only served to draw more press coverage and outside interest.
The MySpace pages related to the Sixth and South Union killings also attracted gawkers. Some were just curious, like the spectators who sit in the back of a courtroom during a trial. But others had an agenda. The "Ludwigapalooza" pranksters, who gathered on the Xanga.com and MySpace pages of murderer David Ludwig, claimed they were out to undermine the "mob mentality" that takes over whenever an accused killer has a social network site. Exactly how this goal was accomplished by posting TEXAS MOTHAFUCKAS!!!!! on Handy’s page is unclear.
More unsettling to Bays and Foley were the Internet sleuths. In the summer of 2005, a group spearheaded by Atlanta opera singer turned crime blogger Steve Huff used Web postings to plot the movements of pedophile Joseph Edward Duncan III and to link him to an eight-year-old unsolved murder. Less than a week after the Sixth and South Union murders were announced, Huff put together a reasonable sketch of what had happened, citing nothing but MySpace and a local TV news report. But Foley resented what commenters on Huff’s site were saying. They wondered aloud why Varo’s friends didn’t call police to the scene right away – and whether the victims somehow brought this upon themselves. There once was a saying: live by the gun … die by the gun.
Foley responded: Get your facts straight before you go bashing on people you dont even know. And Huff came to her defense, blasting commenters on his own site. If you are coming here looking to bitch about something inappropriate or strange in a victims’ life … you can go someplace else.
Following the links from the crime sites to Varo’s and Foley’s pages, people naturally found Bays’ blog. After an August mention on MyDeathSpace, Bays’ readership went from about a dozen a day to several hundred. For her, that was too many eyes. Those posts had too much out there for everyone to read, Bays blogged. I deleted them all.
IT’S A SUNNY THURSDAY in late July. A half-dozen tricked-out trucks and hand-tooled street racers pull up to Bays’ tan ranch house, one by one. People Bays has known for years – like Varo’s jailhouse buddy Mike Whittington, sporting spiderweb tattoos and a wife-beater – mingle with the woman who helped plan Varo’s raceway memorial, Hollie Arrell-Nothwang. She reaches into her husband’s neon-lit 2006 Honda Ridgeline and takes out a laptop to pull up Whittington’s MySpace page. On it are pictures of the "Coupe de Varo," the 244-horsepower dream car they’re all chipping in to build.
Everyone trades stories about Varo – the time he shot a friend in the ass with a paintball gun, the ride to the hospital he gave a stranger, the stray cat he took home as a kid that multiplied into 27, the shot glasses he brought back from San Francisco. Foley shows off the new tattoo on the inside of her lip – and the dv inked on her arm. Folks pass cases of beer, throw chicken on the grill, and pop wheelies on built-from-scratch motorcycles. Bays moves from group to group, doling out hugs, barking orders. From a boom box, Snoop Dogg shouts at everyone not to stop. "At least there’s some good that’s come out of something so tragic," Bays says to me. "We’re all here."
On Sunday, Bays and I climb into her 2004 Chevy Malibu and head north on I-5. She cuts across lanes and darts through traffic at 90 miles an hour all the way to Rochester, Washington. We reach a cemetery the size of a gridiron, lined with pine trees. The family can’t afford a headstone; no epitaph marks Daniel Jacob Varo’s grave. There’s just a purple pinwheel and a stuffed blue bunny in a corner of the grass.
Six weeks later, she calls to tell me about a dream she had about her brother. "It was really vivid. And he kept saying to me, over and over, ’You can always talk to me when I’m gone.’"
The same day, police report that Ulysses Handy III will plead guilty to three counts of aggravated first-degree murder and accept three consecutive life sentences, one for each of his victims.
Bays posts a message on her brother’s MySpace page: It’s done.
Contributing editor Noah Shachtman (www.defensetech.org) wrote about the Baghdad bomb squad in issue 13.11. To see now-deleted messages from Handy’s MySpace page and to read a reporter’s notebook from his sentencing hearing, go to wired.com/myspacemurder. 
credit James Jeamn
Ashley Foley left MySpace messages for her boyfriend, Daniel, long after he was dead.
credit Beth Perkins
Ashley Foley
credit Beth Perkins
Deanne Bays
credit Ashley Foley
Handy and Darren Christian
credit Pierce County Correction Center Booking Photo
Ulysses Handy III
credit Beth Perkins
Mourners at a memorial for Daniel Varo.
credit James Jeamn
Ashley Foley left MySpace messages for her boyfriend, Daniel, long after he was dead.
credit Beth Perkins
Ashley Foley
credit Beth Perkins
Deanne Bays
credit Ashley Foley
Handy and Darren Christian
credit Pierce County Correction Center Booking Photo
Ulysses Handy III
credit Beth Perkins
Mourners at a memorial for Daniel Varo.
credit James Jeamn
Ashley Foley left MySpace messages for her boyfriend, Daniel, long after he was dead.
credit Beth Perkins
Ashley Foley
credit Beth Perkins
Deanne Bays
credit Ashley Foley
Handy and Darren Christian
credit Pierce County Correction Center Booking Photo
Ulysses Handy III
credit Beth Perkins
Mourners at a memorial for Daniel Varo.
credit James Jeamn
Ashley Foley left MySpace messages for her boyfriend, Daniel, long after he was dead.
credit Beth Perkins
Ashley Foley
credit Beth Perkins
Deanne Bays
credit Ashley Foley
Handy and Darren Christian
credit Pierce County Correction Center Booking Photo
Ulysses Handy III
credit Beth Perkins
Mourners at a memorial for Daniel Varo.
Story Extras
