Murder.com

What happened last fall on a tiny New Hampshire
street triggered a national debate on Internet crime.
But was the Web really to blame
for the death of Amy Boyer?

by Chris Wright

THE LOST DAUGHTER: as Amy Boyer planned for her future, she had no idea that a well-armed ex-classmate was plotting her death. "She was so much the opposite of this kid," says her stepfather. "So much sunlight compared to darkness."

NASHUA, NEW HAMPSHIRE -- A little more than 10 years ago, this city was looking like one of history's castoffs. Husks of factories stood crumbling into the Nashua River. Surrounding farmland had given way to shabby strip malls and mismatched suburbs. Main Street slumped into a trough of recession. Pick-up trucks sighed through the streets like tumbleweeds. Like so many New England mill towns, Nashua was chronically, clinically depressed.

No longer. These days Nashua has shaken off its dusty Industrial Revolution heritage. Techno-giants Digital and Lockheed are the city's largest employers. Its regiments of red-brick mills are rapidly being turned into swank condos. Main Street hums with commerce. "Money magazine recognizes Nashua as one of the Best Places To Live in America," chimes the Greater Nashua Center for Economic Development. "People are writing about it, talking about it, and reading about it."

But on the afternoon of October 15, 1999, on a tiny street that the NCED wouldn't even put on a town map, an incident occurred that would put a blot on Nashua's big-little-city status. It would make people write, talk, and read about Nashua for all the wrong reasons.

It was 4:30 p.m., a Wednesday, an unseasonably warm fall day. Rush hour was already in full swing, and at the busy junction of Lowell, Amherst, Concord, and Main Streets, traffic had built to a maddening staccato. The city's landmarks are clustered here: the First Congregational Church, the Hunt Memorial Building, the Civil War monument with its little cannon-flanked garden. The drivers stuck in their cars would have been oblivious to them, and to the unremarkable strip of nearby businesses: Collins Flowers, La Legion barbershop, and the offices of orthodontist John Bednar. All except one driver, that is -- a man in a silver Nissan Sentra who was watching the building very closely.

He watched as Amy Lynn Boyer, a 20-year-old dental assistant and college student, left Dr. Bednar's office. He watched as she strolled with a couple of co-workers through the parking lot. He had, in fact, been watching Amy for years, and as he saw her climb into her red Honda, as he gunned his engine and fiddled with his Glock 9mm, he must have been thinking something along the lines of This is it.

As Amy readied herself for the drive home -- positioned her pocketbook on the passenger seat, maybe checked herself out in the rear-view mirror -- the Sentra flew up

the street and screeched to a halt inches from where she sat, trapping her in her car. The Sentra's driver called her name: "Amy!" She would have looked up, seen the gun inches from her face. She raised her left hand in self-defense, and the sound of stop-start traffic was joined by the pop-pop-pop of automatic gunfire.

There was a few seconds' peace -- enough time to load another clip. Then Liam Youens, 21, pushed the gun into his own mouth. A single action, a simple twitch: pop!

Operator: New Hampshire 911. What's your emergency?

Caller: Yes, there's been a shooting on Auburn Street.

Operator: Thank you, sir. Do you know if the assailant is still nearby? Sir?

Caller: Yes, I'm sorry.

Operator: Do you know if the assailant is still nearby?

Caller: No. It looked like he just drove [up] and shot her and then fucken [sic] shot himself.

I. The sad assassin

There were five other homicides in Nashua last year. None, though, shook the city as much as the shooting of Amy Boyer. It would soon become known as the Internet murder, but for now it looked like a low-end city homicide. A seamy, we-should-have-seen-it-coming kind of death. By the time Liam was done with her, Amy was riddled with 11 hollow-point bullets. People like Amy didn't die like this. They just didn't.

Quotes from amyboyer.com "I wish I could have killed her in High school. I need to kill her so I can transport myself back into high school. I need to stop her from having a life. If I had a life myself, I really wouldn't care even if I was in love with her." "As I passed her from Physics class I saw a rose, 'No, God No!' but it was true. At lunch time I saw her with that guy." "Oh great, now I'm really depressed, hmmm... looks like it's suicide for me. Car accident? Wrists? A few days later I think, 'hey, why don't I kill her too?' That was the basic plan for the next half decade, I work fast don't I?" "When I saw that car and looked at that house and realized Amy was asleep in there, Endorphines flew, it was like crack cocaine, I have never felt that kind of rush in my life, before or since." "Well I got accepted to and attended RIT college, but I was always thinking of the plan to kill Amy. When I would come home from college during break I would mildly stalk Amy." "For some reason I chose this point to fuck with school. I tried to buy a bus ticket go back home, but found myself sobbing uncontrolably, because I didn't want to leave the people I knew." "I got in the car and said I will either have the means to kill Amy or Die tonight, by commiting suicide with the gun before the police grabbed me. But silly me forgot to bring the shells to load the gun." "One time when I got pulled over the cop said that there are people that care about me. That was very sweet and nice and I am receptive to it, But that still doesn't change anything. Notice how my mood has changed here from my perivous rant, that's me Mr. Moody." "So you believe I'm just a copycat? Damn right. One of my favorite things in life is watching CNN and have those words come on, 'CNN BREAKING NEWS' those heliocopter shots of people running, the SWAT team converging on the scene guns drawn. Admit-it you love it too, you think its horrible but you still watch it don't you?"

Amy Boyer didn't associate with the shadier elements of Nashua society. She wasn't involved in an abusive relationship. She was a decent, industrious young woman, given to taking part in charity events, to tutoring students less capable than she was. Though her family paid her college expenses, Amy opted to work a couple of part-time jobs, at a local Dairy Queen and at Dr. Bednar's office. She was hoping to launch a career in dentistry. As the Nashua PD's Detective Sergeant Frank Paison says, "She was well-adjusted, very well-liked, a caring young woman."

As a criminal case, the killing of Amy Boyer was open-and-shut. The police knew the who, what, where, when, and how. The only thing left was the why. This would prove trickier to unravel. Nothing in Amy's background provided a single clue as to why she would look up to find herself staring into the barrel of a gun, and at first the detectives investigating the case were at a complete loss.

As Paison and his squad delved into Youens's past, they turned up a couple of links. Like Amy, Liam had lived in a local suburb, and they had both attended the same school: Nashua High. It was hard to find out much more, because although plenty of people knew Amy, no one seemed to know Liam at all.

In police interviews, Liam's fellow students described him as a kind of ghost, drifting through the school's corridors, sitting alone in a corner of the cafeteria eating French fries. "He was one of those people you don't even know he is there at all," said one classmate.

"Who am I?" Liam once wrote. "Well if I had 20 people buried in my back yard my neighbors would have described me as `Quiet, basically kept to himself.' "

Even those closest to him did not have much to say. His sister Trish described Liam as "reclusive" and "very depressed" but had little else to add. His mother, Clarissa, told the police that to her knowledge, Liam had "no friends or contacts whatsoever outside of this house." And that was about it from her.

Liam's home life was as isolated as his school life. The youngest of six children -- four girls, two boys -- Liam stayed rent-free with his mother, his aunt, his niece, and whichever of his siblings happened to be living at home. He avoided contact with the family, spending his time locked in his bedroom, tinkering with his computer and playing video games, subsisting on a diet of frozen pizza and soda.

"I can't find one friend," says Paison. "Not one person can tell me that this kid had one friend in the whole world.

"Someone who has no human contact, this is contrary to the human psyche. This kid was a bomb ready to go off."

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Chris Wright can be reached at cwright@phx.com.