Murder.com, continued

by Chris Wright

"I have always lusted for the death of Amy," he wrote, before going on to describe exactly how he would kill her. "I'll lay in wait across the street further down at 4 p.m. . . . When she gets in I'll drive up to her car blocking her in, window to window I'll shoot her with my glock." The site was up for more than two years.

GREEN-EYED MONSTER: Amy Boyer's contentment rankled the miserable Liam Youens to the extent that he felt he had to kill her. "I think she may be taking this `I love life' thing a bit too far," he wrote on his now-infamous Web site, which went unnoticed for more than two years.

For Amy's family, discovering Liam's site was like a thumb pressed into an open wound. "Two and a half years this site was out there," says Amy's stepfather, Tim Remsberg. "I mean, it's bad enough to get the phone call, then you get to the hospital and find out she's gone, then you find out that this information was out there for two and a half years and no one said anything to anybody?" He shakes his head, falls silent.

Remsberg is a stocky man with a thicket of facial hair and a raspy, sonorous voice. When he speaks of his stepdaughter's death he assumes a frightening intensity. He will lean across the table, his hands folding and unfolding. The more he talks, the madder he gets.

Shortly after they discovered Liam's site, detectives found that the Internet actually played an even bigger role in Amy's death. Using the services of online sleuths -- notably the Florida-based company Docusearch.com -- Liam had been able to trace Amy's Social Security number and her workplace address. The whole thing cost him a little more than $150. "It's accually obsene what you can find out about a person on the internet," he wrote.

This statement might smack of smarmy bravado, but there's also a hint of bemusement in it, as if Liam cannot believe what he's getting away with. As Remsberg says, "Do we create Web sites so that no one will see them? Of course not. I don't think for a minute that for two and a half years he thought no one was going to see this. He was screaming for help, and we failed miserably."

For all the high-tech aspects of the case, Liam did a lot of good old-fashioned legwork in his stalking of Amy Boyer. As his aunt told the police, "He was in his room, then he'd go outside and ride, ride around in his car, and we didn't know where he went. He'd ride, he'd ride around in his car." His mother would ask, "Where's he going in the middle of the night?"

Where Liam was going was over to Amy's street, to sit and smoke and gaze at the lights in the Remsbergs' windows. Liam's Web site includes a stalker's journal, a blow-by-blow account of his nighttime excursions. When his quarry wasn't around, he would simply resort to stalking her parents. Tim Remsberg recalls several occasions when, lying in bed at night, he heard the sound of heavy breathing outside his window. At the time he wrote it off as neighborhood kids. Now he thinks it must have been Liam.

By his own account, Liam was as timid and edgy as a stalker as he was in every other aspect of his life. Indeed, the reason he felt the need to hire Docusearch.com to find Amy's workplace was that he was spooked by Tim Remsberg -- though Remsberg himself says he was totally unaware of Liam. "It's like, I don't even know you exist, you little dirtbag!"

On his site, Liam recalled an early foray into stalkerdom. "I drove down Amy's street for the first time around 2:30am and parked my car and sat. After about 10mins a car pulled down the street passed me. I though oh god what the fuck am I doing here. I was about to leave but the car wouldn't start! oh FUCK."

Says Paison: "If you read his stuff, you understand this is not a tremendously brave individual."

Eventually, the panicky predator found a pay phone. "I call a tow truck at 3:00am to get my car from my first attempt at stalking," he wrote. "And you know what? Turns out I was so scared that I forgot to put the car in park to start it."

"Heck," Liam wrote, "reading this, even `I' feel sorry for Liam (admit it, if you knew me, at some point you did too)."

Sorry for him? The question is, why weren't people terrified of him?

Actually, they were. After high school, Liam had attended the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, but flunked out after a year. In a police interview, Liam's aunt recalled that period: "When he came back he was acting crazy. . . . He was talking about wanting to have a gun, said he wanted to target practice . . . we were kind of afraid of him."

Liam wrote that "something odd happened at RIT" but added, "I don't want to talk about it." Rumors that he was expelled for starting a fire could not be corroborated by the Nashua PD.

In 1997, shortly after his return to Nashua, Liam was arrested for domestic violence. The incident occurred after he told his mother he wanted to get plastic surgery for a sunken chest. This was a recurring obsession of Liam's. As a detective wrote in his report, the six-foot, 125-pound Liam "constantly complained about his being skinny."

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Chris Wright can be reached at cwright[a]phx.com.