America's Criminals Now Relying on Yahoo! Answers for Murder Tips
Remember the hoopla that arose when it was revealed that Casey Anthony allegedly Googled the term "chloroform" either once or eighty-four times?
Now a young couple in Florida accused of strangling a 19-year-old girl for drug money have left an even more mind-blowingly obvious Internet trail.
NY Daily News notes that the Broward-Palm Beach New Times recently got a hold of police records detailing an utterly insane flurry of Google searches performed on the phone of Nicole Okrzesik, 23, minutes before Juliana Mensch's death.
Okrzesik, along with her boyfriend James Ayers, 32, are accused of strangling Mensch back in March.
They also have no concept of how to go about a research project.
The quest for knowledge kicked off at 3:38 in the morning on March 24th, with a Google search for "chemicals to passout [sic] a person."
(Note that the first search occurred two minutes after a text was sent from Okrzesik's phone asking a friend if he knew where to get crack. The friend responded "what hell no," which is exactly how you should respond to that text, even if you do know where to get crack.)
From there, the searcher, displaying the kind of cracked out poor judgment that might also lead a person to strangle a teenager at 4 a.m. for drug money, turned to bastions of enlightenment Yahoo! Answers and Ask.com.
Here is one of the queries posed on Yahoo! Answers:
"Whats on those rags that make people pass out?"
(Specifically, "You know int he movies how some one puts a rag that has some liquid on it over someone's mouth, and they pass out? What is the chemical that they put on it? I'm not gonna do it.. Iv just always wondered that")
Just when you thought the questions couldn't get anymore dumbly specific than the kind characteristic of Yahoo! Answers, Okrzesik (or whatever mysterious person happened to be using Okrzesik's phone) visited a GoLivewire.com forum entry titled "could you kill someone in their sleep and no one would think it was you."
Most of the people in the forum didn't even provide how-to advice. They just answered the question exactly as it was asked. ("Probably," "No I could not," etc.) Not very helpful, but a valuable lesson in the importance of clear writing.
Equally useless was a visit to a post titled "Thirteen Ways to Poison Someone…On Paper," from a blog run by romance novel enthusiasts. That page offers aspiring authors advice on how to kill characters in their stories. Sample suggestion: "a poisoned dart from Malaysia."
And somewhere within these flailing, crazy searches, a brief foray was made to a Cracked.com article titled "The 7 Most Insane Things People have Done While Sleepwalking." Just a little fun to lighten the mood. Hopefully soon we will have a Cracked.com article titled "The 7 Most Insane Things People Have Done After Reading a Cracked.com Article." (By the way, there's nothing particularly mindblowing about that Cracked article. Nothing you couldn't guess on your own. Eating, having sex...things of that nature.)
The last search was performed at 3:44 a.m., which police say was "minutes" before 19-year-old Juliana Mensch was killed.
And, for the record, they were already pretty sure Okrzesik and Ayers were responsible for her death, seeing as the couple exchanged insanely detailed texts and Facebook messages (Facebook messages. Of course they did.) freaking out about how they had killed this girl right after they (allegedly) did it.
The two are scheduled to appear in court June 7th and 25th, respectively.